Final Topic: the small

The small is something that is almost impossible to define. Concepts addressed in class are difficult to comprehend and make the idea of the small even more complicated and incomprehensible than it already is. Everything is real. Everything that is thought is a manifestation, therefore making it exist, therefore making is as real as the things we can see and feel. But of course we are not sure that sight and feeling are real themselves. This drives me absolutely crazy. How can facts be disregarded as unimportant or false? I like the idea of denying reality, but in order to deny something, you have to leave it in tact. The way that we have learned to think and the angle we’ve learned to see things from completely thrashes reality and fact into a million pieces, then where the real issue spurs from the reassembly. Like a cut-up poem which makes no sense and ruins knowledge completely. It is from this universe that the interpretation of the small becomes self. Who we are is made up of everything. But that everything is actually small. The Invention of Morel challenges reality. And the main character is obviously pretty huge in importance, but what he is made of is what we really see. The recording device is the small. The thing that is essential to his importance, but not to his self. The things that make the large possible is the small. Science fiction is a large. Science is small, but essential. “Science to build the fiction.” Tony Prichard said this in class on Monday and it is the perfect example of the small almost, but not quite being the big.  Ribofunk asks the question “how much of us is human?” Percentages can be assigned, but even those percentages are irrelevant relative to the small, which is our genes. Our identity. In all three examples, the small is something different. In Morel, small refers to on small part of a much larger plot and complex character. The recording device is just the most tangible small, but so many more things are essential like the island, the projectors, the reactions. This is the most like real life and humans, with an infinite amount of different components making a whole and it’s so complex that even changing one thing is overwhelming because so much is affected and so many variables are involved. This is much like the way that I define the “self” that we’ve been discussing. Incomprehensibly complex and immune to tampering for even if we did, we wouldn’t know the effect. With no controlled variable, anything could be the cause and it is just a hopeless mind-fuck. Science fiction has two parts. Simpler than the prior example/identity of the small, science is the essence. As a completely dependent structure, without science it would simply be fiction. Science alone is a small because it is seen as highly influential, but in order to influence and not be the change/the effect, it has to be nano. It is beautiful because it becomes even smaller when thrown into science fiction. Though it remains small, Science is nothing similar to what it is when part of science fiction. In two ways, it demonstrates nano to the t.  The Ribofunk definition of small is all the same. Genes. It is who we are, an the distribution changes, it is all made of up the same tiny things. It’s interesting that the way that they are organized is what matters. Percentages simply split the nano into different groups, but genes are so small that they are not affected by this grouping.  Much like atoms. Everything is made of the same thing, yet different products are possible. All three of these definitions of the small are used to create identity. Who we are is nothing tangible. What everything is, actually, we will never see. The big is the only thing we can actually view. We do not see our genes; we see their effect (the big). We see the branches moving but not the wind. The Science Fiction but not the Science. Everything, if the nano is ignored, just is. Like magic. This is life and the reality is that without looking closer, we will never truly understand what is happening. The nano is behind everything in the universe and it creates, invisibly, what we refer to as life. A little like God, is it not?