Sunday, January 29, 2017

On Cellularity and Choosing

It's one of those strange ideas I get. I've given it several years to either flesh itself out or go away, and it didn't go away. It's time to let it grow.

This idea first started to form in my head some years ago when I was pondering several seemingly unrelated ideas and activities. These things included social music making, finding connecting points with others even in the face of differences of opinion that seemed insurmountable, musing about what life is in its most basic form, gardening and how to tend a garden, and good old trying to better understand living on a suitably deep level.

The core of the idea, stated as simply as possible, is that all life is cellular. As you might guess, since it is an idea that makes an effort to think in big-picture terms, it gets quite a bit more complicated, but it retains that core of simplicity.

I should say--not for the first or the last time--that it is not an interest of mine ever to tell anyone what to think. Take a minute to let that sink in, because it's unusual. A lot of things you could read will try to tell you what to think. I am only here with what I feel are some helpful ideas to assist you in thinking productively for yourself. Even if I could make all the sense in the world, every mind that thinks needs the ability to make sense on its own. We each have our own lives and our own things that we need to do and our own things to figure out for ourselves. My selfish part here is that I hope to live among people who know how to make sense for themselves.

So let's get into it.

It starts with elementary biology. Every living thing is either a single cell or is a bunch of cells that make up a complex organism. You and I are both complex organisms. All humans are. No matter where any of us came from or are going or are living right now; no matter whether we are male or female, or what language we speak or what color our skin is; no matter if we have a religious or political affiliation or point-of-view; no matter even whether or not we care about how our lives originated--important though those details may be--every one of us is made up of cells, and it is productive to understand what cells do and how they work to make life.

Meaning in life is quite a separate question, beyond the scope or the needs of this piece of writing. This is about the simple fact of life. Life exists and is made of cells.

A cell in its most basic form has an inside where the life exists, an outside which is the environment in which the life lives, and a cell membrane which separates the inside from the outside. I'm glad I gave myself time to think about this. I'm finding the simplicity.

The most basic life forms are single cells, and they are the lives with the greatest limitations. Protozoans and amoebas can't move around much, can't perceive much of their environment except on a purely chemical level (if we can think of that as awareness at all) can't reproduce sexually, and therefore can't really develop themselves from one generation to the next, can't learn much (no brain) and are really completely at the mercy of the environment they just happen to be in. If the environment in which a single-celled creature lives turns hostile to that creature's life, the single-celled creature simply dies. It can't decide to get on the bus and go to a nicer place. It has nearly zero choices in life.

Now I'm using scary words. Some people don't take kindly to words like "choice". Try to be courageous. I promise I'm not going to write about birth control or whether or not we have free will. Those are areas of opinion, speculation and philosophy. That's not what we're doing.

Maybe you noticed that I said a single cell creature has nearly zero choices. It's zero choices if you think of it in the way people normally think about choices, but a single cell makes chemical or molecular choices by the chemical/molecular composition of its membrane. The membrane of a cell "knows" what to take in as nourishment, what to keep inside as part of itself and what to excrete as a waste product. It "knows" these things chemically and molecularly.

Let's zoom out at this point to a more familiar magnitude. We've been looking through a microscope at tiny life. Let's look the same way at life that is the size of us. We're made of the same kind of stuff on a bigger scale. Our cells are specialized to specific functions in our bodies. One important difference: our cells team up to make the bigger and more complex organism that is a human being. One important thing is exactly the same: our cells still have that basic chemical and molecular ability to choose what comes in, what is kept out, what is kept in and what is let out. Another vitally important difference: our cells--individually--die off and regenerate all the time, and we, as complex multi-celled organisms, don't die when our individual cells die. To recap this vital point, if an amoeba experiences the death of a cell, that's a dead amoeba. One cell was all it was. By being a multi-celled creature, we get to live much longer than we could if we were just one cell. Multi-cellularism is a survival strategy, courtesy of our biology. Thanks biology!!

Somehow (remember, we're foregoing speculation here...) life develops into something more complex and longer-living, but still retains its cellular basis. Along with more complexity to the organism comes more complexity in how choices are made and a much bigger range of possible choices. At this point, please try to refrain from jumping to any absolute statements or ideas about choosing. We still die some time. Choosing, from the point of view in which I find myself living, does not seem absolute. As much as I'd like to, I cannot choose to eat any and all available matter to fuel my body; I cannot simply choose to live forever as the body in which I live now. As a physical creature, I still have limitations, but I have far fewer limitations than an amoeba has. Thanks biology!! I really mean it. I'm grateful I'm a human. Being an eagle looks fun too, at least the soaring high in the sky part. Eating rodents that aren't cooked or seasoned doesn't seem like it would be all that enjoyable. I suppose there are positives and negatives to everything. All in all, I'm happy to be a human.

Being a human means--among other things--that I was born with an organic (yep, cellular) computing organ in my head, and much of the programming of this computer is programming I get to do for myself, according to the needs in my own life. That's an awesome thing about being a human. Maybe I still don't have every choice in the universe, but I'm not stuck dying just because one of my cells dies and I don't have to eat raw rodents for a living. My life as a human lets me make choices on a scale far beyond single-cell choosing or even eagle- lion- or dog-choices. As a human with a self-programmable mind, I can choose whether or not or how much the "membrane" of my life and my mind are open to my environment. I can choose to close myself off from the world.

Er....

Except for that thing where I have to perceive and interact with the world (my environment. Every life lives in an environment) just to survive. If I don't take nourishment into my body, I will starve and die. If (yep, you guessed it: this is what I've been leading up to) I try to close off my mind from the world, I cannot learn, and my mind will die.

I have heard people say that if you have an open mind, all of your knowledge might fall out. It honestly doesn't work that way, just as cells, the basis of all of life, don't work that way. A mind, living according to the basic rule of all of life, knows what to take in, what to keep, what to keep out, what to push out as waste and what to put out as work produced. It is built into everything your organic computing organ is made of. It is a wisdom of the body, like breathing, like your heart beating without you telling your heart to beat, like hunger telling you when to eat or tiredness telling you when to rest.

An "open" mind gains knowledge through perceptions of the environment outside the body.

You would almost think that an open mind would be hard-wired, standard equipment on all models of humans, but oddly, we get to choose whether or not and how much our minds should open.

With as much truth as I am able to know, we don't have every choice in the universe. I think it's good to make the choices we do have count, and that some of the best words ever spoken are

CHOOSE WISELY.