The word was left for you

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Chapter 5 Life as we know it


    Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.  In him was life and that life was the light of all mankind.

St John 1 : 2


Please note this continues the ideas expressed in "What is thought?" Where the definition of thinking was stretched down to the quantum level and up to the cosmos and life was attributed to anything that can think, that is pretty much everything.  This chapter is looking at the history of what most people would call being alive.


I am not using the definition that to be alive, you must be able to reproduce because mules cannot reproduce, but it is hard to deny that they are alive.  There are many hybrid animals, that think, react and live but cannot reproduce. There are many eunuchs natural and manmade, that live but cannot reproduce. The biological description of living things expects reproduction to replace the dead.
I do not think that reproduction is a necessary prerequisite of being alive.


The biological definition of being alive is a being that has DNA and RNA in every cell of their body.  That is how biologists define life, but this is not the definition I am using either. It is too restrictive to what I think of as being alive.


To me, the distinguishing feature thing that makes something alive is that it reacts to its surroundings, and that usually means that it has many parts and those parts cooperate to continue the life of the whole.


Please bear with me as the concept of thinking is still stretched well beyond its common usage. Possibly cooperation or reaction might be better words at different levels, but none of them covers all the possibilities. I am taking life, as the part of the Universe that learnt to cooperate.


Let us take a look at what the difference is moving the foundation of the existence from numbers to the words means. Mathematics has no meaning in itself; it is just a self-consistent structure. Because of our choice of axioms, it is useful for measuring creation. To imply a meaning, you need words.  The scope of words is far broader than that of mathematics.


If you look at two robots on a factory floor, it is a lot easier to understand their actions, if you know the instructions they follow, their programming.  If you were trying to model this just with a physical description of how the electrons were whizzing around in their electronic brains, it would be almost impossible to follow.


The words give meaning.  Adding words to physics does not make the numbers meaningless it just makes the physics easier to understand.


Living things are full of thoughts, and the actions of living things are impossible to understand unless you include the words.  You can only start to make sense of humans if you comprehend their words, their thoughts. For any "Theory of Everything", you must include words as well as mathematics to describe life. e.g. Understand terrorists whether that is Isis and the Koran or The IRA and their Catholic Bible fighting the UDP with their abbreviated protestant Bible.  You need to understand the words they believe.


The whole of evolution is one slow building process in better and better forms of cooperation through communication; that is using love, to share knowledge.  With the invention of words that progress exploded!  Each human civilisation is richer or poorer directly in proportion to the amount they communicate and with the freedom with which they communicate, with the amount they cooperate.  It seems that without both love and knowledge, none of creation could happen, with both love and knowledge, all of it has to happen.

Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.

Again the words give the meaning.


Going back to the question "What is thought?" at the low sub-atomic level: This is the question all the theoretical physicists are studying "The Theory of Everything!".  In that most basic of quantum particle collisions, what makes the decisions?  What is it?  What are "The Laws of Physics"?  As yet, we do not know. We may never know.


Some say it is life; some say it is not.  For all our understanding of it, it might as well be.  It is currently best described by quantum theory.  It may better be explained by M-theory one of several theories put forward as to what is happening.  Not being a physicist, I cannot tell you, and suspect neither can they.  I think of this "whatever it is" as the Breath of life, also known as the Holy Spirit. It is where God gets his word in.


So let me tell you a story, it is a very long story, but it takes a comparatively short time to tell.


In the beginning, there was a big bang! Producing an awful lot of energy and eventually light.  That condensed quickly into hydrogen, stars and galaxies.  Within a few billion years these first stars died and scattered the other elements they had been making deep in their depths such as carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen; all the building blocks of life as we know it across the whole Universe.


The two most important compounds are water and amino acids.


Water is a rare compound that freezes on the surface while staying liquid underneath. Providing a place for chemicals to meet and interact and it is an excellent place for amino-acids to communicate. Water is good at transmitting both acidity and electric charge.


Amino-acids are essential because they are easy to make and have an internal electric charge, which forms an internal memory. They can also change their external acidity, which can affect their surroundings, especially in water.  The modern ones are all good at making membranes, which is another useful feature as we will come to see later on.  Their other advantage is they can survive in space.

Now what is curious about these tiny thinkers, which is what they are, is that quite probably at the bottom of the ocean there were vast numbers of them just because the right chemicals were sloshing around to create them.  Here I am talking billions or possibly trillions of molecules.  They do not actively reproduce, but what they can do in their very, very basic way is think.


Some amino-acids improve the acidity to make the creation of that amino-acid more likely and some make it less likely.  This is in itself a Darwinian event.  Amino-acids which help themselves reproduce produce more of that Amino acid and so their community grew, compared to those that hinder reproduction.  Not an intelligent decision per se but a good one for that amino-acid to outgrow the others. The amino-acids are already "learning" to cooperate.


What is interesting here is the amino-acids are creating a community of similar amino-acids and making the same decision.


As seen in the previous chapter on intelligence, communities of like-minded "thinkers" are essential to making intelligent decisions.  Not that every amino acid will connect with another but they could.  If it were a community of a billion that would 5 x 1017 potential connections

Because of this, once we have communities of amino-acids, we have the first chance at the very first, if tiny, genuine intelligence.


Once you have a community which has the possibility of thinking there are real reasons why that community should actively encourage reproduction:


The larger the community, the better the communal brain.

High reproduction replaces amino-acids that are washed away or destroyed.

It provides a more consistent way of thinking, than if you rely on different amino-acids or the rocks around you.


It is a defensive mechanism, like shoals of fish. Indeed electric charge can be used as a form of rejection. Or if it is used to opposite charges at both ends of amino-acids, it could cause them to form long chains.


One of the best forms of defence is to have a protective perimeter.  A membrane around the community.  The amino-acids we know today are almost all good at making membranes.  This probably dates back to these early days.


The advantages of an external membrane are enormous:


  1. It keeps the colony together, and they are no longer at the mercy of the currents.
  2. It gives the colony a defence mechanism.
  3. It gives the colony the option and pushes the colony towards specialisation.


So any community of amino-acids which does start communicating between them accelerates the cooperation and accelerates the growth even further.  Now, this is another event that could be called Darwinian, but this time, it is a deliberately thoughtful one.


A community of amino-acids wanting to survive are almost bound eventually to lead to single cell organisms.  That does not mean the less prosperous amino-acids are not still out there.  Just we have got to simple single cell life through nothing more than applying the concept of the Word, through a desire to cooperate.  A desire born of the knowledge that life is always better in a community, a desire born in one of the earliest forms of love.


The Word is gaining meaning.


This love of the community came way before sex.  The need to be a part of that community is still a far more basic instinct to us, and a foundation of our lives.  Every nation and every culture and every religion teaches it; Suicide bombers; American heroes; firemen and policemen. When needed, defending your community is far more basic instinct than having children.


As thought is a precursor to reproduction, I think of thought as the most fundamental Breath of Life and the definition of something that is thinking as being alive, not reproduction.  A man with a vasectomy or a woman after menopause is still alive even though they cannot reproduce.  Although I must admit I do not see individual rocks as being very alive, many books talk of the living rock.  There is a vast range of how much things can think. The more they think, the more alive they become. The Bible speaks of dying to sin and living by the Spirit of Life, otherwise known as the Word.  Living by the Bible makes you an enemy of selfish people.   Wisdom gives life.


As a guess at the beginnings of life as we know it:

Once a hypothetical colony of amino acids can create a membrane, the first specialisation.  Then you can imagine the amino acids doing something they could not do before specialise!


Specialisation in defence the cell wall

Specialise in moving initially using the cell wall and later internal muscles and external fins.

Specialise in letting food in and refuse out still the cell wall

Specialise in getting energy from the food

Specialise in thinking.

Specialise in sensing and seeing.

Specialise in almost anything!


What is also essential is these communities can become communities of communities and so become even more complex and have even more brain power.


The easiest way for a cell to divide is to elongate and twist, look at a butcher's sausage.   However, if anything is specialised within a membrane it needs to split too then elongating and twisting seems a simple way to split the specialisation. At the twist, the specialisations need to split too.  This was the origins of the double helix, that seriously twisted chemical.


Then they can become communities of communities by being multi-cellular.


They can become communities of communities of communities in herds, and as seen in the previous chapter, the limits are boundless.  Indeed for a planet's ecosystem to thrive, different forms of life must learn to balance their needs for the whole system to survive.


If you notice the stories from the Old Testament, this is very much what the Old Testament God did.  If you were kind to each other and stuck together as a team, you survived and did well.  If you ignored the laws of God and went your own way and committed adultery and were selfish and abandoned the appreciation of the Great I am which provides everything, the societies became unstable and fell to their enemies.


The unproven hypothesis continues…


On some of the stars where life started, the star dies before intelligence really got off the ground, but in doing so, it flings amino-acids across space. Thus accelerating the formation of new life on new planets around new stars.  The ones that survive that death are more likely to succeed in the future.  Survival of the death of a star is almost essential to the continued survival of these amino-acids which are just as at home in space as in water.


On other planets, intelligence starts to blossom, and it may reach the state of human intelligence or even higher where would they go from there?


After humans invented words, they could merge families into communities; counties; alliances.  Once we got to multi-national alliances, it is doubtful that the usefulness education for the improvement of our culture could be ignored.


How would these hypothetical intelligent beings explore space cheaply?  Launch space ships across the void to visit planet by planet individually?  I would suggest that this is an exceedingly dangerous and possibly unfruitful hobby.


On the other hand, they could use the amino-acids they came from; the ones that came very probably from a dying star and are already scattering themselves across the galaxy.


Spamming the Universe with amino-acids and waiting a few million years will reveal oxygen bearing planets as they develop. Any interested civilisation can watch for them in their telescopes and be more selective as to where they go.  This is a lot safer route.  Of course, the search for oxygen does assume that they want to breathe oxygen.  Once spotted, they can hop to a known life-bearing planet to say hello and welcome a new civilisation to their culture.


A civilisation that is very probably based on the same amino-acids that their life form came from and could very probably give the new life forms a helping hand.


By this point in the story, we are definitely in touch with our ancient culture.

Now it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were beautiful, and they took wives for themselves of all whom they chose,

Genesis 6:1-2

This method of exploration has great benefits in that the life you find is likely to be based on the same basis as yours, which is where the double helix and sex come in. They are everywhere, and I suspect it is because they out-competed every other amino-acid building block that was ever blasted out into space.  Because they had already invented the Word at a much lower level in their RNA and genes.

The Spiral helix of RNA, DNA and genes are unbelievably successful.


Why? Because RNA and genes use Words.

With just 23 genes of 4 letter alphabet that is already 423 = 279841 different designs for cells.  A human has nearer 23,000 letters in the alphabet of DNA, a vast number of possibilities.

With about 23,000 we humans have nearer 2 x 1017 blueprints for new cells.  Imagine the population of the world as being one human body we would still give us about 400,000 different people.  That is more thoughts and words than you are likely to say in your lifetime held in each and every cell of your body.  If you ever thought of a cell as simple, think again. They are vastly complex and definitely think for themselves.


From multi-cellular animals to herds of mammals, to talking humans, glossing over billions of years of evolution one slow step at a time it took to get us to a talking human with and another acceleration in evolution the word the spoken and then the written word.


This process, as described here, could have taken millions or even billions of years, even the life of one of those early stars to take place and may have happened many, many times before!  This is not necessarily a fast process, but it is an inevitable process.  Darwin says so.  The Great I am says so.


This process is not only true for individual species of amino-acids or indeed animals or plants. It is true of the whole community on that planet or for inter-galactic empires.  If the community is unbalanced, it fails if it is well balanced, it succeeds.  Not only do the animals evolve but the ecosystems they are in evolves too.


If any animal is too successful, it can start damaging the ecosystems, and without the ecosystem, the animal will die off.  The bubonic plague died out because it ran out of humans to infect, balance is vital.  For balance you need inter-species cooperation.  If we are not careful, we may go the same way as the bubonic plague.


The story starts when two passing particles collide and exchange information; it continues with the formation of water and amino acids; these allow the development of life and intelligence from self-sustaining ecosystems. Then space travel becomes possible using a subset of that ecosystem. This allows interstellar travel and inter-stellar communities to become possible. Eventually, the whole Universe could be thinking as one great big think machine.  This is a very real scientific theory similar to one proposed by Seth Lloyd.  I will go into this more in the next chapter.


This story is speculation and may be science fiction, but then again, maybe it is not.  It does not step outside of known science, and so it is a theory just as much as any theoretical physicist's.  It has one important difference; it is based on the Word, and that made life so much easier to explain.


The Word that every animal and ecosystem agree on is that Word is love.

God is Love.  If you cooperate, you succeed.   If you do not you die or at best, you do not thrive.

If we want to survive the oil wars, the lack of food caused by overpopulation, global warming and global dimming, then we as a global community need to cooperate as never before.


Please, love your neighbour as yourself and love the great I am that is the whole of existence with all your mind, soul and body.