人算不如天算
I was asked to make a blog for the NYU IMA Low Res graduate program. (I started with no tangible experience in interaction design.) Math is nature’s poetry, and these are just diary entries.
Alter-Instagram
Reel
I was asked to make a blog for the NYU IMA Low Res graduate program. (I started with no tangible experience in interaction design.) Math is nature’s poetry, and these are just diary entries.
Alter-Instagram
Reel
IMALR-GT-201-01
WHAT: IMALR-GT-201
Over the past week, I flirted with the topic of “kinship-blood” through late-night chats and spontaneous interrogations. My conversations took me on a journey from molecular biology to religious rituals, ancient sacrifice, cardiocentric perspectives, ceremonial magic, ethnic cuisines, heartbreak, and even to Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Adrienne Maree Brown outlined many abstract beliefs that I hold. Her thoughts in Emergent Strategy granted articulation to my research. It armed me with the necessary vocabulary to ask further questions. For this, I am grateful.
-
“You are a collection of almost identical molecules with a different collective label. But is that all? Is there nothing in here but molecules? Some people find this idea somehow demeaning to human dignity. For myself, I find it elevating that our universe permits the evolution of molecular machines as intricate and subtle as we are.” (Cosmos by Carl Sagan)
In your view, what is the function of humans in the universe?
I’m highly drawn to this question- Probably because I don’t have an answer for it. I teeter between (1) believing that our function is to have no function (in the most beautiful way possible) and (2) believing that we are here as a cell in the universe as it tries to experience life on fractal levels, from the unobservable subatomic scale to the incomprehensible vastness outside of the Cosmic Microwave. Regardless of where I happen to fall on this spectrum on any given day, Brown suggests something that I fundamentally believe- Our purpose is love.
I cannot verbalize how deeply I trust that statement.
Earlier, I was wondering how much our stem cells must love their children for them to willingly sacrifice their form, so their offspring can exist. How much do our red blood cells love those around them for them to forgo life, so that their kin can breathe? Maybe this isn’t quantifiable. Maybe there is an equation for unconditional, eternal love embedded in us that we cannot decipher... Maybe it doesn’t matter.
I don’t know.
But I do know that there are a few rocks on this planet that I’ve felt love for (not in a creepy way).
-
How would you define emergence? What is its opposite?
To me, emergence is meaning that arises in our seemingly arbitrary world. I often think about how we are mostly water, and then I wonder if water is conscious, or possibly conscious in a different way? Is consciousness just what information “feels” when it’s being processed. Does that mean we are just code? And if so, so what?
The idea that we are the only “conscious” beings in the universe is insanity to me. (But I’ll entertain it.) What if we are truly alone on this pale, blue dot? How beautiful is that? What if we’re not? How beautiful is that? Why are we not always trying to build our communities up? Even our cells know things that we do not. They aim to observe harmony.
Thomas Young’s Double-Slit Experiment drives me to believe that all particles have some form of consciousness. Though I don’t know if blood is aware of what it is (much in the same way that I don’t know if we’re aware of what we are), blood knows love... and it acts on it. Fervently. Why can’t we?
-
The opposite of emergence would be randomness, a concept I’m not sure I believe in. (Feel free to debate with me about this.)
-
And I’ll leave you with second part of the Carl Sagan Cosmos excerpt.
“But the essence of life is not so much the atoms and simple molecules that make us up as the way in which they are put together. Every now and then we read that the chemicals which constitute the human body cost ninety-seven cents or ten dollars or some such figure; it is a little depressing to find our bodies valued so little. However, these estimates are for human beings reduced to our simplest possible components. We are made mostly of water, which costs almost nothing; the carbon is costed in the form of coal; the calcium in our bones as chalk; the nitrogen in our proteins as air (cheap also); the iron in our blood as rusty nails. If we did not know better, we might be tempted to take all the atoms that make us up, mix them together in a big container and stir. We can do this as much as we want. But in the end all we have is a tedious mixture of atoms. How could we have expected anything else?”