The life cycle of species — extreme brain-canon territory

I woke up in the middle of the night, in that timing where I can’t tell if it’s a dream or reality. Sleep wouldn’t come back, and the afterimage of a video I’d watched before bed kept surfacing in my head. Annoyed, I’m trying to lull myself back to sleep by writing it out as a post.


The video in question:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o-8bLBWx9BA&t=1598s

A species — from the omniscient author’s point of view,
not from me, you, or that one person’s perspective,
but from the standpoint of humanity, or even the ecosystem —
operates almost like the 80:20 rule, where the 80 is indispensable for the survival of the 20.

From that perspective — cruel as it is to those involved — the production and existence of clones is, in a way, perfectly natural. Maybe even indispensable.

Just like a game where, for the smooth flow between admin and user, NPCs are inserted or auto-play features are added, the ecosystem — for the smooth functioning of each species — produces these things in order to operate its own system.

Sometimes it appears continuous and discontinuous; sometimes it looks like patterns and sometimes like irregularities, but if you step one foot — one dimension — back, it begins to look like a fractal structure that repeats with new patterns.

Maybe humanity, too, was like that? Sapiens themselves might be a byproduct of that process. Or perhaps we’re branching off again in the middle of it.

One hypothesis: Homo sapiens is the original strain, and they produce new species for survival. Or they make it possible to do so. The Neanderthals and Denisovans, who disappeared from the Homo genus … and there might have been clones whose names didn’t even survive — the ones who built the pyramids, perhaps. Or maybe they were the originals, and sapiens, the clones mass-produced for their existential convenience, reached a singularity in a very short period of time and wiped out the previous species.

This looks very much like a fractal structure.
Things appear different from each other, yet (when they reach the limit at the singularity) the form repeats again.

Like an AI robot in a movie, evolving until it experiences existential confusion, humanity has pursued the ideal of “benefit to all humans,” the dissolution of class hierarchies, escape from the yoke of religion, independence, autonomy and a transparent society — yet ironically, within all of that, we’re experiencing the same kind of existential confusion. I think we’re traveling along a similar arc.

We are each the protagonists of our own lives, but in the larger play, there are leads, supporting leads, extras, background 1, background 2, even background sound — many different roles.

You may not remember, but a human, too, in adolescence or in the measles-fever of childhood learning, thinks about it once — though of course we soon get pushed by school and competition and grow numb to it. Who am I, why am I so light in this play of life, the world will go on perfectly fine even if I die, so what does this thing called my existence and survival even mean?

The reason this strange and unfamiliar — perhaps long-forgotten — thought is rising again may be that, watching the early part of the video about clones — the worker that can’t lay an egg — I came face to face with my present self.

A clone naturally disappears once it has fulfilled its role. That repetition is repeated countless times, micro-errors pile up, and eventually they create the perfect trigger called imperfection. — Like the AI confusion narrated in our imagined futures — right now, am I not standing in the middle of that confusion as a clone of humanity? Maybe modern times — long for us, but very brief in the history of humanity — are humanity placed at exactly that point.

“The world is so fast” might itself be a piece of evidence that we are in that situation right now. Ecologically, it looks as if we’re drifting from the pattern, but we’re actually a fractal structure repeating again, and like that boundary-not-quite-boundary between two fractal structures — a brief but lucid moment.

And as a child collects insects, as countless beings get casually discarded the way countless lives are tossed aside as cars race down a highway — humanity, too, dies casually within the ecosystem’s motion. Hmm… wait, what’s important here is not the matter of “dying” (everything will perish anyway). What matters more is the question, in ontological rather than survival terms, of what role you play.

Maybe time, too, doesn’t flow from past to future or front to back, but is the process of moving between fractal boundary and fractal boundary, I find myself thinking.


..
One thing or another, but right now
the thought “I am a clone” comes on strongly.

If I belonged to the original strain, even worker ants — many of them — can selectively become a queen depending on conditions.
But not clones. Clones are used like untouchables. Sometimes they aren’t even used; they exist as surplus. Maybe they aren’t even “discarded” by an agent — they vanish without the agent even knowing.

Of course, like sapiens within my brain-canon theory, the clone might end up becoming the protagonist, and that clone might produce new clones for its own efficiency — a momentary clone at the boundary of a fractal structure becoming a new species —

but even so.

No, in fact, even assigning meaning, or arguing about whether something has no meaning at all, is itself meaningless. Like the countless individual cells that make up a living organism, taken-for-granted essentials produced as enormous surplus precisely because of their importance, and we may be part of that surplus, but even surplus has the value of being surplus.

Suddenly heavy in the chest, but maybe also a clean, unadorned scene.

As a single survival it’s endlessly light, but as an existence it ends up contributing in some way —
like a sheet of printer paper with one line printed by mistake, sometimes thrown straight into the trash, sometimes used as a back side, but also clearly serving its purpose as a printout in a project deliverable. That single sheet, in its fated life cycle ending in the output, has to play that role for someone in some form.

Then, is the clone at this singularity moment — the one having these thoughts — some special, meaningful being? The answer, very clearly, is “no.” Some find their existence and use and tirelessly broadcast it everywhere, but in the end, both the surviving clone that managed to pass on its meaning to other clones and the one that didn’t — the one that became aware only on its own and disappeared — are all beings who must be assembled inside that journey or that fixed process.

That’s not
resignation, though.
It’s simply a feeling that this is enough as is.

Maybe the life of a white blood cell is just like that of a clone — quietly, in fact without ever being aware, repeating production and disappearance.
Maybe a cancer cell is one of those clones that, after countless repetitions, fights desperately, feels confusion about its own existence, can’t accept it, and tries to claim its own independence and identity. But ironically, the moment a cancer cell achieves an independent identity, the parasitized organism — déjà vu: humanity parasitizing the earth? — reaches death, and the cancer cell reaches not death but the end.
— That’s the kind of thought that comes to me.

What’s wild is that this strange fractal structure extends to emotions too. Affection and pity for someone, and even rage, can shift in an instant. Even an emotion that was nothing but hatred turns into pity after a long time. And eventually it arrives at the same indifference as in the very beginning. No matter how varied the patterns of a fractal structure are, in the end — same pattern? It’s a contradiction like “language destruction” but it ends up being a true state.
Taste, and pleasure too, are no different, which makes me think the senses might also fall into the same category.

In this respect, I get the strong feeling that it resembles Buddhist philosophy in some way. Of course, I also have the thought, “Maybe in the end this is just rearranging the memories I happen to know.”

And yet, didn’t Siddhartha feel something similar? Of course there must be incomparably greater and deeper things, but I can’t shake the thought that something like this might have been one of them.

In that sense, the “I do not exist” commonly spoken of in Buddhism — while clearly, here I am sensing things and flailing and squirming — the meaning of the “non-self” that Buddhism endlessly emphasizes might be exactly this kind of feeling-feel.




..
So?
There is no “so?”

Just
“it’s just like that”
is all

and
that’s enough.