We're all wired into a survival trip, whether we be a bacteria, a neuron or a human being. All life, no matter how radically different we perceive it to be, follows the same rules: create more life like yourself.
We look at a human being, and its easy to see this rule in human history, human society and the individual psychology of these primates. We zoom past the ego of a human and see the cell, following the same laws as the human. Which makes sense, seeing as a human is just a unity of these separate cells. As within, so without. We see cells follow natural selection, we see that cells who unified and took on special activities for individual cells survived as a being, even thrived, eventually becoming macroscopic lifeforms and our modern human primates. Consciousness and the mind are what we could (but we won't) call an illusion created as an advantage for natural selection by these cells. If machines followed natural selection, they'd have billions of tiny wires randomly hooked up until they gained perception and consciousness. Incomprehensible, but like all things incomprehensible to humans, it's possible and our current reality.
Cells do cause some odd thoughts, such as the problems of identity and what constitutes the overall organism in these ever-changing cells. If all cells of a human were separated and sustained, would we consider that human surviving? All of his organic material has survived, after all. But we can see that this is not a predicament in nature; the survival trip has already been jumpstarted, and many had a better chance of creating more of themselves if they joined into one, even though ironically in higher organisms cells kill themselves for the body, such as in a tree when the cells kill themselves to create structure for the other cells. Another predicament if you are talking about survival, as the cells themselves are not guaranteed survival by becoming a unified organism, but this could be solved by pointing to the DNA of the cells, and realizing that the types of cells are just following the DNA. We see the storybook rewriting itself, and though it disposes of certain words, that is simply what it must do to survive. For the tree of DNA to survive, it must sacrifice its fruit to create saplings, after all.
The predicament comes though, as we zoom even past the cells, and look at their constituents. We see atoms and molecules, and here we have a problem. Atoms follow certain laws of their own and join into molecules, and molecules with other molecules certainly. But to make the jump from molecule to life seems to require an unknown variable, because we must realize that molecules don't seem to get anything out of it. For the constituents that make up our lives, atoms and molecules, it doesn't matter whether they're part of our epidermis, part of our neurons or just floating randomly in space, because they need nothing to survive. They have no DNA storybook that they serve and replicate, for they create the DNA storybook. So here we have a problem, and one that is incomprehensible to me.
Why do atoms and molecules join to form life? Obviously there is a reason, because it has happened to our knowledge, but what do they get out of it? Why would atoms randomly join to form life, and then be governed by new laws to form consciousness? Molecules seem to actually become weaker if you viewed them versus the cells they create, because this union of cellular molecules need energy of molecules to function, needs molecular gases to survive, need molecular constituents to join, etc. Why did the molecules bother when they exist fine as just separate molecules?
This is even ignoring the problem of how atoms and molecules join to form consciousness anyway. Nonliving particles who need nothing from their environment not only became organic cellular machines, who require tasks from the molecules both inside and outside themselves, but further joined to somehow create human consciousness. It baffles me how fermions and baryons create perception and thought, and I was wondering if anyone had an explanation other than Jesus.
-------------------- So long as you are praised think only that you are not yet on your own path but on that of another.
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