God, Man, Consciousness, Magic, Science And Alien Inteligence (1) Musings on the nature of consciousness, from electrons to alien intelligence. "God is what the mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension." Freeman Dyson Where does life come from? If everything is conscious, then the dust chose to live. My personal concept of the cosmos When I was an eight-year-old child I went to a small elementary school that, in those days, went up to only the third grade. One night near the end of the third grade I had a dream that I was leaning against a wall of the school that in reality did not exist at the time. The wall was sun warmed and in front of me was a chain link fence. I looked up and was blinded by the bright sun in my eyes but by squinting I could see a man mowing his lawn while a black dog ran back and forth. I went to a different school for the fourth and fifth grades and during those two years they built an addition onto my old elementary school. At age eleven I went back to the old school for the sixth grade and one day I leaned against the sun warmed back wall of the new part of the school. While standing close to a chain link fence I looked up and found the sun was in my eyes. The bright sun half blinded me but by squinting I could see a man was mowing his lawn as a black dog ran back and forth. Then I remembered the dream that I had in the third grade. I had dreamed of this same occurrence three years earlier! This set me from an early age to thinking about the nature of time and dreams and I tried to understand some of the mysteries that I saw in the world. My uncle loaned me a book called The Strange World of Frank Edwards that was made up of collected news stories of strange things that happened to people. I moved on to Charles Fort and began to study books that recounted some of the odd phenomena that attend reality. What follows are some of my observations culled from these lessons. I don't necessarily have the right answers, I'm just trying to point out directions, trends and where the evidence leads. The history of consciousness, the hidden continuum No one can say where the universe originally came from or why, suffice it to say that it is here so that we can ask those questions. I will try to show that there is a distinct lineage from the action of a single electron to the highest realms of thought. To begin to understand how and why consciousness developed, I must start with a brief history of the universe. One religious viewpoint says that god created the universe as it is and that is that. Let us consider a theory put forth by science. The big bang The current scientific version of creation says that the universe began from nothing and it expanded into everything we know. One small point exploded and created the firmament that we now see in the night sky. The universe blew out in all directions leaving the center empty. From enough distance the universe looks like a giant donut, a shape which is called a torus. The original energetic burst of the big bang gradually became matter. My guess is that matter is energy slowed down a little. The first physical particles in the universe quickly coalesced into electrons and protons. Electrons and protons can be seen as bits of information. The electron is the negative bit and the proton is the positive bit. These positive and negative particles mutually attract and repel each other, which results in the smaller electron orbiting the larger proton. When you put the negative electron and the positive proton together you get meaning. Hydrogen, the simplest of the elements, is the meaning of the combination of one electron and one proton. An atom of hydrogen can be seen as the simplest of electric engines with the electron going around the proton. When you have two electrons orbiting two protons you get the meaning helium and so on up the periodic table to create all of the known elements. The molecules of the universe that we see today were created by the fact that atoms of different elements will bond with each other. Electrons will either join an atom or not depending upon its electric charge, this is called valence. An atom of oxygen is able to accommodate another two electrons and when two hydrogen atoms bond to oxygen, this covalent bond results in a molecule of water being produced, H2O. Stars form Huge clouds of hydrogen formed in space from the residue of the big bang. These clouds of hydrogen became breeding grounds for stars. The denser parts of the hydrogen clouds formed into balls of gas. The balls of gas became large through accretion and their center of gravity became intensely hot due to gravitational pressure that it ignited into a nuclear furnace. Suns were born about two billion years after the universe came into existence. These huge hydrogen fueled suns eventually cooked down some of the hydrogen and through fusion created from pressure, transformed it into the next heavier element, helium. After eons some of the helium cooked down into even heavier elements. The intense heat and pressure at the center of the suns performed alchemical changes, tearing apart and rebuilding atoms to create all of the known elements. After billions of years these stars became old and exploded, showering the debris that we call the elements across space to form meteors and new clouds of gas which in turn created more stars. Our sun is a third generation star; two sets of stars have already come and gone before our star came into existence. An older scientific theory says that sometimes stars get so loaded with the heavier elements that they release blobs of matter into space, which then form into planets such as the earth. As the earth circled the sun its molten elements stratified. The heaviest elements formed into a ball in the center of the planet and the lighter elements formed the crust that we live on and a gas cloud around the outside of the planet. Hydrogen bonded with oxygen to form water in the atmosphere and it fell as rain filling in the low spots of our planet and eventually created the oceans. Science is now moving toward a new theory of planet formation. A news report dated June 2003 indicated that 10 million years after the sun formed the earth became a planet made from materials in the vicinity. A news report dated 07-11-03 stated that a 13 billion year old planet was discovered giving credence to the idea that planets form from the simple materials around them. Earth is a ball afloat in space, circling around the sun, held by the invisible thread of gravity. Gravity is a slight energy but it makes all the difference in the universe. The earth is held in just the right place in the solar system for life. Not so close to the sun that everything would burn up and not so far where everything would freeze. We live literally between fire and ice. Life begins In 1968 polycyclic aromatic molecules were detected in interstellar dust. In 1974 molecules of polyformaldehyde, which is related to cellulose, were found in space. Five percent of meteorites are carbonaceous chondrites and can contain amino acids, sugars and alcohol. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins and appear to be naturally occurring substances. This suggests to me that life would begin anywhere in the universe that it could find an environment that was viable. At some point all of the necessities needed to create life on earth were present. What spark ignited inert matter into life is unknown. Science says that when conditions were right, certain chemicals came together and, with possibly the aid of a bolt of lighting, proteins were created. Protein chains are made with amino acids. Even simple cells are made from thousands of proteins, 30,000 proteins can be made from amino acids. This allowed the simplest forms of life to come into being on earth over three billion years ago. Bacteria have been around for two to three billion years. Single cells in many forms have been on earth for one or two billion years and multi cell flora for over a billion years. Some say life was a chemical reaction, some say a "creator" made life. Is this spark of life, that animating feature, what we call soul? One definition of soul is that it is the breath of life. As has been said, life is the fall of spirit into matter and we are not material beings having a spiritual journey, we are spiritual beings have a physical journey. Whatever, life is here, we are alive and life's exact origin is not in the scope of this paper. Life is predatory, plants and animals need to eat. Colonies of bacteria have been known to attack other colonies of bacteria over food with all out chemical warfare. The drive toward self-preservation fine-tuned the single cell animal's instincts. Animals and plants gradually devised strategies to either catch food or avoid being eaten. They might eventually learn where the best conditions for life are and where their lesser chances are and who their predators are. Sigmund Freud suggested that psychic ability began with hunter prey dynamics. The hunter tries to become more psychic to find its prey, the prey tries to become more psychic in order to avoid the hunter. Life gradually evolved and simple plants and animals appeared around seven hundred million years ago. Those eventually grew into colonies forming larger plants or animals. Certain factors limit life here on earth. All things must be of certain ratios due to natural laws such as the size of atoms and molecules, the laws of hydraulics as in blood flow and lung capacity must fit a given body size. A heart is a pump and must be a given size for the body it inhabits. Bone structure must be able to hold up the frame against gravity, bones must not so light as to break easy and not so heavy that the creature cannot move. Forms develop according to their reach of consciousness. A worm knows digging in dirt and so is worm shaped for efficiency. A cat knows hunting and killing and is sleek and quick. Humans do a wide variety of things and have opposable thumbs to do them with. The size of the human body is half way between an atom and a star. "Consciousness precedes being, not the other way around." Vaclay Havel As life became more complex some species managed to cooperate with each other such as flowers and insects. Insects can smell and see certain colors. Flowers developed colors and sweet scents to attract insects so that they could get pollinated and reproduce. A question comes up, was this a purposeful decision on the part of the flower to change itself for the insect? Did the insects adapt to flowers by growing eyes to see color, scent organs to smell with and wings to fly to flowers so they could propagate them and ensure their food source? The odds are that it was a mutual development on the part of both species to take advantage of the behavior of the other. This may show a deliberate conscious decision in both flora and fauna to evolve in whichever direction that increases their chances of survival. On April 25, 2003 the San Francisco Chronicle printed an article titled: Birds and flowers found to evolve for each other, beaks and foliage change to ease pollination. To paraphrase the article it said: On the island of St. Lucia and Dominica in the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean are plants called Heliconia also known as parrot's beaks and lobster claws. Purple-throated Carib hummingbirds have adapted to two different types of Heliconia. One fits the short straight bill that the male hummingbirds use to feed. As for the female hummingbirds, their long curved beaks have evolved to fit easily into the deep, curved shape of the other Heliconia form. In a paper by Douglas Altshuler and Christopher James Clark they write, "Hummingbird and Heliconia engage in a coevolutionary dance with flower shape evolving in response to hummingbirds bills, and bill shape evolving in response to flower shape." John Kress, a botanist at the Smithsonian Institution's national museum of Natural History in Washington said, "It's the most convincing evidence for this kind of evolution that I've ever seen. The only thing better would be if I could live for a million years and watch it actually happen." Perhaps whatever consciousness it is that brought about these changes is the essence of the soul. Souls evolve Some people say souls exist some say they do not. Some say only humans have souls because only humans have free will. This is a question that cannot seem to be settled but let us assume for the sake of this article that a soul exists. One can surmise that if life evolved so could souls. One can define a soul as that consciousness which is left alive after the physical body dies. Where souls came from is unknown, perhaps they are a constituent of life forms, perhaps they are the spark that preceded life forms. Perhaps they are created in the sun. Perhaps they are thoughts imprinted onto a cloud of electric charges that transcend the physical body. Each electric charge is like a little bit of data, the more bits you have the more complex the soul. If reincarnation exists we can surmise that creatures continually become more conscious as each soul gains a new life experience. Robert Monroe, for whom the Monroe institute was named, wrote in his biography of a time when he felt that he was in an elemental state and had memories of making the same elemental movements over and over again but feeling happy about it. Something like the water cycle, evaporating and then falling as rain over and over again. Perhaps the electric charge of a simple cell evolved into a rudimentary self-awareness. Multi celled animals may have developed a more complex soul as a result of collective cell awareness, each cell reinforcing the whole being. Perhaps the soul is an eternal energy that began as an electron which developed into a cell and then morphed into a more complex creature. There are several bible references in which the human soul used to be called a ghost. When people died they were said to give up the ghost, presumably so the soul could continue on elsewhere. Humans on earth If life and conscious beings are scattered throughout the universe, we can surmise that we can measure interstellar intelligence from the center of the universe. Since the center of the universe is about 11 billion years older than our section of the universe, any sentient races that lived there would be much older and perhaps highly advanced. Most likely civilizations in similarly aged parts of the universe would be as advanced as each other. Any civilization in our part of the Milky Way would be about as advanced as we are, perhaps people farther out from the center are not so advanced as their civilizations would be younger. Somehow, out of evolution apparently, hominids appeared on earth about five million years ago and the human animal as we know it eventually came to live on the earth. On 02-20-2003 a news story went out in the mass media saying that chimpanzees should be classified in the human family because we share 99.4% of the same DNA. Perhaps human and animal consciousnesses are also much alike. The main difference is that humans have an advanced ability to solve problems and therefore they appear to progress. Man has the ability, so to speak, to change his relationship to his environment. "Consciousness is the awareness of awareness." John Dewey For unknown reasons the human appears to have more consciousness than any other creature on earth. The proof of this larger consciousness is that a cow, or any other animal, will walk down a path and step over a rock. A human will walk down the path and apply free will to the rock. A human may move the rock from the path, or throw it as a weapon, build a wall to contain other animals or build a house to gain shelter from the elements. Both the man and the cow have consciousness but the human, having a higher degree of consciousness can deal with the diverse potentialities of the rock better than the cow. The mystery of consciousness seems to increase with consciousness. Perhaps consciousness is a natural force like electricity. Perhaps the whole universe is somewhat conscious and each electron is like a little sending and receiving unit. What we call god may be an energy field of consciousness, a sort of mind field that surrounds the earth. The word nous means mind, the Noetic Institute has called this mind field the nous sphere, it is as if the whole planet is surrounded in a haze of neural nets. Perhaps all thoughts are stored in the nous sphere. In Indian metaphysics this was called the Akasic records, a concept of a gigantic repository of all the memories of every incarnation of every being. Jung called it the collective subconscious. The internet might be seen as a human variation of the nous sphere. The internet carries information across wires and through mechanical means and delivers it to any point that wants to receive it.
Copyright © 2007 Michael Potter |