I wish we lived in a world that self-regulated.
I wish we lived in a world that produced abundant free food by itself.
I wish we lived in a world where you can litter because everything biodegrades.
I wished we lived in a world of infinite beauty and mystery, and peace.
A world that cleans its own pollution, and where my body heals itself.
A world without factories or weapons of war.
A world without chains.
Oh wait, we do.
I wrote again on my tabletop, scrawled the symbols for the interrelationship between matter and energy as it was understood in my day:
It was a flawed equation, as far as I was concerned. There should have been an “A” in there somewhere for Awareness—without which the “E” and the “M” and the “c,” which was a mathematical constant; could not exist.
Vonnegut is a genius, not that he’s the first to have this thought, but here’s an excerpt from a great article I read yesterday:
Could the long-sought Theory of Everything be merely missing a component that was too close for us to have noticed? Some of the thrill that came with the announcement that the human genome had been mapped or the idea that we are close to understanding the “Big Bang” rests in our innate human desire for completeness and totality. But most of these comprehensive theories fail to take into account one crucial factor: We are creating them. It is the biological creature that fashions the stories, that makes the observations, and that gives names to things. And therein lies the great expanse of our oversight, that science has not confronted the one thing that is at once most familiar and most mysterious — consciousness….In short, the attempt to explain the nature of the universe, its origins, its parameters, and what is really going on, requires an understanding of how the observer — our presence — plays a role.
We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
-Carl Sagan
