Stream of Consciousness

On Tuesday, Professor Grobstein talked about how evolution doesn’t strive to get to a place, it strives to discover new places. To compare this to creationism, this conjures up analogy for me: creationism is when your honey tells you to get dressed up for Valentine’s Day because he’s taking you somewhere nice. You don’t know the specifics of where you’re going, but you know that your sweetie cares about you is taking you somewhere that you enjoy. Evolution is packing up the family truckster and just getting on the road…no particular place to go. In the truckster, all I would be able to think about is what route to take, and in particular, how do I make my decisions if there’s no goal and therefore no framework on which to base them? Maybe I should just take in the sights, sounds and smells along my voyage and live in the present… the road is the goal. But how can I make sense of all of this without having a frame of reference? It seems like the present will always change if it makes you revise how you thought of the past. So again, how do I choose a direction? One idea might involve the role of culture. So here’s my “story” about that: maybe in lieu of “true” rules, our cultures create artificial ones so we have a basis for our decisions and don’t devolve into a huge befuddled mass of humanity. How our culture comes up with its rules despite the overall lack of a goal, I don’t know. Hmmmm.