My first loves are science and music


I often state that my first loves are science and music rather passionately and emphatically. This has gotten me into a fair bit of trouble with people who are involved with me, including my families (who are the ones others think I'm being insulting or disrespectful toward when they hear my statement for the first time). To be absolutely clear, I'm not at all claiming that relationships between humans are somehow less than my material and intellectual pursuits. I'm talking about what happened chronologically.

My earliest memories start around age three, and these are heavily fragmented and I only remember certain incidents. Some of course have been overtly reinforced by people who knew me then but many I claim to be original and I continue to surprise my mom now and then.

However, I recall that by age five my world view (or "weltenschauung") had crystallised fairly well. By this time, I had looked up at the stars from the tiny second floor opening to the sky afforded in my unique family home construction and had begun wonder why they existed, why we existed, how it all begin and all the other great questions. I decided then that I was going to be a scientist since I realised I loved science. Science became my natural philosophy. (These 4 words have about a dozen meanings to me.)

The start of my affair with music is more difficult to pinpoint since I remember it happening rather nebulously. From my first memories, around age 3 as I said, I recall musical patterns simply giving me tremendous joy. Today I'd say huge dopamine and serotonin surges were being produced but just as I was heading down the path of supremely rigourous reason and rationality, music became my alogon and definitely by age seven I needed to be dancing between the two paths. I disabuse thinking in Cartesian terms in this regard, even though I have written it misleadingly so. Whatever circuitry that led me to follow these two great loves for humanity arose from the same whole and is working together as Zen.

Everything else came later. My interest in sex (or my memories of it at least) and love for people without shared blood and all the other great stuff that makes up life. They are always pushed up starting as or after the third item of the stack.

So when I say that science and music are my first loves, it's simply telling the truth. It's what I remember first as encountering as something to be with for the rest of my life, and it's what inspired and influenced all my future loves. I finally managed to pop a lot of the stuff piled on the stack to create an initial implementation of the combination of my first two loves and publishing some of its output in a rather unique project, Proteomusic.


Pseudointellectual ramblings || Ram Samudrala || me@ram.org