Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith for November 04, 2014

Parasite Breeding Hosts.Now, there was a band.

Read “Smut Talk,” by Larry Niven: a strain of space-faring intelligent bacteria attempts to invade Earth via a Chirpsithra ship. Appears in his short story collection, THE DRACO TAVERN..My speculation:.Music is a form of Life. It vibrates the atmosphere as do spoken words. It leaves fossils in books. It can be reconstituted from this dehydrated form. Just add thought. How does thought relate to water for this purpose? Just as we are 70 percent water, our humanity is a large proportion of uniquely terrestrial thought. Although humanity is not necessarily the purpose of evolution, the end result, it is a way of transcribing the uniqueness of Earth essence..Other Natures exist, many of them have developed into strange forms quite different from ours. We see them all the time, if not directly then in their effects. We do not recognize them because they are so different from ours. We are dependent on them..Music is a symbiotic organism, that merged with us eons ago. Since we evolved in an atmosphere, sound waves within such a medium have enabled the evolution of music. It first developed in the oceans of course. There’s something in liquid water that holds the seeds of music, just as the combination of organic chemicals are there, also. Music is simpler, and was there from the beginning, communicating with itself apart from moving creatures. It had begun merging with pre-viral forms, then viruses themselves, then more and more complicated forms. .There are qualities to communication, of course. What are the ballads of bacteria, the madigrals of mitochondria, the anthems of anaerobic life in comparison to more bulky forms of life. When sex developed, did the basic love song come forth? As plants evolved, how did proto-music change with it. Animals were the first to become aware of music as in their communications, and Humanity thinks it discovered the concept and made it separate..No, music became aware long before Humanity composed it. Composition is not the forming of music, it is its uncovering of what is there in itself. We have not even domesticated it – it has domesticated us. When we discover the sentience of music, when we utilize properly its philosophies distilled from ancient creatures, will we begin to integrate it into our own evolution. But then, in addition, the musics of the Cosmos await us both, Man and Music. We will flutter into space, unaware the Others exist. What forms of ueber-music will our own encounter as it spreads out into space?

Never eat an egg salad sandwich from a gas station bathroom vending machine.(ref: Futurama – Parasites Lost)

I don’t think the existence of the parasites proves the singer doesn’t have free will. Rather, since the parasites are one of the elements determining the singer’s behavior, I think we have to consider “the singer” to be a system that includes the parasites as well as the the other elements that factor into his behavior, like his nervous system and so forth. Whether this system has free will is a question that will probably never be settled to everyone’s satisfaction – I was very impressed by Daniel Dennett’s book Freedom Evolves.