Chicken Soup For The Philosopher's Soul

You think about madness and how it consumes people. You think about little pieces of joy and how they make your life bearable. You think about a lane which are lined by pubs and college going kids play music there to earn pocket money. You think about places where a poor lady sells bread pakoras sitting on the side of road. There are contrasts, there will be contrasts. The cable tv shows programming that is different from twenty years back. The programming has deteriorated in quality. You think all of this is to make people dumb but then you realise with the internet all of world's knowledge is on their fingertips. Only the ones who would watch TV will become dumb, the TV remote gives them choice of what to watch. There are dumb YouTube videos but the choice is again in your hands, you have the choice on where to click, or touch if it's a touchscreen. What if you don't have a choice? What if you are given only a limited set of options. A chemical reaction in Chemistry gives us an idea of limitations, it takes place only in a specific set of circumstances, sometimes it needs a catalyst, sometimes it needs heat, each specific reaction gives us the specific product. Not all substances are reactive, we have to give them specific sets of conditions for them to react. Mental models may not work in the chemical world, they may not work in the physical world either. Earth's gravity is quantifiable and it doesn't really change, we can calculate it as 9.8 m/s. Mind however can conceive anything. There maybe limitations in our mental capacity but our imagination, at least it seems limitless. We can imagine from black holes to girls in bikinis. We can imagine models of the universe, we can ponder on how our universe is. We can imagine about things like fire and time. Let's talk about fire and time then. Fire, in some ways it is the product of the process of combustion, light and heat, but what exactly it is? It is an entity for sure and it is a process too. How did combustion originate? And time? How did time originate? Time, each day the combusting Sun rises and sets. The sun is not rising and setting, it's just combusting, when we knew less, it was rising and setting, when we knew more we realised that it is just burning. Fire is an entity from a common perspective but form another perspective it is a process. Sun is an entity and time is a concept. Fire gives us heat and light and this heat and light when touched with an inflammable substance gives us more heat and light. It converts the hidden energy in that flammable substance into heat and light until it loses its original composition and is no more flammable. The Sun is burning, and it will burn until it's no longer flammable, it gives us heat and light but we don't think of it as just a flammable burning object, we think of it in many other ways too. Some worship the Sun. Most of us use it for having concept of time. For some rising Sun is beautiful, for some evenings are romantic. It's all about perspectives in the end. Time seems like a constant to us because we have designed it like that. It can be like fire, concept for us but it can be an entity or process too. When we wait for someone we really want to meet, time expands, when we talk to someone we really like, time shortens. Our mind manipulates time for us. At a given point in time there are n number of possibilities, n being the number of possible possibilities. We see the world according to our needs and desires, we paint it according to our preferences, but the world exists independent of our needs and desires. The process, the quality of being human, the humanity, causes us to have more needs, desires and wants and we manipulate our surroundings to us. In the vast unknown we (humanity) are functioning on our basic needs and desires and wants created by us (humanity). We make systems for our better survival, sometimes selfish, sometimes for the greater good (of humanity) and sometimes altruistic, we make systems and we keep imploding within while a vast unknown stands before our eyes to explore. Just imagine if the humanity collectively decided to stop the imploding, and decided to explode, or explore. We have won the earth, what if we started to find what this seemingly infinite space, the universe has to offer to us. How strange is it that this universe functions on laws, it functions in a way that can be quantified. How else we would have explored the space otherwise? How absurd is it to think that there is no intelligence behind this universe that has specific set of laws that governs it and processes that can be quantified. The light of stars takes thousands and millions of years to reach us. Sometimes till the time the light from a star reaches out eyes, it ceases to exist. How selfish is it to think that there is a God who watches over us (the humans) in this vast universe and how stupid it is to think that there is no God, no intelligence that designed this intricate system. Compare a human to a micro-organism, a creature that is so small by our standards and then compare ourselves (the humans) to the universe. A pathological microorganism can even take our life and given the social structure we have one man can affect the health of this planet, like a head of a government deciding that his or her country will be fifty percent forests. It is so easy to change the world, just stop the entropy within our social systems and focus on exploring the vast horizons the space has to offer, but we can't do that. We can't do that because we once created social systems and then these social systems demand continuous improvement to keep functioning properly, to keep away the entropy.