Walking Thoughts

I was pondering a question, something I didn’t know. Like whether or not humans were the first to cook food, to eat cooked food, to be able to digest cooked food, what makes living things that can digest cooked food different than ones that can’t, etc.

I could have looked up the answer, but I didn’t. I actively chose not to.

And then I wondered about the capacity of the mind. Is there a limit, is it different from person to person or other living thing, what causes the difference, what are the effects of the difference, what happens when it breaks, can you expand it just beyond the threshold before it breaks, is expansion even the right way to think about it, etc.?

I was thinking about the capacity to feel emotions, have thoughts and common language. I feel that to ask questions is what makes us human. And yet sometimes I ask questions and am faced with my own self as an obstacle. Is this evolution’s way of slowing our too-rapid growth and change? Or have I simply hit my head too many times due to my space-saving loft bed? Is there too much to know, and is my brain’s refusal to seek out an answer a natural roadblock? They say you have to pick your battles, and often my brain sure does (and it often goes for the easy wins).

And so I pondered natural evolution and human industrial evolution. I was thinking about natural evolution as the Tao, the way of things.

• The Tao implements change very slowly. Humans implement change “unnaturally” fast.

• Evolution in either case can have unintended results and consequences (I think?).

• Both the Tao and humans can work to backtrack or to solve problems.

But what if humans were an unintended result and consequence, a problem for the Tao to solve? What if the solution was to let us destroy ourselves? I’m not sure how often a species will self-destruct in nature, but that seems to be the path we are heading towards. Since the Tao works very slowly, it’s one of many possibilities that we would take out all of its work with us.

Is this mental limitation to know All The Things™️in the age of information technology an evolutionary mechanism to protect us from our own selves? Does this mental limitation utilize our own capacity for greed, violence, and chaos—our own capacity to foster misinformation, disinformation, and information overload—so that we cannot think about more ways to deceive each other and may instead rely more on our base instinct for species self-preservation?

Anyway, the weather was nice today. Too nice for a winter day, even in California, but nice nonetheless.