Coins are not the only two sided entity

The Nihilist/Cynic:


What puts the humans on top of the pyramid of different life forms is the ability to think and analyse the past, improvise current and formulate future actions. It’s not the intelligence itself but the level of it puts humans far ahead of other life forms on earth in terms of advancement.


This level of intelligence does not come alone. It is packaged in such a way that, to be humans, by nature is to seek for pleasure and comfort; these are driven by body and mind. The humans use their intelligence as a tool to procure the pleasure required to satiate the body and mind.


Let us see the most obvious first; the bodily pleasure. To live, we just need food. By nature our body will direct us to get the right nutrition and our intelligence will be used to get it. This level of Intelligence is there in all life forms. That is how the humans were living initially. Here, ours faithfully, “The Intelligence” started using its attribute smartness. It didn’t stop with just seeking the required nutrition; it also found that the nutrition are not available round the year and found a way to stock for future. Then came the others, the liking for taste and it resulted in a lot of variety of food we have today (no complaints for that). This made them to farm. Farming cannot be done by one person so started to create community and in a community started creating all the rules and now, you can see what is going on around us and with us. Any species, by nature indulge in reproduction to save itself from extinction. That instinct was also manipulated by our intelligence to reproduce not just for survival as a species but to make the community bigger, to make it stronger.


So, next is the pleasure of mind. As we saw the attribute of intelligence: greed taking us through various developments, the mind actually is in the background of all these. The pleasure for mind in most cases comes out of satisfying the body. Whatever we feel is required, once procured, the mind is satisfied. When the body needs food, a tasty one, once achieved, the mind is satisfied. The problem here is, a satisfied mind is then manipulated by intelligence. The intelligence instructs the mind to instruct the body to seek for more of those that satisfies the body and we get addicted to it. It can be so many things: Food, physical interactions or even at times seeking emotional connections with others. This ends us in relationships and then brews complications attached to it.


We just end up calling most of our actions as achievements whereas, if one looks closely, we are only overcoming the problems previously created by us.


Anyway, what I am wondering is, what is the point in doing so many things. Eating, working, sex, love, hate, war, inventions and so on. To be born itself is a terminal disease so what is the point of being here? Is this intelligence a Boon or a Sin as it also make us think and thinking at times just confuses us.






The conformist/Optimist:


When I woke up early this morning, it was too dark and was stumbling on the toys of my son and was lucky to reach for the switch and here we go, there is light. Humans by nature are not as good as many animals in seeing in darkness. The humans though posses the power of turning off the darkness and flood a space with light. What an invention is this electric light. We have made such advancement in a very short span of existence in this world. When people started dying of disease, we have got a lot of advancement in the medical area to live a healthy life. Though a lot of animals arrived on this world much before humans, their life expectancy has not changed or in certain cases, they have just vanished incapable of surviving the climatic changes but we humans, have reached an average life expectancy of 60 to 70 and in some cases even 90 or 100 where in when we started it was a mere 40 to 45. Our intelligence level has really left every other life form far behind. We have also become so powerful and our natural character, empathy, has come in to save a lot of species from extinction. Today I can talk to my friends and relatives far away whenever I want to. We have already travelled to moon and planning trips to Mars and some large sized asteroids.


Recently I read a research that said that the fertility level in men has gone down drastically and if this trend continues, men will be totally infertile in 120,000 years this got me worried. In few days after that I read another article that said that a group of scientist has successfully created a sperm cell from a man’s stem cell. They also said that it is not far away that they will make a sperm from a stem cell of a woman. These are amazing achievements in bio technology. Though we have speeded up the warming of our planet, we also have the intelligence to find out what has caused it and take steps to tackle it. The most crucial achievement of humans is the ability to adapt. Adapt with physical environment, adapt and tackle with the emotions shown by fellow humans, to form an ally and to form a community to survive together.


I just feel that I am very lucky to be a human and to be in the era of unravelling. The intelligence that we have got is really a tool to advancement, survival and a window to future.


--Satish