#5 Beneath the Skin: A Humbling View of Human Control What if our sense of agency is just a flicker atop a biochemical ocean? We live under the illusion that we are in control — of our lives, our bodies, even our civilization. But pause for a moment and ask: what truly keeps us alive? It is not our intellect. It is not our willpower. It is what goes on beneath our skin. Each second, millions of molecular interactions quietly coordinate to keep us breathing, digesting, healing, thinking. These processes don’t wait for our permission. We don’t direct them. Most of us barely understand them. And even with the full machinery of modern civilization — its labs, technologies, and medical systems — we are only beginning to scratch the surface of how our own metabolism works. If we ask what governs this invisible activity, we arrive at DNA: a vast archive of instructions refined over billions of years. DNA doesn’t consult us. It doesn’t explain itself. Yet it builds and sustains us from w...
Popular posts from this blog
The City as an Organism
THE CITY IS AN ORGANISM A Manifesto by Frank Vitale A city is a living organism. This is not metaphor. It is biology reframed. It is not a view from inside the human mind. It is a view from outside it — from the perspective of science, where there are no subjects, only systems. From this vantage, cities emerge as living systems — not designed, but evolved. Not symbolic, but structural. They metabolize. They circulate. They replicate. They adapt. Their cells are not brick or steel — but flows. Energy, information, waste, intention. Their organs: transport, governance, communication, trade. Their capillaries: conduits, cables, pipes. Their metabolism: electric, algorithmic, continuous. And humans? Humans are necessary, but unremarkable, organelles — functional, interchangeable, increasingly automated. We are not the city’s authors. We are its substrate. We have never governed it. We are and have always been part of its structure, symbiotic participants in a lineage older than our ...
Blog post #10, Sailing Past Reason On Living with Contradiction in the Face of Determinism and Free Will There is a contradiction at the heart of being human. Science tells us that we are determined. Atoms don’t choose. Chemical reactions don’t have intentions. The brain is made of atoms and chemistry. Therefore, in a scientifically coherent view of the world, human thought and action — like everything else — is the result of causes, not choices. And yet, I choose. I weigh options. I imagine futures. I regret the past. I hold others accountable for what they do, and I expect them to do the same to me. Every fiber of my lived experience insists that something is up to me — that I am an agent in the world, not just a node in a flowchart. So which is it? Am I free or am I determined? The honest answer is: both . And that answer is a problem. The Logic Break If logic demands consistency, then to say that I am both determined and free is to violate logic. And if I accept ...
Comments
Post a Comment