Stretch Your Brain
Read Joe Rogan’s blog. Here’s an excerpt from a particularly interesting post, We’re Getting Closer to Forever:
The idea I’ve been bouncing around in my head over the last couple years is that life, the planet we live on, the universe it resides in and everything that takes place in the entire dimension is really just a gigantic, impossibly complicated mathematical program moving towards a predetermined outcome. That everything; from subatomic particles, to hyenas, to the blow jobs, to solar flares – everything that exists in the entire universe is really just a part of an infinitely complex program totally beyond our comprehension that is moving towards a very certain goal.
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If you were an alien, objectively looking at life on this planet you might very well look at technology as a type of life form. In nature we see many patterns of parasites infecting a host and causing the host to destroy itself so that the parasite may be born. There’s a aquatic worm that grows inside of a grasshopper, and once it’s developed sufficiently to live outside the host it programs the grasshopper’s brain to head towards water, jump in and drown while the worm burrows out of it’s body and hatches into the water. The superior organism has lead the inferior one willingly to it’s own destruction so that it can reach the next stage in it’s development.
I think that very well may be what’s happening to us.
Rogan’s a pretty cool dude. I met him outside my local pub – Stout - after he did a comedy routine at the House of Blues. Rogan graciously allowed me the courtesy of rambling on about how cool it’d be if he [Rogan] and Bas Rutten were the UFC’s announcers. He explained that it’d be senseless to have two color commentators, no matter how awesome Bas Rutten is, and, after all, someone [Mike Goldberg] has to plug the sponsors. Nevertheless, I’d still be cool with Bas Rutten and Rogan. Maybe the UFC can have a separate pay per view broadcast with Rogan and Rutten on the mic. You heard it here first.
Joe needs to read about quantum mechanics. The universe would be totally predictable (to a sufficiently informed and capable computer/entity) were it not for those pesky electrons. They don’t exist in the way that we know things to exist, rather, they exist in clouds of probability until they are forced to “choose” a location based on the parameters of observation.
It sounds totally fucked up, and it is, but many well-designed studies show it again and again. It is also the element that forces (mathematically) free choice upon us.
His second paragraph is a bit of a stretch. I don’t know that worms are a superior organism to grasshoppers. The worm does not do all that shit on purpose… if it did, that would be one hell of a hacking job. Evolution did all of the heavy lifting, and the worm just is.
A lesser creature (at least biologically) that accomplishes (if you could call it that) a somewhat more sophisticated feat is a type of liver fluke that affects sheep. Ants pick it up from sheep shit and once the infection is ripe, the ant feels an overwhelming desire to go to the top of a blade of grass in a field full of sheep and do a headstand until it dies. At the top of the blade of grass, the ant is very likely to be eaten by a sheep, and hence, pass the fluke on.
An even lesser (again, biologically speaking) creature that accomplishes something even more sophisticated is Rabies. Rabies virus causes many different types of mammals to want to bite other mammals, and thus spread itself. That is behavior modification accomplished by a virus.
Furthermore, if you were an alien life form observing earth, you would have had to have used extremely sophisticated technology to get here, and would probably not mistakenly classify technology as a type of life.
Not bad stuff for a comedian though.