326. A Graduate Student's Log-Log Design of Reality: A Provincialist View Embedded Within an Illusory Matrix of Globalism and Scientific Universality

A Graduate Student's Log-Log Design of Reality: A Provincialist View Embedded Within an Illusory Matrix of Globalism and Scientific Universality
[subset of an essay]

The other day I asked my evolutionary biology professor, “If I wore a pair of sunglasses that took the logarithm of reality, how would the world look like?” He stared at me quizzically and I shamefully mumbled to him that I was interested in the concept for science fiction purposes. He then proceeded to respond, in which I have come to interpret that wearing a log-log pair of shades would allow me to perceive everything in my surroundings as closer and smaller even though these elements still existed physically at the same distance. Contrastingly, all unknown elements of my surroundings would be perceived as farther away and “larger/grandiose” even though they existed at a fixed distance….

Who would have known that this absurd log-log question actually had come to be more practical and real-world than I thought?

Isn’t this how humans perceive themselves and reality after all? In a warped, log-log scale Truman show bubble? Don’t we all hold a direct, intimate Provincialist View embedded within a mass-education-and-technology-constructed, indirect, detached Matrix Illusion of Globalism and Scientific Universality?

It is as if our minds evolved to construct this navel-gazing bubble of Humanity—a conglomerate ingroup of subjects (places, resources, technologies, people) that have been assigned emotional and intellectual value—that has no particular set of physical borders, especially within a global pinball, pseudo-autistic system of chronic moving-and-shaking objects that remain backdrop homogeneous fuzzy blur to our senses.

It seems that our minds’ perception of our surroundings translate into a gradient of a few elements of highly-resolved, qualitative PCA-analyses of multi-dimensional meaning, which then upon spatial-temporal expansion from ourselves drowns within several elements of low resolution, which remain to us as mere elements—err, mental ghosts, so to speak—we pass by on a daily basis without any form of mental registration. We pass by hundreds, if not thousands of humans every single day, knowing they have beautiful, colorful, highly detailed stories, yet do we have mental capacity to register them?

The tragedy of this modern mental landscape is that it provides this illusion of infinite choice (especially in the university) while simultaneously holding unstable, fickle, ephemeral properties—a state of chronic, rapid change. These volatile environmental conditions of near infinite options and combinations forces us to chronically question and think about our own volatile mental conditions: what we think about, what we are doing, why we think and do what we do, what should we value… hold on to, grasp onto… despite this hostile world of ephemerality.
It forces me to ask the deep questions. Why me here now? What is my purpose? What’s the point? What is the point of my existence? My relative existence? What is the combination of people, resources, places to help me with the process of doing what I need to do? To help me design a Reality of Meaning? What is my bower, my warped log-log bubble of Reality? What to include in my bower of purpose? What do I tune out, dumped into the world of global human chaos of process? Why does my bower take such a shape? Was it intentional, purposeful design? Or was it an accident? Or was it chance opportunity meeting a prepared mind? The synergism of probability and seeming determinism? Ready for a collaboration? A co-evolution of progress and flow of elements?

Hence, a Eusocial Ecological Niche Space—so I call it—is slowly, generated by our minds.

In the massive pool of intellectual flesh within the university, my streamline flow of thoughts have been desperately going through a very intense sorting and filtering process, just as the human body and mind intrinsically filters the intake of resources and stimuli. What to include in my intellectual territory of maintenance and innovation? What to toss aside and disregard?

And with this the horrible notion of a seemingly ritualistic exercise of an attempt to achieve my own mental sanity, it seems like as soon as I find emotional value in some individual or endeavor, the deep bonds seem to break as quickly as they formed. The only way how I have come to survive in this world of unstable molecular human-environmental interactions of chronic fragmentation is through the constructionist actions of my own writing and art.

My mother chronically reminds me that the only vessel I will truly come to know—and am essentially stuck with for the rest of my life—is is my very own Self. I might as well get chummy with it. “Hello, me! How are you doing?”

So, to continue the formulation of a sense of purpose and existence, I need to chronically tune in to this inner world and tend to this internal, evolutionary and proximally-evolved bower that ultimately constructs this externally-warped bubble of supposedly meaningful Reality.

I am thoroughly convinced that our minds did not evolve to exist within a 6-billion ingroup human leaf cutter ant colony. This global system: is it a success, a triumph? Technologically, perhaps. Psychologically? More so a psychological turmoil and failure. The greatest war that seems to exist today is within our minds, attempting to design external meaning. Success or failure of Globalism, it doesn’t matter. I am too pre-occupied in creating my own provincial log-log world of Reality. Otherwise I will breach my mental carrying capacity.

I suppose ignorance can be bliss. Or our minds constrain us ignorance. In all honesty, an illusory, emotionally-detached global view—a.k.a. provincially warped global ignorance—is all that I can mentally sustain.