Your Body-Made In The Image Of God?

Since we have seen from cybernetics and information theory how systems run according to negative feedback that resembles “purpose”, does you own body operate by this principle?

Slater points out that, in nature, there is no reason for an individual to stand and defy a charging lion, or a wolf, or some predator about to eat us. Yet in war, we are conditioned to stand and advance, even to our own deaths, in pursuit of a system that depends on our individual sacrifice. “A machine-like response had no value until me n began to make war on each other”.

The individual has exchanged responses of himself as individual for the “greater good” of those who share his reality. In its “reality sharing’ the individual becomes more “cell-like” in his self identity. He assumes that little is lost if he dies, since the collective will go on and retain memory of him.

In cells, this is no problem, since cells simply divide and produce exact copies of themselves, which then tend to “speciate” slightly, functioning as cells of different body-parts in an organism. However, one cell contains all necessary in formation to re-create an exact copy of the organism.

This comparison causes us to ask a question relevant to both warrior and cell: How do either of them know if they are acting correctly for the survival of the culture/organism as a whole?

Basically, the answer is, they don’t. They simply operate according to pre-established rules , laws, or directions from DNA that cause their replication according to a certain fashion. There is no reason for them to simply replicate themselves without regard to surrounding environments, but if they do, that is generally called cancer.

What is the “off switch”? There are certain limitations such as telomeres in cells, which reduce the ability of the cell to replicate over many generations, but even this can go wrong when a cell becomes cancerous. How do cultures, operating in this same machine-like replication, avoid becoming “cancerous”?

This, again, was the problem I described in the essay on “The Tower of Babel And The Gray Goo”. If humans reach a point in which they can respond to their own internal “message’ or “circuitry”, there is nothing at all to stop them from replicating until they simply destroy their own environment and therefore themselves. War-like cultures maintain their structure by simply conquering other lands, but what happens when there are no other lands?

But here is a further problem indicated by Kurt Godel with his “Incompleteness Theorem”: there is no process, however formal, however well defined, that can avoid undecidable propositions if it refers only to its own internal consistency, AND there is no way such a system can prove consistency from within itself.

There simply is no “internal” process by which a system can predictively see its mistakes and keep from either running amuck, or becoming extinct due to its inability to adapt. This means that the human immune system, like the human brain, will seek to intensify its defenses and work even harder to re-establish equilibrium or homeostasis with its environment, even if it is that very process that has caused the problems in the first place.

In religions, as Hoffer points out, the believers will simply intensify their efforts, give more, sacrifice more, pray harder, deny all external information, look for closer connection to “truth” from within that particular system, by discarding all unnecessary actions or “worldly” lusts. This cleansing process may involve such things as ex-communications, or even death, as in the Salem Witch trials, or the regular denouncing of Jews in history.

This is basically what the immune system does, though not by conscious effort. It seeks to maintain its integrity by successfully challenging all “invaders” or threats to its replicative/reproductive system. If a virus, for example, invades, the organism’s immune system goes to “all out war” to identify and crush the invader. One of its first methods will be similar to the fanatical religion: it goes through a “cleansing” process by vomiting, diarrhea, sneezing, anything that cause the body to expel its invader, including “burning(high fever)”.

What is most interesting is that the “invader” actually prompts this “cleansing” because it allows the invader to spread itself to other individuals of the same species, thus altering their behavior as well. If the people of Salem burned witches, it behooved the other people to understand, identify, and “tag” the practices of witchcraft so they could be “cleansed” of such offenders.

“There are unbelievers in our midst!”

This becomes the process, at both the cellular and cultural level, which provides the “off switch” of adaptation and evolution! If any complex system has no method of proving its own consistency, it is forced to react to external stimuli, which acts as “information” to alter the “negative feedback” of the “purpose machine”!

With toilets and thermostat, a human provides the necessary corrections as an external agent to the system. But if the human itself is embedded within a larger system which it does not or cannot understand, there must be other external corrections to cause behavioral adaptations. In fact, we, like computers, have for centuries adapted to these external “negative feedback” systems that have altered our goals and “internal circuitry”, yet we have doggedly stove to ignore them and look to sources which are merely imagined extensions of ourselves, as Narcissus in the Greek myth.

These imagined extensions of ourselves have become external “purpose machines” of our own design. First, it was religion. When religion did not offer the desired goal, we switched to government. Yet both religion and government are merely the extensions of our own thinking processes. Both are forced to assume that, if one person cannot offer the solution to a problem, any people together, composed of exactly the same human shortcomings, can overcome the problems by sacrificing themselves to the greater good. This completes the “closed circle” of the mechanical “purpose machine” that can do nothing but offer variations of the same old problems, based on the same old negative feedback, and completely ignoring solutions from external sources.

This is basically the cause of the worldwide crisis in which we find ourselves today, assuming that a solution is provided by working harder at the same process to achieve equilibrium between the desired effect and reality, even further closing the circle by assuming that reality is what we imagine it to be.

The “purpose machine”, like our immune systems, simply seeks to extend itself globally so that there can be n “unnecessary” changes, so that the system can be permitted to all corners of the earth, and everyone is forced to adapt to a bad environment.

Slater points out:

..David Bakan, following Selye and Freud, sees the organism(or culture) as in more danger from its adaptive response than from external agencies”.

The adaptive response of culture or organism is to simply cleanse or ignore, to minimize the options by giving a certainty of “truth’ to the “higher powers”, whether they be government or God, just as the organism, responds to its past memories of invaders and uses the same defenses to maintain its integrity. A s the old saying goes, all generals are involved in fighting yesterday’s wars.

Again, from Slater:

The more we create a diseased environment the more frantic we become in our efforts to escape it. And each motion in the service of escape carries us farther and farther from the state of health to which we are so desperately seeking to return”.

“Escape” in this sense, is created by the need of an “immune response”. If we can recognize the threat, we can cleanse ourselves of the offender, the gadfly, the virus, that causes discomfort, rather than looking to see what possible solutions are offered from different perspectives. What we are discovering more and more, scientifically, that there exists a “Global brain” of which we are basically unconscious arts, and it has built us, step by step, in both diversity and intelligence. Slater begins this exploration and more recently it is explored by Howard Bloom, in a book coincidentally, titled Global Brain. More on this next essay.