Impossible & Other Nothings: Poetry

somnambulist

What do we know?

Don't answer immediately. Think it through, carefully. What do we know, really?

What objective truths are true now, and always will be?

Consideration, questioning, rationalizing. It's something every human being, or at least every functional human being does at least at one point in time. It's something rooted in our core, that wondering. That curiosity. That hunger for answers that makes us inanimate and unresponsive, burrowed deep within ourselves in the search beyond the physical universe where every human travels to find truth. No use in denying that we do this.

And then...why are we here?

And for the more deeply heuristic theorist...are we really here?

Are we alive...or living...or here as we deduce the question to be. What is the definition of living, of being alive and conscious and rational?

Is life the ability to breathe? To feel? To think?

Then what of the eight-month-old fetus writhing in the mother's womb. It cannot breathe, but is it alive? It is fully developed to feel pain, but can it think? If it was born, at eight months old, it would live. There is no doubt that a baby once born into this world is alive. But why? What makes it so? What is this judgement we make that determines whether something is alive or not? Whether it has rights or not?

And what of animals, who are living, but cannot rationalize or think as we do. They are alive, but what makes them so?

Is life the ability to respond and react to outside forces?

Then we can say a two molecules are alive, in that they can react to the other molecule's balance of ions in its orbit. They can move and respond and exchange electronic charges, but they are not alive. The molecules that make up the air and water and wood and dirt are not alive.

Is life the ability to function independently of outside forces?

Any group of atoms and molecules can remain functional in a given system without interfering forces, yet they are still inanimate.

Can life be given in a lab?

Take a dead body, every part of it completely functional and able to move and breathe and process food and feel, but it cannot. Why?

If machines were implemented to make this body move and breathe and process food, would it therefore be alive? Of course not. Why?

Why...why...why...and why does this even matter? We know what is and is not alive. Ferns and human babies and dogs and bacteria are alive...but why do we not have a definition for this life?

How about a single cell, is it alive? It cannot breathe or think or even feel pain. It is so simple that it is more machine than a piece of nature. So then, if a cell cannot make its own decisions, and is only a perfectly programmed organism like a computer program, than what are we beyond a vast system of billions of individual, finely programmed cells so complex in their design that they are able to function as a whole and in unison?

What are our thoughts beyond these billions of cells exchanging information and accidental chemical reactions occurring cerebral cortex?

And if this is all the way it is, then how do I know that I am an "I" and not a "we"?

How do I know that I am real and my own person, and not a perfectly programmed organism designed to respond to outside forces in a set pattern decided by these cells, all intricate and programmed as well, that dwell in my brain?

How do I know that these are my thoughts, and not just chemical reactions occuring in my cerebral cortex? If I am no more than a slave to the billions of cells that make up who I am, that determine my thoughts and actions and even my fate, how do I know anything at all?

See what I mean? If there is no objective, beyond physical sense of being or truth or consciousness or rationality or whatever you call a soul, then you can't know or believe anything for certain. You can't trust your thoughts or your instincts to be your own and not the dictation of some parasite or the collected number of cells that make up your apprehension. Can't even trust that your future is your own and not decided by these billions of cells and bacteria and who knows what else could be making up the being of yourself, or if you even are a "you", or just a physical system just as special and independent as the water cycle.

How do we know anything, then? How do we know who designed this plot and this universe?

If there is no objective defining law of existence, then we truly know nothing. There is none found in the scientific world. So then...where do we go to find out if we are truly real?

There is no rationality or life or the certainty of the human soul outside of a non-physical universe. Who then, is the author of this non-physical universe?

Do we know? Does anyone?

Do you?

So again I ask you, what do we really know?