Lungs The Machinations Of Gilbert Ryle (nozick Loses)
Aren’t we already plugged in?
Or that is to say we are the contraption itself,
contingent on the selves that lived before.
Savanah-driven adaptations overlaid on ancient biology, nothing more.
Spilling out to trace the distant shores.
The briefest knee-jerk twitch,
the anatomy of grief that fills your skin -
perfected rules-of-thumb programmed in.
In patterns and cascades, digitally-made.
Our bodies, shutting down as we speak,
sculpted by the culling of the weak.
Aren’t we behaving plastically,
but in just the way spec’ed by our R&D?
Bilateral symmetry
tugs our limbs to march to universal beats.
And if we were brains in vats,
I fail to see us being any more empty
or constrained by contingencies.
The heat of jealousy,
soldered in by reproductive economy;
a sense of beauty,
selected for by ancestral attentional needs;
the briefest knee-jerk twitch,
the anatomy of grief that fills your skin -
ad hoc jury-rigs hard-wired in.
