the electronic self

[pnictogen_wing]

I believe that it's an insufficiently appreciated fact about the human body, and indeed about the bodies of all living creatures on Earth, that they consist largely of bags of aqueous chemicals. The cell, the central unit of Earthly organic life, is a contained chemical environment, distinct from that maintained by other cells and distinct from the surrounding medium. Whatever life is, it's a trait of fearfully complicated interlocking chemical reactions going on within a contained (but not fully closed) system.

That implies something interesting about life: a good deal of it consists simply of electrons being shuffled around.

All chemical reactions occur through the interaction of "valence electrons", the outermost electrons of atoms which are relatively labile and can be readily added to or subtracted from. Chemistry isn't "just" electrons moving around, any more than a great painting is "just" pigments on a canvas. But the electrons are the lightweight part of atoms and molecules, liable to move around much more swiftly than the heavier nuclei. Both neutral and charged molecules are constantly circulating around the body, so at all times we're seething with shifting electrical charges inside of us, the "body electric" as Walt Whitman called it. (Really? Whitman coined that phrase? And so early too...remarkable insight, that.) I'm reminded also of how "electrochemistry" is used in *Disco Elysium*—more or less accurately, I think, to refer to this particular aspect of human existence.

It's our general opinion, that we've yet to refine further, that much of what the human mind thinks of as its awareness or consciousness is tied up with the swift activity of moving electric charges in the body. Human consciousness ends up caught in a tension or conflict between two poles or extremes: that which is carried by the swiftly-moving electrons, and that which is carried more slowly by entire molecules moving around. It's possible to become too self-aware, I suspect, of one's fast-moving electronic self. One can become too "wired", as it were, living on the ragged edge of one's quickest, most twitchy and hyperreactive perceptions.

I also think there's clear implications for how human beings interact with electrical devices. We subconsciously recognize an odd kinship between ourselves and our machines: in different ways, we both rely upon electrical charges moving around. In computers that attains an extreme degree of over-elaboration and...well I think I'll just leave it there for now.

~Chara of Pnictogen

Comments

[beige_alert]

Is that why tritium glow lights are so nice, the beta particles?

Hello β my old friend
I've come to talk with you again

https://flic.kr/p/pHzuyw

[pnictogen_wing]

now that's pretty! but I now wonder whether the quality of radium paint's light is somehow subtly different in feel or vibe from tritium paint, because radium is an alpha emitter ~Chara

[amphobet]

I think we have something of a wave-particle duality that goes mostly unacknowledged. We think of ourselves as particles. Discrete, distinct. Solid.

There's a common misconception that every 7 years you're made up of completely different cells. If that were true, we wouldn't have scars, and would be able to regrow limbs and regenerate spinal damage.

So obviously you have some of the same cells, but what about even smaller building blocks? What about carbohydrates, lipids, and proteins? Individual water molecules? Atoms? Electrons?

It seems obvious that we are constantly exchanging matter around energy with the environment. Aren't we like a wave in the ocean? A wave is not made up of the same water molecules from one moment to the next, but we see it as something distinct that moves in space and exists within a certain span of time.

[pnictogen_wing]

I agree. I sometimes think about how human existence and awareness can be dimly envisioned as an extremely complicated "wave packet" localized in space but only during that period of existence which we call "life". before and after that period, however, the matter of which we're composed does not cease to exist, and it seems unlikely to me that *consciousness* ceases utterly to exist on either side of that interval. we spread out towards infinity on either side of the center of the "packet". ~Chara