I was engulfed in feeling and noise when I noticed it. My eyes were closed, I tasted nothing and I smelled nothing. Then I noticed I was actually tasting something: I was tasting nothing: my usual saliva, the air touching my tongue. I was smelling something, nothing new, but definitely not nothing. And I was definitely seeing something, I was seeing the blackness of my eyelid walls, a color black. After a while I didn't see that either, I saw other things with my mind. My physical eye was off, but I still saw, just not light reflecting from objects into my eyes. Only my mind bouncing back and forth. I understood life.
The thread linking the philosopher to the idiot to the dog to the plant to the bacteria. There is the physical world - lifeless and static - and there the living being, of varying size and complexity but universal features - a mind and communicative channels. On one end, the bacteria - its "mind" says one thing to its "body": Survive!, maintain your life, consume "food" through your "mouth". The sunflower is the same, only with more channels: move and point to the sun. The dog barks at threats, searches food with its ears and nose, all just to live. Then the humans, of immeasurable mental complexity and versatile instruments such as hands and eyes, though categorically the difference from the bacteria is just size, the drive to live is fundamentally the same. I feel we are fortunate of being self-aware and able to analyze our mind and travel way beyond the basic directive of survival to the far end of abstract thought and symbolic artistic expression. But all things considered, I am a bacteria, I live, I strive to keep living, I die eventually. In the meantime I get to experience all kinds of emotions, and that is something.
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