LIFE, LOVE, & EVOLUTION

We are swung naked into the writhing streams of life, interacting with its myriad forms as we grow old, and ultimately, succumbing to the cold wind of death. These scenes—these snippets of film—are wound together as moments of passing awareness, encapsulated in their own contexts and time-frames. As T.S. Eliot put it in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock : Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea. One day, however, the visions and revisions will end. One day, our incessant wanderings, whether in time, space, or thought, will reach their inevitable destination. The processes sustaining us—the modules that jingle and jangle in the crowded sphere of our bodies and minds—will either dwindle down or come to an abrupt stop. One by one, our organs will begin to fail, and likewise, our mental processes will probably decay in a haphazard fashion; first, we may lose our sight or o...

Natural selection is a passive observer—a lurker in the shadows that is there by not being there. Its presence is made known by what it leaves behind: the functional patterns that perpetuate their own survival and reproduction, or “life.”             We are awakened into our bodies and minds. Some are flawed, others less so, yet all bearing the primordial mark of millions of years of jury-rigged construction. As soon as an entity comes on the scene that enables its own survival and reproduction, its presence in this universe and on this planet becomes a mainstay. And so it goes for our minds; they are here now, though we don’t know for how much longer. Our thoughts and emotions, flowing in patterned rhythms through the four dimensions of this universe, are experiencing these patterns—indeed, they are these very patterns. There are, in fact, no pattern “experiencers,” only the patterns themselves. Of course, these patterns aren’t haphazard; their develop...

Image source: wiredforlego (https://www.flickr.com/photos/wiredforsound23/11186742126)                 The intolerant left may have just found a partner in the censorious right. Of course, this is nothing new; neither side has been an immaculate paragon of free speech rights, despite self-righteous protestations of adherence to the First Amendment.                 Late in the evening on Tuesday, Feb. 7, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) took to the Senate floor in opposition to the confirmation of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) as the incoming attorney general, one of President Trump’s administration appointments. In her vigorous attack on Sessions’ nomination, Sen. Warren invoked old criticisms of Sessions from the late Sen. Edward Kennedy and Coretta Scott King that focused on Sessions’ civil rights record. Though a more meaty argument by Warren may have been made if...

Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/wasik/22785930068 My main reasons for opposing Trump lie outside the sphere of his disqualifying personality and temperament. Rather, it is Trump’s opposition to Enlightenment values that bar him from holding any elected office. Specifically, international laws against the targeting of civilians during warfare and using torture as retributive justice are at risk of rotting alongside half-eaten taco bowls in the gastric juices of the president elect. Also at risk is the founding document of our Jeffersonian democracy—the document that is the first instantiation of Enlightenment-era thought in the practical realm of governance: the US Constitution. Trump’s threats to expand libel laws against journalists and to bar individuals from entering the US if they hold the wrong religious beliefs should give pause to those who support him because of his presumed opposition to the unconstitutional free speech stifling culture of political c...

It might not be tomorrow; it might not be in ten years; eventually, however, the dawn of secularism will rise. Not to wax utopian, but it is hard to foresee how an interconnected world can fail to embrace the liberal ethos of free speech, the separation of government and religion, and the valuation of human lives over dogma and ideology. As of late, there have been quite a number of attacks on Enlightenment (I hesitate to say “Western”) values of free debate and reason. Too many demagogues have found it worthwhile to impugn the free exchange of ideas for the sake of protecting this or that group’s sacred values. Freedom from being offended has replaced the freedom to express one’s views in the public sphere. Whether it is the Christian right’s “War on Christmas,” the feminist left’s war on the biological differences between men and women, or the Muslim right’s war on the criticism of Islam (not to mention Islam’s literal war of global Jihad), pluralism has had quite a difficu...

The best case for consilience, at le ast as I see it, is the lack of coherent borderlines between levels of explanation. Specifically, if I were to describe why it is that I want water at the moment, I would most likely mention something about my lack of fluid intake over the past two hours. Or, I might defer to a more “ultimate” level explanation and state that, because my circulatory system is dependent on water, a water-seeking-and-imbibing set of processes has evolved which enables me to survive and, ultimately, reproduce. Now, if I were to offer the latter of the two explanations, I would probably be shunned at parties. However, neither of the two explanations is either more or less valid. Likewise, although there is a distinction between the two, the precise ways in which the ultimate level-phenomena are related to the proximate-level phenomena are complicated, a nd are still part of an ongoing body of research.            ...

Taking its time to mellow out on the soot-layered windowpanes, the saxophone’s melody softened its momentum. The grimy edges of these sin-covered vertebral exertions lay waste to the saxophone’s origins and enveloped its effusive sounds in a nothingness—a nothingness permeating and infusing rhythm into the heart of the city. The buildings—century-old relics, stretching their tired, old-world hands into the single-layered present from the nostalgic aura of the booze-soaked lights and sounds of the past—swayed with the melody’s multilayered textures, and I, easily misled by my infantile yearnings for the taste of cosmopolitan heaven, swayed along with them. Once again, I found myself on the island. The high-class, upper-scale rhythms of old Manhattan have almost completed their gradual, gradated diffusion into the synthesized novelty of mechanized beats, and we, lost children of falling markets and falling columns, roamed the streets in search of something—perhaps each other, p...