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    Slime Dynamics
    Slime Dynamics
    Slime Dynamics
    Ebook92 pages1 hour

    Slime Dynamics

    By Ben Woodard

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    About this ebook

    Despite humanity s gradual ascent from clustered pools of it, slime is more often than not relegated
    to a mere residue—the trail of a verminous life form, the trace of decomposition, or an entertaining
    synthetic material—thereby leaving its generative and mutative associations with life neatly removed
    from the human sphere of thought and existence. Arguing that slime is a viable physical and metaphysical
    object necessary to produce a realist bio-philosophy void of anthrocentricity, this text explores
    naturephilosophie, speculative realism, and contemporary science; hyperbolic representations of slime
    found in the weird texts of HP Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti; as well as survival horror films, video
    games, and graphic novels, in order to present the dynamics of slime not only as the trace of life
    but as the darkly vitalistic substance of life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJohn Hunt Publishing
    Release dateSep 28, 2012
    ISBN9781780999067
    Slime Dynamics
    Author

    Ben Woodard

    Ben’s imagination has led to adventures around the world.Trekking Tibet and Mt Everest.Studying in Austria.Hiking in Scotland.Bicycling rail trails.House building in GuatemalaAnd now, imagining original children stories told through Spellbinders and through his books. Imagination fired by adventure and experiences.Ben is active in SCBWI and a member of a local children’s writing critique group. He is a former Marketing Manager for a major corporation and ran his own marketing consulting business. He started writing children’s stories in 2008 and has completed over twenty books including picture books, middle grade and young adult. He lives with his wife in Lexington, Kentucky.

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    • 3/5
      would be 4 stars if it had been edited well. A great many typos. Woodard's writing tends excessively towards the paratactic.

    Book preview

    Slime Dynamics - Ben Woodard

    distribution.

    Introduction

    Slime Ascent

    "As long as humankind recklessly proceeds in the fateful

    delusion of being biologically fated for triumph, nothing

    essential will change."

    -Peter Wessel Zapffe, The Last Messiah

    Life is not even meaningless.

    -Herman Tønnessen, Happiness is for the Pigs

    Millions of years ago, above a recently hardened earth, gases in the atmosphere reduced and then were exposed to solar and other forms of energy, allowing the creation of organic compounds such as nucleic and amino acids, which would eventually interact leading to the first forms of life. These globs of swarming proto-life within the primeval oceans regulated by principles of physics for self-organizing systems provided the template for all organic being and all eventual thought on the planet Earth.¹

    Despite the fact that humans gradually ascended from these clustered ponds of ooze, slime, as both a general name for a life-generative and semi-solid substance in the physical sense and the disgust of life, the ostensible grossness of organic being in a metaphysical sense, slime remains something to be left behind and forgotten. This is despite the fact that humans are well aware of the fact that our individual biological geneses consist of the unceremonious mixture of slimy biological components (of sperm and egg); sexual procreation being an obvious example of the disgusting yet generative articulation of slime-as-life and life-as-slime.

    While it would be impossible to exhaustively explore the numerous religious and cultural vestiges it can be argued that both religious and cultural discourse assert that either we are not slimy or, if we are, we can escape our sliminess through culture, aesthetics, juridical systems, piety, abstinence, or the next life if need be.

    The part of this abandonment of slime we will explore results from a misconstrued sense of evolution: the sense that our sliminess can simply be shed over time, evolution as perpetual betterment instead of local adaptation. As Stephen Jay Gould describes "The vaunted progress of life is really random motion away from simple beginnings, not directed impetus toward inherently advantageous complexity."² An assumption of eventual perfection attempts to rid human being of not only an accidental beginning but of its base material nature.

    While the cultural and religious resistances would clearly obstruct any assertion that our existence as a species is only material and accidental, what is surprising is that intellectual adventures which set out to be more rational such as science and philosophy are themselves guilty of refusing to accept the tenuous and material moorings of humanity. That is, regardless of scientific or other intellectual discoveries it seems that humans must, for the sake of pride or simply life-justification, retain an inherent meaningfulness.

    The question of life’s meaning leads us to the problem of what about life makes it life? This opens up the problem of emergence—what is it exactly that is emerging from the slime pools? Emergence can be defined as the arising or generation of complex entities or systems from less complex sub systems or less complex entities. Or, put more directly, emergence allows a thing to be more than the sum of its parts. That is, at some point inorganic entities combine (under very specific environmental conditions) to create organic systems which then interact and become life. Eventually we go from chemical compounds to something like a virus (self replicating but often not considered alive) to life as a self contained, self replicating entity which grows and changes by borrowing energy from its environment. Emergence is the theoretical explanation of these jumps. Emergence is generally divided into weak emergence and strong emergence. Weak emergence implies that the novelty or change observed can be traced to the specific results of its component parts. An example of weak emergence would be explaining the structure of a snow ball from the structure of a snow flake given atmospheric changes over time. There is nothing seemingly new about the snow ball given what we know about snow, it is merely an arrangement of smaller parts into something larger. Weak emergence means that new properties arise in a physical system are reducible to the components of that system.

    Strong emergence on the other hand suggests a certain irreducibility arising from a system’s components. The primary example here would be consciousness or even life itself.

    That is, an emergent account of consciousness would argue that consciousness arose from the work of synapses and neurons but would assert, contrary to what reductionists claim, that consciousness is essentially beyond the material capacities of neurophysiology. Strong emergence would hold that thought, on some level, escapes the limits of its physical components.

    At first glance, the concept of strong emergence appears as one of the last (and strongest) bastions of anthropocentricism, of demanding that humanity deserves, or automatically occupies, a place of metaphysical or spiritual importance. Rather the issue is treating phenomenon on their own level, that is, explaining a process of digestion chemically does not explain the activity of an animal acting in order to consume food.³

    Engaging with levels of existence can easily lead back to a formulation of existence where humanity reigns on high, if for no metaphysical reason, then for our technological or artistic capacity.

    It should come as no surprise that even after the numerous dethronings of Man: Copernicus knocking us out of the center of the universe (in the heliocentric model of the solar system), Darwin kicking us face first into the pointless chance of evolution and of Freud unthreading the rationality of our own minds that humanity still attempts to remain resolutely immune to the baseness reality of life and matter.

    Steven Johnson’s text Emergence begins with Toshiyuki Nakagaki’s work on slime molds in which he trained one of the blob-like creatures to find the most efficient path through a maze towards a food source despite the gooey organism’s lack of cognitive function.⁴ As Johnson points out, slime molds have attracted much attention since they function as both individual cells and multi-cellular organisms.⁵ Slime mould behavior questions the very division between life component and life as such especially when they appear to act with intent, when they get better and better at solving the maze.

    For humans, the mindless functioning of life, of organisms moving towards goals without any form of intelligence, of creatures that function in a completely bottom up fashion reasserts not only the accidence of thought but also thought’s unimportance for survival. In other words, the very idea that simplistic forms of life can accomplish what seems to us complex behaviors raises the question: to what degree is higher intelligence a significant advantage? That is, the idea of complex behavior without an intelligence guiding it is ostensibly disheartening in that chance and coincidence surpass telos and destiny and yet, at the same time, if emergence is essentially pattern recognition the question becomes whether emergence is merely an objective or subjective category. Does

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