Proof of Consciousness

An amazing insight came to me a few evenings ago–I believe it can be shown quite logically that consciousness underlies all, and this physical reality is not all there is.

Follow me on this thought experiment.  Visualize the inside of one of your cells.  The beige colored outer membrane surrounds you as you float in the warm fluid which makes up the bulk of the interior.   All around you, a biological factory is in full operation.  Vesicles–small translucent containers made of cell membrane–transport nutrients past you from one part of the cell to another. 

You follow one vesicle to a bean-shaped object, a mitochondria, which is one of the sources of the warmth.  The vesicle merges with the outer membrane of the mitochondria and injects a few spongy fat molecules, which you realize is the fuel for the mitochondria.  Swimming past the mitochondria, you approach the center of the cell where an porous oblong sphere, the nucleus, looms in front of you. 

Fitting snugly through one of the pores, you swim inside and see a chaotic mass of snake-like shorter RNA strands attaching and detaching from a central mass of longer DNA strands.  Some are making copies of the DNA code and moving it to small blobs, just outside the sphere, called ribosomes where curly protein strands are constructed from the instructions in the RNA, molecule by molecule.

Taking in all this fascinating activity, which happens in trillions of cells each day throughout our bodies, consider these fundamental questions:  what is causing all of this?  What is animating and directing the activity of these small cell structures?  What makes this a living cell, and not a mere soup of inanimate goo?

What makes the atoms and molecules of a living creature different than those of a rock or a piece of plastic?

I don’t think there is a difference.  It’s a simple conclusion, and it’s what many atheists believe, as well.  Yet, from the atheist perspective, this non-difference means that life is merely an accidental chemical reaction which has evolved itself through accidents upon accidents to its current form that we see in all the things which we call “alive” in this world.

I propose a different view, however.  What if this means that the animating source of life (simply “life” from now on) is also contained in everything else?  I ask that you suspend your preconceived notions on this, even if you agree with me so far.  Simply consider what this means.  What if life is in all atoms?  What if all those things which we consider dead are simply alive in another form?

Now the question comes, why are “living” things animate, exhibiting the conventional seven factors of life (reproduction, metabolism, adaptation, homeostasis, organization, growth, and response to stimuli) and “dead” things inanimate if their molecules are the same and both contain life?

I think that biological science, for all its dogmas which have developed over the years, is correct in what it theorizes about the evolution of what we know as living things.  There also may have been a primordial soup from which biological organisms sprang.

I also think that this was both an accident and an intention.  Yet the word intention is almost too strong of a word.  A better word might be expression.  I don’t believe that there is a transcendental being who “watches over us” and “directs and guides” us, but what I do believe is that every thing and every biological entity in existence is part of this unquantifiable life essence. 

As all things are this essence, it certainly would have the ability to change itself and experience things in different ways.  When I say “change itself”, however, I’m not sure it’s quite the same as our concept of a person “changing” themselves or their environment.

I don’t believe that it knows, because it simply is.  I don’t believe that it reasons, it simply acts.  And I believe that it acted to allow itself to express through different means, namely biological organisms.  So, it is there as rocks, and it is there as organisms, and though these forms are vastly different, as life they are one and the same.

This is different than simply substituting the world life for the term atomic material.  This is not a way of saying that we’re all protons, neutrons, and electrons, and that those forms are what connect us.

I choose the word life to describe it, because it points a little more accurately at what I believe this essence is.  It is not a god in the traditional sense, and it would be closer to what is has been called Qi, Prana, or the Holy Spirit.  Yet those still imply a separation of sorts, and something you can have or not have.  No, this life essence IS all things, not within or without.  As the biological expression of life, we are able to think, dream, observe, and create, and so life can do these things.  As a rock, life exists as an incredibly passive form whose purpose cannot be seen entirely in the small time span, and extremely limited observation of a human, and so life is also this.

If life is all, then it is vast, as our telescopes continually remind us.  So much occurs in the vastness of the universe that it’s like a distributed network of information that continually enriches and evolves what life is at any given moment.  Life may not even have to harbor an intention to evolve; it just occurs.  I believe that the best description of life’s movements are described in the Tao Te Ching.  It’s a flow, like a river.  It just does what it does. 

The flow of life is effortless, and change takes eons. As the conditions for biological life occurred on this planet, perhaps life flowed with that expression, as it does for all expressions, eddying and pooling around the process until the right configuration of forms aligned.  This permitted an extremely rudimentary decision-making expression to occur with the collection of molecules which formed the precursor of biological life.  Biological life is interesting; as the expression moved forward, it began to imitate its source.  It evolved itself through various adaptive processes, into the many species and ecosystems which surround us presently.  Many biological life forms are also self-aware and sentient, which seems to be a rare quality in existence.

Humans and rocks are of the same essence.  What is opportune about our existence, however, is that we are probably evolving life more rapidly than it has ever been evolved before.  Biological life has come from a chemical pool to conscious humans in only a few billion years, which is incredibly fast compared to the expanse of time in which our universe has been in existence.  Our existence an evolution as an expression of life contributes to the total of what life is and what it may express as it continues flowing.