Matter

Thoughts on who and what we are

We’re only matter.
floating alone on an impossibly small rock
and that illusion you call Will
is a predictable series of chemical reactions
and interactions
which demonstrate, conclusively
that you have never really been anything at all.
Your matter is all you are and will ever be.

If you’ve spent any deal of time
in places where people like to parrot
smart-sounding ideas,
you may have heard something
along these lines.

Having now spent significant time
in the kinds of places where people
commit Chemistry
I’ve found this enlightened worldview
seems no more common among trained scientists
than among the general population
which makes me wonder
if this is truly a matter of evidence
or one of personality.

I readily admit
despite my proud credentials
I find myself unable to abandon
that which is sacred within us
-but don’t think I haven’t tried.

These days I can draw, name,
and create
those branched heterocycles
whose short trips through my synapses
motivate even the most profound
of life’s moments
-but try as I may
to convince myself
their existence disproves my own
I still find something
in who we are
in violation of the laws
governing Brownian motion,
and I find a holiness
a permanency
in the ways we treat one another
that suggests, to me,
our contributions to this world
are not exclusively entropic.

Call me crazy
but I don’t think my love for my wife
is merely a consequence
of limited magnification
just as I object to the idea
that my ability to synthesize dopamine
in my round-bottomed flask
means all that poetry was a waste of time
just as I doubt the ability
of reductive empiricism
to fully account
for the sense of awe I feel
in a profoundly beautiful piece of nature
let alone the entire human condition.

Then again, perhaps I am a fool
to assign some weight of evidence
to the experience of consciousness
when others seem so happy
to leverage their own minds
against themselves.

Or maybe I am simply not
enlightened enough
that I still perceive the difference
between my fellow man
and a toaster oven.

Allow me to state
for the record
that the difference transcends complexity
and when you tell me
we are simply machines
both of us understanding
my toaster is only useful to me
in so far as it makes my toast
both of us understanding
I am free to use that toaster as needed
and dispose of it as necessary
I begin to question
how thoroughly you’ve thought this through.

Admittedly,
I appreciate the creativity
in asserting that the very means which communicate
my reality
could simultaneously discredit it.
Likewise, I am not blind
to the beautiful simplicity
of deciding that absolutely everything
lies within the grasp of your understanding
and if you are confident in this assumption
I only hope,
sincerely,
that when you have attained
such perfect completeness
you will share some
with the rest of us
because an awful lot of us
have fooled ourselves
into thinking it all means something.

Then again, maybe don’t.
After all
We’re only Matter.