Why we might ask is the brain so all imposing? Why has everything developed by the brain become so all encompassing important? The answer lies in a very twisted reel of the physics and circumstance of the universe and its conception of perfection. I say its conception of perception because we can observe it, and as it is an observation we must conclude that the universe is intrinsically as we observe it to be, and even if it is not it does not matter, for us it is so. And when we observe the universe and everything in it we have to come to one paradoxically worrisome situation, the universe tries to perfect itself. Don’t pause to think of it as absurd for me to say that, just analyze yourself, do you try to perfect yourself? Does your government try to perfect itself? Does god try to perfect itself? Does the species seek to perfect themselves? I am not judging the merits of the type of perfection that is thought out, government certainly consider effectively controlling their peoples a perfect and reasonable objective, while this may in fact be bad or good for the people regardless it is an objectification of a subjective idea of perfection.
If we postpone moralizing the matter, all things that we know to live, seek some form of a perfection. How then might that perfection be measured? I measure perfection by how much freedom of movement I have within the environment I inhabit. The greater my ability to move about, up and down and sideways through the social classes, through the professional and economic ladders, and even I measure my perfection in my ability to leap social conventions. Others might measure their perfection in their ability to worship god without having to get a job. Some might think it a perfection to be idle without natural resistance from the governing masses. A machinist might consider a screw or a laser chisel a perfection. The universe might consider expansion a good thing, that is if size is what matters and it is really difficult to get the title of universe without being gargantuan and largely indifferent to all the things inside of you.
Obviously we are not perfect, it is doubtful that people can be born, at least into this universe, if they are perfect. Perfection is unlikely to endure or understand or appreciate the concept of suffering and limitations. God, the most perfect diamond in the universe does not suffer and is not bound to limitations. God himself is everything but the suffering and the evil in that everything. You and I get cancer, you might consider evil and pain God’s cancer, he doesn’t like it, but he has to put up with it. Of course this minor part of an imperfection in God’s universe is being cured, by a step by step self help book, you don’t need any PhDs, just this one book and a bit of repetition and you can cure the part of the perfection that you are. See in God’s eyes you are the part of him that is imperfect and he wills you to perfect yourself in his image.
My point is that if God, the most perfect of things, has not obtained perfection is not from lack of trying, we are a stumbling block, but God has tried and will infinitely continue to try. See god too is seeking to perfect himself just like DNA is seeking to perfect itself. Just like a virus that gets attacked by penicillin seeks to adapt and or become resistant to it or to learn to eat the penicillin, bottom line a virus seeks to perfect itself. Why even a cancer tries to perfect itself, a cancer is nothing more than a cell that said to itself, “No I don’t want to die, no I don’t want to die just so that my host can keep the general characteristic to which it has grown accustomed, I don’t want to die, I want to live for ever and reproduce and be my own host.” Cancer in attempt to become an independent and self sufficient organism, blows itself out of proportion and collapses the entire environment that host and surrounds it. So it is with brain.
Brain, even as it is magnificent, can grow obsessed with its own importance and corrupt the entire system, persons and humanity which it is design to embody. This is because as things seek their perfection they begin to realize two laughable but critical facts. The imperfection is really out there; and, the only way to perfect yourself is to change everything into you. Anything less, is limiting and not perfect and most probably finite. Though I am not sure on this last point, it may indeed be that the only thing that can last forever is imperfection, this is because if you just think about it a little bit you will come to find that imperfect things are willing to share and sharing with added tolerance is what makes the universe so complex, varied, and huge. The most successful politicians are usually the most ambivalent, they are committed to neutrality, they cant seem to attach with militancy to any opinion or cause, they could belong to either, or and, and; the most successful artists usually cater to mass sensibilities, this is true even if those mass sensibilities develop, within the mass, posthumously. True artist are so sensitive that they may actually live and be more at home with posterity. Certainly an intolerable condition while they are alive but if you smell aesthetics from afar you aren’t getting lunch anytime soon. Still the artist realizes this at some level and prefers to live in the future because the perfection, at least for the artist that smells the future, is in the future. The artist is intolerant of his times because he is tolerant of the times to come, not because he is really intolerant, in fact the artist is ambivalent to real time conditions; having already, done much like god, and martyred his being for the sake of exhibiting in posterity. Part of the reason for this form of nihilist aesthetic from the part of the artist and god might be induced by sheer disappointment with the current condition, so they fall in love with the promise, with the possibility and they compromise and hemorrhage their present condition.
The brain is different than the artists and a little more different than god, it only cares about the present, it has very little value for the future. Lack of planning is an endemic function of the brain, this is because the brain is design to function in real time environments. An artist and god suffer sensibilities that have very little to do with getting along, eating and immediate satisfaction. The brain however was designed to live, adapt and function in response to the local environment, a brain is only visionary as far as it seeks to secure and control the reality which it has to endure. A brain is creative, but only creative at a functional level. A brain creates logic, logic is linear, a brain creates control, control is a fanatic structure to nurture the conditions of security and predictability. When a brain searches the future, it searches with fears; this is why most films about the future are filmed after the human race has exploded all their nuclear weapons and all are left are mutants trying to reconstruct a world order. The brain plants this fear in us, so that we prepare for the most horrible outcome, caution is a brain’s function, study the situation, analyze it, draw conclusions, check, verify and catalog those conclusions, learn them from memory, slowly adopt them into your mode of thinking. Brain does this because it makes brain important, one of the most beautiful representations of this is retirement planning, there is nothing more hilarious than watching a thirty year old working diligently to nest a nice retirement plan. Hilarious brain work.
The brain has to be cold because the brain has to make decisions that aren’t always appetizing. A father in China has regularly had to make the decision to live far away from his family in order to provide them with money so they may have a habitat and nourishment. Brain does this, brain has to decide how many nuclear warheads it will take to destroy 250 million people and which cities and military installations it needs to destroy first; and the brain must do this without imagining the laughter and creativity and ingenuity that it has to destroy within itself and in the world, in order to accomplish this task, a task that to the general executing it becomes a brilliant strategic campaign, you have to think!
It is the brain that does economic calculations, when an economist decides to raise your interest rates it is his brain telling him that you are feeling to happy go lucky and that he needs to prevent your free spending feelings from inflating out of proportion. When they raise your interest rates maybe you will barrow less, maybe you will put more money in the bank, and if you start doing that to much the economist will use his brain to free up capital flows so that you can spend more and not depress the economy. There are many ways to look at this but the way an economist looks at it is the most frigid. Why, because he has to think like a brain to manipulate the entire economy, the economy is a brain function it was created by brains that move these levers and pulleys so as to balance out human desire with some sense of rational behavior. As the brain widens to encompass the wider and wider population the brain exponentially freezes.
Brain creates knowledge. Of all things being and none being nothing is more important to god than faith. Of all things being and none being nothing is more important to an artist than the aesthetic. Of all things being and none being nothing is more important to a fashion designer than a failure to remember last years fashions. To the brain nothing is more important than knowledge. Brain and knowledge are intertwined and unable to bleed to death separately. Brain defines itself with knowledge. Its ability to gather, to question, to probe to investigate, to affirm and to repeat, and, and this is the and that counts, and its ability to predict logical outcomes, is the precision and perfection of brain/knowledge.
If brain can predict logical conclusions at a universal level, such as it is wished with a Grand Unified Theory of Everything, then god will have nothing that knowledge can not reproduce. It would be difficult not to have absolute faith in rational logical linear knowledge if such can reproduce, recreate and know the universe and its functions. It is the obtainment of such perfection which eludes science, and science unlike god has a tougher measurer of its success, proof; god, wisely tied belief to faith, a far more lenient measure that made up in appetizing mystery what it lacked in precision. In a sense god’s perfection outdid brain here, because brain commiserated to proof the definition of the unknown, you can not say you know something unless you have observed it, tested it and reproduced it; proof is physical, it is real, proof is graspable, tenable, proof reaches conclusions that match the universe and everything in it; but god, perhaps wiser as he is older than knowledge, decided that the unproven could be believed if one administered faith, and the more unbelievable something the greater faith it would require, but one thing was sure, faith would win out. If you feel it and you believe it, and believe it blindly you cant go wrong!
I am probably being a bit obvious here, unification theory is nothing more than the attempt of anyone thing, to make itself the most important thing in the universe. The god thing wants everything united under its own image and belief system, and brain/knowledge wants everything united in its own image, and I want everyone to believe everything that I believe and it would hurt me any if they all wanted to be like me, and here you have the Grand Unified Theory of Grand Unified Theories: “Everything in the universe is related to me!” That is to say that the universe is not different from end to end, but rather that there are international, universal and supra-entity laws that govern everything and everyone. Of course this laws do not feel, morality does not feel though it may indeed be a consequence of feeling, justice does not feel though it certainly is a euphemism for vengeance, and the physics of the universe is the most insensitive of all, the weak force, the strong force, the gravitational force, and electromagnetic force they don’t care about you and I, they only care not to break any of the laws that make them up, there is law and order in the universe. Humanity discovered this with its price possession brain/knowledge!
And are we ever fortunate, because without this brain/knowledge thing we would have never known all these encyclopedic things we know, more important and a pleasant surprise it was, but thanks to brain/knowledge we now know we are the smartest thing on our planet and from the immediate look of things the most intelligent thing in the solar system. We might even be the smartest thing in the universe, though we can not yet prove it so we must doubt it, still we search on but it certainly looks through the telescope that intelligent life is the rarest of preciousness.
It may have never occurred to us that we might be rare because we are not desirable, nor would it occur to brain/knowledge that the executive committee of the universe said no to more life forms like us, preferring blackholes, suns, whitedwarfs, neutron stars, even more empty space, just a few of the things that are not only larger and more imposing and more common than us; not to mention neutrinos which happen to have a free run of the place. But we, little people with big giant brain/knowledge, we are specials.
Well I guess if there is going to be a baseball card collection in the universe it would not make much sense with anything else than a human in the picture with statistics on the back, IQ 129, ergonomically bipedal, fully functioning brain; and baseball caps are certainly a unique accomplishment. The ability to catalog the universe has to be impressive as well, and we have awed ourselves, not an easy feat after all, we are primarily skeptics. We doubt everything, we question everything, we don’t just believe, we ask deep and insightful questions, and we don’t settle for the first answer that comes along; we have in fact proven that we can disprove ourselves, we have throughout time found just cause to end entire belief principles, and we did it because the truth was more important to us than our pride. That is the kind of self correcting animal that we are.
Anyway there is nothing wrong with admiring the human race, it would be difficult to believe that the human race could sustain itself without loving itself first. Of course love is an irrational and not really logical brain function, but more on love and all that it does to contradict brain later. For now we only bring love into the picture to explain one brain function, self aggrandizement. Yes, brain is logical but it is also in love with its child knowledge, and the reality is that brain wants everything that reproduces to be knowledge, the smartest thing in the universe is in love with itself; this is not logical, this is not rational but it may help us explains why it is all important. And as things become all important they homogenized hegemony into perfection.
I need to reiterate here that we are covering a critical substance full element: the natural tendency of any given matter, subject or being is to want to make everything else in its own image. It is a natural inward tendency, it is probably not a healthy thing for anything living outside of that desire. The only technique to accomplish absolute mastery of the universe is to make it like you, all entities in the universe must and wish to disembody themselves of their self being and turn it into you; the infiltration is never pure, the host organism will never get your ideas or nature just right; still you, me, god, scientists, and everything will attempt it until some harsh mangled tragedy collapses the idea. We want everyone to be avatars of us, and everyone else wants us to be avatars for them, the resulting collusion is not a very ripe universe, rather a universe with everything trying to get into everything else, and since everything is already whole even as it is only part of a part, then not only does it not fit into anything else, but it wont fit into anything else; this is precisely why the god thing has been so destructive as it attempts to manifest itself within us here on earth. The idea is good, the god entity is probably very nice, but endeavoring to make a perfection out of a human is really pushing cockroach idealization too far. One might dare ponder why is god not just sufficiently satisfied with his own greatness enough to leave us alone?
Monotheism religious, governmental, rational, etc… is the objective of each of us for the rest; if things understood themselves a little better they would merely try to be themselves so as to accomplish the universe, just the exploitation of the self by the self is a worthy task and exuberant task, besides the universe does not have room for two versions of you; the universe does not replicate entities, there is a mandatory exclusion law in the universe for no-two-of-a-kind, all the suns are different; it is this absolutism which makes us crave the cloning of what we are. The universe masters this individualism at a cosmic level because things that are the same can not cohabitate with anything else; and things that can not cohabitate can not a universe make.
The universe in us is the complex self, and yet brain/knowledge cries out: “I am one with everything and everything needs my rationalizations.” Only there maybe places where brain/knowledge might not be allowed, just ask Love.
