Remusings

It is obvious that there exists many definitional ambiguities with regards to the phenomenon that we call "life". Interestingly, in a world where hegemony of description is essentially the seat of power, the term has yet to be completely hijacked by the authoritative establishments under which we live today. Therefore, when I decided to Google "define life", the output was multifaceted, diverse and often vague. Nonetheless, conversation cannot be stopped short, simply for lack of exact descriptors. Among the many definitions I found, there is the scientific one (defined by the dynamism of biological processes), the pragmatic one (defined as the necessary condition to be 'alive'), the temporal one (defined as the phenomenon that occurs between birth and death), the philosophical one (defined as the existential conundrum within which we all dwell). And among the various other articulations on the net, Terence McKenna provides a definition of life that I...

Until very recently, the term 'consciousness' was exclusively reserved to describe only the human experience of cognition and thinking. This was, of course, a result of the hegemonic scientific dialectic in our society. By its monopoly over definitions, science was determined to keep the animal kingdom away from being conscious at all. Until apparently sometime in 2012 this happened . However, the curious thing about it was that this admittance of animal 'consciousness', occurred much more like a UN resolution, than as a scientific breakthrough. Instead of the time tested age old scientific methodologies of "truth-finding", the definitional laxity occurred in the form of the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, which was signed into existence by a group of prominent international scientists. While the comedy of the situation was ticklish to me on its own, it also drove home a very obvious point as well - that essentially, science has very little to say...

In Berlin, you can actually feel the air fossilized in its history. While one can argue about the phenomenological contradictions inherent in that, the sensation of it is undeniable. The city has seen itself as the focal point of geopolitical watersheds that have shook the foundations of human civilization in the last few centuries - blinding flashes of human achievement, alongside some of the darkest moments of human history. Keeping aside the subjective judgments on these historically gargantuan episodes, Berlin has been "the time" and "the place" of immense significance, many times over. I had heard that the Germans loved their beer. But their newfound pride in their wine was news to me. Therefore, although I found it strange to be having the grape brew one evening in Berlin, Professor I. F. was a man of very specific tastes - namely vino rojo. Sitting on the window ledge of a spacious apartment in Wedding, we had been mumbling through the didactics and reveri...