It finally dawns on me as a consistent pattern of thought that we are no more than the accumulation of germs working cooperatively to produce a functional system for protective replication. IOW, such things as E.coli proliferate through our system and fun ction quite well until we take in some other strain of bacteria or virus that causes the E.coli to re-organize its protective strategy, and forces us to an adaptive process.
Dr. Jordan Rubin, in “Patient, Heal Thyself“, points out that we are actually healthier when we open ourselves to exposure from our environment in the form of dirt, germs, and viruses, because that’s what makes up our bodies and immune systems.
Further, what is known as “junk DNA” stored in our bodies is actually the remains of former viruses that attacked us, and are now neutralized in a kind of cryogenic process in which parts of them are selected for DNA to combat the invasion of alien viral DNA. Dr. Rubin has also discovered a form of black rotting material that looks like dirt composed of bacteria in a form that remains unchanged, apparently as old as the earth itself. Simply eating this “dirt” seems to cause healing within the body.
More interesting, it seems that the brain is actually a secondary apparatus that developed when the genes could no longer store necessary information, and a self aware decision process developed from the need to act when uncertainty arose.
The gut, it seems, was the first place in which bacteria and viruses organized and developed their strategies through competition among organisms, and it was this competition that allowed for the further development of our immune system, which is also a marvelous intelligence system that recognizes, neutralizes, and incorporates viral invaders.
Dawkins has shown that certain viral invaders affect behavior. This is also shown by Dr Moalem in his book. Certain bacteria can literally parasitize the brains of ants and spiders, creating a kind of feedack loop on which ant ad spider behavior act to further the spread of the bacteria.
There is no reason to believe, therefore, that human behavior, indirectly, is not also affected by viral and bacterial collusion.
For example, cancer is a process in which cells reproduce themselves without regard to their external environment. They become, to all intents, “immortal”. Placed in a petri dish, cancer cells do not separate and show respect for neighboring property, but grow in massive disorganized lumps that care nothing for symmetry or limits.
Jared Diamond in “Guns, Germs, And Steel“, points out that Europeans spread around the world and conquered the lands of Central America as much by the spread of germs they had acquired through intimacy with domestic animals as much as by guns or steel. This suggest something indirectly: suppose the very need to spread and conquer other civilizations is nothing more than the need of those bacteria and viruses to interact, to “cut and paste” with other systems in other envrionments, to affect our behavior in such a way that we must spread ourselves and overcome other environments for social justification?
Pulitzer prize Winning author Jonathan Weiner points out in the book on early studies of genes and fruit flies that language developed as a form of justification for actions. For example, if a split brain patient is shown the word “walk”, he may get up and start walking across a room. If asked why, he will say, “I want to get a ‘Coke’ “, or “I want to stretch my legs”, etc. IOW, the language merely occurs as a conscious justification for why he acted as he did.
This means that the more unwieldy the language, the more it is subject to control of an elite, the more people will accept it symbolically as controlled by that elite.
This, in fact, is what McLuhan points out in the development of heiroglyphs and ideograms as opposed to alphabetic text which is subject to constant alterations that produce relationships of sound, which are themselves based on a very simple base of letters. From simple beginnings, complexity develops.
This very problem is summed up in the story of the Tower of Babel.
The people had one language, they communicated with one symbolic
representation of the world, and “nothing they imagine shall be
restrained from them”. IOW, the formula for accelerated entropy and
cancer. The “trick”, therefore, was to create a linguistic process in
which “information’ continualy separated them so that the lingusitc
“excuse’ they offered could not be proven consistent with the
environment itself.
This, essentially, is the proof contained in Godel’s theorem.
The myth of the Tower of Babel shows an amazing insight into a very necessary process for the evolution of human societies. The brain may be conscious of itself, but it has no mechanism by which the “software’ of conscious thought may reach into the “hardware’ of physical genetic processes. As Howard Bloom points out, the brain is like the chief executive who must make decisions after all the facts are in, but who can only rely on the way the facts are presented to him.
The most basic interaction, and the intelligence system which controls it at the cellular level, is the immune system. “Language” is the secondary process by which we organize, classify, and justify the necesary decisions made to avoid death and destruction.
I have to ask myself if the most inspiring speeches, the ones remembered for their call to sacrifice and to “higher” and lofty goals, are little more than linguistic justifications offered for the necessity of our need to conquer and interact with other environments.
War, for example. The behaviorist B.F. Skinner points out that if you hit an amoeba with a very tiny electric charge, it will attack its closest neighboring amoeba, suggesting that at the most basic levels of life organization relies on a form of warfare to control its destiny and territory. You will also notice that the very best place for “superbugs’ to develop is on the theaters of war, where soldiers are constantly exposed to antibiotics that provide a breeding ground for ever superior forms of viruses and bacteria that take the very protective information provided, and evolve themselves into ever more dangerous vehicles of expansion.
“From whence come wars and fightings among you? Come they not even of your lusts that war in your members?” James 4;1.
The simple fact is we cannot simply use willpower or our logical mind to reach in and control these “lusts’ that war in our members, because these “lusts” are driven by the necessary life extension processes of bacterial and viral interaction, the necessary exchange of information for the cells theselves to reproduce effectively. If we do manage to control them, then we ourselves behave in a socially cancerous fashion, in the form of proselytizing religions, narcissism, imperialism , etc. The linear extension of “self” expanded while destroying surrounding environment, the acceleration of chaos and entropy.
W cannot develop a language, however formal or disciplined, that represents truth of itself. Language is useful only for general descriptions based on scientific observation. Language used for justification through belief, in the form of religion, defines a “God” who is more than existence, and cultures end up sacrificing theselves to that which is not useful for reproduction. Overspecialization, which leads to extinction of both cultures and species.
To develop and worship a God subject to language, therefore, is to worship a God that is locked within the social communicative needs of human survival. Such a God will generally be selected ABOVE any God that would reflect truth, since truth often challenges the reproductive imperative.
Therefore you end with some interesting conclusions about any God of truth: “My ways are not your ways, neither are my thoughts your thoughts(isaiah 55;8)”. The natural mind is enmity against God, and cannot be subject to God(Romans 8:7). All attempts to worship and organize in God’s name will result in disunity and war(Matthew 10:34-38). There is no need to follow any person who claims such power(Matthew 24:23). In fact, as a matter of law, we are commanded NOT to organize any system symbolically or iconically as God ( 2nd comandment).
So in fact there is a necessary distinction between “spirit” and “flesh” as pointed out by Paul, who also, in Romans 7, pointed out the futility of trying to control this “flesh” by the use of willpower. Can’t be done.
Logically, therefore if we DO try to organize in God’s name by the development of symbolic, iconic representation, the result will inevitaly be war, “wars and ruors of wars”. Why? because as historians have shown, it serves an evolutionary purpose for the development iof diverse cultures. it expands the gene pool for selection of diverse options among DNA, allowing for the “cut and paste” of viral invaders. From dust we came, and to dust we shall return. The microorganisms that formed tiny civlizations also formed humans as extensons of their own civilizations. Whatever higher quality of the human mind that leads to “righteousness” will not be accesible by human govenrments or religion, since they are merely the extensions of cooperative processes emerging from our genes. The human mind and self awareness is a mid-point, a kind of “halfway house” of development, between the “lower’ states of cooperative development and the “higher” stage of civilizational development. We are not the controllers of our destiny, nor do our thoughts parallel the thoughts of God, if there is such a being.
