Silent Spring

Where do you go when you sleep? The other side of the world or just an atom away in all those extra dimension they tell us really exist wrapped up amongst the dancing particles that make us all up? It's the time of year when the cool of the evening brings out the last gasps of the summer insects, battering themselves against the windows in their mistaken flight around the artificial moons we make for them. I see the garden leading down to the stream, dimly lit at the far end but deliciously inviting in the slanted light from our windows and the open door. The ground is littered with apples and we have piled some of them up in an old tin bath by one of the sheds; they fall at random over the days until the pile rots into some sort of equilibrium and the sweet smell of them fills our noses in all parts of the house.

And here is an army of insects, all types and all sizes, battering against us and the light, invading our spaces with no purpose, no direction other than to use our lights as their beacons. They think they are travelling in straight lines because of course the moon has no parallax at this distance. But our lights move and the insects try to keep them on one side and end up confused into flying in circles.

And when does this end of summer turn in to Autumn and then in turn what point defines the start of winter. Looking at the time as one whole thing, they just roll along, with the first ice in the landscape of empty trees, no more than a second away from the first fogs of late August. Because place stays place. The trees don't move, the house stays the same, the changes that the seasons bring simply paint our world with a thin layer of pastel because underneath things change so slowly.

We have so many levels of change around. Deep down all is moving and the instant state of the universe is gone for ever as soon as you begin to try and catch it. Then in the processes that keep us alive, things are spinning and dividing and moving and yet lying here I cannot catch any of it save for a faint pulse of blood in my ear or the rasp of breath through my lungs. Even my brain which has all these processes in its control, cannot let me know of them. I can think about these processes with the help of neurons which are in the same networks that keep all these processes going. A neuron which fires now as I think of these words will an instant later be part of the network that kicks my pituitary gland into some important hormonal task and I will never know. Just 200 years ago, most of this was not known to any human being. The brains which make the music that lives beyond our allotted time, could not think about the processes which they carried out all the time. We were simple machines then, unable to think about the processes which led to thought. Of course we could think about thinking - the philosophers have always done that - but they could not know how they thought about thinking.

I am thinking about everything in the universe and then the nothing that came before it. And then to extend this thought which has come back to me many times over the years, I think about my brain thinking about everything and nothing. It is odd to me that again the neurons that think this do not have defined roles within my head. They are just conduits for electronics and chemicals and yet in an instant I can translate the sounds that hit my ears, process them through countless billions of processes and return with a word to sum up what I have heard. You cannot follow a program through the brain for even a single photon hitting a single receptor in the eye, branches out through some sort of amplification into a cloud of thought that is filtered and distilled through processes which change at each new use to form a defined and pointed response. That is remarkable but it is obviously the product of a heuristic attack on development; it is so obviously right and correct that it must have been created as the result of responses to all the stimuli that have passed through every creature between the first and now.

There is just no way that any entity could design something like this. It is the process of finding the centre of a ruler by balancing it on two fingers in thousands of dimensions. It may take time but it will always succeed. And all of a sudden I know that this proof of life outside our world. But what if our existence became at one with the method of creation? The world is so well defined - we have regulations and just outside the window I see a plane, a complex construction of well-defined and smoothly polished machinery, pointing the way forward from one place to another in as few steps as possible. And that is the way humans go these days. We want these well-defined paths and yet this is at odds with the way we have developed. Mind maps are designed to reflect the way our brains work logically so that there is as much correlation between the way we think and the way we record what we think. What if we extended that to the way we act as well? I would guess that most people feel a deep fracture between the way they have to live their lives and the way they would want to live them. Beyond the basic needs for survival (but even there is potential for change) we could just drift like thoughts, start from the tiny point of our birth and grow like impulses in the cortex, lighting up different parts of the world and then closing them down again, waves of existence across the brain of the world. Maybe this sounds like a plea for anarchy and I know that I am the wrong person to try this. I don't like the unknown. I like things to be certain before they happen.