A rare occurrence

I was reading a story in my ELA class about a man who valued his journey more than the material worth of the object he would receive from completing his journey, and in a rare occurrence, the story made me think.

Now this is a pretty simple subject: material objects don't make you happy, being a consumer whore does not make you happy, people make you happy, being around people makes you happy, family makes you happy... you get the gist of it.

But what exactly is a material object? Is a video game a material object? I would think that just about everyone would say that yes, a video game is a material object: the game has publishers that whore it out to as many people as they possibly can. But when you get past the commercialism, the fact that people are simply trying to sell you something, what do you have?

This gets into the age old question of: "Are video games art?", but i want to try and stray away from that, and look at it from a more grand scale:

We are, when you get right down to it, the universe attempting to understand itself (yes I stole that from Carl Sagan). We are replicating patterns, patterns that are no longer slaves to a chemical reaction that is called instinct; where we think on the most basic level possible ("I'm hungry, I'm tired, I'm horny"). We now think in concepts and patterns.

We gained a lot from the ability to conceive concepts and now we want to understand where we are in the grand scheme of things. However there is a complex problem within our brains. Carl Sagan had once said, "deep inside our brain something rather like the brain of a crocodile exists". We ended up in this uneasy truce between the Reptilian complex and the Limbic System/Cerebral cortex. Emotion Vs. Logic. Its made life a whole lot more interesting.

What does this have to do with material objects? A material object, from my understanding, is a human concept in physical form. We went from being this almost mindless machine that was only concerned with fulfilling its most basic instincts to this machine that wants to explore the universe and create things. The things we create are shaped by the complex in our brain of Emotion Vs. Logic.

The things we create are important because, other than understanding the rules that govern our universe, there is nothing else for us to do. And seeing what you can create is cool.

Almost all of humans' technological jumps have been created for the need to kill each other, only after these jumps did we do anything useful with the information we gained. There would be no internet without the militaries need to communicate, no computer without the militaries need to send encrypted messages, no metal working without the militaries need to create swords and armor. Our genius and progress has been fueled by the reptilian part of our brain, so i guess we should thank that little voice in our head that screams "RAGE!".

The reason i am so fascinated by video games is because we are now creating universes with their own rules, however, unlike the universe we live in which we are generally modeling ours after, these man-made universes have a goal, a purpose to fulfill.

This purpose is what i call art.

If the universe was conscious and was able to manipulate the rules to create life we would be called art. However because art has a purpose, and because we have no proof of this greater consciousness, we must assume that we are here because of chance, therefore we have no true purpose. The ability to create worlds of our own opens up opportunity's, infinite opportunity's to create worlds were we have purpose.

Or you know, you could go start a family i guess.