Solemn dictations

This is a cross post of something I wrote a long time ago in middle of nowhere. I kind of like this one, so I thought I would move this one to somewhere more accessible.


 

             

This is something I ran across in my visit to the Met today. It's a funeral marker of the ancient Greece, around 500 B.C. or so. According to the description given by the little placard at the bottom, there was an inscription on the stele at the original site. The translated version of the inscription reads like this.

"My daughter's beloved child is the one I hold here, the one that I held on my lap while we looked at the light of the sun when we were alive and that I still hold now that we are both dead."

The time was almost three thousand years ago, but the human sentiment runs the same. I might even argue that the dying grandmothers of the old were much more articulate than the living young ones we have right now. Nonetheless, I feel saddened and glad at the same time when I remember this scene, bathed in a solemn and melancholy light, phrases and situations telling its story through subtle hints which later echo in the heart of a young man from three thousand years in the future. Will we leave something behind as such? Will we leave behind something so that people living in three thousand years in the future would shed a tear or feel their heart wrench at the tales of people long gone and forgotten? Will the human identity remain resonant throughout the times?

                            

Another something I picked up. It's from roughly the same era as the above funeral marker. This one depicts a little girl saddened to let her pet pigeons go. This clumsy photo of mine doesn't do justice to the subtle nuances and expressions that were retained in this piece despite its age. People talk of evolution and change all the time, but what we consider to be fundamentally human trait doesn't seem to have changed much, if we can communicate across space and time like this through frozen motions and facial expressions.

I am beginning to suspect that what we consider to be the nature of humanity has deeper roots than previously imagined, perhaps even locked up with the characteristics of the human body/nervous system. In that case, it should be possible to engineer psychology to create the most fundamental, minimal model of 'mind', possessing consciousness yet universal enough to be applied to every physical system, akin to the stripped down version of gene sequence for the most basic life form to act as a template for synthetic life.