"Chemical Scum" (or "Room 506")

<<- You know, I never...

I never meant...

- You never mean to hurt anybody…

But you do… >>

And once again it is true. Like Jagger said “old habits die hard”. 

In the escape from room 505 to be at home again, I entered room 506 of Warhol’s Hotel instead. It turns out to be a cold and dark place where nothing makes sense because cameras are held by some lover of randomness who is mainly improvising. “Oh! You know what would be awesome, sync the zoom with that erratic whip… but, oh! It will be better if I do it while I focus that fellow’s mouth. Bad idea… I'll keep zooming like I was doing before”.

You think so fast but with so little background of what you are doing that you end up wandering through winding roads, feeling scummy. You say you never mean to do something and it’s partially true: you don’t mean anything at all, as your actions have no real intentions. There is no voluntary self.

Even your reflexions are responses to innumerable stimuli, mere illusion of reason, happening as a consequence of universe’s history and as purposeless as its evolution. Yes, I am scum. We all are! We are just, in the words of David Deutsch, Chemical Scum; floating in space, an ephemeral configuration of matter that is so complex it has given rise to a virtual representation of reality, the conscious mind. It is Descartes vs Husserl… or Descartes plus Husserl... Anyway, Chemical Scum after all.

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Note: I wrote this back in 2010 while I was remembering some facts of 2009 and was supposed to be published on an empty blog I had created in 2008. For some reason I couldn’t find that blog anymore so I was “forced” to create a new one. The title of this blog was, in some extent, because of the thoughts at the end of the text. I also wanted that this would've been the first post, one that resembles the blog’s style: A total mix of “deep” knowledge, coarsely applied to daily, common, and real (or fictional) situations. But as I never felt it had been truly finished... I postponed its publication.

It originally began without the mention of Room 505 which I decided to include now in an attempt to make it fit better with a semi-fictional storyline.