Brain Dance And That Southern California Rain Song – Essay
This morning, while driving to my regular lectures, the brain cells inside my head were running around, doing their usual Chinese ribbon dance with the dendrites, making connections, coloring perception, and then sending the signals to the part where perceptions are created. Next, they were making more connections, destroying Time and Space in the process, excavating memories and reconstructing remembrances of things past, and so on and so forth… an endless cybernetic process, as if my mind, brain, and consciousness were one huge cauldron of an LLM or language learning model that hallucinates.
A song, as always, started to play. Yes, my brain is lyrical and compositional. Albert Hammond’s “It Never Rains in Southern California” began playing, and as the tune continued, none was erased… as the poet Omar Khayyam would say. Memories of my early dorm life started coming in, recalling when I was thirteen back in Kuantan, Pahang, in Malaysia. In between the words and music of this Albert Hammond piece, images flashed back and forth of the Los Angeles fires and how much has already been lost. Rich and famous, poor and unknown lost their homes. Theories abound how the fire started and perspectives were deployed to offer explanations – scientific, cultural, religious, conspiratorial, and commonsensical.
My mind posed this theme of inquiry: from Hollywood comes Firewood. How might the industry of escapism from harsh realism—of creating movies to craft and invent realities and to drown the depressed in fantasies—end its existence? Hollywood, through the LA fires, is having its own apocalypse. This time it is real. More real than a reality TV show or starring-Jim Carrey-1998-Scifi Comedy The Truman Show. As real as what Armageddon looks like.
Then I started thinking, as always, about truth, belief systems, the nature of religion, and why people continue to argue, fight, and even kill, or worse, engage in genocidal acts in the name of advancing this or that “Truth” conceived as universalizing.
But if Truth is Universal, as claimed, and each religion claims truth-ness in its advancement and colonization of the mind, what about this: what must Martians, if they exist, believe in?
What will be the preferred religion of the Martians? How might the preachers, prophets, sages, and messengers of the “Truth” reach them? What language will be used? Or what means of communication must the messenger use?
I did not get any answers from the conversationalists in my brain, as I would expect them to come up with after this ride, letting them play and fight with ideas. No answers. Only the song fading away as I took the exit from highway I-80 …