C-168. Catching up: another climate problem

Humans, even if we look back no farther than the Garden of Eden, have had a rough go of it. Hard lives. Short lives.

How else might we Read events there in the Garden of Eden? How might we usefully deconstruct this story to see how rough it was and how it then became even rougher?

But first let’s put Eve and the apple in collision context. Much earlier in Earth’s history and even now in the realms of physics and chemistry, collisions were and are rife … one-step entities taking steps we would characterize as approach or avoidance relationships. Collision or noncollision: a matter of circumstance either way. Later in the biological realm, we meet the “Tumbler” (E.Coli), a behavioral entity that takes more than one step, but only one kind of step, “somersaulting” away from where it was if that place offered no sustenance to maintain its step taking. An Arrange advance (C-165) in avoidance behavior….

Further along in the biological realm’s CEM-history brings us to humans and other species with their advanced Arrange forms of collision avoidance and approach, in consequence of evolutionary and developmental capacity capability advances in the body step, in the step’s minding moving … and, for both body step and minding moving, in the Grasp Involve (these functional aspects that mark the multi-step, varied-step animate entity for whom approach and avoidance can and have become Arranges* -- matters of composition, like the entities themselves: something made).

***

So we pick up the story now with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, with quite a bit of history already behind them (e.g., Eve, we infer, was made; and made of something), and each has a history of personal and social steps taken before the “apple” incident (i.e., collision). MidCourse (C-139), midExpansion (C163) for both, and in both of two respects, for behavior per se and for their particular behaviors….

Eve: “That apple looks good. Nice and red!”

Adam: “It’s probably good. Better than some of the things we’ve eaten that were red.”

Eve (reaching for the apple): “Like those bush berries that you tried last week.”

Adam: “We do have to find things out the hard way, don’t we?”

Eve (munching) “But some good things too. Like when we try things together.”

Adam: “Yes. Still it’s a bother keeping track of all that we know now: what to do and what not to do.”

Eve (still munching, but frowning) “Yes. But we have survived. Remember that poor little animal that ate the mushroom.”

Adam (pensive): “Just think of all the things we should avoid that we don’t know about yet.” (Grave) “Not just what we shouldn’t do again. But what others might do to us.”

Eve (finished with the apple; apprehensive): “Others? Do you suppose that’s the way it’s always going to be?”

Adam: “Yes, and that’s not all. If we survive our tries that don’t work … and when bad things happen but we do survive, we shall have to try to fix things up …and those tries may not work either.”

Eve: “There’s no end to it. It’s all so negative!”

Adam: “Well … it’s not all bad. No one is telling us what to do and what not to do.”

Eve: “Not yet.” (Pause) “If there was someone else I suppose they would be concerned about us -- what we did or might do.”

Adam: “Yes.” (Pause) “There’s some positive. We get to try. So maybe we can get better at trying.”

Eve: “And if there are others like us, maybe we can try together.”

History is otherwise clouded. She confronts an apple. Approach or Avoid? This question will have come up before. She appears to be grown up. By now the problem of Course should be haunting her, given the Nature of Things and its general persisting conditions of partial order, consequentiality and discontinuity … its incomplete instruction and its continuing, daunting call for needed functionality. She won’t wait for the apple to fall to begin thinking about what’s going on and what some similar kinds of falling there might be.

Eve: “Am I to make my way by knowing what to avoid or by knowing what to approach? And how to know and do either?”

* Notably, re approach, for soft collisions … to build steps and/or bodies that further functionality. Communication’s forte` -- in act if not in content.

(c) 2016 R. F. Carter
S