God

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[quote]Imagine our cells could talk to one another, and they debated the existence of god.

Imagine they never thought to question what they were doing, their make up, that they were made for a purpose, to exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide and to exchange the reverse. They never thought to question why they were the way they are?

Could it be the same for us? Are we just cells to a greater body? Is this thing conscious? can it do the same things as we can to our cells?

Perhaps the function of the human being provides some vital service for the living being that is the nation, or the human race? Maybe we're not as dependent on it as our cells are to us. Money and oil is obviously the lifeblood,

Is there any way I can test this hypothesis?

you called?

+1

Alan Watts once described how there is constant warfare going on at the cellular level in our bloodstreams, yet the discord at that level is necessary for there to be harmony of the body at a higher level. (Of course it isn't literally warfare in the sense of cells actually declaring war on each other, but rather the physical and chemical interactions based on relative structures of those involved: energy and charge distribution etc. acting with or reacting to each other in the various fields of our observable universe. )

I think Watts was trying to suggest that possibly all the discord we experience in our daily lives (the violence, the wars of humanity, etc.) may be necessary in order for there to be harmony at a higher level of existence or awareness. This seems similar to some points suggested in this thread.

One might say that humans are recapitualing the history of cells.

A billion years ago all life was unicellular ( like ameobas today).

Than cells learned to cooperate and form multicellular organisms.
Then the idea gelled and we had an explosion of mulicellullar life 600 million years ago-from which all plants and animals that are bigger than microbes evolved.

Likewise some of these multicellular organisms themselves learned ot cooperate and form communities of organisms- like ant hills and bee hives and flocks of birds.

Then one primate managed to take cooperation to a whole new level - with specialization and communication on a pair with the specialization of cells within a body resulting a community that functioned as a super organism. And this super organism (human civilization) is still growing and evolving today into ... god only knows what final form.

I've actually considered whether the universe itself might be some kind of greater organism that we're "cells" of, but in the end, I think it's just an unprovable theory of no real relevance to my own ethics or beliefs. A cool one, but I see little point in dwelling on it.

i see people as similar to "self contained" ant colonies.

the seat of consciousness is the figurative "queen", and all the cells in the body are
"workers" whose sole purpose is to feed or defend the queen.

all our cells are contained within the boundary of our integrated organism, where as ant colonies are like cells that can ex-cur from the body of their origin.

ants that are born as workers do not know why they perform the tasks they perform.
cells in our bodies do not know (consciously) why they perform the actions that they do.

in an ant colony, i suspect only the queen has consciousness, and i think that all the other ants are unconscious, and they simply are inevitably destined to carry out the tasks that service the queens desires. i also do not think that the queen knows what she desires, but her dissatisfaction caused by circumstantial disequilibrium determines the activity of her workers.

i think that all the cells in our body are like restrained ants that are held within the custody of our skin.


we think we have will, but we are just conscious of the process of the autonomously inevitable activities that we think we are "choosing" to do.

there is no "choice". there is only one "most correct" way of operating through a circumstance given the environment of the person who thinks they have free choice, and they inevitable "choose" it.

Q: do you want to live or die?
A: live.

the answer is inevitable and not a result of free choice because there can only be one choice that leads to biological extension.

i guess that the exception may be suicide, and i think it is biologically self defeating to choose a path that will result in ones demise. that is why i think that people who commit suicide are aberrations of the natural course of fundamental biology.

i am not sure whether lemmings commit suicide. i think they blindly follow the leader over the cliff. i do not think they choose to die.

who knows? i am not sure i am on topic because i have much difficulty in interpreting other posts in this thread.

IIRC lemmings don't actually jump off cliffs like that, I seem to recall it's a false rumor popularized by some movie or something, but I don't know for sure. Either way they obviously (IMO) don't choose to die.

Also, I think the "choosing to live" thing depends on your environment. I think humans naturally try to fill gaps when necessary, like if there aren't enough electricians it's more likely someone will want to become an electrician, or someone will nearly always play devil's advocate in an argument if there's no one to argue that side. I think almost anyone would want to live in the situation that some disaster left a tiny number of people alive, or if they similarly considered it vital to preserving their own specific heritage, or something, but when there is no shortage of population the survival instinct isn't as strong. I believe this may be responsible for any increased number of suicides, because overpopulation is making people feel less need to live.

In fact, I'm pretty sure wanting to die CAN potentially help biological extension. If you can protect your family by dying in war, it may be more useful to the survival of your genes than clinging to life.

i think that being ambivalent to the prospect of ones death in a war significantly reduces the possibility of survival of their family.
once i die in a war, i can no longer attempt to swing the war in the favor of my family.
my effort to fight against what i do not wish to happen requires me to stay alive.

blithely sacrificing ones life in a notional act of bravery is all warm and fuzzy, but so is the experience of one who is doused with napalm and lit up.

if i was in a war, i would carefully calculate how to keep myself alive so that my mind would continue to be available to think of ways to subvert their actions, i would want to save my friend tammy from the possible eventuality that i do not want her to experience.

i will fight very hard in a war if it is required to protect tammy.

it is stupid to sacrifice one's life unnecessarily. no one else loves her like i do, and i would be determined to stay alive to fight against a world that may not consider her life to be important. .


i am more useful alive than i am dead.

It's true that lemmings don't do that.

There are some ants that, when they lose the pheromone trail of the rest of the colony, will follow each other's trails in a never ending circle until they collapse and die. Obviously that isn't suicide.

People who commit suicide are generally mentally ill, or else at the end of their life anyway and just want to end it quickly and painlessly. It is the illness that is the aberration, if anything.

Like all animals we are hardwired to avoid pain. Prolonged physical or psychological pain from which there is no escape can make suicide appear to be a desirable state in such circumstances because it makes the pain go away. So in a way it is a bug/loophole in our mental software.

It's interesting you bring up suicide, because I think this is some of the best evidence there is a mega organism, a god, if you will.

I am vaguely aware of genes which tell cells in your body to die if they grow in dangerous, malignant ways.To either inhibit growth or kill the cell altogether.

In same way we might subtle send messages to people who are burdens, or are detestable to kill themselves. We have a concept of being something disgusting, revolting, like a pedophile or a murderer. In which if I found myself in that position, I imagine I would kill myself.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLlSySWuoiA[/youtube][youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljRKhZ81aqY[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kCEj0ud1Ks[/youtube]

To the OP:

This has occurred to me too at times, especially after seeing the flim Fantastic Voyage. It's an interesting mental puzzle.

What I mean by god, is not the same as the biblical god, what I mean is the relationship between you and your cells.

We are gods of our cells, we can kill ourselves and kill each one of the cells, we can sergically remove some cells from our body, we provide them nourishment and they provide us with consciousness, the ability or the illusion to make decisions.

From our perspective the living entity we might comprise (I call it our god, because I can't think of a better word for it.) provides us with oil for our cars, and it may be that from our perspective we don't see how such a thing is conscious, aware of itself and making decisions because we know how those decisions get made. (By majority vote, or by cost-benefit analysis) I assume if our cells intelligence and the ability to notice things they too would come to the same conclusion This consciousness is just a set of rules carried out by individual cells, that if you understand the rules there is no mystery regarding consciousness.

It's an idea that groups we humans can make up are just as alive as you or I (maybe more alive) and it is capable of making decisions, of providing, perhaps it eats, like we do, it exercizes it sleeps maybe even has sex (but I can't think of how it does this yet)

Maybe its impossible to comprehend how this thing works as impossible as a blood cell supposing the human body and making sense of its behaviors as talking, running, breathing air, eating, having sex, if blood cells had a brain it would be so foriegn from its existence as a cell, that it could have no possible idea of the being it made up.

Perhaps our functions are too simplistic to understand the life of such an entity.