What if?

A friend and I had a long conversation today, not quite as desultory as long conversations tend to be. It was about human beings in general, if we are right. And my brain still hasn't stopped hurting from thinking about the possibilities.

We do a lot of things in our lives. How do we know if what we do is right, and how do we know that the way in which we are doing what we do is the way in which to do them? Is it a basic instinct of man, or are we just doing what we're taught to do? Let's take an example. We eat with our mouths. Is it necessary that we should eat only with our mouths? How do we know if that's the only way to eat? Maybe there are other, more efficient ways to eat and digest food. Maybe the mouth wasn't meant for eating at all. How do we know for sure? What is it that makes us do what we do? We weren't taught how to breathe, were we?

The only way we(my friend and I) could figure out to test whether man was doing things out of instinct or from what he learns in life, was to raise a child without interacting with him, to bring him up like how a plant is grown, giving him only the basic necessities. After he's become strong enough, we put him in front of some kind of danger and see how he reacts. There are some fundamental flaws even in this; one of them is that, by giving him basic necessities, we are exposing him to parts of the external world. He might learn something from them. Then there is the possibility of the child becoming mentally retarded due to inadequate interaction with the environment. Also, it is impossible to carry out such an experiment, even if it was, we wouldn't be the ones to do it, for humanitarian reasons.

We take it for granted that we are the highest among all beings. In school, we are taught that Man is at the crest of the food chain; that all other beings only live to serve us, directly or indirectly. Isn't it possible that we might not be at the top, that our existence might be serving some unknown purpose, that we might be working for something bigger than us? What if we were?

Hugo Weaving (Agent Smith) said something in "The Matrix" that comes to my mind now. It goes like this: "I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet, you are a plague, and we are the cure." Biotechnologists have found a way to use the way in which a virus acts to their advantage. What if someone/something is using the way in which we act to their advantage?