tiger, tiger...

A couple of verses from William Blake's "The Tiger"

"Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?"

Sheer poetry, sheer beauty. A beautiful poem inspired by the selfsame creature, which is now critically endangered. What have we done, that this magnificent beast is now fighting a losing battle with an unseen foe!
Ever an object of awe, the tiger has been the victim of an insatiable greed for its skin, its claws, its bones and various organs. The worst offenders? Big game hunters, rich assholes who seek trophies to hang on their wall, chinese bastards and assholes who believe that the bones and organs have medicinal values (hence are valued even more than gold on a weight basis), and last but not the least, assholes who poach the creatures.
A few years ago a tiger was killed and skinned in a zoo in Hyderabad, India. That incident made my blood boil! If I had a gun in my hand and the bastards, who perpetrated the heinous act, in my sights, there would be a reckoning the likes they would not have imagined in their worst nightmares. And I am not talking a swift death here, but lots of suffering. What happened to the zoo employees who colluded with the poachers? They were suspended! Can you believe it!

The tiger is only one of a multitude of species now being wiped out because man's greed and insatiable appetite for increasing civilization's boundaries. If an apex predator like the tiger has met with this fate, it's going to be a much tougher fight for the rest of God's creatures.

about human nature

The human being is an amazing creature. Apart from the ability to create and use various tools, this creature is equipped with a highly complex brain capable of astonishing feats of innovativeness and a wide array of emotions.
Human nature is the collective of all the emotions and values that the average or the collective human being possesses.
Human nature has multiple aspects, ranging from noble and admirable characteristics to downright loathsome and stomach-churningly disgusting ones. The irony is that it takes the good characteristics to realize and recognize the evil ones.
The thing we have in common with most of the creatures we share this world with is selfishness - the god-given, inborn instinct to preserve oneself and one's interests above all else. Only in some cases is this instinct over-ridden by a nobler virtue - like somebody sacrificing their own life knowingly and willingly for another being's well-being.
Unlike less intelligent creatures, the human being is capable of doing much more to fulfil it's instinct of looking after it's self interest. That's where the blessing of dexterity and a well developed brain starts bordering on a curse.
Unfortunately a very integral part of most human beings' self interest are the flaws of selfishness and greed. Both these character flaws have very bad implications for the surroundings of the human being. The things comprising the human being's surroundings are usually the object of and which usually bear the brunt of the human being's selfish greed. Ironically, the surroundings also comprise of other human beings. So it's usually a match made in hell, where all human beings are the victims of each others' selfishness and greed.
The down side is that in this never-ending cycle of human greed, there is massive and irreparable damage being done to other aspects of our surroundngs - the environment and other creatures with whom we share this world.
The only glimmer of hope for both the world human beings live in, and for human beings themselves is the other nobler side of human nature. It's the side that recognizes that what's happening is wrong, that something needs to be done to stop the snowballing disaster that's headed towards this world, and that only humans can help stop the destruction and the subsequent darkness that will envelope the lives of all the creatures that still live.

About working out and the deterioration of lifestyles

I recently joined the gym to get rid of some extra kilos. My BMI (body mass index) has been steadily increasing over the past few years and in the recent past I started getting a tummy and my face started losing it's lean look. When my BMI finally breached the magic 25 mark and people started noticing how much I'd gained, I pushed myself to the gym. As a consequence I spend an hour or more everyday working out, burning calories and generally increasing my base metabolic rate. I have to say, it does feel good to have my tummy almost flat again and getting back the semblance of a fit body.
But what I wanted to write about is the effort that has gone into getting back from being slightly overweight. It speaks volumes about my lifestyle. I used to be quite fit and not have a shred of anything that could be interpreted as body fat. A few push-ups and sit-ups at home once in a while and a few pumps of my father's old barbells used to give me that athletic muscular look. Then I didn't have to try in order to be fit. Life was good - I could eat as much as I wanted, and not have it show up in the form chubby cheeks or an expanding belly. I miss those days.
There were a couple of turning points that changed things - the first one was at the age of 18 when I stopped using my bicycle and moved to a mopped. I put on 5 kilos then! The second one was when I finished school and got a job which mostly entailed me sitting at a desk and moving only when I had to attend meetings. The increase in my weight has been meteoric!
I see all the changes from when I was 18 to my current self, over the past 10 years, as a deterioration in my lifestyle. Sure I am having fun now. But I was sure having fun back then too! Just in a different way. Now my fun mostly involves watching the telly or reading or getting some thumb action on my PS2. I miss going out with mates and participating in some sport for fun.
I now have to pay the price for the change of my definition of fun, with one hour of my waking time every day spent in the gym. And I am only doing what I could be doing as a part of my day-to-day activities and as a part of having a great time with mates!

Is the deterioration of our bodies, the accumulation of fat and the hours of time some of us spend in the gym trying to get into shape or trying to maintain our fitness a sign of the times? Aren't we letting the quality of our life deteriorate because of our lifestyle choices?

About perceiving in 3 dimensions

This post is a follow-up to the previous post about how dimensions constrain our perception and indeed, our thinking.
Continuing with the analogy of a chessboard, you can now see how expanding one's perceptions from one dimension to 2 dimensions enabled us to understand the game of chess. In both cases the game of chess was reality. The same moves, the same logic. What differed was our perception and that consequently changed an inexplicable and mystifying situation into something a lot more understandable.
Now imagine for a moment one of those 3 dimensional chess games in Star Trek, where there are multiple chessboards one on top of the other. Suppose in this hypothetical game of chess, the chessmen can move along the plane of one board, as well as across planes to a different board. Now imagine that you could only perceive in 2 dimensions, that you would only be able to see what's happening on one board of the many that exist in that game. You would definitely understand some things about the game (a lot more, for example, than what you would understand if you could only perceive along a single dimension). But a lot of moves involving movements between the planes would totally escape your comprehension.
Things like how some piece would suddenly disappear from view or how some piece would suddenly appear from nowhere. Things like how some peice would suddenly get captured by another piece that wasn't even there. Imagine a move where a piece moves to another plane and returns to some other place in the original plane - would seem like "teleportation" by the piece.
But taking a step back and looking at the entire game and all the chessboards involved would explain a lot. Expanding our perception to 3 dimensions (adding "depth" to length and breadth) would also expand our ability to understand the reality of the game better.

In the next post, I shall take a step back and talk a bit about some basics of dimensions and an observation about human thinking.

Dimensionally constrained thinking

A long time ago I saw this program on TV in which the brilliant Richard Feynman was explaining the basics of dimensions and he brilliantly used a chess board as an example to demonstrate the invisible wall imposed by the dimensions we perceive.

Imagine a chess game being played on a board. The board and the game are 2 dimensional, and all the things that happen happen in 2 dimensions only. A chess piece, for example, can not jump 2 spaces in the air and remain there until it's next move, or indeed, burrow 2 spaces below. All the pieces move only in 2 dimensions.
Imagine a being perceiving only along one dimension - in this case, one of the rows or columns of a chessboard. How would that being perceive the game? How would the being understand the "rules" that govern the reality of chess? Not very well, because all that would be visible would be those pieces and moves, which would intersect or end up on the row. The being would never know that the bishop travels diagonally, or that pawns can claim an opponent's piece diagonally.
Now expand the being's perception into 2 dimensions, and the whole game is visible. Suddenly a lot more information is available for making inferences about the game's reality. Now it all makes a lot more sense. What were earlier one dimensional actors in the game, suddenly appear to be playing their full parts.

What a brilliant brilliant analogy. Hats off to the amazing Feynman - a truely brilliant mind!
I'll talk about how we can extend the analogy to more dimensions in later posts.

what does it take to flog a blog?

I just read an email in which somebody posed a question which got me thinking. The question was why are so many people writing blogs when nobody ever reads them?

Excellent question. Why do we blog? Why do I blog? Just to keep a diary to record my thoughts? Maybe something more? What's the difference between penning my thoughts on paper and putting them in a blog? The possibility that they will be read by others. The opportunity for some discussion with other people with varying opinions. But then what does it all amount to if the only people who read the posts are ones who accidently stumble onto the blog while browsing all the other millions? Not much I guess.
Chances are you (the person reading this post) are just a random browser who'll probably never return once you click on the "next blog" button, or a mate, or most likely, ME at some point in the future (whenever I decide to read all my posts once more). All this here post and indeed, this entire blog will amount to is a message in a bottle adrift in the sea of time, to be opened in the future by none other than me, as I muse upon my own thoughts of the past.

A walk on the Moon?

I wonder sometimes what it would be like to be in space, away from the earth. What would it be like to be on the moon? Maybe even another planet in another solar system. Much like in the realm of science fiction that so many brilliant writers have created in so many books.
Would it really be unreal? Would it really be "out of this world"? Or would it be like going to Detroit? I have never been to Mars, but then I have never been to Detroit either.
Does Detroit have a magical quality to it that needs to be experienced by being there? Most probably not. Does Mars have it then? Most probably only in my mind!
What is it that makes us get the thrill of being in an alien place? Would we act any differently there? Would we think any differently there? Is that what it is really about?
I never really wanted to walk on the Moon or on Mars, or indeed on any planet/place anywhere else. But what does bother me a lot, is that I'll most probably never be able to. I much rather have a choice and decide to stay where I am, than know that I didn't have a choice even though I would have chosen what I have anyway.

The chemistry of love

It's very interesting how all our emotions and feelings can be attributed to chemicals acting on special nodes in the cells of our body. The nodes are commonly termed as receptors and will be referred to as such in this post.

Love, it seems, is nothing more than a bunch of really cool chemicals acting on their own special receptors.
A long time ago I read this article about how the "high" that people experience in the early stages of love could be attributed to the fact that the situation enabled the body to release it's own home-grown set of amphetamine-based transmitters. These will attach to the same receptors that other amphetamine-based chemicals link to. That's apparently the reason why the first rush of love puts a skip in one's step and makes one feel like nothing is impossible. That's amphetamine for you baby!
Unfortunately, similar to it's synthetic cousins, the natural compounds quickly saturate the receptors and therefore, after some time the receptors do not respond to the chemical. Hence the plateau you experience after some time into the relationship. "Where's the love gone", one is oft-times forced to question. Well, it went out with your receptor's increased tolerance to the special love chemicals.

If you break up, the chemicals dry up and the receptors get free again (this process takes some time). So "romance" CAN be experienced again after some time passes.

However, for those relationships that continue after the first high ends, there IS something to look forward to. The security that a long term relationship affords makes the brain release another class of chemicals, related to opiates (Morphine and derivatives). These chemicals, called endorphins give a nice warm secure high (in contrast to the exciting sharp high caused by the amphetamines). The good news? The receptors for endorphins are not as easy to saturate as the ones for amphetamines. So the high is a continuing one. Enjoy it if you last that long into the relationship :)

What all this also explains is the pain caused by break-ups, un-requited love, getting dumped etc. Your body is suddenly cut off from it's "fix" of feel-good chemicals. What you experience are withdrawal symptoms. The more your addiction, the worse your symptoms.

That brings me to another point - is love all about chemicals? Can we be fooled into believing that something is true love just because the chemicals make us feel so? Isn't there any aspect of magic in love? Isn't there just that one special person who will rock our world?
Damn, being a romantic at heart, and a true believer in true love, that's a really sobering and unromantic thought!
On the up-side, you can view break-ups in a new light, and realize that it's not the end of the world as you know it. It's just your body begging for the feel-good chemicals it was used to, and nothing more. The good stuff can happen to you again, and there is really no reason to feel like it's not going to!

A licence for parenting

For a long time I have been apalled at the way most people raise their kids. I continue to be apalled and the degree will only worsen. Here's why -
Shitty parents usually raise shitty kids. Kids nowadays lack most of the qualities desirable in good kids - obedience, respect for elders, common sense, good morals, openness to good advice, good sense of right and wrong etc.
Most of the above mentioned qualities even make for good citizens of any society.
A good proportion of kids today lack these qualities. These kids will go on and more likely than not, create even worse kids of their own, because they will not have any good values to impart AND will act as worse examples for THEIR kids than their parents were for them.
There is an excellent chance that society in general will continue to deteriorate at an ever quickening pace.

What caused the problem? Probably the fact that idiots and assholes have been reproducing unchecked for millenia now, and that has caused a severe increase in the number of idiots and assholes among us.

What's the solution?
Well - how about mandating a licence for raising kids? Given the potential (and likely) tremendous negative impact they can have on somebody's life, and society in general, people should be required to give a serious of very exhaustive tests to determine their suitability to raise kids.
If we have driving tests and job interviews, it just makes good sense to do this as well.
Any person/s who does not pass the test should not be allowed to have kids UNLESS they can arrange for another person to raise the child - another person WHO HAS THE REQUIRED LICENCE!
I believe this is a good way to ensure that the population of the world will come back into reasonable limits, and the quality of people and society in general will dramatically improve.

why do we count our time in years?

In another one of my musings, I wondered why we measure our time in years. Sure, days make sense because it's an easily observable naturally occuring phenomenon.
Years may also make sense because they enable us to bundle a larger period of time in repeatable bundles (in terms of seasonal variations).
But convenience apart, who do we attach so much emotional significance to the duration of one year? Why do we celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, new years, etc? Why do we mourn death anniversaries? Does it make any difference to us where the earth was around the sun when this event happened in the past? Not really. But we still wait until the earth is in roughly the same position around the sun to celebrate it?
I think a cooler measure would be 1000s of days past since the incident. Or if one were to wish to delink from the earth's movement, perhaps one should count in seconds, or in billions of seconds.
Wouldn't it be cool to say "Woohoo - today I am 10,000 days old!!" or "I am due to move into move into my 11th billion seconds!".
Definitely seems like a better idea than linking emotions to the orbit of the Earth around the Sun.

Stupid adverts for stupid people

One thing I have been noticing lately is a spate of really dumb adverts on the telly. Most of them are not even watching once. It's a scary thought that so many companies are paying so much money to incompetent advertising agencies to make ad campaigns for them, and that the results are so incredibly pathetic!
I would hazard a guess that less than 1% of the ads shown on the telly are good. Less than 5 percent are just about average. A good 30% or so are bad. 30% more are really stupid. And a whopping 35% of all the adverts on the telly are downright IRRITATING! They make me want to smash the TV set right there. But I make do with just switching the channel to something else.
This is a really quick way for TV channels to lose viewers. With so many bleeding channels, it's usually a miracle if a viewer who switches channels comes back to the old one - at least for the duration that the viewer will watch TV that evening/day.

I think it is a sign of times - that too many people today just do not think. They'll watch anything. And more and more it feels like all the stupid adverts are really targetted towards morons. What's worrying is that the proportion of stupid adverts is increasing at an alarming rate.

Watch out for occasional comments on stupid adverts in subsequent posts.

Define Life - another perspective

This is a follow-up to my earlier post about how we define a living being.

Earlier I talked about viewing chemical reaction systems as life forms and then about viewing collections of individual life forms as more complex life forms.

In this post I will explore the temporal aspect of life - the fact different life forms having different life-spans.
In nature we find different life forms having widely varying life spans. Right from tiny organisms which have life span of a few minutes or a few hours, to amazingly ancient trees, some of which are more than 5000 years old.
Also one has to speculate about the time perception of life forms. Does a life-form's perception of time change with one's life span? Do some insects, for example, perceive they only survive for a day? Or do they perceive their one day life as an entire lifetime?
Would an insect with a one day life span look at human beings (without having an insight into the true lifespan of humans) and perceive us as immortal beings? Beings which do not demonstrate any visible change in many lifetimes of their kind? Definitely, if the insect had the capacity to think that far, that's what it would think. It probably perceives trees something similar to mountains, because they are static and exhibit even lesser change than moving beings.

Now think about life forms with life-spans which dwarf the human life span. And not just a hundred times over (like some ancient trees), but 10,000 times over perhaps much much more. Would these beings not appear te be Gods to us? Now just suppose that these beings are immobile. And furthermore that their movements are proportional to their lifespans i.e. they move, react, perhaps even perceive very very slow. Would they appear to be statues to us? Frozen in time? What if we never recognized them as life forms because we have never known their form? Puts a slightly different spin on our view of our world.
Are the mountains really only just mountains? Do they not change shape over extremely long periods of time? Do they not get born? Do they not grow or diminish? Are they alive (and not just to the sound of music [joking])? Perhaps.

Just something more to think about.

Define life

This post is about another one of my musings.

Take one string of thought and take it to it's logical conclusion. What do you get? Well - something like the following...

What exactly is life? How do we define what lives and what does not? How complex does a being have to be to qualify as being alive. What special attributes does a being need to have to qualify as life? What exactly IS a being anyway? We'll take a look at some of these questions here. I do not promise any answers, just a few ideas that should hopefully make you think beyond the usual view you may hold.

Looking at a human being, life seems to be defined, in the most basic terms, as a complex biochemical reaction capable of sustaining itself beyond the normally expected duration. I define it thus because that is precisely what we are - an amazingly complex collection incredibly complex biochemical reactions. And we go ahead and sustain this "life" by adding fuel to sustain the biochemical reactors we possess within our body. EVERYTHING about us has to do with chemistry. Complex organic biochemistry, but chemistry none-the-less. This includes simple metabolism to complex feelings, emotions and thoughts (watch out for a blog on the chemical nature of emotions and feelings, coming soon).
By that perspective, we are a walking talking chemical reactor. Nothing more, nothing less. Everything we do, feel or think is nothing more than sets of chemical reactions.
Extending that principle and looking around us for more examples of systems fitting into this definition of life - let's consider a test-tube with 2 reagents undergoing a chemical reaction to form new compounds. Is it life? Probably not, because the reaction can't sustain itself. But who knows... perhaps it's an incredibly short-spanned life - one without comprehension. Perhaps like a newborn infant that's doomed to not live past it's first few minutes. Perhaps it's the boundary of life - and then again, maybe not.
Let's look at the Sun and the stars. Incredible scale. Self-contained systems. Self-sustaining systems (they generate heat because of gravity and nuclead fusion). Giant chemical reactors. They even seem to have an instinct for survival (the whole phenomenon of going "nova" in order to avoid collapsing into a black-hole).
Seems to be closer to our definition of life, doesn't it? So are the stars alive? Are they living beacons of the universe? Have we been looking for life elsewhere in the universe when it was everywhere and we just could not see it? Perhaps.

Let's look at another aspect of life. Consider a human being. Apart from having one single consciousness per body, we are anything but one single being. We have BILLIONS of tiny bacteria, viruses and other organisms living within our body. Most of them are essential for our survival (indeed, for without most of our gut flora, we'd die of gut infections very very quickly). We have very tiny organisms called mitochondria within our cells, which enable our cells to use the energy they get (indeed, and mitochondria are called the powerhouse of an animal cell). These are speculated as being independent organisms which have been integrated into the animal cell a long time ago. Most of the cells of our body have independent life. In our lifetime, we give birth and lose countless cells in our body.
Where is all this leading? Well, I was attempting to demonstrate that the definition of life can also be extended to complex systems comprising of individual life-forms, all functioning together in the system. Some benefitting the system, some harming it. But in all, they stabilize the system so that it gradually sustains itself, and therefore qualifies as a life form.
Looking around us in another attempt to find paralells - some social insects like ants and honey-bees immediately spring to mind. A multitude of individual life forms (as we perceive them) working together for what seems to be a collective. Is an entire beehive or ant colony an individual life form? Possibly so, by the perspective mentioned above.
Are entire eco-systems life-forms? Again possibly.
Is the entire earth a lifeform? Once more, possibly. A life form comprised of countless individual life forms. Are the ocean currents, wind currents, the rain cycle etc akin to blood? Are individual eco-systems organs of this being (with the blue-green algae of the oceans perhaps being the lungs since they generate most of the oxygen of the world)? Perhaps. Are we just cells in one big giant body? Just possibly.

I think this is long enough for a blog post. Watch out for a follow-up post on yet another perspective. Hope you found this one interesting.

Vegetarianism is for heroes

Of all the traits a human being can exhibit, one I admire is vegetarianism. Vegetarianism, by whatever design, for whatever reason, is just the RIGHT thing to do.
Not to mention the fact that it is good for the environment and humane as well.
I more admire people who choose not to eat meat because of ethical reasons, than those who make the choice out of religious reasons or because they never tried it and don't want to change. Sure it helps either way, but have a backbone and choose not to eat meat because it's not a good thing to do!

One of the ever-raging debates between people who eat meat and people who do not is where does one draw the line between respecting life and therefore not eating it. One of the most common counterarguments is plants/seeds have life too. You kill them when you eat them. Plus eating meat is natural.
To me, all these defenses are just pathetic excuses that these sorry assholes use to justify a character weakness.
Eating meat while knowing how the animals suffer and how much damage it causes to the environment is just unforgivable. People who still eat meat after knowing that are just selfish assholes. Yes, I believe that non-vegetarianism seldom goes alone - it is always accompanied with it's sister trait of asshole-ism.
Fortunately all is not over... this assholism is not incurable. It can be lost if you choose to stop eating meat! Disclaimer here - becoming a veggie will not result in not being an asshole anymore if you are an asshole elsewhere too, but it will make you less of an asshole.

One of the worst defences of meat eating I have ever seen is on the blog of a chap called Maddox. Maddox can be funny as hell but he's demonstrated that he can be a giant asshole. Here's what he has to say -
http://maddox.xmission.com/grill.html

Will you check out the cheek of this idiot that maddox has quoted -
http://www.wildlifedamagecontrol.com/animalrights/leastharm.htm

It reminds me of so many smokers I have seen. Those smokers who are not shameless about their habit will try to justify it. Some of the worst justifications include things like smoking is GOOD for your health, secondary smoking is worse for you, so smoke yourself etc. Apparently there are medical studies which indicate there is no link between smoking and cancer and others which indicate that smoking is good for your body. YEAH RIGHT!

To get to the point, it is always possible to conduct some study or to refer to some statistics, to try and justify things which are just plainly and obviously wrong. The links I have given above are examples of just such pathetic attempts to justify a criminally cruel practice - taking an animal's life for eating it's flesh.

So now you have to ask yourself one question - are YOU an asshole or a HERO?

Would you do this to your mother?

Catchy title for a post, isn't it.
For the longest time, I have believed that this planet earth on which we dwell has been a mother to all things living and non-living. It sure fits the definition of a mother doesn't it? All the things we need to continue our existence and so on are provided to us by this planet. Each molecule of our bodies, each electron that courses through our neurons as thoughts, as impulses, everything is from this planet. The fact that we exist at all as sentient beings, is thanks in large part to this planet. Is it not the mother of all we survey then?
It saddens me everyday and every moment to think how we treat this mother. How selfish are we, as sentient and intelligent beings - how short-sighted and rapacious. Every day I am ashamed of all we do, or rather, all we undo, in our never-ending quest to have a better life. A better life, of course, as defined in strictly materialistic terms.
There is a school of thought which believes human beings as being the cancer which is eating away at this planet's life system. I tend to agree, even though I never met anybody who studied at that school. Fits into the definition of a cancer perfectly.
All the animals we selfishly slaughter for their skins, their flesh, their bones, their horns, their teeth, their heads or any other parts of their bodies are just one example.
All the trees, young and old, which we chop down for making houses, furniture, paper etc are another example of our selfishness.
All the species we have made extinct and all the species we continue to make extinct everyday, all the forests we continue to destroy - need I go on?
I for one, have an attachment to the way things were... the way my world was. And I hate to see what's happening to it now.
How stupid and greedy be these humans who continue to rape this planet on which they were born and which gave them everything they have! How selfish is this human race!
Would you do this to your mother? Eat her away bit by bit for satisfying your selfish wants?
It's time to do something. The time is now. Your mother needs you to act for her well-being NOW. Are you man/woman enough to do it?

Is North really UP?

In my recent musings I stumbled upon a really basic axiom most of us take for granted - North is up. When we travel North, we go "up state" or "up north". Similarly we go "down state" or "down north". What the hell, Australia is even referred to as down under!!
MOST maps assume North to be up. When we think of our countries, we picture them North side up. Would most of us even recognize our nations if we were presented with their map, say south-east side up?
Of course, most of us go through life taking the "upness" of North for granted. Think for a minute that in the cosmic scale of things, if the South were the real "up" direction. Doesn't that feel funny in your tummy? Now turn things on their side and think if East were up. Even funnier. Would we see things sideways? Ummmm not really, but it gets you thinking!
I for one (being the non-conformist that I am), would like to think that Australia is really up above and the rest of the world is down under. Maybe it's time to CHANGE THE MAPS!!
Or better still, let's turn the Solar System on it's side and make a wheel of it. That way everybody gets to be up once in a day! Much better!
One thing is making a system of reference (like the Cartesian plane geometry system, with x,y coordinates) - another thing is to live in a such a purely random system assuming it's the way things really are. And then once in a while, a thought occurs, which changes the whole perspective!
Is there anything else we should be questioning? Well, I'll see what else I can rustle up :)