What a gene wants, what a gene needs...

Cause and effect drives Western thought.  We look at things as a linear progression: A to B to C to D ad infinitum.  I am a direct result of physical forces that drove unicellular organisms to share responsibilities for survival a trillion or so years ago.  It is mechanical and objective.  I see what you see.  So what do we see?

There is a "force" that we seem to see when describing/understanding cause and effect: desire.  A gene "wants" to survive.  It wants immortality.  But really, a gene doesn't want shit.  A rock doesn't want to fall; ice doesn't want to expand; a tree doesn't want to grow.  A worm doesn't want to eat shit and, I'd even argue that a dog doesn't want to crap or fuck.  These things just do.  They just exist.

This puts us in a chicken or egg situation.  Do I act because of desire, or describe the already initiated act by desire?  There is some scientific evidence that it is the latter.  Our actions (at least a subset of actions studied) are initiated a fraction of a second prior to our conscious decision to perform them.  Whether this is true or not doesn't really matter.  It doesn't matter because I don't know where my desires are initiated anyway.  Why do I like the color blue?  Why do I love my wife and child?  Why do I brush my teeth?  To maintain their health.  Why do I want to maintain their health?  Cosmetic, practical, and customary reasons.  Why do I care about these things?  The pre-pubescent eternal questioning can go on forever.  (It's pre-pubescent because after puberty you only have one question: how do I get laid?)  At certain point, it just is.  I just like the color blue.  I just love my wife and child.  

Identify with your disease

My guaranteed to read lead in is this: Fuck.

The origin of this lies in the fact that my "Patience" entry is the highest rated.  I am certain that it isn't the quality of the writing but the fact that the word "fuck" reveals itself in the first sentence and has two encores in the first paragraph.  Everybody loves the unnecessarily inappropriate.  I'd love to hear the top ten words that would get you reading (ear muffs everybody: fuck, shit, balls, cock; are you listening Google?).

Now that you've gotten this far, on to identity.  I don't know who the hell or what the hell I am so this will be an oft-treaded topic on this blog. I don't think I'll ever really know who this person who fakes my narrative truly is (there is so much redundancy and feedback in that sentence - I, I, my - I'm getting nauseous; I truly am a strange loop).  I refuse to read The Ugly Duckling to my daughter because I don't want to give her the false impression that we ever figure out who we are.    Maybe that's Buddha and Sartre's point anyway: defining yourself is succumbing to entropy (energy not available for useful work).  If I am what I am, the process is complete.  I am not available for useful work (i.e. the process of becoming).  I am a pinpoint.  I am stagnant.

But that is a topic for another day.  What concerns me here is identity and disease (there is a great book called Human Identity and Bioethics if you’re interested).  My god is the physical process.  I wouldn’t say physics per se because physics is a construct for understanding.  I simply mean that everything as we understand it is an infinitely dissectible set of processes: the unicellular organism driven by physical forces shares work with other organisms forming multicellular organisms that become increasingly more outwardly complex, but still driven by the same basic forces.  We are simple patterns of cause and effect (I don’t actually believe in cause and effect to be honest - blow your mind on this: Backward Causation).  Consciousness, free will, morality, spirituality are all versions of an uninterpretable chaos of physical processes.  I am that zygote in my mom’s uterus (just opened up a shit-can for the pro-lifers).

This means that we could not be anyone or anything other than our diseases.  Whatever the arbitrary classification of disease that my body will eventually degenerate into, that is me.  It is part of the process that is me.  If I were to define myself by the personality that emerges from the chemicals in my brain, I would have to define myself by the disease that shares the same chemicals, cells, and physical causation.  It is the ultimate Catch-22: you couldn’t live without the disease that’ll kill you.