posted on Mar, 2 2008 @ 03:33 PM
Assume for a moment that nature is a living entity outside of all creatures living within it. Assume that the DNA that composes/conducts all of our
bodily make-up and functions has a life of its own that is sentient and controls evolution.
The second sentence may seem far fetched when we consider that DNA is so minuscule that we need a microscope to see it but let's put ourselves into
perspective - take a sheet of A4 paper, use a pen and place a single blue dot into the middle of the paper, put the paper in the middle of a wall in
your home, stand back about ten paces, can you still see the blue dot? How small is that dot compared to that page? Compare it to that wall. That
dot is Earth, everything else is this Universe. Think about how big a human being is relative to that dot? I'm not saying things are to scale but I
would hazard a guess that that wall should be much, much bigger to get a more accurate comparison.
As a side note, did you know that a cell knows how well and healthy it is by listening to its neighbours? When it's neighbours tell it that it is
unwell, it kills itself. I mention this to give you the idea that communication and computation occur at cellular level, I'm not saying a cell is
conscious but I am saying it is a living, social entity in much the same way that ants form the cells of an ant nest.
I'm asking these questions because I have a feeling that nature has it's own agenda for allowing human consciousness to develop.
As far as we know, nature got along fine without humans and consciousness for many, many years. I'm not saying that other creatures haven't been
conscious in the past. I'm not saying that we are the first technological civilisation to be developed by human beings (we've achieved a lot in
10,000 years, why couldn't we have not done this before at some point in the previous 240,000 years). Why did nature, in my opinion, allow the
perfectly well working, non-conscious computer system that is the brain to devolve into a quirky system that needs an identity to learn to control
both the brain and the body?
I'm thinking that after numerous mass extinctions caused by uncertainties within the Universe i.e asteroids, multiple volcanic eruptions,
earthquakes, floods and so forth, that DNA (hence nature) decided to build an imperfect machine perfectly designed to avert or contain catastrophe or
preserve DNA's other creations. Nature definitely puts a lot of its resources into us and lets us currently get away with a lot of things that are
bad for nature's other creations at the present time. But think about this, there has to be a reason that nature lets us go on as we do. If nature
wanted to kill us she could easily create something to do it. We are not particularly strong compared to many other animals so nature must have
protected us at some point in our early evolution.
What if DNA is a self replicating machine, alien to this planet, designed to facilitate the terraformation of this planet for an alien race. What if
the DNA program developed a quark and we are the result? As an alien, what would your response be? How would you feel?