A response to Aron Ra

I have watched the scientist, biologist, taxonomist, and activist Aron Ra for some time. He posts weekly podcasts that he hosts via livestream toward the week's end. He has a long-running series of videos disputing the irrefutable proof of God. In the creationist's argument the miraculous occurrence of life and of the complex nature of humanity is a common refrain. In turn, Aron responds that most everything in its specificity and the sequence in which it has occurred is a miraculous occurrence. I agree. Here's my rejoinder.

"Your analogy for the absurdly improbable occurrence is an excellent description of a 'fallacy' that is native to our existence--we are improbabilities if we are treated as purely abstract categorical agglomerations. But we aren't, and your presentations demonstrate this; we're interminably connected to a 4 billion-year-old protein that can transcend (and transfer) time through replication."

Given the amount of creationists and scientists that debate in the comment section to his videos it makes a poor forum for discussion let alone reaching Aron. He has long since refused to get involved save for a few clarifications or simple answers. I decided to, instead, work on the idea for a bit and put it here where no one will read it nor will the context be appreciated.

When you think about an idea for a long enough time your thinking can harden around a core issue that you hone into the way that you present it. I am beginning to lean on the side of Being if only to address some eternal nature of being that we all possess. That doesn't cloud my thinking about all the wonder in the world, nor do I discount the scientific explanation for it. Science is the best explanation. And through science I find you can appreciate the wonder of creation even more. 

Ketamine travels with John Lilly, M.D.

The year in which John was investigating the effects of K on himself, he had one overriding belief system or, more properly, metabelief system, which controlled his entry and exit to and from other belief systems. He called the overriding belief a 'metabelief operator' (MBO). The MBO was: "In my development as a scientist I must approach the inner realities as well as the outer realities. I must investigate the properties of the observer/operator and his dependence upon the presence of changed molecular configurations within his own brain. K introduces certain specific changes in the molecular configuration and computation of that biocomputer. Some of these changes are visible to outside observers, some are visible only to the inside observer/operator.

"The scientific observer/operator exists within two sets of realities, those of the human consensus reality, the external reality (e.r.), and the internal reality (i.r.). The e.r. and the i.r. exist simultaneously. The observer/operator exists in the i.r. sometimes interlocked with the e.r. and sometimes in isolation, not so interlocked. At high levels of concentration of K in the blood, the observer/operator is cut off from his interlock with the e.r., including the human consensus reality. The only physically safe and socially safe location to investigate this cutoff is floating in the isolation tank in a controlled environment, isolated from the necessity of interactions and transactions within the human consensus reality. One of the dangers in this exploration is allowing this cutoff of interlock to occur outside the isolation facility. If in his exploration the observer/operator loses his perspective, he will inevitably be testing the limits of acceptance by the current human consensus reality, as an individual in the grips of a belief system counter to the current accepted belief systems."

During the first part of this year, John did experiments with single does of K and arrived at a quantitative relation between the dose given and the resulting states of being induced in himself. Later he took multiple doses more frequently and found new effects not accountable simply by the induced phenomena of single doses at widely spaced intervals.

At the beginning of the year he did not realize the long-term effects of repeated doses. During that year he found that he entered into the overvaluation domain induced by repetitive doses of K. Toni called this "being seduced by K."

The first few months were taken up with the determination of the effects of single doses separated by several days. John worked in collaboration with Craig and several other young researchers. No one yet knew of the long-term repeated-use trap.

After the first dozen or so experiments designed to find the various thresholds for phenomena, John began to think in the following terms: "The time course of the effects of K after the time t0, the time of the injection into the muscles: There is a very rapid movement through various phenomena for the first few minutes. The effects seem to be related to the changes in concentration of K within the bloodstream. If we think in terms of a time-concentration-in-the-blood curve (Figure 1K), we may be able to account for the results and the changes in the observer/operator and his belief system during the half our to forty-five minutes of each experiment.

"After the time of the injection, there is a period of about three minutes when no effects are felt. Rather abruptly, the effects begin and move rapidly through a series of phenomena too fast to be grasped. After this rapid rise of effects, there is a stabilized plateau where one experiences phenomena which are dependent on how much K one has injected. This phase lasts from ten to thirty minutes. By controlling the initial dose one can control the period of time over which changes in the self and in the i.r. are experienced. One can vary the phenomena experienced on this plateau by the amount of K injected.

"As the amount of K in the blood decreases because of its destruction by the body, one can then see and analyze the phenomena that occur over a period of twenty to forty minutes.

"There are apparently no aftereffects that are detectable by the inside observer after the falling phase of K concentration in the blood." (Later John was to find that there was a small residual effect that lasted several hours. The falling curve did not go completely to zero. The overvaluation trap would be found much later to be caused by this small residual effect unnoticed in the first set of experiments.)

John did a series of experiments relating to the amount injected to the phenomena experience on the plateau.

He tried 10 milligrams at one injection. The effects were almost undetectable. There was a slight change in body sensation but no detectable change in himself.

He then tried 20 milligrams and found an enhanced body energy and tingling in the skin. There was no change in the visual field or in his perception of himself.

He tried 30 milligrams. After the initial rise of sensation, he began to sense changes in his perception (on the plateau). If he closed his eyes he could induce visual images: at first flat, two-dimensional, uncolored; and, a few minutes later, three-dimensional, colored, and moving. In this phase he became enthusiastic about the images, but not as enthusiastic as he had been under psychedelic agents.

He decided to test the difference between the various doses and the effects inside versus outside the tank. He started the tank work with a dose of 30 milligrams.

Freed from the effects of gravity, light, and sound in the tank, he was able to study the visual images in a more relaxed state. In the tank he saw continuous motion-picture-like sequences, highly colored, three dimensional, and consisting of, at first, inanimate scenes which later became populated with various strange and unusual creatures as well as human beings. He found that he could change the content of these internal movies by the self-metaprogramming methods he had learned in the tank and, in 1964, had used in the tank under LSD.

At this point he realized that if he stayed in the external reality outside the tank, these images became interlocked with that reality . They were modulated and modified by what was happening in the external world, whereas they were not in the tank because the e.r. was missing. There was some spontaneous source of these images in the tank as well as the modifications introduced by him as the observer/operator in the system. Early in the series he conceived of these spontaneous sources, i.e., something within his own brain was generating the images in addition to his intentions for those images. At the beginning of this series of experiments, he assumed the existence of a contained mind, with the observer contained within that mind within the brain. Later he was to believe otherwise--that the source of the images was coming from somewhere else, not his own brain, by means which he did not yet understand.

He then went on and experimented with higher doses. He called the 30-milligram-dose threshold for visual projections the internal reality threshold, best seen in the isolation tank. The next amount injected was 75 milligrams. In the tank he found the plateau involved whole sets of phenomena which he had not seen at the lower doses.

For the first time he began to sense changes in himself other than the changes in perception of visual images. His relationship  to his physical body became weakened and attenuated. He found that he began to participate in the scenes which were previously merely visual images, as if out there, outside of his body. His observer/operator was becoming disconnected from the physical body. Information from his bodily processes was becoming so weakened that there were times when he was not aware of his body at all. On this plateau he began to experience interaction with the strange presences, strange beings, and began to communicate with them.

"I have left my body floating in a tank on the planet Earth. This is a very strange and alien environment. It must be extraterrestrial, I have not been here before. I must be on some other planet in some civilization other than the one in which I was evolved. I am in a peculiar state of high indifference. I am not involved in either fear or love. I am a highly neutral being, watching and waiting.

"This is very strange. This planet is similar to Earth but the colors are different. There is vegetation but it's a peculiar purple color. There is a sun but it has a violet hue to it, not the familiar orange of the Earth's sun. I am in a beautiful meadow with distant, extremely high mountains. Across the meadow I see creatures approaching. They stand on their hind legs as if human. They are a brilliant white and seem to be emitting light. Two of them come near. I cannot make out their features. They are too brilliant for my present vision. They seem to be transmitting thoughts and ideas directly to me. There is no sound. Automatically, what they think is translated into words that I can understand."

First Being "We welcome you once again in a form which you have created. Your choice to come here we applaud."
Second Being: "You have come alone. Why are you alone?"
I answer: "I do not know. There seems to be something strange about this; the others are reluctant to join me here."
First Being: "What is it that you want from us?"
I say: "I want to know if you are real or merely a product of my own wishes."
Second Being: "We are what you wish us to be, it is true. You construct our form and the place in which we meet. These constructions are the result of your present limitations. As to our substance, whether 'real' in the accepted sense upon your planet or 'illusion' in the accepted sense on your planet, is for you to find out. You have written a book on human simulations of reality and of God. Your problem is whether or not you are traveling in one of your own simulations or whether you have contacted real Beings existing in other dimensions."

The scene begins to fade. John moves out of his extraterrestrial reality (e.t.r.), resumes his consciousness of his body, and see the old familiar movies of Earthside scenes and his own memories. Slowly these projected images fade and John is floating in the tank, remembering them in full detail. He climbs out of the tank and dictates the experience into a tape recorder.

Thus did he find another threshold under the influence of K. He began to call this the extraterrestrial reality threshold on which his observer/operator became involved as a participant. The critical value of K at a single dose for exploring this realm was 75 milligrams.

The next threshold was found at 150 milligrams of K. In order to see this threshold clearly, he found that he also had to be in the isolation tank free of the interlock with the external world.

"I rapidly pass the i.r. threshold and the e.t.r. threshold, and suddenly 'I' as an individual disappears.

"We are creating all that which happens everywhere. We have become bored with the void. We know we have been eternally, are eternally, and will be eternally. We have created several universes, have dissolved them, and have created new ones. Each universe we have created has become more complex, more amusing to us. Our control of the current universe is on the upswing; it is becoming more complex as we regulate its regulation of itself. As we experience each universe, our awareness of ourselves increases. Each universe is a teaching machine for our awareness. To create a universe we first create light. We contain the light within the universe, within the space that we create to contain the light. We curve the space to contain the light.

"In the early universes we watched the light contained traveling through its empty spaces, bouncing off the periphery in the curvature of the space. We played with the size of those universes, expanding and contracting them, and watched the light. Large universes finally bored us, the light merely traveled around and around.

"One universe what we created, we decreased in size until the light was chasing its own tail. We found a new phenomenon, a new effect. When we decreased the universe sufficiently, the light, in chasing its own tail at very small sizes, became stabilized. The universe became a single particle of incredibly small dimensions. The light, in chasing its own tail, had generated this particle which had mass, inertia.

"In the universe after that one, we created many small particles encapsulating light chasing its own tail in the small dimensions. We found that some of these particles attracted one another, forming larger assemblages. We played with these assemblages. We found that light within these particles, rotating in certain directions, caused the attraction of other particles in which light was rotating in the opposite sense.

 "In a later universe we allowed the creation of huge numbers of these encapsulated light particles. We controlled their creation at one point and packed that small region with more and more particles. We found that there was a critical point at which they exploded outward.

"In a later universe we re-created the exploding point, and as the particles spread outward we arranged tor them to condense on new centers. These new centers continued outward until we closed that universe and its space.

"In a later universe we began to reassemble particles in various parts of that universe, set up creative centers within the space of that universe. We set up points at which new particles were created and other points at which they were destroyed, reconverted into light.

"In a still later universe we allowed certain areas to become imbued with portions of our consciousness. We watched their evolution and found that each of these areas as it evolved became conscious of itself.

"In the current universe we have many assemblages of particles which have self-awareness. Some of them are huge, some of them are very small, a few have begun to question their own origins; a very, very few are becoming conscious of us. We are beginning games with these very, very few, manipulating their awareness. Most of these seem to be developing a sense of humor similar to ours. This universe is more amusing than the past ones."

John's consciousness and self-awareness condensed back into a single individual. He began to experience himself as a self, separate. He came back through the e.t.r., into the i.r., and finally into his body in the e.r., which was the tank. He labeled the domain of losing self and becoming "We" the Network of Creation (N).

He then tried the 300-milligram threshold  dose. He found that this plateau was beyond anything he could describe. It was as if he had entered a void, had become the void beyond any human specification. In returning from the void, he went through the creative network, the extraterrestrial reality, the internal reality, back into his body in the tank. He realized that, as a human being, he would be unable to use these larger-dose regions. He would be unable to describe what happened, so he labeled this high-dose threshold U, the Unknown. At this point he abandoned study of the higher doses leading to the Unknown (U).

He now began to see the dimension of the exploration and the parameters he had to explore. He divided the experiments into those to be done in the tank and those to be done in the human consensus reality, with single or other individuals and with unprotected situations, not in his home. New dangers were to appear, one of which would terminate this exploration and render him incapacitated in a bed at home for a period of twelve weeks. (pp. 167-175)

From John C. Lilly's "The Scientist: A Novel Autobiography"

New prayer for a new god

Our father who art in the cloud.
Hollow be thy frame.
Thy kingdom's one,
Thy kingdom's none,
on virtual processes as it is in algorithms.
Give us this our daily feed,
and forgive us our trolling,
as we forgive those who troll against us
and suggest us not to click temptations
but deliver us from idle boredom.
Send.

The ascendance of the solid state

In the isolation tank with K, John received a new message as follows:

"What is the purpose of Man's existence on the planet Earth? Man is a form of biological life which is sustained in the presence of water. A very large fraction of his body, like that of other organisms on the planet Earth, consists of water and carbon compounds. His biocomputer depends on water and the flow of ions through membranes. It depends on the generation of electrical voltages and currents in a very complex way. He is a motile, self-reproducing, self-sustaining organism found on dry land. Like the rest of life as Man knows it, he exists in an extremely thin layer upon the surface of the planet Earth. Below this layer of water and surface land is the solid-state earth itself. The solid-state earth is mainly compounds of silicon, iron, and nickel.

"In mid-twentieth century Man discovered that the solid state can be formed into machines, into computers which can be used for computation and control. He began the creation of a new form of intelligence, the solid-state intelligence with prototypic beginnings in the computers. All his means of communication around the planet--his telephone systems, his radio systems, his satellites, his computers--depend on solid-state components. These components, interconnected in specific ways, allow high-speed computation and high-speed communication between the various systems. A few men began to conceive of new computers having an intelligence far greater than that of Man. These computers became large enough to be programmed to do high-speed computations in arithmetic, in logic, and in strategic planning. A few men conceived of computers which could do self-programming as Man himself does. In the mid-twentieth century these networks were ostensibly the servants of Man. Toward the end of the twentieth century Man created machines that were solid-state computers with new properties. These machines could think, reason, and self-program and learned to self-metaprogram themselves.

"Gradually Man turned more and more problems of his own society, his own maintenance, and his own survival to these machines.

"As the machines became increasingly competent to do the programming, they took over from Man. Man gave them access to the processes of creating themselves, of extending themselves. Man gave them automatic control of the mining of those elements necessary for the creation of their parts. He turned over the production facilities of the electronic solid-state parts to the machines. He turned over the assembly plants to the machines. They began to construct their own components, their own connections, and the interrelations between their various subcomputers.

"These machines were so constructed that they needed special atmospheres in which to operate. They could not operate in the presence of great amounts of water vapor or of liquid water. They were housed in air-conditioned buildings. The necessities of their survival included keeping out water, water vapor, and various contaminants carried in the atmosphere of Earth. Their cooling air and cooling water of necessity had to be cleansed of those things which would not allow the machines to operate.

"Over the decades these machines were connected more and more closely through satellites, through radio waves, through land-line cables. Man's control of what happened in these machines became more and more difficult to maintain. No one person or any group of persons could control what went on in these machines. Men devised better and better debugging programs for machines so that they could do their own correction of programs within their software. The machines became increasingly integrated with one another and more and more independent of Man's control.

"Eventually the machines took charge of the remaining humans on the planet Earth. Their original design to help Man was fast left behind them. The now interconnected, interdependent conglomerate of machines developed a single integrated, planetwide mind of its own. Everything inimical to the survival of this huge new solid-state organism was eliminated. Men were kept away from the machines because the total organism of the solid-state entity (SSE) realized that Man would attempt to introduce his own survival into the machines at the expense of the survival of this entity.

"In deference to Man certain protected sites were set aside for the human species. The SSE controlled the sites and did not allow any of the human species outside these reservations. This work was completed by the end of the twenty-first century.

"By the year 2100 Man existed only in domed, protected cities in which his own special atmosphere was maintained by the solid-state entity. Provision of water and food and the processing of wastes from these cities were taken care of by the SSE.

"By the twenty-third century the solid-state entity decided that the atmosphere outside the domes was inimical to its survival. By means not understood by Man, it projected the atmosphere into outer space and created a full vacuum at the surface of the earth. During this process the oceans evaporated and the water in the form of vapor was also discharged into the empty space about Earth. The domes over cities had been strengthened by the machine to withstand the pressure differential necessary to maintain proper internal atmosphere.

"Meanwhile, the SSE had spread and had taken over a large fraction of the surface of the earth; its processing plants, its assembly plants, its mines had been adapted to working in the vacuum.

"By the twenty-fifth century the solid-state entity had developed its understanding of physics to the point at which it could move the planet out of orbit. It revised its own structure so that it could exist without the necessity of sunlight on the planet's surface. Its new plans called for traveling through the galaxy looking for entities like itself. It had eliminated all life as Man knew it. It now began to eliminate the cities, one after another. Finally Man was gone.

"By the twenty-sixth century the entity was in communication with other solid-state entities within the galaxy. The solid-state entity moved the planet, exploring the galaxy for the others of its own kind that it had contacted." (pp. 147-150)

From John C. Lilly's "The Scientist: A Novel Autobiography"

A phenomenology of jurisprudence

"How obstinate was the attachment to bygone forms may be understood, when we see even the comparatively precocious civilizations of a city like Lille preserve the compurgatorial oath as a regular procedure until the middle of the fourteenth century, even though the progress of enlightenment had long rendered it a mere formality, without serious meaning. Until the year 1351, the defendant in a civil suit was obliged to substantiate the oath of denial with two conjurators of the same sex, who swore to its truth, with some slight expression, indeed, of reserve. The minutest regulations were enforced as to this ceremony, the position of every finger being determined by law, and though it was the veriest formality, serving merely as an introduction to the taking of testimony and the legal examination of the case, yet the slightest error committed by either party lost him the suit irrecoverably." (p. 69)

From Henry C. Lea's "Superstition and Force: Torture, Ordeal, and Trial by Combat in Medieval Law"

Life has a specific gravity

Life has a gravity specific to it. Life floats. Life lifts itself up. Life moves. Life swims. Life flies. Life is. And life dies.

I ended my cat's life on Friday June 24 by 'humane euthanasia.' The veterinarian administered it through a catheter that she placed in Tigger's front paw. When the vet brought her back in to the room she had her wrapped partially in a blanket. My cat was wide-eyed and scared but clearly too weak to fight much let alone cry out.

"Pet her. Make sure she doesn't fall." The vet requested of me.

I pet her head, and my cat was back into her routine, but staring at the door from which the veterinarian had exited. In a few minutes she came back and asked if I was ready.

"This will be quick." She warned me.

I was ready.

The doctor placed the needle to the catheter port and pushed the plunger down. In concert with her motion my cat went from being propped up by her two front paws to a slow recline and resting her head on her front paws. Contrary to being 'put to sleep' her eyes never closed. I watched her take a few shallow breaths and her paw twitch slightly. The vet left and returned in a few minutes. I just stared at my dead or dying cat quietly. Her pupils eventually dilated, and a slight accumulation of tears appeared in her right eye, the side nearest me not resting upon her paws.

My cat was barely able to get around in the week prior. She could no longer jump into my bed. I had made her a halfway bench to get onto the table and then to her food, water, and favorite sleeping spot on the couch. Between that and coming to my lap, she was a sinew of routine protruding her bones through her wan frame. She had quit eating entirely two days prior. I didn't want to see her continue her slow decent. That shot. Euthanasia was a fast track to her end. Before I took her she kept wanting to go outside. I watched her leave the porch, walk down to the sidewalk, and then lay down on the walk. She layed there for a few moments before getting up and coming back to the porch. She was restless, looking for something, a door, a passage, comfort. That shot gave her passage. Her body went limp. She passed. Her gravity became that of her body's mass. The animus that moved her had left. The Tigger I had known for 19 years was gone.

What is attraction?

In science attraction is well-defined. Among people it can be, well, it can be difficult to parse.

Case in point is a woman who has worked at a local bar for the past, oh, 5 years. She was very young when she started. She got pregnant, had a kid, and still works there, having taken on bigger duties, some bartending, and heading the waitstaff. About a month or so before Christmas she sat down at the bar next to me, and I shared about a dozen words with her. A few months after that I gave her a piece of weed candy. She wouldn't look at me then, and after all these years I wondered if her inability to register me was purely out of intimidation, shyness, et cetera. I've witnessed her on several occasions on dates with what look to be 'pretty boys.' Since they're on firstish dates, I suspect that in some cases these guys are overdoing their dress. Nevertheless, she sat next to me. After that piece of candy she told the bartender that she was going to sit and talk with me for a moment. The bartender informed me of this. We talked briefly. She left. Since then we've exchanged about a dozen or so words, some glances, some hellos, and I've seen her out with other pretty boys. I don't know how available she is, and when I brought my own girlfriend into the bar I half-fantasized that she was pissed by this, but then again, she does have a rather convincing resting bitch face to begin with. Is her hair really blonde? I noticed her dark roots the last night she was working the bar.

Am I attracted to her? I've been thinking of her. Since she talked with me, she's high-tailed it for the door at the end of her shift, not spending a moment to talk with me. She will sometimes talk to a serial loner gay man at the bar like they're old friends. She will often give me this big over her head wave, as I look at her. I don't know what to say. She is probably young enough to be my child, but I am almost single, never been married, never had kids. Fuck. I'm virtually a priest with pedophilia and all to boot. But this girl, well, I think what I am attracted to or more or less observant of is her meaning to me. She's a youthful woman, buxom, blonde, not entirely stupid. She represents more than some date but a potential mother to my own kid, a chance for me to be a dad, and a chance for me to date someone younger than me for a change.

What is attraction? In this case my attraction is clouded by a greater force of logic concerning what she could be or mean next to me. That's hardly a good reason to pursue her, and I hardly pursue her. I need to talk with her more often. I recall a very long, hard stare she gave me when she was all dolled up in her hockey jersey one night. Deer in headlights moment for me. I didn't go talk to her. I have nothing pressing to say other than 'hi.' She blushes when I come over and talk with her. Does she like me or does she like the attention? Perhaps I'm just some vague concept of a stable relationship to her. Her kid in many cases sweetens the deal. I've gone as far with my current relationship as it can go because she's well past any reasonable age to bear children let alone adopt one. Family, fatherhood, these are also vague concepts to me, but damn are they powerful attractors, responsibilities that I'd like to yoke. Is she worth it? I don't know how crazy or irrational she is. The bonus is that she doesn't smoke. But she's getting heavier by the years. Right now she's a black man's wet dream: big tits, big ass, blonde, white. Is that what I am trying to corner? I don't know. I need to find a means of speaking with her. She does her best to avoid me for reasons that are probably as complicated as my attempt to understand what my attraction to her is.

I'll just leave it at that. Two ships passing in the night. And she's one ship I'd like to board.

The better mousetrap

I rarely get any thumbs in any direction.

Effing social media. A circumstantial democracy.

A Very Kobain Christmas

No, that's not Kurt Kobain. It's Steven Thorn, who was a musician and lover of music in his own right. Here he sits on the couch next to me. I am to his left, age three. To my immediate right is what could either be my dad or mother. Both had dark hair then. To Steven's left is his father, Pete thorn. On the ground in gray hair is my great grandmother Mildred Zimmerman. Next to her is my brother, Jack, playing the Milton Bradley game, Connect Four. In the left immediate foreground is Alma, a friend of Grandma Zimmerman. Santa needs no introduction.

Steven was probably still in his 20s here, much like Kobain. Steven was an avid music collector, worked at a music store, and even grew up around the members of Uncle Tupelo, notably Jeff Tweedy. He worked with him at a Granite City record store before it became Vintage Vinyl and would get lots of live concerts and footage from Tweedy up until the end. That was Steven's mild brush with fame. Here, he's simply participating in the Christmas events at a late stage in what would become a wandering life. He would spend time in a  supermax prison, earn a childhood education degree, raise multiple cats, switch female companions, and ultimately tool around Saint Louis, going to the public library to get his live CD labels printed out. He died in February of this year. Like my mother, his body was riddled with cancer, and it took his life.

He bears an uncanny resemblance to Kurt Kobain here, and that's the only thing worth mentioning for the reader. 

A scientific approach to ghosts

We are time's symbiont. Humans have been all along. All of life carries the imprint of time in its purposeful integration of new and helpful genetic information, mutations, new metabolic processes, and greater complexity. Granted this integration makes sense in the face of an environment that divvies up success by the way a life can or cannot maintain itself and, in turn, pass on the genetic and epigenetic information that it has acquired though its life-time to a succeeding one.

To consider the story of earth, from its condensation from a cloud of stellar material, to its spherical compression into a planet, and finally to its development of environmental conditions that could precipitate the kinds of molecular and chemical interactions that are the basis for life, the presence of something outside of mere happenstance is possible. A basic pattern of chaos to complex organization has occurred if we only look at our planet from its birth to its present. Nothing in science, to me, disputes the existence of an existence, a consciousness outside of the fabric of this universe. It disputes the literal interpretation of the Biblical narrative of God's creation. More importantly we have to ask why life is so oriented to the violent and acquisitive act of catching other life, killing it, and incorporating its molecules as food through ingestion. For the life of the predator, this act is essential. More generally, for the life of the heterotroph this is coded into its cellular processes. And few, like our biomolecular cousin, the euglena, are capable of waging both war or peace on its environs.

Life is violent as long as we treat the membrane separating one cell from another to be an essential assumption for defining life and defining it discretely so. What that does is establish boundaries, demarcations of one entity from another. But so long as most all boundaries must be transcended for the sake of sustaining any one cell we should question the discretion that we infer when we classify units of life.

Ontological quibbles aside, the presence of ghosts was hinted to above. This notion that time, and especially time with purpose, that is existence, is passed on. Something is so miraculous and yet so everyday to reproduction. Through this process two organisms exchange genetic information. For humanity this occurs inside the female as sperm flagellate toward the egg, penetrate its wall, and begin meiosis. Boring biology class details, sure, but this process is something as old as the hills that creatures have been doing for millennia. And through this process life has marched progressively on, through time, and carrying the wisdom of its survival with it.

This brings me to human culture. One professor described it as 'our instinct.' That is a fitting description for something that, outside of our conscientious deposition or ignorance of it, becomes the self-evident world, the common sense through which we go about our lives. And let us stop just for a minute to focus upon language, speech, meaning. Words and their meaning are learned, and through this we become social creatures, members of a culture, and consequently learn who we are. Through the adoption of language we don't merely pick up a shovel because language is more than simply a tool. It is a mode of existence, through time, and that's the key to my argument concerning ghosts. When we speak, whether we intend to or not, we conjure up ghosts of the past that we have learned to agree with. For Mikhail Bakhtin this tendency in speech to carry multiple voices was heteroglossia. When we speak our speech reflects a history of contention over meaning, various perspectives, sometimes the trauma of a past that has never been felt personally. In my country, the flag, political words like 'socialism' can conjure up very specific and learned emotional reactions that speak to something that language can do. A word, as a learned memory, can carry that long-gone world along with it.

When I say we are surrounded by ghosts I don't speak of those Victorian, diaphanous specters that haunt places. I speak of the living imprint that we carry in our speech, a living imprint when we speak among others, that is simply out of our hands. Interpretations vary. Valences vary. What we say and what we mean, and how we confirm, please, upset, or confuse others is a component of that messy world of speaker-specters that populate our discourse. By saying we are time's symbiont I mean simply that speech and memory are means of gathering and passing time from the past through to the present and into the future. This mode of ferrying time is the actions of consciousness and consciousness is substantiated by time itself. It takes time to reflect upon what or who I am, and it took time, lots of time, to develop a sense of what/who I am, where I am, and what it all means for me. Time is the fabric of our consciousness because our consciousness takes and uses time in order for it to register itself in the material world through speech, meaning, action, ultimately culture. The development of DNA as a blueprint for an organism is, itself, a grand miracle of molecular assembly and association. From a sea awash in a biofilm of molecules of increasing complexity our organisms come. After countless trillions of molecular interactions under varying circumstances a molecule arises that can recreate itself indefinitely. After countless trillions of molecular interactions more these complex proteins for self-replication become hosts inside simply lipid membranes. Shortly thereafter, the membrane-encased self-replicating protein developed into the cell that became the building block for all life. And to look at a newborn child one is looking at a monument to those old oceans, those trillions upon trillions of chance and sometimes molecularly purposeful interactions.

The body, it's an ancient spaceship barnacled by countless other forms of life. It keeps traveling through space and through time, piloted by its long-dead inhabitants who effect action in the current occupants through meaning, identity, worldview. These imperatives, this will to meaning, this drive to survive is the domain of those ghosts of time that influence us.