Requiem For The Sand Flea
Wednesday morning. It is the morning after another interesting, passionately discussed topic: panpsychism. Sounds esoteric, and implausible on its face: that mind might be a component of all of reality, from the sand flea, no, lets start even more basic, with the electron. How about reciprocity of rudimentary awareness between a single electron and its immediate context? Can I justify this view, that everything, nothing excluded, has a quotient of mind? No. The discussion turns upon what one is willing to accept as one’s definition of mind. Moreover, our instruments of observation have a limited bandwidth, they only take us so far. There is much that we are unable to observe. And perhaps the final flaw in the matter of justification is our standard for justification has to do with external observation, and a logic/language suitable to that standard. If we cannot mathematically describe a phenomenon in it’s external relations, we almost always cross it off of our list of “the real.” Our language for describing reality from the inside, poetry, is barely understood.
So, I live in a time, when the sand flea is regarded at best as a resource; that is, its function in relation to us. Or as expendable, not to be taken into account. We treat the earth, all of Nature as our strip mine; a cupboard for our pleasure, for processing into products that exponentially increase the wealth of few, with diminishing satisfaction for those of us fortunate enough to be on the winning side of the line. That would be we 
who live in the northern hemisphere.
Little is to be done. We will plunge ahead captive to what we have created, and to the notion that mind/consciousness is a quality giving us hegemony over all the rest….
So, may we raise another glass of sweet white wine to celebrate the demise of the sand flea, and much else as well? It is certain that the glass will run empty, sooner than we all think.
We’ve finally broken this earth. And we thought the party would last forever.
