Portrait of the Creature as a Hapless Biped

You have this magnificent brain. It’s a complex lump of meat that’s evolved over millions of years to operate like a supercomputer that condenses an infinite amount of information into a small cache of relevant facts that allows you to survive and thrive.

This same lump of meat once made a tasty treat for predators which you and the fellow members of your species learned to cooperate to conquer, and for a long time, the largest, most dangerous animals became your main source of food. Predator became prey, but some big event wiped them out. Being hunted to extinction? Maybe. You are an insatiable carnivore for knowledge, why not for giant tigers? But really, you can’t remember. That was an ancient ancestor of yours that had to adjust from big to small game and figure out agriculture.

The basic design for the lump of meat gets passed on but the lump of meat reconstitutes in different bodies through many generations. It keeps figuring out how to prolong the life of that body, but the body has a conspicuous way of sabotaging itself despite the lump of meat’s best attempts to predict, and therefore prevent, immanent disaster.

The lump of meat didn’t encase itself in such a thick skull for nothing. Its supercomputing extends to accurate but somehow woefully inadequate foreknowledge of your stupidity. That lump of meat has been forced to sit there through generation after generation collecting and storing data on every dumb thing your ancestors ever did. That’s right, the lump of meat in your head right now has that stored in you somewhere, ready to blossom into awareness at a crucial moment before you make a possibly fatal mistake.

But do you listen? FUCK NO.

You just plow ahead, take it right in the face, and somehow, miraculously, you manage to survive, and the lump of meat who used to be a tasty treat for giant tigers must admit that maybe its calculations were off. So maybe you shouldn’t listen to that lump of meat all the time since not only did you survive but you’re so happy and hey wait a minute what’s going on here I’m supposed to be in charge but it feels so gooooood but get a grip on yourself you’re under the wicked spell of some mind-altering intoxicant you fool no no no its just a pretty flower, flowers can’t hurt you OH MY GOD WHAT IS THAT!!!

I told you so says the lump of meat. You should have listened but it’s too late and you’ll just have to die now and…

…the lump of meat stores this knowledge in the ether for your future offspring who will likely ignore it too. Pretty flower indeed, you insipid twit. The term “too good to be true” mean anything to you, huh? We’ve been through this so many times, but you insist on believing that “this time will be different, I swear”.

You’re just food for a flower!

Anyway, you’ve got this lump of meat, it knows all these things, it makes all these calculations, but somehow new stuff keeps coming up. It turns out the world doesn’t fit into your neat little categories, diagrams, and formulas, and you’re always bound to miss a whole lot more than you take in and maybe that lump of meat doesn’t make you so smart after all so why don’t you just come closer and—

NO! Get back, evil flower! It may have gotten all the giant tigers, but it won’t get you, no matter how sweet its nectar, or seductive its scent…

…dammit. It got you.

You really need to learn to control yourself. You barely lived long enough to breed! You just jumped right into the flower’s mouth. Sure, it’s hard work to sustain a family since the evil flowers ate all the giant tigers, but you’ll make do, and the evil flowers will die out in time. Trust the lump of meat in your skull. It was smart enough to make that skull thick and turn the table on the giant tigers. It’ll take whatever comes next.

Just stay away from those damn flowers.