August 18, 2019
Dear Eric,
There’s no good reason to imagine we’re anything but atoms and molecules, and compounds and organs, and muscles and limbs, and brain and mind—instantiated through energy borrowed of the sun and the internal heat of the earth. That’s it. In a sense—a very crude sense—we are complex chemical reactions: natural processes unwinding through brief years, months and days towards some conclusion which a sufficiently powerful computer algorithm might one day plot and predict. In a sense our destiny was always set, with our deliberations and decisions being just some distinct moments of seeming agency along our chemical unwinding from conception to death—a pathway we could hardly avoid or choose otherwise; a route decided not by us, but instead by the complex orchestrations of a universe which delivered us into life, and mindlessly conspires during every moment we live to nudge and jostle us into every decision and action we vainly think our own. We live, we experience, we think, we decide, and we move—but never truly of our own volition, and always on the path of our law-bound chemical unwinding. Life therefore, is like a theme park pirate ride: an unintentional horror, joy and amusement in which the robot pirates and the living riders are one. We live our lives then along seemingly invisible tracks we can never jump or escape, for we lack utterly the will to do anything but stay our course. -Kurt
My name is Kurt Bell.
You can learn more about The Good Life in my book Going Alone.
Be safe... But not too safe.
Comments