Ladies and Gentlemen:
What leads a man, a mere mortal, to build up the audacity to write a blog - to make his thoughts known to all of mankind? An intellectual vanity project? An attempt to create an outlet, an escape valve for his own tortured psyche? The temerity of believing - if even for a split second or with the slightest shred of sincerity - that his own cortical juices contain something of real value to the world, like the gold nuggets that coalesce billions of years after a supernova explosion? That such value could be contained in an arrangement of ions and chemicals in such a provincial quadrant of the Milky Way galaxy - now that is something truly pretentious. After the hundred-millionth blog in the Solar System sets up shop, those smart aliens observing us with cutting edge microwave telescopes are probably starting to get a little disappointed. They thought the internet would transform humankind, culturally, intellectually. Perhaps it has, but objectively, what it has spawned are companies that trade at 600 times earnings. So why would the hundred-millionth-and-one blog be any different, any better? Why would we even attempt to navigate the morass of information that most of my fellow netizens would say is useless and irrelevant anyway?
Well, someone needs to be mining that cyberspace to find those nuggets of gold. Sometimes the gold bubbles up from under a stream of millenial magma - sometimes it falls from the wake of a wispy old comet. But more likely it forms within ourselves. In fact, I just took the liberty of looking out a window into the miracle of the human brain, that information powerhouse, source of mystery, and object of unscrupulous speculation at worse, and evolutionary, revolutionary device at best. Sculpted, chiseled to imperfection by the Master Builder - his holiness, the Great Algorithm, also known in intimate circles by the rather unassuming name of Trial and Error - the human brain is a nest of vipers. It sits at a crevice atop the human body; in the course of mummification, the Egyptians threw it out the nostrils, preserving the nobler, more useful organs like the guts, kidneys, and spleen. And the Egyptians were supposed to be the medical experts of the ancient world. It is not a workhorse like the heart, or a troubleshooter like the liver. It is no wonder the Egyptians were so fond of magic and the afterlife: they knew the human body inside and out, having opened it up so many times, and something didn't add up. Something was unexplained. The beating heart must have been the seat of life, the receptacle of a 'soul' if you like. Because if there was no 'wandering spirit', how could the human body have been anything but a lifeless doll, devoid of 'animation' and plantlike in character?
They were overlooking a well-protected organ, holding about 2% of the mass of an adult and burning 20 joules per second, or 20% of the average power consumption of an adult. What is this 2-20 rule? What sort of evil scheming is going on here? What sort of evolution on steroids is this? This is an awful lot of power consumption to be using for an organ "that does nothing" or at least stuffs the skull. It's an awful lot of power consumption to be diverting away from muscle development. The Master Builder placed quite a wager here, putting so much effort on a quiet machine that handles different modes of signals processing.
But it was a wager that paid off handsomely many times in the past. Vertebrate animals had come to roam all around the earth and eat everything in their sight to maintain their bulky bodies. Without a hub for sophisticated signals processing, their lifestyle would not be sustainable. But perhaps - perchance - such a machine could be made so sophisticated as to reach a threshold - a threshold where it reached awareness of itself - and then take over the world, as a Matrix gone awry. This moment - a touching moment indeed - was portrayed in the ceiling of a quaint Chapel in the Vatican about 500 years ago. The painter, Messer Michelangelo, was not present at that instant, inasmuch as it takes place every day in the deepest recesses of the human mind, in the moments of deepest stillness, reflection, and self-awareness - when the mind has no one to mind but itself. At that moment, a light kicks in to illuminate the stillness of the cosmos, to guide us on our journey from a star system in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way galaxy to a location that transcends space. This is not some trendy New Age cult; it is pure neuroscience. What it means has often been left to the discretion of the poets, however.
An intellectual journey is more than a journey through space, it is a mesh of synapses firing out in new directions. It is the sensation of having "access to God's thoughts", even if only for a brief pulse of time. It is an ecstasy, a climax, a summit, with the cold mountain air on your cheeks, as you peer over the land as Moses peered down at the plains of Canaan. It is being there without really being there, with the paradoxes expanding the frontier of possible possibilities; it is escaping the puppet show in Plato's allegory of the cave, only to be blinded by the sun; it is finally summiting the mountain to find a whole new mountain range. It is also a rush of epinephrine, more addicting than crack or LSD, and this is the level of meaning and actualization that we human being pine for, as a by-product of our multiple-folded neocortex. If only the dolphins and whales are also clamoring for it, in their desperate ultrasound wails.
Isaac Newton, the one who "stood on the shoulders of giants", was among the last modern alchemists, and first modern scientists. His life was determined by a longing to find hidden codes inscribed in the lines of the bible, and to develop a Philosopher's Stone. His life is perhaps better known for his success in developing equations for the movement of planets and stellar bodies, and some of the fundamentals of calculus. Both are the result of an innate drive in the human brain to create order out of chaos, to challenge the premises of time and mortality, to bend the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The human brain is not a machine to be discouraged easily. It believes that at every burst of oxygen it is on the verge of scaling a peak, of seeing the thoughts of God. How is it that one object can so complex? How is it that one object may disentangle so much information - like humanity's 3 olympic size swimming pools of gold reserves, dug out of the ground in thousands of years - and hence, contain so much information, so challenging the chaos of our world? Perhaps there is something of the universe in our brain, or something of the brain in our universe, in a recursive, exponential, fractal-like repetition of reality. Perhaps there is nothing but a sophisticated delusion, no more fleeting than a bad acid trip, no less delicate than a legendary flower that blooms in the desert every three thousand years. Perhaps there is no difference between the two.
But out of our zest for life, the potential of the human brain, and the putative inscrutability of our universe, no stone may be left unturned, no synapse left unfired. Because the intellect bursts with sound and fury, and rises not like a predictable loaf of bread, but like a mysterious geyser, pouring forth its message, burning and brief, from the bowels of an unstable Earth.
