Flowers exist. Flowers are symptoms of sexual selection. Sexual selection is incredibly expensive from the genome’s point of view. So if genes are “selfish” in some sense, sexual selection is logically impossible, unless plants weren’t logical, or unless there was something wrong with the logic underwriting the concept “self” of which the concept “selfish” is a product. There must be an excess beyond selfishness within the genome, which goes all the way down at least to the DNA level.

The excess consists in a phenomenon happening for no good reason, and a contradictory one to boot, which does not match itself at least in its behavior (ethics, in a way); it was not “designed” for a purpose, for example, but since this language also implies the concept of purpose, the phenomenon seems to be purposefully purposeless. So we can say that there is an excessive contradictory phenomenon happening for no good reason all the way down to the level of self-replicating molecules. We usually give the name aesthetic dimension to an aspect of reality in which stuff happens that doesn’t matter as much as “real” or “more real” stuff like extension in space-time, and in which a “true lie” modality rules such that things can have the point of not having a point. In other words, recursion is part of this dimension’s basic flavor. There is an intrinsically excessive aesthetic dimensionality that is fundamental at least at the scale of self-replicating molecules.

Something supervenes on selfishness, even if possible, namely the excess intrinsic to the dimension of appearance. Altruism is just the inverse of selfishness, a byproduct of selfishness talk. So it’s not that. You can’t laugh at it in the manner of “How can you desire to get rid of desire?” That’s because this something is structuring the laughter as such. Self implies that it be open, which is to say, porous, because it’s a heap composed of things that don’t sum to itself.

We call Dasein the basic overall flavor or frequency of the phenomenology of the field of human doings (to the largest extent to which they are thinkable). This frequency of the “how” of the human (I’m avoiding saying its emergent property because of some thoughts about emergence) paradoxically structures the field of human doings as its logical possibility. Its possibility condition is its phenomenology, its how.

Or to put it in my language, appearing is logically prior to being. Flowers are logically prior to plants (even though they are chronologically after). Hallucination is logically prior to thought (but you can’t call it that until you’ve had a thought). Sexuality is logically prior to cloning (but later in evolution terms). Evolution only looks like it had a point when you look at it backwards. Random mutation, aka pointless appearing, is what is fueling it.

Appearing is logically prior to being. Which means that if you try to delete anything even vaguely associated with that, you are messing with a fundamental ontological part of the structure of the real (let alone reality). Which means that what you are doing must involve violence. The STEM educational ideology, for example, emphasizes computational skill over understanding math. STEM is a way to turn children into very much slower versions of existing smartphone calculators. Children are thus trapped in past states of outdated computational devices, which is to say, they are frozen in a part of the realm of appearance that is sliding too far past the future for the nowness to take hold.

To return to the basic argument.

This in turn means that there is no way to contain the Dasein phenomenological flavor to the human, since Dasein establishes what “human” means in advance. This implies that Heidegger’s fixation on the smoothness and containedness of a world, a concept that can easily pair with fascist thoughts, is a defense reaction to the basic explosiveness of Dasein (it can’t be contained to the human and it is futural explosiveness, opening) not unlike a blister, just as depression is a reaction to anxiety, to too much stimuli, too many phenomena, too much appearing. Anxiety: the basic state of the way we live the feature of the real that allows for things to happen. Thus one Buddhist teacher says that samsara (confusion space) consists of “Waiting for something to happen.” Got it?

There’s always some other little baggy or three of water pouring out of the bigger baggy of water, wherever you look. The fountain of happening that is happening requires that worlds be porous and therefore shareable. And shareable in a modal way because they exist in a modal way because they are heaps. So you can share the world of a lion 30%—I don’t even understand half the things I say myself, so I think that’s pretty good to share a lion’s world 30%, all things considered. There is a possibility for coexisting. We don’t have to overdo proving why to care, which is a performance of pretty much not caring.

Depression is an ontological mistake that has metastasized into a fatal condition lionized as the default philosophical mode in certain domains (“the West” for example). Depression is the default lump ontology (substance + accidents) packaged for experiencing. By tearing off the appearance (he just says that he likes me) depression hopes to get down to a basic essence. But like Basil Fawlty pulling open a soft dessert to find a duck, depression won’t find that essence. You don’t find things like that. You find them by hanging out at the appearance level. Since it’s transcendentally inseparable from being at every point, there is no fundamental problem. You are simply in what seems to you a state of certainty, a state characteristic that is common to low-resolution versions of this truth space, in which true and false are distinguished rigidly. Fake news lives in a truth space like that.

As you go up a level, you become more grey, which is to say, you allow yourself to be in love. The way wisdom appears is as love, according to the logic of the word philosophy (a logic that is not quite distinguishable from the logic of absurd clown), a kind of more or less intelligently confused being-with that does not allow the confusion to shut down, but instead experiences stronger and stronger smelling (just to vary the metaphor to avoid the eye thing yet again) confusion, implying that at higher resolutions true and false become less separable or even inseparable, but not in such a way that they collapse into one another.

If that isn’t the logic then we are stuck with “sophy” as some kind of vanilla object that some kind of vanilla subject, the “philo” part, is pursuing, either to catch up (run away very fast) or to pursue forever (that’s a bit sad on reflection). The chase phenomenology of the subject-object truth space is the thing to investigate, because it’s a not great quality story about the ambiguity that structures reality, which could be compared with shimmering without input, that is to say, non-mechanical shimmering. Like an aroma in the air. This has nothing to do with grasping or not-grasping- anymore. Things can’t go on and on forever in this world, but they can be radically uncountable, which is to say, infinite, because the most extreme example of shimmering is being “still” and moving at the same time. The very idea of stillness must mean this basic note, this frequency. Nothing has no color or flavor at all.

Don’t worry so much. Cynicism is funny because it’s strictly impossible. Reality is fundamentally safe. Stuff can happen. We are many, they are few. Spinal Tap, if you’re reading this, it’s what the flowers seem to be saying.