IT'S ALL CODE: SOS

Socionomic legal attachments.  Here's a starter story. This thought sequence is zero-sum, starting from scratch, so it will take a few days to work through. It's much harder than simply opposing Christianity and calling atheism "new."

Someone expressed to me that they were shocked, SHOCKED, that Thomas Jefferson "slept" with a slave and had children with her that remained enslaved for many years.  My response was that after noting that the slave Jefferson slept with was a half-sister to his first "all-white" wife, both having the same father, and remembering that Jefferson promised his first wife that he would not marry again, I speculated that marriage and slavery were not legally that different -- at least in that time period.  Then my conversant was REALLY shocked.  In her mind each woman inhabited a separate bubble of conventions, attributes and status.  She didn't think about "attachment" in either case. So here are two people making attachment arrangements that accommodate several kinds of systems and identities, but we don't know how each one or the others around them at the time "feel" about it.  Or how to feel about it now.

All living things are phenomena arising from the interaction of a DNA "code" that is electromagnetochemical circumstances emerging out of the environment they are in.  Human beings are an expression of an evolved code that developed over many millennia from microbes through vertebrates, then reptiles, and next mammals.  We cannot read that code except through highly technical instruments or through our own cellular organs of detection, i.e. the senses.  Much of it is unconscious.  What is derived by the senses from the raw code and then sorted by the brain into "consciousness" is where we get our "idea" of who we are, our identity, our attachments.

This matrix comes from the environment, so if the environment doesn't contain something, it is not perceived, not sorted, not incorporated, doesn't exist.  There is always unknown, dark matter.  In a sense this is a "virtual" mind-only version of the world.  "Flat earthers" will not accept it.  You can't see it from outer space as with the planet to prove it is a sphere.  This idea of "what a human is" sounds as preposterous as it did the first time I heard about atoms and was told a chair was little vibrating bits of nothingness that only leave tracks, not images.  But it is the best fact-gathering premise we can develop with all our instruments.

So the code determines where we come from (birth) and where we are headed (death) but all that stuff in the middle is managed from internal code pushing against and drawing from the environment, whatever it offers.  Rivaling in unbelievability all the other institutional religious ideas, it is believed by scientists who try to use virtual ideas to get at something provable with facts, which -- in the end-- may not be very factual in our ordinary sense.

Nerves, muscles and sense organs may use atoms/
molecules to operate, but that's sure not how we think of flesh.  One human with almost no environment, particularly human society, is in a state of torture, freefloating, formless.  Solitary confinement, though the lucky carry with them a brainful of ideas, memories, and systems whether math or words or songs.  These are virtual, but they can save a person's sanity even when in society.  They are a big part of identity and attachment to the world.

In the beginning these are so vital that a baby who has no backlog of experience to use and who is not stroked, cuddled, fed, and rocked, told stories and presented with other humans, is very much subject to death or at least "failure to thrive" which is a medical term when no direct cause is identified.  "Mirasmus" if you need a fancy word.

The first attachment is the umbilicus that connects to the mother's uterus wall. For nine months the mother is meant to be the environment to the new human being and what she does makes a crucial difference in how that premised code-result may turn out, esp. in the early weeks when she has no idea that she has been inseminated.

In conventional prosperous US society, the mother is embraced and protected by a partner, not necessarily a male and not necessarily just one -- so long as it supports a wanted pregnancy.  In our modern terms, she also has the right to end the pregnancy if it has gone wrong or if she does not wish to accept the physical hardships and mental work, or maybe has no support.

The next attachment is to family which again is not necessarily biological, gender-assigned, legal, or even voluntary, though it is much better if -- like pregnancy -- it is wanted and supported.  So the mother is embraced by the partner, the three of them are embraced by the family, and ideally the family is embraced by the local people, who are in turn embraced by the formal entities of the society, which may have sub-societies embedded in it which will create complications for all humans involved.  Like Christianity, they will try to claim universality.

There is no universal religion.  The one imperative is survival.  Whatever supports survival becomes religious.  To create a society that causes people to choose not to survive -- rationally --  is evil. (Farmers or teenagers.)  To create a society that supports life it is necessary to have sufficient beauty, laughter, shelter, food, connection to others. music, and pleasure.  These are blessings.  We don't need them to survive but if we don't have them, who would want to?

The cultural and societal arrangements that once kept people alive were worthy "religions" until they died out.  Then they were history.  No one set of arrangements is permanent nor can it be because the world changes all the time.  The great advantage of code-based life is that beyond the basic code provisions of creating and maintaining creature fleshly life, many variations and reconfigurations mean that there is generally a margin of oddball people alive to design a new system and sometimes they prevail or are renewed.  We may be close to that point now.  We've been there before.  We worry about it quite a lot.  

Many, including myself, do not feel confident enough to have children, but I have survived much longer than I expected.  Much longer than some of my ancestors. My greatest reward for staying alive is now the code of writing, not necessarily novels or poetry or any other genre, but the great pleasure of weaving the words that explore the darkness of modern life.

https://aeon.co/videos/evolution-is-not-only-about-competition-the-cellular-origins-of-a-very-big-idea