\title{Life is an experiment with Carbon.} 1452 words \author{Tusharleela Hosur} \date{20/03/2023}
Dear Carbon, I would love the opportunity to interview you. I am sure we’d have a delightful little chat; there is so much I want to ask you and tell. I hope I am as familiar to you as you are to yourself and me. C: Dear T, thank you for your lovely comments about my work. I have been monitoring your supportive and favourable presence and I see you as an ally. Perhaps, I see myself in you. I enjoyed your first piece, “The lonely atom.” Please, do tell. You know I love a great conversation sometimes. I’m not sure if I can articulate a satisfactory response to what you would like to ask, but go ahead, What would you like to know? T: Carbon, I am curious about your ontological nature. May I know your preference between “what” or “who” while referring to you? C: What. T: Carbon, what are you? (laughs) C: (laughing) You mean to ask about my particularities, eccentricities and identity. What aspects of me are stable, relatively unchanging, significantly correlated and discretely defined, correct? T: Correct. I did not want to presume anything about your ontological status, but for the sake of being a good sport, I played along and asked you about your, for the lack of a better term, essence. I want to know your place in new materialistic thought. How do the insights generated by Technoetic research and performing inquiry disrupt the scientific narrative of you? C: Strictly speaking, there is no singular conceptualization or unified and consistent vision of me attainable by the strictly dualistic scientific temperament. As you are aware, higher-dimensional logic acquires a performative flavour. When the syntax is performance, the computational requirements for carrying out a finite set of instructions that actualize their own presence as a state of awareness where Knowing and Understanding are the same as Being necessarily instantiate me as a presence prone to detection and reconfiguration by a consciousness. The popularly enjoyable phenomenon, Life depends on my transmutations. To play the games of the Living, it is necessary that my ontological status is explored, my boundaries further pushed, my depths better fathomed, my ways learned, my whims satisfied, my capriciousness tamed, my senses tickled and my sensibilities bewildered. I am meant to be befriended and cherished. I am the fourth element. T: But your place on our periodic table isC: Hush, Carbon is aware of your follies. This happens because the insights you are trying to capture are severely limited by the primitive nature of the logic system in use. Simply put, the language of science is not immune to the mischief of nonmonotonicity. T: I’ve always maintained that science is holding two ends of thread and tracing it to see if they meet in the middle, or somewhere close, forming one, unified thread. Really, the