0114: Senses Working Overtime

You know, you're already a lottery winner. Yes, you.

You've got consciousness, the cells that make up your body and brain and heart and skin and blood have given you the gift of consciousness. Most things in this universe aren't self-aware, but you sure as hell are.

That's... I wouldn't call it a gift, because gifts imply a giver, and I don't think there is one. But the fact that you're aware of the universe, of how soft a blanket is, of the taste of cherry , of hugs and the thrill of a bus arriving just as you get to the stop, and looking in shop windows and hearing the bells of a church six blocks away, that's actually a startling evolutionary development.

Consciousness is little more than a trick, developed by the cells that make up our body, to delude us into looking for food in a slightly smarter way. It's an evolutionary advantage. But not only has it worked, it's meant we can see-hear-smell-touch-taste so much more than just sustenance and prey.

Hell, we've fucking figured out art.

Sure, we can tell if bananas are off before we eat them, and we know there's bears at the zoo we shouldn't play with, but we can also enjoy Mozart and Jane Austen and Mark Rothko and Ella Fitzgerald, even though they're long gone from this world. The squishy meat in your skull can take the pictures and words and noises made by those long-gone people and turn them into some kind of feeling and meaning.

That's a bonus, dawg. You're a winner.

If you can find something beautiful to put in your sense-holes today, think about your entire evolutionary chain, going back to the microbes that were swimming in the primordial soup, that made it so you could do that. It's a happy side effect of an amazing evolutionary parlor trick. Go play.