« A Day in the Info-Land »

Consider a worm that lives in the ground, surrounded by the ground, in a kind of 360-degrees touch-filled environment.  Now, consider us - humans - intellectualizing, dreaming, analyzing, conceptualizing, theorizing, imagining, pondering, contemplating, envisioning, mulling over, ruminating, dwelling, thinking.  We are fundamentally out of touch, out of touch with the immediate and local reality.  We are not "here," we are somewhere "out there," in a dream-land about some abstract reality that we ourselves have constructed.

Evolution of the body - it seems - is to keep distancing itself from reality.  Sense of touch was first.  A living membrane of a primordial cell was in a 360-degrees/24/7 contact with its most immediate and local reality. Then came smell - a first distance sense.  Then hearing.  Then vision.  Each distance sense bought us a bit of heads-up about what is coming, a bit of future to ponder and to prepare for.  A bit of distance from the here-and-now immediacy of reality. 

Then came mind, the Grand Distancer of all.  Mind - through "knowledge" - with each thought of abstraction - distances us away from reality into a land of representation.  Whereas, evolutionarily, we started out in a touch-filled/life-filled/reality-filled environment, we have - with time - moved out of reality into a mind-filled (sensation-filled, feeling-filled, thought-filled) holodeck of abstractions.  Verily, we are inhabitants of the Info-Land.  Information-gatherers.  Information-hunters.  Information-processors.  

So, here we are and here I am.  Just another day in the info-land.  Except for the vaguely real springy amortization of the QWERTY landscape my hands are tap-dancing on.