Just about everyone has an image of a “crystal.” It’s a shiny, maybe even a glassy structure. Diamond comes to mind. Ice on a windshield in winter, also. Those who have taken a geology course might remember that crystals come in diverse forms and colors and exhibit a number of physical and chemical properties. Not all crystals fit into the stereotypical imagery. Because our planet houses thousands of different minerals, we can’t blame any of us for not knowing all their forms and characteristics.
 
With so many minerals on our planet, we have to be thankful that someone has done some classifying to make sense of their diversity. Dana’s System of Mineralogy has been a go-to book on the subject for a long time. * But the system presents some problems: For the most part it describes the ideal, and not necessarily the real, that is, the stuff one finds in natural settings. One can’t blame the mineralogists for this sometime discrepancy because, as you know, when we categorize, we have to set some parameters; we have to impose order on seeming chaos. Fortunately, minerals seem to lend themselves to classification, such as Dana’s and the scheme codified by the International Mineralogical Association.
 
Now there’s a guy with a new idea about classifying minerals, and his approach might be applicable to what we observe in our everyday lives. Okay, “guy” doesn’t seem respectful, so “thoughtful mineralogist Robert M. Hazen of the Geophysical Laboratory, Carnegie Institution for Science” is more appropriate. He’s laid out a plan that classifies minerals by “natural kind clusters” that accounts for, as he terms it, the “messiness” of “planetary materials” in an evolutionary setting (810). **
 
“Ho-hum!” you think. “Yeah, I’ve seen crystals. I’ve seen minerals. So?”
 
This isn’t a lesson in mineralogy; rather, it’s one in philosophy. How do you handle the diversity of your world? You’re like the mineralogists. You make your life easy by classifying; you make yourself secure by putting the indefinite number of stimuli you encounter into a spreadsheet of the mind. You are the Dana and the Hazen of your own experiences. You are the classifier, but as such, you have to deal with a potential flaw in your worldview.
 
Hazan has a brief and insightful analysis of the nature of classifications in his paper. He notes that sometimes Nature gives us “an unambiguous quantitative basis of kinds” (811). His example is the atomic number. One proton equals hydrogen; two, helium; three lithium, and so on. Because biological systems, in contrast, develop—you ain’t what you once were—their classification is requires looking at evolutionary changes. Modern biological classification isn’t limited to a simple Linnaean perspective because both organisms and their ecological settings reflect ongoing physical and biochemical processes. And then there is a classification system that divides the electromagnetic spectrum into gamma rays, X-rays, ultraviolet light, visible light, near and far infrared rays, and so on through microwaves and long radio waves: That system is a bit arbitrary. Where, for example, lies the natural cutoff between what is “visible” and invisible? Bees and other critters see more of the blue end of the spectrum than we do. You certainly don’t have an owl’s night vision. So, we can see that some classifications systems are somewhat “artificial” and are imposed from an anthropic philosophy.

Back to your classifications. If you skim through the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders the American Psychiatric Association’s “bible,” you will see all the “recognized” and classified disorders of the moment, from “Acute Stress Disorder” to “Trichotillomania.” Each of the disorders has as many variants as there are people who suffer from them; each sufferer is an individual. That means that mental health care professionals have to rely—often—on their experience just as mineralogists in the field have to rely on their experience to classify what they see “in a natural setting” and under evolving conditions.
 
Just as Hazan has attempted to tie mineral classification to real-world evolution and settings, so each of us needs to consider the natural setting of the people we so readily classify. Let me give Hazan’s example of diamond, a naturally forming carbon mineral with a variety of origins. “The first mineral in the cosmos was nanocrystalline diamond that condensed from incandescent, expanding, and cooling gases ejected from the first generation of large stars…” (811). But diamonds have also formed in the much younger and cooler Earth. An evolutionary classification system would detail the differences and place diamonds in complementary categories: Some macrocrystalline diamonds formed from “deep, high-pressure, carbon-bearing aqueous solutions…and others from deep, high-pressure, carbon-saturated Fe-Ni melts…” (812).  See? Hazan offers a classification that doesn’t replace the older systems of Dana and the International Mineralogical Association, but rather complements them with one based on mineral evolution and origin.
 
Now, what are we going to do with your classification of people? What are we going to do with your social classifications? Or your philosophical ones? Or your psychological ones? Or, my goodness we can’t forget in the current setting, your political ones? You are by nature a classifier. Classifying makes life easier, doesn’t it? It allows you to put everything in a slot, a drawer, a file for easy extraction and use. Classifying enables you to compare. Be cautious, however, that your systems of classifying aren’t more Dana-like than Hazan-like.
 
 
*The System of Mineralogy of James Dwight Dana and Edward Salisbury Dana, Yale University 1837-1892, published in different editions, like the Seventh Edition: entirely Rewritten and Greatly Enlarged by Charles Palache, Harry Berman, and Clifford Frondel of Harvard, under a number of copyrights (e.g., 1892, 1920, 1944, 1951, and 1966).
 
** Hazen, R.  (2019). An evolutionary system of mineralogy: Proposal for a classification of planetary materials based on natural kind clustering. American Mineralogist, 104(6), pp. 810-816.      Retrieved 9 Jun. 2019, from     doi:10.2138/am-2019-6709CCBYNCND    Online at https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/ammin.2019.104.issue-6/am-2019-6709CCBYNCND/am-2019-6709CCBYNCND.xml   Accessed 9 Jun 2019.

Apparently, Denisovans and Neanderthals shared the Altai Cave in southern Siberia, or at least, if not shared, then occupied it off and on over tens to more than one hundred millennia. * The changing character of a neighborhood isn’t new.
 
And that’s a point made by David M. Raup in Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? ** The neighborhood continues with different occupants. I can think of my own childhood neighborhood; all the original occupants are now gone, moved or passed away, replaced by different occupants. You can say that mammals generally took over the neighborhood from the dinosaurs in the same manner and that our species has moved into the Neanderthals’ neighborhoods.
 
Species occupying the same neighborhood at different times—and maybe, because the Denisovans seemed to have intermixed with the Neanderthals at the same time—makes me think of how different ideas seem to occupy the same brain. The cave of the skull isn’t a home for a single idea-species. And there’s a reason: No one has yet discovered a philosophy that answers all our questions with finality. In addition, most of our ideas are tinged with emotion and assumption. Go ahead: Convince me that you hold the same ideas in the same way you held them in your younger days.
 
Ideas keep moving into and out of our brains as we find their weaknesses in contradictions and incompleteness, discover other ideas, or merely abandon on a whim what we once held to be true. The occupants of the brain’s neighborhood change. The houses—or the caves or rock shelters—appear to be the same, but inside the occupants differ from those who first built and occupied them.
 
Do some archaeological digging in that Cave of the Skull you carry around, that portable neighborhood. Do you see evidence for multiple occupations and for cross-breeding among idea-species?
 
 
* SCINEWS, Denisovans and Neanderthals Lived in Denisova Cave for Thousands of Years. 31 Jan 2019. Online at http://www.sci-news.com/archaeology/denisovans-neanderthals-denisova-cave-06864.html
See also: Zenobia Jacobs et al. 2019. Timing of archaic hominin occupation of Denisova Cave in southern Siberia. Nature 565: 594-599; doi: 10.1038/s41586-018-0843-2
Katerina Douka et al. 2019. Age estimates for hominin fossils and the onset of the Upper Palaeolithic at Denisova Cave. Nature 565: 640-644; doi: 10.1038/s41586-018-0870-z
 
**W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1991.

  MEDPAGETODAY posted a podcast discussion between Drs. Andrew Perry and Caroline Kahle in which the two addressed the issue of “ethically-challenging cases.” * As one who never had to resuscitate a person, I was caught up by the ethical dilemma doctors face when a person suffering from a terminal illness or multiple medical issues suffers cardiac arrest.
 
The stories related by Dr. Kahle are every bit as dramatic as any TV hospital episode, but I think one of her points crosses over into everyone’s life. She says, “First and foremost, I think that almost every physician goes into this [profession] with empathy and somehow along the way we lose that…Sometimes it’s the job that takes it out of us, the moral injury of what we get exposed to [italics mine].”
 
In a conversation with a young nursing student a few weeks ago, I heard the simple statement, “People die in the hospital,” a comment made with teary eyes. Yes, the young woman was filled with empathy upon witnessing a death. So, I mentioned this to an older nurse, who with dry eyes said, “It takes a little time to get used to.”
 
Ambulance drivers, EMTs, doctors and nurses, police, and soldiers: All of them probably suffer from “the moral injury” to which they are exposed, to use Dr. Kahle’s words. The hardened heart, the heart that stops beating for others, is a part of human experience. We all go through that kind of cardiac arrest to some extent. And once we suffer such an attack on the heart, it’s difficult, if not impossible, for us to resume life as it was, to see tragedy as we once saw it.
 
I’m reminded of a line in “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” by Dylan Thomas: “After the first death, there is no other.” I think of that line when I hear a Dr. Kahle or a young nursing student recognize that human empathy can be injured, can be overwhelmed by tragedy. I think of it when I remember the death of a friend of mine when we were in eighth grade. Yes, every death since then has touched me, but no death touched me as much as the first one. I have not, all these decades later, forgotten Joe Debich who died from leukemia long before there was effective medicine for the disease. In a sense, after Joe’s death, there was no other.
 
Dr. Kahle calls the deadening of the heart a moral injury. It is, in fact, an empathy injury. To some extent all of us have been  injured by a world that continues to add tragedies to our memories. For the most part, we “get used to it,” don’t we? But every so often, say at the conclusion of a sad movie, the empathy wells up as tears roll down, strangely for a fictional character played by actors we don’t personally know. That expression of empathy gives us hope that some measure of resuscitation works for a deadened heart. 
 
 
*https://www.medpagetoday.com/blogs/ap-cardiology/80279?xid=nl_mpt_DHE_2019-06-07&eun=g1239050d0r&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Headlines%202019-06-07&utm_term=NL_Daily_DHE_Active  Accessed June 7, 2019.

Maybe we are all like Buck, the dog featured in Jack London’s The Call of the Wild. Or maybe we’re like the boys stranded on an island in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. That is, we might all be a bit wild inside though most of us mask it with a bit of civilized mildness.
 
Apparently, being wild is a normal youthful behavior as Spring Break—nay, every college party—often demonstrates. Wild isn’t new, of course, and it’s not limited to the young. There are all those risk-takers, for example, like those who just perished on Mt. Everest or at precipitous selfie-sites, where being in the wild or being wild has gone wrong. With a growing population, the wild beckons an increasingly larger number of humans with its Siren song, some hearing it just once before hitting rocks. Maybe William Golding had a legitimate point when he portrayed an innate savagery and wildness in his characters in Lord of the Flies. The wild, in Golding’s view, is only suppressed and repressed by the civilized mild.
 
Wild, today, comes in yet another guise, the wild of the riled. It seems that lots of folks are “riled up” about something, often about politics, political correctness, and social norms. I’ll leave you to make your own list—possibly including whatever riles you. A quick look around social media and the Internet reveals that there’s no shortage of topics that rile. And as riots and violence attest, the riled often become the wild outside the virtual world of phones and computers.
 
In a world of riled and wild, remaining mild is difficult, but not impossible. Remember that almost all past reasons for being riled have faded from memory. That which riles is usually temporary, a condition that applies to today’s riling points and to those Sirens who rile.
 
The mild do not sing as loudly or as often as the riled. Their preference is often silence or muted comment. They recognize that any song they might sing either further incites the riled to be wild or lacks the decibels to be heard over the din and cacophony of the wild.
 
Past generations might have associated wildness with physical behavior alone or with the impulse to act wildly, but such associations don’t fully characterize today’s wild; we can add verbal behavior and, strangely, “virtual” behavior. The online and social media of the riled play daily tribute to their own lords of flies.
 
One of the characteristics of mildness is compromise. Another is a search for solutions. In Golding’s novel, boys unchecked by the controls of civilizing mildness serve destruction and death, not compromise. Boys turn savage regardless of their connection through a common background and their need to cooperate for mutual survival.
 
Today, we might ask ourselves how mechanisms originally meant to connect people across varied geographies and political lines have become mechanisms for destroying lives. Surely, as the mild would like to believe, those who foresaw an interconnected planet were not motivated by some lord of the flies when they made and perfected the Internet and social media.
 
However, that their inventions of Internet and social media have made the interconnected world an island of wildness might indicate Golding was correct in his assessment of humanity. There is an underlying wildness that will of its own accord surface and pay homage to some lord of the flies.
 
If Golding was correct in his assessment of humanity, then all mildness is an easily removeable mask. In our present circumstances, that mask seems to be a transparent covering through which we readily see the underlying wild in the riled. 

Maybe it’s because we’re so very very finite that we are a bit obsessed with how old things and people are. Time is, after all, more enemy than friend because of entropy regardless of how many vintage bottles of wine attract attention at auctions—even those that might have turned to vinegar—and how many people collect rickety antique chairs. Now, we’re obsessing over the age of mushrooms and universes? Go figure.
 
Ever since the COBE satellite captured the Echo of the Big Bang, everyone has been locked on 13.8 billion years (give or take a week) for the age of the universe. Considering its potential future of trillions of years, we find the birth of Everything rather young unless we do some comparing with objects that lie within the universe: Galaxies and their stars and stars with their planets. But the universe’s age isn’t as accurate as we might think, and it poses a really big question: What do we do with the “Methuselah star” (HD140283) that might be 14.5 billion years old? * You know the old saying: “You can’t be older than your mother.” Have you been happy with the 13.8 billion-year age of the universe based on the initial Cosmic Microwave Background assessment? Did you think: “Hey, there’s nothing I can do about it, and I have no way of cross checking all those bright scientists who stamped their approval on 13.8 billion years”? Well, now, somebody else has lowered the age of the universe by a billion years or so, and that makes the Methuselah star much older than its mother. **
 
Then someone came along and did the opposite for mushrooms, pushing back their origin by a half a billion years.*** It’s a paleontological analog of Methuselah’s age. Mushrooms thrive by consuming organic matter. If the mushroom was around a billion years ago, on what did it feed? We need to look into the possibility that other life-forms were flourishing a billion years ago, long before the Cambrian Explosion or the Ediacaran fossils that mark the fossil record with a widely accepted beginning for multicellular life.
 
So, why should I mention the universe’s age and the age of the oldest mushroom? I’ll mention a vague memory I have of a 1950s TV show, maybe Twilight Zone, in which one of the actors said he was “an old man” because he was in his 60s. Whereas it is definitely true that life can end at any age, in the 2000s, we are surrounded by a number of people whose sixth decade is a rather active one, more so, I believe, than it was for sixty-year-olds of the 1950s. Sure, we like to keep track of “absolute ages,” those we can pin down with a specific number, but relative age appears to be just as important and maybe even more so when it comes to feeling younger than the number might indicate.
 
As we all learn, we have two sets of ages: The numbered age and the attitudinal age. We can argue that the latter is a counter to the former and that staying physically active is the mechanism for staying young. But fighting off entropy is probably a losing cause; we’ve all cracked the age egg relatively long ago, and we’re not putting it back together. However, that attitudinal age is an egg from a different bird altogether. It’s an egg we can renew by being creative. Seeking to be creative can make the universe of the mind much younger than the universe of the brain. So what can you do to revitalize your youthful creative self?

You are immersed in matter and process, and you’ve been taught (directly and indirectly) which process applies to which matter. Think differently. Look to apply a process to matter with which it is never associated. Look for analogs.
 
Here’s an anecdote that reveals how ageing minds age. A colleague of mine introduced a new curriculum and course at a university-wide committee meeting. In the course proposal he recommended books that crossed a variety of academic fields. One committee member from a different department, was upset that books in his field were included in the reading list and angrily questioned how someone in another field could have the audacity to recommend books associated with his field of study. Is there any example more telling of an ageing mind than one showing a refusal to see knowledge holistically?
 
We are steeped in what we do every day, and it’s difficult for us to take a different approach to what we daily do. Yet, the only path to revitalization is one that is different from the typical. The creative mind can, in fact, be younger than its component parts; your personal universe can be younger than Methuselah. Also, in an analog of those very ancient mushrooms, you’ve been feeding on some ideas for a very long time even though you haven’t yet discovered fossil evidence that they have been there all along. 
 
Sometimes going back to the beginning is the best way to the end.
 
* http://www.astronomy.com/news/2013/03/hubble-pins-down-age-of-oldest-known-star
 
** https://hub.jhu.edu/2019/04/25/universe-expanding-faster-than-expected/
 
*** https://phys.org/news/2019-05-billion-year-fungi-earth-oldest.html

I don’t fully agree that the last century gave rise to some special “Me Generation” as a couple of authors and a follow-up media reported and labeled the Baby Boomers. “Me” has always been central to individuals at some time in their lives; to label an entire generation thus and to say it was a special circumstance denies the role the Self has always played in human affairs both personal and social. Just like other social and historical explanations—i.e., “the Lost Generation,” the “Great Awakening,” and those groupings of people who populate the current decade—"Me Generation” and all such designations are generalizations. Within any generation diversity plays a role, and no label seems to be universally applicable. Yet, all social designations applied to a generation do indicate some dominating trends that the media use as shortcuts to understanding why people do what they do and why they see the world as they do. All such designations are foundations for pop psych, pop sociology, and commonly used metaphors.
 
We don’t like the darkness of meaninglessness. So, when we have difficulty uncovering an objective reality, we rely on a personal one. And that brings me to our philosophical dilemma: How do we reconcile our personal reality with an objective one? The philosopher David Hume seemed to argue that the former imposes itself on the latter. Other philosophers have argued that the latter imposes itself on the former.
 
The film Guardians of the Galaxy II features a small plant character named Groot whose oft-repeated words are “I am Groot.” Although those words do not change, by his inflection Groot reveals emotion, puzzlement, and understanding in the film’s various settings and contexts. And in the context of the movie, Groot also demonstrates that there is, indeed, a reality outside the Self. He stands ironically in contrast to the villain Ego, who can make whatever world he wants. Ego is a “me” of seemingly unlimited creative power capable of making reality.  
 
In saying “I am Groot” in every circumstance, Groot reveals a philosophy all of us carry either ostensibly or secretly: For much of our lives, we see the world not empirically, but subjectively. Each of us, at times, sees the world as an extension of Self. Even in our most profound science we cannot refrain from some slightly personal perspective—with one very special exception. When we ultimately face that which can end our existence, we recognize an indisputably objective reality that no subjectivism can alter. Death imposes an objective world upon subjectivism. How “me” sees the world becomes irrelevant when something from “outside the me” threatens.  
 
There’s no denying the importance of “me” in revealing objective reality. Science doesn’t initiate itself; science doesn’t do itself; it is not a creator, but merely a methodology to achieve understanding and control as we see a need for either or both. People do science, and that requires choosing (to do, to do this way or that, to include or not to include, to pursue a purpose or fill a need). Puzzled by the very large? Build a telescope like the Hubble. By the very small? Build a collider like the LHC. Your choice. You could sit sipping soda, but, no, you drive yourself to discover and understand, to experience and record, and to make and distribute. And you do all of this, I assume, because you believe that something exists outside your awareness of it, that the refrigerator light does, in fact, go out when you shut the door and that a tree in a forest does make a sound when it falls in your absence. Yet, simultaneously, you want to believe that much, if not all of the world, is an extension of you and is your creation. At times you play Ego.  
 
If you think the world has an objective existence, you have the same thought Einstein pushed in his arguments with Bohr about the atom. Albert didn’t want a world in which God merely rolled dice; he didn’t want a world in which observation determines the ultimate reality and individual perception accounts for the predictability of a Newtonian world or an Einsteinian one. There’s security in the stability of a world of actions and reactions, of inertia, gravity, and a world of warps in the fabric of Spacetime. Our car navigation systems work because we can use Einstein’s relativity to adjust clocks on satellites to account for the real effects of velocity and gravity.
 
You and I might recognize that one Self sees a world differently from another Self and that both “mes” can claim a truth to their perceptions, but both “mes” do so within the context of a predictable, independently existing world. If no such objective reality exists, then both of us are left with an ultimately incommunicable “I am Groot.”
 
At the end of Guardians of the Galaxy II, Groot has an opportunity to save his friends and the universe by pushing one of two buttons on a bomb. One button is an instant detonator; the other sets a timer that would give Groot and the Guardians five minutes to escape the blast. Groot almost pushes the wrong button, but stops, and pushes the correct one as he was instructed by Rocket. His choice isn’t the result of how a “me”—in this instance, Groot—sees reality. Death makes itself known as an objective reality that overrides any subjective one.
 
Sure, as you go through your day, you’ll say “I am Groot” many times, but for most, if not all of those times, there will be nothing final on the line, nothing that imposes an unavoidable restriction. Around you, you will encounter some who insist that “me” is all there is, that no absolutes, as Hume would argue, really exist. They believe they alone decide reality, and they might do so until they encounter that one reality they cannot change, like Groot’s having to choose the correct button. If they push the wrong button, objective reality will make itself known as it has for countless humans before them, people who believed that the world is as they believe and that they choose what is real like Ego.
 
Ego dies at the film’s end because a little plant-guy whose only expression seems to be centered on his personal existence actually recognizes an objective reality and an absolute that cannot ultimately be avoided.