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“I Am So Excited” The Druid’s take on the
Nested Excitation Structure of Identifiable Being Human
beings have always sought to understand what it means to be—to live,
to feel, to know. In the simple declaration, “I am so excited,” there
lies a depth of ontological mystery that reaches from the surface of our
consciousness down into the energy quanta substrate that comprise all matter.
Modern physics, biology, and philosophy converge uneasily at this
declaration, each providing partial and sometimes mutually incompatible ways
of situating it in the grand order of nature. The druid
reconstructs a natural context for that single utterance, proceeding in
layers from the person to the smallest known excitations, to clarify what is
meant when a self-aware being claims to possess an experience, and to
illuminate the fragility and wonder of that claim. 1.
The Personal Horizon To say “I
am so excited” is to make an assertion that presupposes: ·
A subject (I), ·
A condition of being (am), ·
An affective state (excited). It is an
utterance uniquely human: a demonstration of first-person awareness, affect,
and linguistic abstraction. At this level, the meaning of excitement is
immediate: a felt intensity, an anticipation, a surge of vitality. This layer
is the most accessible, the one we live in moment by moment. Yet we
know that this surface layer emerges from more basic substrates. To trace
them is to journey into successively deeper orders of being. 2.
The Cellular Order “I am so
excited” could not be spoken if you were merely a cloud of molecules without
form or process. Your self-awareness depends on the integrity of roughly 70
trillion cells, each a microscopic entity, indeed a world
in its own right. These
cells are: ·
Individually alive, maintaining homeostasis. ·
In constant exchange of signals—ions,
neurotransmitters, hormones. ·
Organized into tissues and systems: the nervous
system, endocrine system, circulatory system. In your
neurons, the state you call excitement emerges as cascades of electrical
impulses and chemical gradients, traveling at astonishing speeds and
coordinating activity across many regions of your brain and body. At this
level, excitement is measurable as: ·
Increased firing rates. ·
Synaptic potentiation. ·
Hormonal surges (e.g., adrenaline). Yet even
this cellular life is itself constructed of still finer architectures. 3.
The Atomic Order Each cell
is composed of ~100 trillion atoms (actually complex
chemical elements): ·
Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus,
sulphur, and trace elements. ·
Arranged into complex molecules that maintain the
biochemistry of life. ·
Interacting through electromagnetic forces. Atoms
themselves are not solid billiard balls but complex aggregates of dynamic
energy interaction systems. Note the shift of interpretation. Atoms were,
and still are, the un-splitable, like bits. The
traditional image of electrons orbiting nuclei is a simplification that masks
the deeper quantum reality. What appears, at the level of cells, as the flow
of ions and molecules is, at the atomic level, a dance of fields and
energies. That’s why already the ancient Indians experienced the world as a
dance, namely the Dance of Shiva. 4.
The Quantum Order In the
early 20th century, physicists discovered that atoms, now redefined as
chemical elements or modules, are best described by wavefunctions—probability
amplitudes confined in their own curved space-time. The electrons in your
body occupy orbitals defined by Schrödinger’s equation: ·
Not fixed paths, but
standing wave patterns. ·
Described by quantized energy levels. ·
Collapsing into definite outcomes only upon
measurement (meaning contact). When you
interact with. Meaning contact them, these probability waves (of excitement)
yield defined states or energies—“particles”—(meaning real moments), but between observations they
exist, indeed, are inferred as evolving potentials. This is not a metaphor
but the best account we have so far of what matter is at this scale. It
follows that, even as you declare excitement, the components of your body are
not wholly determinate. The certainty you feel in your experience is
underlain by pervasive indeterminacy. 5.
The Subatomic Order Atoms are
composed of aggregates of protons, neutrons, and electrons, and
protons and neutrons themselves are made of aggregates of quarks and
gluons, all energy, hence excitement momenta: ·
Quarks are confined quantum excitations—they
never exist freely but only as bound states within nucleons. ·
Gluons mediate the strong force binding quarks
together. ·
These entities are not little balls but further
quantized excitations of quantum fields. At this
level, the apparent solidity of matter dissolves almost completely into
varying excitations. The most accurate mathematical models, indeed informed
guesses, describe these excitations not as things but as mathematical
solutions—modes of fields, subject to uncertainty and fluctuation whereby it
must be clearly understood, in all scientific humility, that mathematics
can predict everything and explain nothing. 6.
The Nested Orders Unified From
minimum energy packets to quarks to atoms to cells to a conscious adult
human, there is no simple point at which “excitement” appears. Each layer,
and excitement field, constrains and shapes the next: ·
Without the coherence of quark excitations, there
are no protons. ·
Without energy laden, excited atoms, no excited
molecules. ·
Without excited cells, no organized excited
metabolism or nervous system. ·
Without coordinated excited neural dynamics, no
excited subjective experience. Each
layer inherits the excitement and uncertainty of its substratum but also,
being confined, displaying seeming emergent stability. The nested orders of
emergence, hence of confined being, are both astonishingly
fragile—sustained by processes that could, in principle, dissolve—and yet
robust enough to support the illusion of the continuity of self as vastly
complex aggregate of excitement states. 7.
The Existential Implication When you
say, “I am so excited,” you are doing something no atom, quark, or field
excitation can do on its own: you are reflecting on your own fundamental
state in language. The first culmination is the actual, real experience of
your state as vast composite of discrete excitement confinements or states.
The second is communication, meaning transmission of one’s state of nested
excitation orders that have self-organized into that coherent unity. Yet, in
strictly naturalistic terms: ·
You are not fundamentally different from the
universe you observe, merely a localised alternative. ·
Your experience arises from dynamic patterns of
energy and interaction, meaning you’re a festival of exciting events. ·
What you call excitement is a high-level ordering
of processes whose deepest foundations are probabilistic fluctuations @c. This
recognition neither diminishes the reality of your experience nor explains it
away. It places you and everything you do within the same procedural
continuum as the matter of the cosmos. Plainest
Distillation You are a
locally structured process of confined and unconfined excitations manifesting
as an identifiable reality. You are a high-level mind-boggling festival of
awesome events generating coherence and continuance in a nested, albeit
unobservable, always-fluctuating ocean of nano-excitations. |