Thought Experiment #1

Definitions

A thought experiment. Not your typical type of paper and so this will not be what most papers for English classes are expected to be. Experiment is exactly the right word. This is the way I would prefer it to be anyways because I don’t typically like conventions and/or doing things a certain way because “that’s how it’s supposed to be done.” I feel that convention is actually a limiter more often than we would like to think. There are many examples in history of convention vs. invention, of items and/or ideas. For example there is always the example of Galileo and how he came up with the idea that the Earth revolves around the sun, not the other way around. He was met with fierce resistance simply because “that isn’t how it was always taught.”

I feel like this applies also to parasites. “Parasites” has such a negative connotation to it simply because it has always been taught that getting parasites is gross and bad in every way and will kill you. This is untrue. Sure there are of course parasites that will kill you if you get them, or only take and don’t give anything back. But a lot of the parasites that we hate out of principle actually benefit us in many ways as well as taking from us. A symbiotic relationship. Sure some parasites may take some food from your gut without you being any the wiser, but they also help fight many of the diseases that are very dangerous to us. They can help with allergies ("Radiolab: Parasites"), colon cancer, and a number of other things that can cause huge problems.

Also, when we really think about it, are we really so different than parasites? Aren’t we parasites as well, in our own way? For example we take milk from cows, eggs from chickens, and many different animals’ skins to make our clothes. (Serres)How is this a symbiotic relationship? We strictly parasitize these animals and justify it in any way that we can. “We need to survive,” or “It relieves cows to be milked,” are among the most common of our justifications. I can accept that it relieves cows to be milked, but what about skinning animals and wearing the skin to help us live, eating them to survive, taking what we want from them, when we want it, without a thought of giving back. How are we not parasites?

It seems to be that our main problem when it comes to this classification is with our definition of the word “parasite.” We always think of the creepy, crawly things that get inside of us and parasitize off of us, which is a normal reaction, but what makes us so different in the end? We do the same thing with the word “animal.” If I were to say I saw an animal today, not a single person, including myself, would ever think of a human first and foremost. The typical idea of animals would be an eagle, or a bear, or a dog. But nobody seems to think that humans are animals when there is no real difference between us. We as a species seem to do this out of sheer arrogance and a feeling of superiority.

For example, we see cats as primitive “animals” that do things purely out of instinct and because they want to, not because they have a complex thought process that leads to them doing it. Well the tomcat Murr would tend to disagree with this claim. We, as humans, do not understand why cats cry so loudly at night and we tell them to shut up because they are making an awful racket. I tend to think, when I hear a cat crying out loudly in the middle of the night, that they are just being annoying because they can. Well Murr’s love Kitty said to him at one point when she heard him singing, “Is that you singing so beautifully, dear Murr?” (Hoffmann, Bell, and Adler) He tends to put a definition to what cats normally do in everyday life that we see as weird and unintelligent, that makes everything seem so clear and normal that we don’t normally see when we are just hearing cats screeching outside of our windows.. It is all in our difference in meaning for every little action, thought, word that we use. They have a meaning for “singing” so loudly (and terribly in my opinion I might add) that seems to escape our grasp every time because it is not the same sense of music or singing as we know it, and so it is just racket.

This leads me to ask “What other words and ideas do we have a hard time expressing?” The biggest one that I can think of is “life”. What is life? What defines it? Some would say that it is the ability to think and survive. Others would say it is having a biological “body” as well as some other qualifications. This has been a big part of the argument for and against abortion. When does life start for a baby? Is it when they are born or when they are conceived or some time after conception but before birth? For me this applies in even more instances. For example, a computer virus meets all of the major decided upon qualifications for life, but it isn’t considered life because it isn’t biological. Or if we were to create a robot that acted in every way with its own personality and decision making factors, we would not consider it life simply because it is not biological.

This talk of technology leads to another idea of mine. This is about the idea of “temes” brought on by Susan Blackmore. I understand what she is saying about their being a third reproducer now, technology. She has a sort of truth to it, but I feel that “temes” are really just a way for us to reproduce. We talked about it a bit in class, how we don’t need technology that we get at first, but as we get to putting them to use, they become necessary for survival. For example, our farming technology is all a way for us to further our survival. At first they were a convenience, but eventually this convenience turned into a necessity for life. With populations growing the way they are, without our newest and best farming technology, we would all be dead in a very short time because we wouldn’t be able to provide enough food for the masses. So I see “temes” ("Susan Blackmore: Memes and "temes"") as more of a way for us to reproduce our genes. Really we use “temes” as a way for us to survive. So I don’t see them as their own category, I see them as a way for us to reproduce and create offspring and grow as a species. I know that she says a lot of them can reproduce on their own, and maybe they do. But all we have to do is shut off the power. I mean we don’t see different people as different levels of reproducers even thought the only way we can truly control how much they reproduce is by doing something drastic like castration, or killing them (shutting off their power). I see it as saying our blood is a different level of reproducer when our blood does reproduce itself without our telling it to, but we still need it in order to survive and pass on our offspring. We need it to reproduce to do this, and so I don’t see “temes” as their own level of reproduction, just an extension of us trying to reproduce.

Even today we talked about the possible implications of increasing technology. We talked watched another Ted Talk that brought up the things that we have been able to reproduce using this new technology. For example, eyes to implant into a blind person so they can see, ear implants, turning skin cells into stem cells. All of this will benefit mankind in the way that it will keep us alive for longer individually. That is a good thing, but as a species it may not be such a great think to overshoot our population cap by a large margin, which almost guaranteed to happen in such a case. This technology not only furthers our genes, and reduces parasitism in some of the ways that Serres sees it. In his book “The Parasite” he has an example of a “crippled” man suggesting to ride on the back of a blind man so that they could both move, and the “crippled” person directing the blind man with his eyes. This would remove these situations for humans to parasitize on other humans in that way. Of course it would most likely open up other ways for us to parasitize each other, because that is what we do as humans, parasitize. (Serres)

So I would say that I am sympathetic to parasites and how they live out their lives and the negative stigma they have. But this doesn’t mean that if a leech latches on to me I’m just going to let it suck my blood by any means. I would rather just know how they work and how to live alongside them, but that doesn’t mean I want to sacrifice my own energy and health (in many cases) in order for them to live. And that is the selfish attitude that has kept many organisms alive and not extinct for as long as they have been. We touched on it in class and I don’t see it as a bad thing to be selfish in those situations. Just what is sometimes needed to stay alive. Everything does it to some extent, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be done to another species. For example a lion may eat the young of another male’s simply to increase the proportions of his genes floating around in the population.

Bibliography

"Radiolab: Parasites." WNYC. Web. 29 Apr 2010.
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Serres, Michel. The parasite. 1st ed. Minneapolis, MN: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2007. Print. Hoffmann, Ernst, Anthea Bell, and Jeremy Adler. The life and opinions of the Tomcat Murr. Penguin Classics, 1999. Print. "Susan Blackmore: Memes and "temes"." Youtube. Web. 28
Apr 2010.