Thinking on the shoulders of Giants

   I had a revelation last night. 

   I often do when I smoke Weed. You know, it changes your perspective on things for a little while, helps you see a different facet of a problem, or let’s say, think about things in a different manner.

   Anyway, I was thinking about how crazy phones were. How insanely developed this technology is, you know, we managed to extract some funny minerals from rocks & soil, and we modified it to such an extreme that today, we are capable of encoding them with electric signals, you know, this magical thing happening between parts of atoms we can’t even observe directly, so that they react in a specific way, which will have an effect on some other funky rock & soil derived things, which will eventually produce funny waves & particles (either or both, actually) which will be interpreted by our brain as colorful lights, which themselves are going to be interpreted as words, images, references we understand because of some other weird electrical signals in our nervous system, and we’ll laugh, cry, get angry because of it. 

   It’s a little bit crazy, no ? And I’m not even going into the cultural systems supporting the creation of these images, nor the network infrastructures we get these images through, nor these required to power up these magical bricks we call phones. I didn’t speak about sound either !

   It really is impressive just how many things are involved into common, everyday things. Into everything, actually. And even more impressive is how much we don’t understand any of it. 

   I mean, individually.

   Because, some humans made the phone I’m holding, so I guess someone must have understood how these rare earth and funny metals could be put together to assemble a microprocessor at some point. Someone invented the videocamera required to film the funny, sad or despicable scene I’m reacting to. They had to at some point !

   And, even when we’re not involved to invent and assemble things together, the universe still does. We didn’t invent photosynthesis, nor rotting, fermentation, electricity. These things just were - and then we understood a part of it. 

   So here I was, thinking about all of this - how everything is interconnected, how we don’t understand the World we live in yet we keep on living and reproducing it, and how ironic all of this human & natural advancement often results in misery, stupid memes and less comprehension of each other still.

   And then I thought of something.

   We’re standing on the shoulders of Giants.

   That’s the saying, isn't it ? Nobody is self made, that’s a given. I don’t think anyone argues this anymore, anyway.

   Yet I think only yesterday I truly understood to what extent this was the case.

   Follow me for a second : take something you’re interested in.

   Whatever it is. Are you a lawyer? Think about the Constitution. Are you a Cinephile? Think of the history of Cinema. Do you like Wine ? Take Wine! Architecture, Languages, Sailing. Anything.

   Whatever you’re interested in, all of what you know about it, individually, you know because you learned about it, right ?

   Would it be at school, with your parents, on the internet, in an obscure book from the local archives - this knowledge didn’t come to you from nowhere through magic.

   Now, where did the school, parents, internet, book get this knowledge in the first place ? They inherited it from somewhere else, didn’t they ? 

  You might have learned Sailing with an instructor, this instructor might have learned what he knew because in they were sailors in the family. And the family knew what they knew because of generations of sailing, yet this knowledge too, was inherited. If you rewind the film, the boats looked different, the people too, and there’s no guarantee they were sailing for the same reasons as you do, but there was knowledge being passed down from the very beginning without being lost, otherwise it wouldn’t have come to you. It would have been lost.

   Because knowledge gets lost, sometimes. 

   Languages go extinct, technologies too. Ancient libraries have burnt with rare books inside, breweries have been closing with their recipes lost to time, inventors have died without developing their projects, whole groups of people get genocided and with them whole aspects of their culture dies.

   But if anything still exists today, you can trace it back to the very origin of the universe, don’t you think ?

   Film-making obviously came later in history than Sailing did. 

   But if Film-making was ever possible, it is because cameras were invented. And cameras were invented it is in part because electronics made it possible. And isn’t electronics possible because we understood how to manipulate metal ? And didn’t we learn how to manipulate metal because of other aspects of human culture that made it more likely to use these tools ? Isn’t toolmaking quite a fundamental part of being human in the first place ? 

   I speak French as my native language. But I didn’t invent French. I learned the grammar, colloquial expressions and jokes because I learned them, partly with my peers, partly with my family, partly with François Pérusse and his funny programs on Radio. Maybe even some at school, who knows.

   But none of these people invented French. They also learned it growing up, commodifying it as they go, spreading the past generation forward. 

   And, again, if you rewind the film far enough, Français becomes François, which becomes Françoys, which is actually a weird amalgamation of Romanic and Germanic roots. But nobody invented these languages either. They might have been codified in a specific place and time, but nobody invented them. They evolved from past generations of people that were just… speaking.

   Once again, if you rewind the film, aren’t you just going all the way back to the invention of language ? Aren’t we expressing ourselves in a way that is built on the totality of human experiences all the way to us ?

   I’d like to propose a working hypothesis.

   We are the universe forgetting about itself in order to sustain itself.

   You’re free to see in this hypothesis a form of spirituality. Take care of yourself.

Etienne, Gstaad, August 12026