ature of consciousness

CONSCIOUSNESS AS A UNIVERSAL QUALITY OF NATURE

The purpose of this essay is to affirm that human consciousness is but appropriate for the human and qualitatively no better than any other form of consciousness and perhaps, in cases, not on par with other life forms – as when man crosses wits with beast and looses. Also, its purpose is to explore the existence of consciousness on the physical and tiniest of biological levels. And to investigate the possibilities of Universal Consciousness.
Our Maxim states: Consciousness is the awareness of a thing such that there can be or is an appropriate response to it. Awareness is the consciousness of a thing such that there can be or is an appropriate response to it. Then, consider:
Consciousness on the physical and biological level: Heat: (phys) An atom or molecule responds to the electromagnetic particle of heat (the photon) in the form of increased thermal activity witnessed by electrons being pushed into higher energy shells by the photon's heat energy. (bio) Body cells respond to heat in the same manner. Touch: (phys) As atoms and molecules are resilient, they respond to physical pressure by compression and rebounding back to their normal shape. (bio) Mechanical compression is the way touch is translated in the body. Sound: (phys) the same happens with sound i.e. the mechanical compression and rebounding of the atom or molecule to its original shape. (bio) In the ear, it is far more complex, but at its root, sound results from mechanical compression.
Light/Color/Sight: (phys) Photons of light when hitting the atom or molecule raise the electron to the shell characteristic of that color. (bio) The eye also sorts photons of light. Thought/ Feeling: (phys) (bio) Atoms and molecules, then, centered upon their nucleus, have a complete consciousness system – and, in biological organisms, in addition, help generate and relay thought and feeling. On the physical level, all atoms have the whole constellation of consciousness systems found in biological organisms. In system behavior, there is virtually no difference between the human sensing system and the atomic or molecular. There is a difference in degree between the physical and biological but not essence.
Indeed, the protons, neutrons, and electrons that comprise all things physical are a form of
E = mc². It is the physical in the form of the four elements: earth (minerals), wind (air), fire (sunlight), and water that follow the electromagnetic blueprints housed in the genotype (the complete genetic blueprint of an individual which itself is in essence atoms and molecules configured around an electromagnetic blueprint) that builds every cell, impulse, skill, and feature in the biological mind and body. Those two energies – i.e. the energy birthing the universe and the electromagnetic force including its atomic "blueprint" form – are virtually the same. The nature of Nature is consciousness.
Consciousness on the biological level: David Mattingly hosted "The Invader Species" on the CNN program Earth Matters discussing new species of animals introduced into foreign habitats. Susan Collins, presenting one of the segments, commented that, "When you alter nature you set off a chain of reactions and there is no changing back." First of all, it should be remarkable that an animal, often from a different continent altogether, can quickly learn enough about a completely foreign environment not only to merely survive, but to thrive. There are differences in temperature, flora, fauna, seasons, food availability and nutritional differences, daily cycles of light and dark, and so forth. All these changes must be noted and adjusted to. That should tell us something about animal intelligence and consciousness in itself.
In any case, when an invader consumes a type of food important in the food-chain such that those higher on the chain can no longer survive, they leave in search of other food sources. When a fly is hungry, it searches out food. When tired, searches out a safe place to rest. When in the need to mate, seeks out a mate. When being attacked, makes attempts to escape. When raining, seeks cover. Both invader-affected animals and even simple flies show awareness of their environments. This awareness is a thing that warrants further investigation for it may reveal interesting things bearing on human consciousness as well.

LIMITS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

If the consciousness of each specie of life were a tiny dot and all the dots compressed into the sun which would represent them all, the consciousness of man or animal would each be an insignificant tiny dot on the surface of the sun and their ignorance the overwhelming remainder of the sphere.
For humans, consciousness is often limited to the range of our senses and past experience. Thus, concerning vision, we can't even see our own face except when we look in the mirror. We are not aware of what is beyond our range of vision and therefore not aware of things behind, above, below, and within us. We are not aware of things in front of us beyond the range of our sight. If our vision is sharp, we can see every leaf on every tree in a garden – however, we are unaware of the exact number though we see them all. Audio-consciousness is roughly a sphere about us and sounds too faint to hear within that sphere as a pin dropping on a carpet we are unconscious of. We are conscious of our experiences and culture, but are unaware of people, historical periods, and cultures we have not heard of, experienced, or read of.

Following this line of thinking, the conclusion we arrive at is that our consciousness is very limited. Furthermore, we are not conscious when we are sleeping with the point being that human consciousness has daily cycles of darkness and light: i.e. awareness and not. In addition, while consciousness heightens with energy and high emotions, it lessens to the state of unconsciousness even during waking hours with sickness, depression, and low energy states as hunger and thirst.

There is another angle to look at consciousness. The body is full of sensors in every square centimeter of external flesh: variously light, sound, touch, smell, and taste sensors. The body is bombarded with sensory stimulation every second of the day. We even feel the bed below us. But, though a flood of information comes continually to our senses (even the sound of our own breathing) we are aware of nothing during sleep and if one becomes parapelegic, they loose all sensation below the neck.
However, in both sleep and paralysis, the same quantity of information comes to the senses. But, we are unaware of it. In this sense, we are conscious: but only when we are awake and whole. Consciousness, then, is partly a function of energy-level and sensory connectedness. Yet, of those adults both awake and whole, some will be more conscious than others. Thus, to say the human being has consciousness is a statement without but very much in need of qualification. It is even more true in the following.

Though awake and whole the human has a limited window of consciousness as the new born and old and infirm are aware of precious little. A person with amnesia, one who is drunk or under the influence of drugs, or one who is catatonic or autonomic is but minimally conscious. It goes without saying that a person who is knocked out, one in a state of shock, or in a coma has no consciousness even though they are living people. In all the cases spoken of in the previous three sentences, a lowly mosquitoe biting anyone of these people or parasite locked into them has more overall functional and pragmatic awareness of its environment on a comparative and perhaps absolute scale than any one of them.

We are conscious but completely unconscious of experiences in the womb. We start as two entities: a tadpole-like sperm and egg. We have no memory of being formed as a sperm or egg. No memory of when the sperm or egg we came from was only 50% formed. No memory of ejection from our fathers. No memory of the nine hour marathon we won against billions of other competitors. We have no memory of swimming as a tadpole through the filopian tube to unite with the egg that became us. No memory of union with the egg. We are unaware of our experience in the womb. We have no memory of the first months or years of life even though there may be emotional imprinting in the sense that emotional experiences may assist in forming our dominant feelings and attitudes.

We are aware, but we are not aware of much. Awareness began when Nature gave us permission to be aware: after all the work to make us was done, the light switch was turned on and we became the most conscious things in the universe – so the mythology goes. If there is life after death and has always been, it is belief and not a reality that can be measured. And, if it really does exist and one denies it, then that is a true irony of the limits of awareness.

Consciousness would seem to be a highly constrained and limited faculty with relatively little range but enough so as to be useful to function in the environment a thing exists within. Further, to be conscious of realities out of a things' domain would seem to be an unwanted extravagance for Nature to design and out of practicality would not. And this would only mean that human consciousness was appropriate, but not superior. The consciousness of any given individual is hardly a thing that we could call universal consciousness and is an infinitesimally small sliver of what could be called such. And there is infinitely more that we are unaware of than we are aware of – particularly in the realm of disease as it begins first in one cell and we never know when. We are not aware of things what is happening now in each one of the 10¹⁴ cells in our body. Billions of photons of light are strike our eye each waking moment, but we are not conscious of them as they individually enter.

Those who applaud human consciousness as awareness of spirit, curiosity about the meaning of life, and such may not have made a big point. There is no insect or animal that once made aware of the greater questions would develop a longing for them. If we became a fly, we would likewise loose interest in such questions. On the otherhand, consciousness is a two-way street meaning lower animal consciousness and human consciousness are not mutually exclusive.

THE GENERAL UNCONSCIOUSNESS OF MAN

Each species of animal (see Lorenz) and plant would seem to have some form of consciousness. Humans depend upon the Farmer's Almanac speaking of the budding of trees and sprouting of plants to indicate the end of winter and coming of spring – as plants and trees are reliably "aware" of these things before we. In addition, there are molecular structures revealed in laboratory research which show plants have "consciousness" organs (or organelles). In plants "consciousness" is due to the simple fact that plants follow the sun with their leaves and their roots seek to penetrate downwards through the ground. The phototropic and geotropic organelles in their cells respectively make them as aware of the sun and gravity as we. Plants have hydrotropic organelles that seek out water and other organelles as well giving them great awareness of their environments. We have lots in common with plants. Discussed below is how perhaps half of the dry mass making up our cells is bacterial: we are only later from the ape descendent – both we, and ape, and all animals have bacterial ancestry and it is from the activity of bacteria in our cells that we can even move, think, and manifest the consciousness which is the focus of this essay.
Not having the full complement of a flora's organelles (we can't predict spring as well as they) we are not as aware of their environments as flora are. At night, bees see flowers in soft violet colors with ultraviolet sensitive eyes and hunting animals see dull-red glowing prey with infrared sensitive eyes. In utter darkness, a cave spider senses the air molecule vibration (not even sound) of insects breathing or scarcely moving with two radar-raised hairy antenna-like legs. How would you like to meet a hunter like that in the dark? We have none of their sensing organs and therefore are unconscious, unaware of their dimension of reality. In the human and animal, the retinene molecules in our eyes respond to light and small stones in the utricle and saccule respond to changes in gravity in our ear making us respectively aware of light and gravity.
Deprive the plant of its phototropic cells or the human of its retinene molecules, and neither would be aware of light. If the geotropic cells or utricle or saccule were removed, neither of us would be aware of gravity. Using simpler but similar organs, the plant is made aware of its environment in these two fashions as is the human made aware of his or her own. And when a person is blind, they do not see meaning a plant would have more consciousness than a blind person would of light. Consciousness is a thing shared by all living things, plant and animal. Even most one-celled animals seek light and abandon shade for it discerning the difference between the two and expressing choice or preference and, in the process, displaying consciousness. But, human consciousness has its limitations.
Limitations on human consciousness: If a quill represented the details of the habitat of a given species of plant or animal and their consciousness of it; and if all plants and animals were each represented by one quill; and all quills stuck into a round ball representing earth; each species of plant and animal would know and be more infinitely conscious of its quill and "piece of earth" than man. The Life Sciences are devoted to learning some aspect of a given or all species of plant and/or animal that that species – and/or their control mechanisms (e.g. most damaged cells become physically active and recreate themselves: but only when damaged) – are conscious of themselves. This will be later discussed.
Man is but shallowly conscious of but a few dozens of the tens of thousands of quills in "Life's" ball of quills and not aware of the remainder. We are a bit conscious of the activities of our pet dog or cat but recent research shows they have normally unfathomable lives when they leave the house that they are aware of and we are not. Other animals are largely complete mysteries to the average person. Those animals are conscious of themselves but we are largely unknowledgable and unaware of the details of their lives (still many plants and animals are undiscovered), their languages, their morphological development, or their reasons for doing what they do.
Concerning consciousness, while some animals are creative, some appear to have linear consciousness in the sense of not being able to move far from the dictates of their instinct and live from eon-to-eon without being corrupted by social evils. Man, has been conscious of good and bad with the option for pursuing either end and preference for the bad too well displayed in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment where we are made uncomfortably aware of our inner darkness. The choice between good and evil accompanied by choice for and pursuit of the later has resulted in an immoral, corrupt world. Conscious of the bad, and imitating it, man often lives below the animal as genocide, hate, arrogance, drug use, politics, and crime too eloquently attest. What good is consciousness if it does not promote good?
The consciousness below – cellular consciousness vs. "human" consciousness: Cells are aware of their state and in a puncture wound, tens of thousands of cells may be damaged and soon repair themselves. We are aware of the small wound but thoroughly unaware of the activity of any given cell involved in the activity of repair. Human consciousness is the veritable tip of the iceberg of the overall consciousness of the body as we are 99% aware of things external to the organism but 99% unaware of the iceberg below the water i.e. unaware of things internal except a portion of our thoughts and feelings, hunger, tiredness, pain, and sexual arousal. We are 99% unaware of organ and cellular activity. However, internally, individual cells are self-conscious and aware of their environment and aware of the intercellular co-operation they are involved in but which human "consciousness" has no access and is unaware of. Schrφdinger though a Nobel physicist, who at the time was a great inspiration to molecular biologists, in 1944 wrote of the nucleus in the individual cell and body:

Since we know the power this tiny central office has in the isolated cell, do they not resemble stations of local government dispersed throughout the body, communicating with each other with great ease, thanks to the code that is common to them? ¹

Oxford University Animal Behaviorist, Richard Dawkins, says of the self-awareness within cells (via its genes i.e. replicators) and between cells:

The first thing to grasp about a modern replicator is that it is highly gregarious. A survival machine (metazoan) is a vehicle containing not just one gene but many thousands. The manufacture of the body is a cooperative venture of intricacy.²

Speaking in this case of more overall communication within and between cells, involving the input of hormones, Lewis Thomas, former Dean of Yale Medical School, writes:

Hormones are sent off to react silently with cell membranes, switching adenyl cyclase, prostaglandin, and other signals on and off; cells communicate with each other by simply touching; organelles send messages to other organelles; all this goes on continually, without even a personal word from us. The arrangement is that of an ecosystem, with the operation of each part being governed by the state and function of all the other parts. When things are going well, as they generally are, it is an infallible mechanism. ³

The body's CIA (lymphocytes) look for foreign agents (antigens) wanting to sabotage your body. Thomas presents the old medical idea in the following showing how indeed cells have self and environmental awareness:

Lymphocytes are genetically programmed for exploration, but each of them seems to be permitted a different solitary idea. They roam through tissues, sensing and monitoring ... They carry specific information in their surface receptors, presented in the form of a question: is there anywhere out there, my particular molecular configuration? ... Lymphocytes are apparently informed about everything foreign around them. ⁴

Also concerning inevitable cell self-awareness, von Neumann, the father of the modern computer, using the cells of the nervous system as the model for the computer you use every day, wrote of cell malfunction:

There never occurs a [cellular] malfunction which cannot be corrected by the organism itself, without any significant outside intervention. The system must, therefore, contain the necessary arrangements to diagnose errors as they occur, to readjust the organism so as to minimize the effects of error, and finally to correct or permanently block the faulty com-
ponents. ⁵

The conclusion, then, to draw of this section is that the body is self-aware. The organelles, replicators or genes, cells and systems are in a state of continual communication and awareness. In size and mass, compared to the beacon of light, the lighthouse is an utterly enormous structure, the beacon so very tiny by comparison. The human, like a lighthouse made of bricks of cells shining its light of consciousness outwards from the beacon of its eyes into the night-darkened oceans of the world, the human is aware of nothing of its own construct nor the constant activities that are undertaken beneath its skin to keep the human organism functioning each second of the day, every day of the year, and every year of his or her life. It is ironic: the human consciousness we brag so much about is 99% unconscious of its inner self.
Things the body knows that we are not conscious of: We don't know the body's plan for us and have to wait patiently to find out what facts have been decided from the moment of our conception. As a baby, neither our parents nor we know how tall or heavy we'll be. Gosh, without a sonogram, we do not even know whether a child is a boy or girl prior to birth! At five, we don't know what we'll look like at 16 or 60. We are unaware of what genetic diseases will strike if any, or when. Don't know when we'll begin to bald (if ever) or wrinkle, when, or how much. We don't know when our hair will turn grey or when we'll get or loose our first tooth. But, the germ cell and its daughter cells and organs which generate us are conscious of all these details and it truly is as well-planned as a daily, hourly, and minute-by-minute plan of our lives set into action with conception and planned perhaps for 100 years in advance: every detail contained in the first cell that became us and the body's information system completely cognizant of it. But, we are not.
We do not know of the single cell that becomes cancerous, when it does or which second cell becomes cancerous. Cancer cells slowly crawl through the body looking for places to anchor. They are "aware" of their activities and when they evaluate the information at their disposal and decide that they have found the proper resting site, it is good fortune when we even learn that it is there; that knowledge often comes too late after the cancer is already widely spread; once learning of it, all we can usually do is wait to die. We cannot say what each or any particular one of the 10¹⁴ cells are doing in our body. Do not know what the cell in the tip of our eyelash is presently doing: don't even know how many eyelashes we have, which are ready to fall out, which are getting ready to come in. Generally, the human is not conscious of much.

A MOLECULAR BASIS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

The chameleon-like nature of human and animal consciousness: Let us establish an understanding that while consciousness requires a working mind and body, the potential to have consciousness is genetically coded in the single cell of genotype that spawns any metazoan creature and that genetic code is contained in each such cell. Thus, in a sense, consciousness has a cellular genetic aspect to the extent that were it not coded in the germ cell of any given animal, consciousness in that creature would never exist (genetic engineering sometimes targets behavioral goals which is a form of consciousness about something). And the occasional failure of a human genotype cell to contain various types of genes coded for consciousness have created deviations in human behaviors – some sad, others barbarous.
With such an understanding (i.e. consciousness is genetically coded in each cell but needs an adequately working mind and body to express itself), if a piranha bit a piece of our finger off, that finger genetically and functionally was a part of our system of consciousness. Once removed, while it no longer contributes to our consciousness, it nevertheless is comprised of cells with coded molecular blocks containing latent genetic instructions for human consciousness (which could be cloned meaning they really do code human consciousness).
The molecular blocks formerly coding human consciousness would be digested as that finger is digested and those blocks assimilated into the piranha's sensory system and cells where some human consciousness molecular building blocks would be re-spelled into the piranha consciousness-genetic-code. In this manner, the genetic molecular blocks spelling a human consciousness-system would be rearranged into molecular blocks coding a piranha consciousness-system: genetic, sensory, and functional.
If two hours later we retaliated by eating raw susi piranha, the same thing would happen in reverse: molecular blocks spelling piranha consciousness genetically and organically (theoretically, those cells could be cloned into a whole school of piranha which would eat you alive) would be rearranged into molecular blocks spelling human consciousness genetically and organically. Those who eat snails do them the service of chameleon-like, turning them into people. In this manner, the human cannot make claim to innate superiority as such is transient: the lowly can be made higher and the higher made lower. And all return to dust.

SUPREME INTELLIGENCE BEHIND LIFE?
UNCONSCIOUSNESS OF OUR PURPOSE

Darwin, in Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, in his letter to Asa Grey at Harvard, confessed that, " I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws." Supreme Intelligence, then, would have been involved in the design of life if Darwin is right. In this section, we discuss the ideas of Einstein, von Neumann, Dawkins, and Thomas where they also seem to allude to a Supreme Intelligence behind life (though that may not have been their purpose) of who's ever-present activities we are unaware.
Dawkins describes the relationship between genes and ourselves. "Replicators are packaged in huge colonies – individual bodies.⁶ Dawkins considers the likelihood that there was/is another and greater form of consciousness which created living creatures such as ourselves for its own purpose and it bears investigating as it would point to a duality of consciousness within the human form – that which we identify with as ourselves, and another predating us by aeons with its own form of intelligence but to who's thinking and purpose we have no access and are not conscious even as it would apparently co-exist with our recognized form of consciousness.

The packaging of living material into discrete vehicles became such a salient and dominant feature (imposed on life by replicators), that when biologists arrived on the scene and started asking questions about life, their questions were mostly about vehicles – individual organisms. The individual organism came first in the biologist's consciousness, while the replicators – now known as genes – were seen as part of the machinery used by individual organisms. It requires deliberate mental effort to turn biology the right way up again, and remind ourselves that the replicators come first, in importance as well as in history.

One way to remind ourselves is to reflect that, even today, not all the phenotypic effects of a gene are bound up in the individual body in which it sits. Certainly in principle, and also in fact, the gene reaches out through the individual body wall and manipulates objects from the world outside, some of them inanimate, some of them other living beings, some of them a long way away. With only a little imagination we can see the gene as sitting in the centre of a radiating web of extended phenotypic power. And an object in the world is the centre of a converging web of influences from many genes sitting in many organisms. The long reach of the gene knows no obvious boundaries. The whole world is criss-crossed with causal arrows joining genes to phenotypic effects, far and near. ⁷

The question raised by Dawkins, metaphysical in nature, yet certainly logical to the point of being inevitable (especially from the view of non-locality: click), is that indeed, there are other conscious' than the human and consious' that consciously created the human and other living entities simply to enhance their own survival. Yet, Dawkins is not alone in this line of thinking (other conscious' and purposes) for Lewis Thomas writes of the history of the living cell. The cell shared by plant and animal have common organelles (a cell's organs) that were once individual creatures that perhaps three billion years ago one-by-one inhabited and were reproduced along with what became the plant and animal cell. Thomas likewise considers the possibility that metazoans such as ourselves exist for the purpose of the creatures colonizing us: and if we do, we are unconscious of the intelligence that formed us in the sense that we cannot conduct a conversation with it or intuit its present and ongoing thoughts.



A good case can be made for our own non-existence as entities. We are not made up, as we had always expected, of successively enriched packets of our own parts. We are shared, rented, occupied. At the interior of our cells, driving them, providing the oxidative energy that sends us out for the improvement of each shining day, are the mitochondria, and in a strict sense they are not ours. They turn out to be little separate creatures, the colonial posterity of migrant prokaryocytes, probably primitive bacteria that swam into ancestral precursors of our eukaryotic cells and stayed there. Ever since, they have maintained themselves and their ways, replicating in their own fashion, privately, with their own DNA and RNA quite different from our own. They are as much symbiants as the rhizobial bacteria in the roots of beans. Without them, we would not move a muscle, drum a finger, think a thought. Mitochondria are stable and responsible lodgers and I choose to trust them. But what of the other little animals, similarly established in my cells, sorting and balancing me clustering me together? My centrioles, basal bodies, and probably a good many other more obscure tiny beings at work inside my cells, each with its own special genome, are as foreign, and as essential, as aphids in anthills. My cells are no longer the pure line entities I was raised with (hairy sub-men, ape-like); they are ecosystems more complex than Jamaica Bay. The usual way of looking at them is as enslaved creatures, captured to supply ATP for cells unable to respire on their own, or to provide carbohydrate and oxygen for cells unequipped for photosynthesis. This master-slave relationship is the common view of full-grown biologists, eukaryotes all. But there is the other side. From their own standpoint, the organelles might be viewed as having learned early how to have the best of possible worlds, with least effort to themselves and their progeny ... My mitochondria comprise a very large portion of me. I cannot do the calculation, but, I suppose there is almost as much of them in sheer dry bulk as there is the rest of me. Looked at this way, I could be taken for a very large, motile colony of respiring bacteria, operating a complex system of nuclei, microtubules, and neurons for the pleasure and sustenance of their families, and running at the moment, a typewriter. I am intimately involved, and obliged to do a great deal of essential work for my mitochondria. My nuclei code out the outer membranes of each, and a good many of the enzymes attached to the cristae must be synthesized by me. Each of them, by all accounts, makes only enough of their own materials to get along on, and the rest must come from me. And I am the one who has to do the worrying ... There they are, moving about in my cytoplasm, breathing for my own flesh, but strangers ... If I concentrate, I can imagine that I feel them; they do not quite squirm, but there is, from time to time, kind of a tingle. I cannot help thinking that if only I knew more about them, and how they maintain our synchrony, I would have a new way to explain music to myself. There is something intrinsically good-natured about all symbiotic relation, necessarily, but, which is probably the most ancient and most firmly established of all, seems especially equable. There is nothing resembling predation, and no pretence of an adversary stance on either side. If you were looking for something like natural law to take the place of 'Social Darwinism' of a century ago, you would have a hard time drawing lessons from the sense of life alluded to by chloroplasts and mitochondria, but there it is. I like to think that they work in my interest, that each breath they draw for me, but perhaps it is they who walk through the local park in the early morning, sensing my senses, listening to my music, thinking my thoughts.8


Man is unconscious of the Supreme Intelligence guiding life: As Thomas notes that half our weight is sheer bacterial in both our body and mind we are offspring not of apes but of bacteria. That raises interesting and unanswerable questions about what the net contribution our bacterial mass has made/makes to our intelligence, thought, and feeling. Let's say we became squeamish due to being crammed-full of bacteria: for sure, we would have neither intelligence, thought, nor feeling if all our bacteria left us due to our squeamishness. Is Thomas right? Do they understand our thoughts? Are our thoughts actually theirs? Are we being "used" in a mutually beneficial relationship? If so, our tenants haven't broadcast the news. Are they more intelligent than us and much more so? Are we really God's Temples with God's Spirit dwelling in us and the chloroplasts? These are rhetorical and neither in science nor philosophy, and certainly not here, will we ever find an answer for them.
What Dawkins and Thomas are alluding to, whether it was their intention or not, approaches the role that a Supreme Intelligence would have employed to form so called inanimate materials into simple living materials and through a web of interdependent relationships build upwards the pyramid of life. Gregor Eichele, an embryologist in the Department of Biochemistry at Baylor College of Medicine writes: "What is perhaps the most intriguing question is whether the brain is powerful enough to solve the puzzle of its own creation."⁹ Several related comments may be made between this and the others of this paragraph.
Firstly, just as it takes more intelligence to make a supercomputer than it does to type your name on one (brains are far more advanced than super computers) so too, it takes much more intelligence to make a brain than it takes to use one. Secondly, even though a handful of people may discover how the brain is made, 99.99% of humanity will never know the details. The point being that people can virtually never know or simulate in real time how the brain they use every day is made. Finally, Einstein said, "[Natural law] reveals an intelligence of such superiority that compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection."¹⁰
Darwin, Dawkins, Thomas, Eichele, and Einstein are really alluding to the design of life under the guidance of a Supreme Intelligence. But, the human is not privvy to the second-by- second, minute-by-minute consciousness involved intimately with the sustainment and design of life. Actually, there is so much activity in each cell and replicator within each cell within us that we would not want to be burdened with all of that information. We would not want to be that conscious.

THE RIGHT AMOUNT OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Just the right amount of consciousness: We might conclude, then, that the measure of consciousness we have is suitable and given the current state of affairs, we'd probably need neither more nor less. And, even if God did want to give us the full quotient of Consciousness that He or She has, we wouldn't be able to handle it. Wouldn't understand it. And probably wouldn't want to. To know what every fly and proton in the universe is doing is too much. As children first of God and later bacteria that is abundant evidence of the Creative force behind and within the marvel and beauty of the human form and life – and of all life from dinosaur and whale, to butterfly, to flower, to bird et. al. And, consciousness of that marvel is probably all the consciousness we need. We need enough consciousness to praise God and help our fellowman, live harmoniously and good neighbordly with nature – and that would be enough.



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