The meaning of life, and that sort of thing

As a graduate student, I spent a lot of time thinking and reading about the meaning of life, and that sort of thing. I read well over a hundred books on biology, physics, history, politics and religion. As a result of all that, I came up with my own answers, and since that point about 5 years ago, I haven't had the chance to really pursue them as much as I'd like. So I share them here in an effort to stimulate conversation with anyone interested. This is pure armchair philosophy, so don't confuse this with my day job.

My theory of life, the universe and everything:
If the amount of matter/energy in the universe is truly finite, then the number of forms and patterns that it can take is also finite, resulting in a competition between them. Those forms and patterns that tend to create the conditions in which they thrive will tend to persist longer than those that do not, leading to an evolutionary universe, an arms race towards efficiency, and time itself. This competition and quest for efficiency applies to and describes the dynamics of everything within the universe, including stars, forces, cuckoos, people and ideas.

My theory of thinking:
An organism’s behavior results from competition amongst its constituent cells for that which allows them to persist in more or less the same form.

A little background:
Open nearly any high school text book on Biology and you will find the following two theories in more or less this form:

Cell Theory
1) All organisms are composed of cells
2) Cells are the basic units of structure and function in organsisms
3) All cells come from preexisting cells

Natural Selection Theory
1) Variation exists within species
2) All organisms compete for limited natural resources. Those organisms that are most similar will compete the most intensively.
3) Organisms produce more offspring than can survive.
4) The environment selects organisms with beneficial traits.
5) Natural selection disrupts a population’s genetic equilibrium by allowing fit organisms to survive and reproduce at a greater rate than less fit organisms.

I think of 'fitness' as implied by my theory of everything. I combine cell theory and natural selection theory in the following way, and feel there is hardly any need for further justification:

1) Cells are alive.
2) The cells of an organism are alive and come from preexisting cells.
3) Variation exists between cells within an organism.
4) All cells compete for limited resources within an organism, with the most similar cells competing the most intensively.
5) Cells produce more offspring within an organism than can survive.
6) The environment within the organism selects cells with beneficial traits to the genes within those cells.
7) Natural selection within an organism disrupts the distribution of cells within an organism by allowing fit cells to survive and reproduce at a greater rate than less fit cells, on time-scales of the life of the organism and that organism’s species as a whole within the universe.

That is, we need to stop thinking of our cells as 'our' cells before we can begin to understand where we came from and what conciousness is. It seems to me that thinking and conciousness are not described best by a soul or something supernatural, but by our neurons playing king of the hill in a quest to survive and thrive. The following essay puts it into a little more graphic context.

Food for thought

I believe that before we will ever correctly understand why organisms act in the way that they do, we must convince ourselves that these actions are initiated and controlled by competition for survival at the cell level within the organism.

Most cells within an organism contain exactly the same DNA, but differences in gene expression cause cells to differentiate into vastly different morphologies and function. Although some variation occurs between species, this differentiation begins after six or ten cell divisions starting from a fertilized egg. The DNA sequence acts as a cookbook with many pages arranged in chapters such as Liver, Legs, and Ligaments. Early in the division process, the cells scramble to own their own chapters and prevent other cells from using their recipes, using recipes designed for that very purpose. Not all chapters are alike, however, and the most prestigious chapters are gobbled up first, Neurons before KneeCaps and so on. As more cells are produced through division, fewer and fewer chapters are available for the taking, and new cells must remain content with chapter sections and eventually just individual recipes. The progeny from each of these cells begin their life on a new page within their respective chapter until all of the recipes are used, at which point there’s nothing left to do but follow in their parent’s footsteps. Though the analogy may be new, the mechanisms of this differentiation are well documented.

In reality, however, a better analogy is not recipes from Betty Crocker but recipes from the Anarchists Cookbook. A war exists within the cells of our body. They do not suffer from our delusions of multicellular organisms competing against each other for survival. Each and every cell within our body is engaged in a struggle for life and death against its fellow cells, and natural selection at the gene level, imposed as a competition at the organism level, determines the arsenal of weapons available to each cell. That is, because organismal cells lack the tools to survive outside the environment of the organism itself, a recipe that arms a cell so well that it can defeat all others will end up killing that cell because that cell will kill the other cells required to maintain the organismal environment it needs to survive.

Consider an analogy of neurons and liver cells to camels and dung beetles. To broker a secure existence, neurons are predisposed to wanting to innervate anything that sits still long enough and liver cells are predisposed to wanting to eat the waste products of neurons. At some point, multi-cellular creatures existed that had only a few neurons (not enough to call a brain) and a few liver cells (not enough to call a liver). Through natural selection at the multi-cellular level, the neurons developed into a brain and the proto-liver cells into a liver. In this way, a symbiotic relationship developed such that the bigger the brain became, the bigger the liver became. Because they were not competing for the same raw materials, the competition between them was minimized – in fact each depended on the other for continued growth, ensuring a lockstep evolution. In an analogous way, multi-cellular organisms, such as camels, produce waste products that would ultimately kill them if they were not removed from their environment, thus requiring the population of dung beetles (and a host of other organisms) to increase at a rate in proportion to the population of camels (and a host of other organisms).

In both cases (cellular and multi-cellular) the agents have only a limited arsenal of weapons at their disposal. Liver cells do not eat neurons, though the capacity of eating other cells clearly exists within the genetic recipe book of every organism with white blood cells. Similarly, dung beetles do not eat camels, though the capacity of insects to eat animals clearly exists with the genome of insects.

But what of the competition between neurons to neurons, liver cells to liver cells, camels to camels, and dung beetles to dung beetles? Imagine yourself a new born liver cell. Here you are, with the capacity to eat shit while others eat grapes. Do you complain? Do you revolt? Do you know any better? The answer is, of course, No. Each cell acts only within its abilities, even though the genes for an alternative lifestyle reside and are maintained within its nucleus. So each liver cell strives to eat the most shit as it is able, and would do so to the point of starving all of the other shit eating cells if it could. Only it cannot. Natural selection has reduced weapons available to a liver cell such that, on the average, it cannot starve out its neighbors. Similarly with neurons, kidney cells, and every other tissue in our body. But it is only because each cell is competing as hard as it is able that we are able to survive at all as a multi-cellular organism: only the most efficient cell warriors survive and reproduce, and only those multi-cellular organisms that have well balanced armies internally survive long enough to reproduce, and only those that reproduce have a chance at long-term survival as a species.

How does this relate to poetry, politics, and rock and roll? Consider again the neuron, that impotent cell that eats grapes. The neuron is essentially political by nature. Its only weapon is to communicate with other cells, neurons or otherwise. To stop communicating means certain and swift death. But the birthright of neurons varies greatly. Most motor neurons are expendable, at least in terms of the continued Life of the organism: without a head your dead, but lose a leg, gain a peg. And it is no coincidence that the head contains those neurons that ultimately control our motor functions.

Somehow the food entering our bodies must be allocated to the trillions of cells requiring nourishment, just like the food on our planet must somehow be allocated to the billions of people on our planet. I assert that the analogy between our body as ecosystem and our planet as ecosystem are not spurious, but result from the same forces of competition and symbiosis.

Consider the brain as analogous to the US Congress, and the remaining cells of our body as ordinary citizens organized into governmental agencies, support agencies, publicly traded businesses, private business, free agents, and terrorists. In the absence of coercion from peers, we all more or less would be able to survive on our own. We possess all of the abilities necessary to hunt and gather all of the nourishment our bodies need to survive without the aid of the highly specialized hierarchy of infrastructure present in the 21st century. If we did not, chimpanzees or cockroaches – who are able to do this – would currently rule the earth. However, given the current circumstances of human life on earth, we depend on each other for existence, much like the cells of our body depend on each other. Though I am physically capable enough to hunt, gather or grow my own food, I cannot escape the fact that my fellow citizens are coercing me to work for their benefit or die. For ours is not a nation composed of altruistic cells, but one in which competition for survival forces us to be useful to those who would otherwise kill us. Your liver cells feel no differently.

The fact that our system elects its government is no detriment to the analogy, because it is still a selection process – the fact that neurons were voted into power eons before Bill Clinton does not detract from this point. But the fact that neurons attempt to get away with as much as Bill Clinton is central to our understanding of our behavior.

None of our cells cares about our survival. How could they? Their genetic arsenal gives them no such power. They are each out for their own short-term gains, fighting with full force against their neighbors, whether they be other neurons, liver cells, cancer cells, or red blood cells. But their arsenal is limited.

But what of this competition with other neurons? It is well established that those organisms (and here I emphasize the point that the cells of a multi-cellular organism are in fact organisms themselves) that are most similar compete the hardest with each other for limited natural resources. If neurons had the ability to kill each other they would (and in fact they do very often in the early stages of Life), but if they were too successful at this vertebrates would have made into the 21st century only as part of the fossil record. So they only have enough power to reduce their immediate competition, then form alliances with each other to promote their own agendas in exactly the same fashion that congressmen fight their own rivals to get elected and then form alliances with the other elected officials that have no direct ability to take over their function and so are not direct competition. And it is these alliances that form the basis of our thought processes.

Neurons posses a unique ability. They are impotent because they maintain a cell structure in their normal functioning that prevents them from reproducing. This structure allows them, however, to form alliances with other neurons. Dawkins introduced a conceptual basis for ideal replicators: those structures that could replicate themselves in such a that they could be duplicate accurately and prolifically and protectively. He applied this most directly to genes, but went further to suggest that ideas themselves fit into the same category. He called such ideas memes.

Any idea, such as the Christian Bible, Democracy, or a musical tune that can potentially be considered a meme. Going one step further, the idea of ‘I’ can be consider a meme as well. If you were a neuron, you would be well advised to link yourself with a strong meme, such as ‘I’, because then you would increase your chances of survival because you would increase your efficiency. That is, strong memes are efficient memes. They do not have to work as hard to survive because they concentrate their efforts on maintaining a strong survival vehicle to perpetuate their existence. Allying yourself with one of these memes, becoming part of its machinery, is simply an efficient way to compete against rival memes. The physically basis for this is known as habituation – friendly neurons don’t need as much neurotransmitter to trigger each other. So by forming ideas – that is, by creating a pattern of electrical dynamics that typically has some benefit for the organism as a whole – they need less neurotransmitter (outputs) and garner a higher share of food-carrying blood flow (inputs). By tipping this input to output ratio in their favor, they simultaneous increase their efficiency and literally begin starving other ideas, thus encouraging the conditions in which they tend to thrive. Aligning yourself with the ‘I’ meme is therefore sucking up to the boss of ideas, because the ‘I’ meme also tends to keep the organism alive and reproducing, further increasing it long-term evolutionary existence. Want to see this quest for blood in living color and real time? Just hook yourself up to a functional MRI.

My short list of related books to read:

What is Life? -- Margulis
Triumph of the Embryo -- Wolpert
The Selfish Gene -- Dawkins
Neuronal Man -- Changeux
The Story of Psychology
The Moral Animal -- Wright
The Breakdown of Nations -- Kohl

Great video series:

Testament -- Roper
The Ascent of Man -- Bronowski