529. It's Official::: I Have the CRICs Disease (Chronically shifting Relativistic Identity CrisiS)... As I've Always Had, But Now Officially Diagnosed

Though I get along best (and most strongly affiliate myself)
with Environmental Historians,
a rogue group of human-environment synthesizers, indeed,
I find it extremely difficult to call myself an "Environmental Historian."
I think academic disciplines are sooo retro, sooo old school,
sooo collapsing Tower of Babble Syndrome,
that with today's cumulative, interrelated problems,
I think that the next hot and fashionable and sexy and NEEDED
thing to do is to be some kind of unclassifiable, free-range intellectual,
so versatile in thinking and feeling,
that you can maneuver deeply into the minds
of any intellectual you encounter, whether at the bar
or a grocery store or a university campus.
And that there are no arbitrary rules or conventions
or terms of agreements or strings attached
that control your thoughts and actions,
except that you're on an ultimate quest, an ultimate purpose
to ask the most pressing questions, seek the most profound answers
that guide daggars to the root guts of all disciplines,
splice and reweave their messy, bloody cores
to a new, workable whole of self and one's place in the universe,
to satisfy the metaphysical (abstract) and the practical,
and solve real problems, for personal sanity
and self-constructed world order.
Or then, is this pursuit all just a self-indulgent video game,
all constructed in my mind?

So, you'd think this profession described above would be
called "philosophy," but you're wrong,
because it turns out in the so-called university "philosophers"
are actually studying the brains of dead philosophers
who passed away +200 years ago
rather than observing and experimentally interactiong
with the world, pursuing their own sense of contextual self.

But just in case, if you really do want to know
how I do classify myself, I'm actually
a biologist who loves rocks and studies humans.
I survive, I replicate, therefore I am.
(as Descartes rolls in his grave).
And therefore... I'm a biologist.
It's by default; I can't change the fact that I'm an organism.
That I'm life. That I'm a sack of chemicals
encased in a gooey membrane that detects
and responds to my environment such as to keep
me--the sack of chemicals--in one functional piece.
Heck, I was born that way!

(Disclaimer: As you can see, I find poetic comfort in the mechanical,
machinist "scientific" description of the world.
Other post-modernists would critique that my definition of life--
sack of chemicals that replicates, etc--is so "cold" and robotic.
I find it so invigorating and so paradoxical
that it's flipping cool to just think that I'm merely a sack of chemicals.
For me, it takes a heavy load off of thinking of the
"true meaning of life," because in the end,
it's all pretty straight forward...
if you decide to see it that way).

Other Blogs/Files that are precursors to the CRICs disease::: Blog 135 (Discrimination Against Difference), key words: intellectual identity, individual intellectual identity, Vic's list of resumes on the right hand side of Biologically Incorrect, Vic's Long PDF and Vic's Short PDF...