Could you see the future?

 Every so often, I think about how, from a reductionist’s point of view, we have been functioning as a simple process of life existing and interacting with other forms, both animate and inanimate. We do specific things in specific ways that seem like obvious solutions to us when observed on the surface level, yet, we differ in the way that we construct narratives to make sense of it. And if we could believe our lie (or uncertain thought), how could another person not? The other day, while making instant noodles with a friend, we had a conversation-

"Why did you crush the noodles within the packet?"

"For the same reason why Keema tastes better than large cuts of chicken on a grill, smaller bits ensure that the masala spreads around the surface".

Now fundamentally, I did it because I'm used to making it this way for a long time, even before I could develop this logic. But why did I not answer this harmless question straightforwardly with, 'I don't know, that's how I've always done it'? This gave a premise for my mind to wander about and come up with all kinds of reasons as to why we make such narratives.

Humans became sapient when they started to think about how they thought. Animals can think, so can plants and bacteria. Colonies of fungi communicate and pass directives, birds migrate in unison without a leader, and an ant signals his friends to feast on an insect together. 

What happened so differently that we developed sentience and they did not?.

Why has our way of living evolved to the way it is now?.

What are we without our communities?.

Well, I think the answer may lie within the question. Chaos, as Charles Darwin and Lewis Morgan answer how it all happened, I presume absolute chaos is what gave birth to order. A process with an infinitesimally small variation when repeated over and over again, will yield something different. But you could never find a starting point if you went back interpolating. In sum, the butterfly effect. Because if we think about it, it was a single cell that created all this variation we see around. A down-scaled example of this would be the Zygote, which was a single cell that differentiated into all the different cells we have in our body today. Now, the things mentioned until now were common knowledge, and if you're interested in trying to know why HOX genes give structure to the body, the Mandelbrot set would be a good place to start.

Sorry for the drag. I'll be getting to the important part in a moment.

As of late, I have been exploring psychedelics. LSD in particular. It raises thoughts on what our immaterial mind is, and how it emerged from a material reality through the alchemy of some forces and elements(stardust(or cosmic waste if you're not a romantic)), futile questions like what is our role in the universe and is there something above us that has set the right value of a cosmological constant, ensuring perfect conditions to appreciate the creation of life. But more importantly, it helped me establish the fact that our brains and bodies are just organs of the mind. We function through the execution of various networks in our brain. Closely looking at these networks will show you an interplay between psychological and physiological attributes.

 An example: The act of writing. A network responsible for making this happen fetches words and phrases from where the language is stored and processed(the Broca's area), constructs coherent thoughts by analyzing what would make more sense, and transmit that information to our fingers which type or write it onto a notepad. Like this one network, millions are running in synchrony to sense, perceive, comprehend, and perform action. Since all these networks cannot be running at all times (energy expenditure concerns), a single network evolved to the position of a dictator and assigned rules for these networks to interact with each other when called for (you don't see music or hear taste for this very reason). It is called the Default Mode Network(DMN). LSD fucks this up.

Suddenly you could sense different networks that usually operated under specific conditions, now all lit up. With the dumbing down of this dictator, new connections between these unrelated networks start taking shape. You could see the visuals of the music you're hearing. You could suddenly smell mom's chicken curry when you thought of it.

It is somewhat closer to the theta state achieved through meditation, which works by shutting down the Precuneus, bringing a sense of oneness or ego death. You no longer feel attached to your material possessions, you speak more directly in conversations, you stop improvising on what you're about to do or say next based on your fear of judgment. The use of both meditation and acid together provided another premise for my mind to play in. Multiple attention. A precursor to the development of an immaculate language as an emergent property.

We've always been under the notion that we are extremely capable of multitasking and stretched it as far as debating which sex could do it better. Scientists recently concluded that we could only switch between tasks, meaning that you could be attentive to one thing for 8 seconds, the 9th second you're on to something else. You could sense a weird fear when typing while driving, a dissonance while writing a blog and trying to stay attentive in class, or simply, a hesitation when you attempt to tap both hands at different rhythms. This is because of your brain's inability to concentrate on two fully-fledged memory and cognition intensive tasks together. What if we could achieve this?

Our minds are capable of cultivating the future. Hypothesize that you're at a road junction with one way traffic on the Y-axis and the lights are green. As cars stream past at speeds over 60kmph, you see a blind woman on the other side attempting to cross. A car on the distant end of the lane cruises on autopilot, but hidden from the woman's view and vice-versa. Far beyond the scope of corrective action, from the driver's or the AI's perspective because of a blind spot, let's suppose. Your basic math logic paints a picture in your mind that both these entities will intercept at a specific point, resulting in a collision. And that is what happens. Out of all the scenarios you could see, this was the one you saw because you had the right point of view. The many possibilities of an outcome collapsed into one. Or a different example is of you knowing a person so well that you know what they will do next, soon after their 3rd breakup with the same person. To me, this resembled Schrodinger's experiment with the cat, adopted into psychology.

Imagine, if we could be attentive to multiple complex trains of thought, all at once, a standpoint where you could have an abundance of information flow, processed within logically accurate boundary conditions, that presents you with different perspectives without fixating on a vantage point. You simply expect everything. All of this makes me wonder if Clairvoyance could be a real thing. As conventional language cannot grasp and propagate multiple streams of thought intertwined within each other, we could end up needing a new language. A symbol drawn using this language would put a paragraph of sentences to shame. Research has been filling many holes that were paramount to entertaining the possibility of storing stock market data into DNA and producing disease-resistant babies using CRISPR. It’s not a matter of ​if​, but ​when.​ Companies will continuously upgrade Neural implants like Snapdragon chips, opening doors to transhumanism. So that one day if you dream to live forever, it would be as easy as uploading a file onto the Drive. I think I’ve gone too far. 2077 far.

Afterall, it’s all just stories. For I, is like any other common denominator.