Life of Lives

Consciousness is a fundamentally human concept. The charge and mass of an object are measurable properties of matter that can be experimentally verified, however no physical reaction will take the sentience of an agent into account, simply put, to be alive is a definition assigned only by the alive, and to whom only give it importance.

That being said, to be aware is clearly an important distinction to us humans, it forms a core aspect of our collective moral philosophy ('beings' deserve a certain level of rights and welfare over the inanimate). Therefore it is important to form a conception of what it means to be conscious, how we see consciousness as an attribute, and what elements of the universe 'count'. 

As has been stated, what humans think of as 'being' is an illusion created by our own minds. We see ourselves as single agents, indivisible mental 'atoms'. This of course is a convenient lie, evolutionarily it is more effective to view fellow humans and organisms as a single cohesive being, with singular thoughts and emotions. This is perhaps why the concept of a soul is so prevalent in our cultures, we are naturally inclined to view beings as containing a single 'self' which contains the thoughts and phenomena we experience. However, when one looks inside the human body, we find not a single entity in a covering of skin, but a billion billion tiny entities creating together, more a society than a being, capable of complex life. When we look at a single specimen of those denizens of our form, we find not a single, simple being, but a multitude of parts, each part of each part can be examined down to infinity, until we find only the most basic pixel of the universe, if it exists at all. When science makes the smallest possible part of the universe visible, then we will truly see 'you'.

Then, perhaps, is the being defined by its constituent elements? If we look at a human like a computer, we see layers of complexity form; pure matter, cells, systems, and at the highest level, the whole being. each layer makes up the layer above, adding complexity to the system by combining billions of less complex parts. Each level of magnitude then, is perhaps 'more alive' than the layer below, basic elements are decidedly dead, simple systems following a set of rules, and yet, the being, made entirely of these inert parts, is clearly alive, it therefore must be the quantity of dead parts, and their configuration, that allows the emergence of apparent sentience.

What, then, does this mean about how we perceive consciousness? If life is an emergent property of inert matter, what does that tell us about the existence of lives beyond our own? Firstly, what about artificial life? Given that the parts of a machine are fundamentally similar to our own building blocks, simple parts made from basic matter and energy, to transmit and receive signals. It stands to reason that it is possible to create a system capable of sapient thought. And in fact, even now, all computer systems fall somewhere on the spectrum between utterly dead, and humanlike-consciousness, many computers have more complexity even than some simple biological forms such as viruses or amoeba. Even basic computers are capable of rudimentary decision making, based on evaluation specific criteria, but in reality, how different is this from our decision making, we also, evaluate criteria, just, billions of times per second, and perhaps with a certain element of chaos.

If computerized life is possible, then, what about simulated life? could we, with a significantly powerful supercomputer, simulate a human in near-perfect detail? And if so, would he be alive? It, again, stands to reason, if humans are conscious, and computers have the ability to simulate complex life, that this artificial human would be just as conscious and self aware as any human. This logical outcome has disturbing consequences, given that these humans would also have the same rights as any, making advanced simulations for scientific research purposes, morally dubious at best. These kinds of highly accurate simulations are, perhaps fortunately, are not currently achievable, and our current computers are not nearly advanced enough to create a human brain. However, computers are not the only systems which create simulations of the future. To gather data from any nonimmediate point, say, the future or the past, requires a simplified simulation, this is how human foresight works, we create a simulation within our minds, with simplified parameters, and preform an experiment. By thinking about the future, we are creating a simulated one inside our minds, just like a computer, in that system there are caricatures, basic versions of real or imagined individuals, based on what we understand about them. For a time, a part our conscious minds are occupied with thinking about (or simulating) these caricatures, given that our brains are capable of consciousness, is it not logical that a portion of the brain would be able to create a consciousness of a 'lower level' (Closer to the 'dead' side on the consciousness spectrum if you will.)

Ants are a truly remarkable configuration of life on Earth, they exist within a pseudo-hive mind. While each ant has a single mind and behaves as an individual, their actions and choices are instinctively influenced by pheromones released by their nest-mates. In the end, we find an almost contradictory situation, the ants both act entirely as individuals, and as a collectives, when taken together, a whole nest seems to have a consciousness of its own, making large scale, complex decisions, which no single ant has the individual intelligence to. Pheromone trails interacting with the small intelligences of individuals creates an emergent intelligence which can construct complex nests and plan out routes for finding food. Just like the cells working in the ant's body to create an emerging intelligence, so too can those disparate ants create an intelligence of which they are perhaps unaware they are members.

Could this 'super-life' perhaps extend beyond the small world of the anthill or beehive, could, through collective experiences of each other, those colonies of insects form an even higher intelligence between them, of the species as a whole, expanding and growing much like so many other forms of life. While elements of this high intelligence may compete with each other, this in the end only facilitates evolution, the greatest weapon of the super-intelligence. Over the last billion years, all of biological life, the system of basic laws which governs our collective existence, has expanded at an exponential rate, becoming more intelligent, more numerous, and more capable of spreading across as much area as physically possible. Perhaps then, we are all individual 'cells' within a truly gigantic 'organism'. the basic units of this collective, plants and bacteria, produce complex proteins and sugars from light, which are then refined and expended by larger and more intelligent forms of life (Or, it must be said, by smaller and more numerous forms, such as viruses) , a sort of factory for buildings the most  intricate and powerful chemical chains which exist in our known universe. 

We exist within a asystem which is unprecedentedly complex in our universe, which certainly contains the hallmarks of an exotic form of life, it is made up of trillions of parts which conduct metabolic processes, it grows and expands, and, perhaps most importantly, it adapts to its environment incredibly well. though of course the vast interconnected network of life is governed more by mathematical constants that some central, immutable soul, that being said, there is very little modern scientific evidence to suggest that our minds do not work in rather the same way, more discreet parts interacting in turing-complete ways than one unified mind.

Alan Watts one wrote "Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself". You are part of a tiny group of individuals which are not only aware of themselves, their own consciousnesses and the consciousnesses of others, but also of their unique place in the universe, a tiny speck of dust within an absurdly complex set of chemical systems, built by pure mathematics over billions of years. In that sense, is life, of which we are a core facet, not also aware of itself, if only in a small sense, just as our minds are sapient, while are organs are less so. Life is a living, breathing, evolving collection of tiny parts which produce the energy and nutrients it needs to survive as a whole, so, perhaps, and though it certainly seems bizarre, maybe life itself is conscious, just as its constituents are, a higher, and a more complex form of life, the likes of which can only be imagined.

Perhaps, however, the question of what consciousness is, isn't the one we should be asking. Maybe consciousness is truly just a made up distinction we humans use to pretend we're different from rocks, trees and enzymes. Maybe the only distinction between sentient and non-sentient is wether it looks sentient from our deeply biased perspective. In truth, can anything be truly self aware, aware that it exists and is separate from the chaos of the universe, because to prove that we must understand every facet of our fundamental makeup on the deepest possible level, a feat so impossible its practically absurd. Its one thing to say, "I think therefore I am", but quite another to understand what thinking truly is.