Introduction.
When we look at one celled plants or animals, they are very small, and not usually visible to the naked eye. However, we know they exist and can see them with a microscope. Over time, evolution has created multi-cellular plants and animals. Unless of course, you take the fundamentalist Christian view that the earth is only a few thousand years old, and, what we today see as fossils are merely artifacts, left for some noble reason, by our Creator.
Before considering the latter conjecture, first let us explore the idea of evolution, and what that may mean for humanity.
You and I are human, scientifically known as Homo sapiens. We belong to the animal kingdom, as opposed to plans, fungi (like mushrooms) or the various other scientific categorizations of living things.
Take people for example. We are living beings composed of literally billions of cells. We have skin cells and bone cells, muscle and heart, lung and kidney cells. Barring an anomaly, these cells make up a unique person. Now what’s interesting, is that I can take a few of those cells – skin or liver or kidney – remove them from the body to which they are attached, put them in a petri dish with the proper nutrients, and they will continue to grow, at least for a while. Some types of cells do not last very long. Other types of cells in our bodies are much longer lived. Thus far, the only cell in our bodies that science has not proven replaces it's self is the brain cell, the nerve cell, also called the neuron.
While science may not be advanced enough yet to be growing a new heart, it can certainly keep heart cells alive for a long time, outside the body.
Here is another fact. Over time, virtually every cell in our bodies will be replaced. Older skin cells will die and slough off, only to be replaced by new living cells. With the possible exception of neurons, as nerve cells are called, our entire body is replaced many times, cell by cell, over the course of our lives.
What makes me, me.
I am physically not the same person as I was yesterday, last month, or last year. Aside from being me, the personality that we all know, I am a product of the food I eat, water I drink and air that I breathe. The person who went to bed last night is physically not the same person that woke up this morning! Therefore, we can be said to live in a state of constant physical change. This colony of siblings cells renews itself regularly, with cells reproducing, growing, dying, all the regular rate. The body is constantly renewing and changing. However, the mind is another story. The mind has a continuity that the physical body does not.
This raises a number of very interesting questions such as, who or what am I… or anyone else for that matter. On the one hand, I am literally a colony of independent sibling cellular level organisms that live together in a highly structured colony, have their own goals, and have the shared goal of staying alive. They start out like a new colony, grow and prosper as a mature city or country, and eventually, and inevitably, die like the ghost towns of the wild West, with only our skeletons surviving the ravages of time to prove that we once walked here on the earth.
Life begets life.
One of the distinctions between living in nonliving is that the living give birth to replicas of themselves. They go through a process of combining old forms of matter, in new ways, into new forms of matter. There are several different methods of reproduction. At the single cell level, we have the ability for a cell to split in half and create two new creatures, called mitosis. There is the ability for two single cells to share nuclear material also called DNA , then divide, which is called conjugation. With higher life forms, there is the very common sexual reproduction. The results will that process called parthenogenesis which is the fertilization of an egg without the need for male.
The possibilities for reproduction of the species are many.
The process of reproduction however, is limited to ordinary living things such as plants, animals, fungi and the like. Minerals do not reproduce. They may chemically change form in a chemical reaction, combines or split apart. But they do not reproduce or cause reproduction to happen. There is no way to have two lumps of iron give rise to a child called iron.
Non-me flora and fauna.
it is interesting to note that most of the cells in our body share the same genetic the two real; that is, they are what I define as many. However, there are numerous microscopic plants and animals that live on us and in us. These microbes may be symbiotic, meaning it may do us some good and we do them some good, and some may be parasitic, that is, they draw sustenance from us but give nothing in return -- such as a tape worm. This symbiotic microorganisms are the most interesting. We do know that microbes in our gut help us to digest food. they are symbiotic. When we take some antibiotics, they not only kill the pathogens, or bad microbes, but also kill off some of the symbiotic micro-organisms that help us digest food. Eating yogurt, for example, is known to replenish the use of microorganisms that are healthy for us. So even we, as humans, are actually colony creatures! Human life could not be sustained without the helpful microorganisms that live within us.
Interesting question number one.
We are conceived in her mother’s womb, a new living creature, physically dependent upon, and attached to, the parent. We are born as infants, totally helpless, operating on pre-programmed, instinctual actions alone, which seem to be hardwired to conception. We go through several phases of life, and perhaps, have children of our own. We then grow old, and die, leaving our children as, arguably, our greatest legacy.
Understanding this points out an interesting conundrum. Who am I, really?
Is that essence which is me – my personality, separate from that colony of living cells which represents my body in the independent living creatures that inhabit it? Or, is my essence, me, simply a byproduct, or in more scientific terms, an emergent property of this colony of cells living, growing and sharing themselves? It would certainly seem that the unique thing, that unique living organism that I identify as myself, is separate from some biological processes that make up my body.
If I call the self aware entity a mind, essence, spirit or a soul, then it is certainly something different from the collection or, colonies of differentiated cells that make up my body. In scientific terminology, something that we have to discover is whether that thing we call the mind is:
a). an emergent property of the elements and compounds that manifest themselves as tissues made up of cells, naking our body, or,
b). something different entirely, a processin which a particular batch of cells provides access to the reality which we perceive as these four dimensions! Is the body of machine, like an automobile or a telephone which transports matter or information that is used by some type of organized energy we call mind, spirit or soul?
In other words, is the body a vehicle which allows its passenger, the independent mind, to operate in this plane of existence, these four dimensions. Is the mind separate and distinct from the body which it uses?
Option b) presents us with some very satisfying solutions as we will see.
Basically, we are asking ourselves is the essence of self, the mind, separate from, and using, the body. There are many arguments, which we shall explore in more detail, which support the hypothesis that this is in fact the case.
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