borne
Scope
Consciousness is only borne. The steps that get us there vary when observed but follow a specific progression. Understanding how the world as we see it relates to the world as it is has been deemed the hard problem of consciousness. Everything that is understood and replicable is borne by the hands that brought it into being. When we connect pieces that show themselves it can feel as though we are arriving at revelations separate from our experiences or the happenings around us. What we witness and feel is lived through with reason. Deference is not natural but an externalization process. The concepts that make complex interactions possible in human society today would seem identical to magic were they present at the same levels of precision and control over the same kinds of distances millennia or even centuries ago. How would America have come to be were it possible the voyagers searching for spices could just send a mental message after meeting any peoples from India?
The balance in life comes from systems adjusting for the things we can not see. Society makes explicit the laws by which people agree to act and nature fills the rest with fluid pressure, both aiding and eroding the system to move it forward. Is nature is equitable? What more is there outside of rule of the strongest? There are many kinds of strength. The way we are made guides us in the growth needed yet unseen.
Many hands
How we reached the age of sliced bread is a long path extending across generations. The conveniences of today are marked by the stepping stones laid by those that came before. The perspectives, understandings, and techniques originated from the well of resources we stood upon in youth. The origin ascribed to millennia of understanding across cultures with written histories we could follow, even this is a gift. How would the creation of self arise were the stories of arrival spread across unnamed galaxies and orphaned family trees? We do see peoples working to erase or obscure others across arrival stories. The reasons are simple still and focused on telling a specific kind of story. The message left for generations to come is the processed product. Choosing to tell tales of only the best parts is natural. Moreover, given the present trends seen to lean towards erasure of those once lauded public figures contrarily validates the best self only method of detailing the past.
The vulgarities, savageries, and wanton acts of the past feel distant and inexplicable in the present. Separated from the perceptions, understandings, and felt constraints of moments past we impose our present world view on the hands that lived to forge the path prior. The separation we impose on ourselves in relation to the past as well is presumptuous. We can only guess as to how past flows through and strengthens life today.
Grown Devices are Borne
The pieces we seen are rarely the only ones in action. Think of the examples of devices seen in development across the world today. There are tests done and constructs imposed to prompt later development. In engineering we see stress testing done to find failure modes and the fracture points along which to reinforce. Demonstrations are done to show strength and lend in extensions of what is possible through peer review and collaboration within the designing community. What we work for comes visibly as it is ready to be held. The moments of failure held up to that point are just as if not more important in appreciating the gravity of the final destination. In fact, where we arrive is rarely where we expected or what was thought to be seen. How many moments of failure would be the felt as the ideal for others is a question yet able to be assayed.
The early days of life are all moments in reflection protected by darkness. Eggs, wombs, and cocoons all wrap us in silence and stillness to focus. The parts fundamental to life that act on behalf of the being to which they are party work unceasingly to construct the new self to be brought to light. The beauty is deep in how the light touches and recedes, ebbs and flows, through experience.
We are in a similar time. The self expressed through the devices held today is one founded on expansion, a distillation of the qualities to which society has aspired. The main progress has been in scale, form of expansion, and type of infrastructure connections nurtured. As devices have grown more intelligent and at greater scales we have been witness to a trend, systems held by our hands growing in undirected ways. The past decades would be the womb were we to view the internet as a self to be bestowed. Held by our shared experience, we are moving into a period of industrial fabrication to growth.
How would we view the world given knowledge all the stresses past were not as they seemed? The jostling endured but moments guiding our progress would engender divergences in thought prompting more interconnected expressions. We know not the fullness of the hands that held us or how the world is possible as it is today. The simple view we hold today is direct and observable. As we continue to create appreciating how the mentalities we demonstrate in the process illuminate the possibilities at play in our own active growth processes as individuals and a society.
