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