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Dec. 18th, 2006 11:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sophiaserpentiaI called my parents and spoke to them for a while last night. It was the first time i had spoken with either of them in over a year. The conversation was going pretty well... they have started using my new name and my mother even said it was one she's always liked. But only a few minutes into the phone call one of their cats became very distressed and died as i listened.
I'll call back tonight or tomorrow night to learn more and finish the conversation where we left off. But it's left me terribly depressed. I dreamed about killing and predation and death, and woke up pondering the idea that there must be death.
My thinking went like this: Suppose there were no animals that ate other animals. Suppose there were no animals that ate plants, either. Suppose there were no death. As it happened in the course of our ecosphere's evolution, these things (killing, eating, predation) prevented various imbalances and spurred the evolution of certain traits. I've mused in the past that maybe intelligence would not have developed if not for predation. Is it possible to imagine a world where there is no killing, eating, or predation -- or even death?
I can actually conceive of it. This could happen is if the entire ecosphere were a single organism, balancing to adjust to resource availability and adapting to changes or biological threats as necessary.
So there you have it, a philosophical demonstration that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds: a single superior alternative, even in concept only, is sufficient counter-proof.
On the way to work this morning, i read this, in the conversation between the Christ-figure Wilbur Mercer and protagonist Rick Deckard in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
There you have a succinct summary of the philosophy in the Bhagavadgita. It is a fatalistic kind of philosophy which would be excoriated from the Marxian point of view, because of the ease with which this philosophy can be used to goad people into submitting to terrible classism or even participation in war and other brutalization.
I almost feel like it is our duty to rebel against this philosophy even if it is true. Maybe especially if it is true.
I'll call back tonight or tomorrow night to learn more and finish the conversation where we left off. But it's left me terribly depressed. I dreamed about killing and predation and death, and woke up pondering the idea that there must be death.
My thinking went like this: Suppose there were no animals that ate other animals. Suppose there were no animals that ate plants, either. Suppose there were no death. As it happened in the course of our ecosphere's evolution, these things (killing, eating, predation) prevented various imbalances and spurred the evolution of certain traits. I've mused in the past that maybe intelligence would not have developed if not for predation. Is it possible to imagine a world where there is no killing, eating, or predation -- or even death?
I can actually conceive of it. This could happen is if the entire ecosphere were a single organism, balancing to adjust to resource availability and adapting to changes or biological threats as necessary.
So there you have it, a philosophical demonstration that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds: a single superior alternative, even in concept only, is sufficient counter-proof.
On the way to work this morning, i read this, in the conversation between the Christ-figure Wilbur Mercer and protagonist Rick Deckard in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
"Go and do your task, even though you know it's wrong."
"Why?" Rick said. "Why should i do it? I'll quit my job and emigrate."
The old man said, "You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe."
There you have a succinct summary of the philosophy in the Bhagavadgita. It is a fatalistic kind of philosophy which would be excoriated from the Marxian point of view, because of the ease with which this philosophy can be used to goad people into submitting to terrible classism or even participation in war and other brutalization.
I almost feel like it is our duty to rebel against this philosophy even if it is true. Maybe especially if it is true.
