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and here quickly my reply to your last lengthy mail: /i had missed this very big point, and last semester, i asked no questions, so i got no answers./ totally agree on this. Its good to be reminded of this sometimes! /to this end, i penned the following after readin john brockman's piece on the third culture. it made sense to me. reading edward o wilson's consilience. and found this. the ossified intellectualism of the great theorists should now be padded with the flesh and blood of a new humanism. the knowledge we possess, and that we will continue to create and discover for ourselves in the sciences, in the arts, in all the different parts of humanity must collide to form one body, and it will be a coherent body as marvellous as the bodies we now possess. perception will change, in methods, in scale, and we will see in different light and at different degrees of magnification so that an understanding of who we are may emerge from the various levels of being, and through different forms of being. we will know that we are systems that are part of a system that is a part of a system that does not end because it has no beginning. it's a tad simplistic, i think, but it sums up for now how i feel about what we are. organisms made up of organisms making up organisms. it convinces me that there is no point in questioning the beginning or the end. we are the middle, exist in the middle, and the middle is as important as the beginning or the end. what we should be asking questions about is what we can do to make sure this middle works as optimally as it can within the system, since we have the capability to ask./ maybe this is the task given to us: asking questions? but no, there is no task-giver, unless of course you want to believe in god. I dont think we have to strive to work (or function?) optimaly unless we are sure we know what our task is. I personaly prefer to reflect on this a bit more... :-) /but really, i think that humans are perhaps the least evolved of all creatures - dolphins live, my cat lives, other plants and creatures live, completely acclimatized and adapted to their environment./ from a scientific point of view: we are perfectly evolved, since we exist. /we are the only ones who are uncomfortable in our skins./ thats what defines us as being human! hence the tool makers, which leads us directly to the cyborgs ;-) /it pains me to no end to think of how it's always us who throw the balance./ thats because we are the only one to reflect on what we are doing. /it's as though we are precisely that element of chance mutation in darwinian evolution. we are the glitch./ like every other beeing on this planet... My diagnosis: I believe you suffer of a terrible culturpessimism and you see humanity as a form of virus that destroys itself and the planet it inhabits. sometimes I catch this meme aswell, but I developed a kind of resistance to it, since the planet (resp the eccosystem) shows an incredible ability to find its own balance again and again. we shouldnt forget on what condition life started on this barren ball, and through which disasters it ran through. it most certainly will survive us humans as well. this doesnt mean stop trying to avoid our mistakes, but more than trying is not possible, since thats the principle our evolution runs on, too. either it succeeds (on one way or another - always depending on how you define success) or it fails. but then.. we are all one. so long love and miss you m