Hiding Our older-Self

I had a thought today. We (people) are often ashamed of how we were like, or things we did as teenagers. Like maybe it was a poem you wrote, which you now think is pretentious or too emotional, or maybe it's your photos where you try to look sexy as hell, or you had your ponytail cover one eye for "cool effect", or maybe it's a love letter you wrote someone which now you think sounds super-naive and silly, your T-shirts that tried to project a certain image to make people like you, or how you recorded yourself singing, thinking you were a world class singer. But my thought was, that maybe those things, which we try to pretend never existed, are actually something to take pride of.

That was a time when we displayed our selves out in the open, naively, without a greater context, without considering or knowing how they will be received. They present some raw sides of us, in a way that today would require much more courage to show. So you may have been silly, but you were out there and you were real. So I think that should count for something.

That said, there are still things I did and wrote/ created back then which I will never show anyone alive now 😂😂

But I wonder if that's the best way to exist.

How can the organs of an organism cooperate so well?

I had an interesting thought about living things. We tend to think of living things as a single entity composed of "parts", each with its own specialization.
A plant has roots, leaves, flowers etc', a human being has a liver, eyes, blood vessels etc'.
And it seems mysterious that all these specialized organs come about in perfect cooperation with one another.

But there is a different way to think about it.
We don't question why predators have the teeth and body that they do. We know that they developed the way they did because there was an abundance of prey around, and this was the best way, most suitable way to capture and digest it.

But we can think about the parts of a single entity in the same way.

The cells that compose the roots of a plant may have developed gradually in a specific micro-environment. What do I mean? Imagine for a moment that you have a plant-like organism, without roots, but that extracts its nutrients from above the surface of the water. However, some of the cells of that organism are attached at the bottom. Those cells are constantly surrounded by the chemicals secreted from the cells above, as well as the moisture and darkness in their current location. Over millions of years being in a similar environment and replicating, those cells will adjust to using the specific chemicals and degree of light and moisture in that part of the organism, eventually changing from the standard cells above it and specializing into a "root cell". A similar thing happens at the top of the plant, where some cells develop over time into leaves, or flowers. The final result is a conglomeration of cells, each with its own specialization, and we don't understand how something so complex came to be, and how the different parts developed such intricate cooperation.

But, if we think of how each of those parts individually adjusted to its own micro-environment, it is not surprising that it is so well suited to communicate with the rest of the plant, or to take advantage of the moisture in the ground.

Our limbs and eyes developed over time, based on their own micro-environment.
Think of a worm-like creature, swimming in water. Its head is at the end of the body that is first to move toward or away from things (the "steering wheel"). That is the single most sensitive part of the organism that will benefit most from sense perception (sight, smell) because it is the first to die if it runs into the wrong thing. So it is no surprise that eyes and mouth develop at that particular part of our worm. Just like root cells develop where it's dark and damp.

So my idea is that each one of those components develops the way it does to survive in its own micro-environment, given the by-products secreted into that environment by the rest of the organism. That's how complex systems get created with the ability to synchronize and communicate so perfectly.
It's not that the plant said to its cells: "you there, go to the soil and become a root, and you there, go up toward the sun and make a leaf", but rather, this mass of cells started specializing according to the micro-environment of each part. But the products of each of the other part became part of the constant micro-environment that that part needs to adjust to. Just like a predator evolves to be able to hunt. :-)

I hope this will be interesting for someone and worth reading. There is probably writing about this somewhere.. Maybe eventually I'll get to it. For now I just like thinking about this on my own and sharing these ideas.

One of the interesting things he talks about (toward the end) are how we are similar to animals in having a biological basis for an "us vs. them" behavior. BUT, he says that in humans this behavior can be based off of ideas, rather than territory or blood relation.

So it made me think.. This ability to abstract patterns rather than just respond to them right away has proven to be very efficient for survival. You don't rely on stimuli alone to preserve yourself - you have the ability to predict the future.

So now at some point once this cognitive way of functioning developed, it endured. Now you have a whole bunch of these creatures walking around making decisions based on their IDEAS. So what it means for you as an individual animal, is that your life and survival now depends on other people's ideas more than the usual factors that existed for other species in the past (like blood relations and territory).

This creates an evolutionary pressure (I think that's the right term), to monitor and respond to other people's ideas, as a high priority - maybe even higher than factors like the tit-for-tat behavior he mentions or things like blood relations. That's why people can be so angry at someone's political views that they could end a friendship over it.
Ideas are THAT important to our species.

It is an inevitable behavior... and happened for the same reason why abstract thought came about in the evolution of brains. I think...

Turns out I am a big time biology nerd. This stuff is fascinating. Understanding who we are and why we are the way we are.
And isn't it cool that so many living things have existed not having a clue of their own complexity. Having self-awareness was not required to survive. You were an amazing feat of engineering crawling or running around the earth not having a clue that that is what you are.

Do trees know that they are in an urban area?

When I see trees decorating the streets and sides of the road I usually have this peculiar feeling or thought. I know that this tree I'm looking at, which I associate to an urban landscape, came from some part of the world where its kind grows wild.

And I have a strange feeling that is hard to put into words, of realizing how out of place the tree is, growing inside a designated square, surrounded by cars and pavement.

If you saw this tree in its natural habitat, you would be immersed in a certain feeling that is unique and typical of the growth place of that kind. If you stood there and absorbed that feeling, the cooler, damp air, the scent of the combined effect of the filtration of the leaves, the pace at which the tree moves to the wind, you would experience the essence of that tree fully.

But then we take that tree, and plant it in our street, and it makes the street so much nicer, but we are no longer able to sense its essence. We make it into our decor, we enjoy some aspects of it and become blind to others.
It is fine, there is no crime in that, but it is still something interesting to think about.

I guess maybe I feel a little sad for the tree who is so out of place in our urban environment, except I realize that a tree has no awareness of this kind.

But today as I was looking outside at a tree I realized something (I chose this picture from the world wide web to illustrate my thought):

Not only is the tree not aware that it should be sad, or that it is out of place; but to the tree, its own existence is not in question, but the existence of the pavement and everything around it. The tree gets what it can, and makes room for itself where it's possible. To the tree, only resources and the world exist. We think the tree is here to serve us, but, as evident in this picture, the tree thinks our environment is here to serve it. It grows, and we are the ones who are "out of place".

It doesn't care that it is not living in the forest. It is living somewhere in the world and that's enough.

I know that this is an allegory, since trees don't have such thoughts, but it is still a powerful allegory for me. When I feel out of place I can remember that somewhere in my nature is the same quality of the tree. I grow and enjoy the world, and the things that are not in synch with my nature are the ones I don't have to consider as prominent.

Like the tree, we belong to the world, even if we sometimes don't feel like it's our "natural habitat".

Bad design is a result of ego

It is when someone wants to have something implemented because it was "their idea" and not because it is a "good idea" (an idea that logically matches other human beings' experience and needs when using a product).

I think the measure of how much a company has a user-friendly interface can be sort of an indication to how much the company is run by ego, and an environment where employees walk on eggshells as to not threaten anyone's ego, rather than be free to express good ideas.