I had a dream last night, it's about a cell moving into space, unknown to him. (I'm using male gender pronoun just for the anthomorphoziation of it, so it sounds sentient, it doesn't even have a brain let alone a gender.) Cells look some how and some way smart, but in essence it's somehow just chemistry and physics. Biology feels more like a taxomony (the branch of science concerned with classification, especially of organisms; systematics.) The underlying rules on why cells does it needs to do its heavily grounded in physics.
From the way we think, to why we have 5 fingers instead of 6, to why some of our cells which we think are ours may not always do the thing we thought it's in our best interest to do, like cells which grown to be cancer cells. The major trope is always the cell and the environment, not only about what he knows about the environment but what he does with he knows.
The major trope of the cells is surviving by learning about the environment and act accordingly or perish/die.
Learning again sounds like a classification for humans to better understand what a certain thing is doing, while microscopically, some beings inherits individual intelligence and sometimes collective intelligence. Collective intelligence for example is an ant colony, it can do amazing thing to ensure the colony survival that an individual simply cant posess alone, we observe and check their intelligence out of the collective intelligence, like an emergent property. Emergent order.
Emergence happens when a system behaves in ways its individual units don't on their own. This phenomenon can be seen across nature, such as when lifeless atoms give rise to living cells, water molecules create waves and starlings swarm and swoop as one.
In my dream, somehow a text or quote just appear to me that "Order is emergence." Like a revelationary dream.
About dreams, couple of fun facts, you may realized it that it's nearly impossible to remember 100% of yesterday, so when we dream, our brain process or filter what's important to him and what's not important. The not important ones are to be rendered to be deleted, simply because there are no space to save it. I can't recall every minute of what happened since last year, last month, or even last yesterday, but I can remember some important parts of it, what I remember even sometimes not what I consciously choose to remember. Like someone who devastated who forgets something terribly important to his yet his brain forgets, now the emergent property of "The Self" seems like a different person to its Brain which chooses what to remember and what to discard. Isn't it just cool?
I write to remember, it can be framed by remembering, you certainly or even literally lived more life as you remember more of your life, you are not a drone. One thing for sure for me is that had I just forget 100% of yesterday and had to live today without yesterday, I feel already like a brand new human.
Memory Futility
I had two dreams last night, because my initial sleep was interrupted and I had to wake up. The first dream was horrifying. I was on a test, a very important one, I could just feel that it's very important, there's a huge urgent and danger tone to the gratifying situation that I must excel this test. There was a lot of papers that I must answer the questions to, yet I endlessly skim the papers and couldn't find a single question that I know the answer. I am distresed. I feel like a highschooler going for the uni entrance test, or something that hard to pass, but I remember vividly that this test is all it matters.
I went to the toilet to freshen up my mind and just get heavily disturbed by whats in the toilet... I was accompanied by the guards to walk to the toilet, I see lobbies and so many rooms with people taking the test. When I was inside the toilet, I was heavily disturbed by the abundance of shit on the fucking floor! There's so many shit and the guards feel like there's nothing wrong about it. I didn't even have the mood for the piss now.
I was back at my seat and just pretend that I know something and answer those questions based on my gut feeling, yet in a sense it feels terribly wrong because this is so important but I don't know if there's anything else to do. I felt a life-threatening sensation.
I finished quite frankly first in the room, not because I'm the smartest, but because I'm the dumbest and I just don't see any other way to finish the test, it's gibberish and non sense to me. I went out of the room and waited. Then my friend got out from the far distance room and I approached him. We didn't talk about the test and just walked together, almost as if that's what we always do.
Then we got into another room where a spokeswoman shared a screen on a big ass screen reviewing the questions and the answers. I didn't ask a single question to my friend and just watch calmy there and had this feeling of "How fucked up am I."
Then I woke up.
Who was that, how did I end up there. And certainly now that I can call that that dream is no longer important to me.
But I couldn't help but to think.
There's this part of the brain called the "Default Mode Network" that is responsible for the sense of self. I think to myself, was that part was shut down, or mix-and-match different parts of my memory and improvise? Certainly that sequence of "Dream" had no piece to be played in my current life. But more distressingly, I didn't even bother to ask myself, how come a man like me get into that situation in the first place? How about my yesterdays? I just followed blindly what I was already doing and the situations to become what the situation needed me to be.
So... What Am I?
The second dream feels more grounded, it's just a cell under a microscope thriving to survive. Well it most certainly will not since it's living on a microscope, it will soon ran out of resources to feast on. Imagine a water that is ripe of microorganisms, it must continually learn about its changing environment and act accordingly. Learning is a major trope in all living being. It even stole what it's not initially theirs to maximize it's chance of survival, like a mitochondria to be inside him. Now mitochondria exists in almost all known living organism.
I'm sick recently, I could get sore throat from time to time, and it's most of the time from a bacterial infection. These bacteria in order for it to cause rash and unpleasant sensation on my throat, to the extent that I want to rip my throat open, must have sucessfuly got in unregistered by my immune system. I have to consume medicines and rest more for the hope that my immune system eventually catch up and kill these invasions, sometimes taking anti-bacterial medications greatly help and escalate the recovery of the disease. My immune system, for language-wise must learn of these bacterial outbreak inside my body and work its best not to let it ever happen again, for the sake of my survival. While I would like to think that I am of what I posess (my body), while in this instance, I don't consciously become my immune system, i do not travel accross blood streams and answers to stress call and prepare necesarry proteins to engage combat with the bacteria, my best conscious act that I can do is to sleep and hope my immune system works what needs to be done.
So what am I?
I am of an emrgent property, an observer, from a centralized nervous system that I can command my muscular and skeletal bodies sustained by my nervous system to do what I hope it do. Will it be like that forever? Unfortunately no. I am not immune to future diseases that may happen like alzheimers or parkinsons, etc, that one day I may not able to move my skeletal and muscular bodies how I wished it to move. My being is grounded by my cells communication that is grounded by physics and chemistry.
The cells of a parkinsons patient does not revolt for its singular conscious wants, it's simply a misscommunication arrived from a structural failure of ion pumps grounded by structural chemistry and malfunction of its physical functions.
I am just physics and chemistry and I hope that my cells are able to learn from its prior mistakes in order to become the best version it can possibly be. But is it even possible?
Turns out it's what we've been doing (as a collective) all along.
This is the best looking chart that I could find.
Life is too beautiful to just opt out of it, (at least for a lot of people), that they've been learing and finding ways to extend longetivity of their lifespan.
So how does this come back to the title of the article?
Recently I've been thinking. What is the best thing I could do?
Like as in, I know I have some history with suicidal tendencies,