Sequestered Time

The human body is an amazingly complex thing. It's not complicated. It's rather simple, it is just that there is so much going on, we can't fathom a portion of it at one time. That's why it's complex.

This semester I've been diving into a big question: what constitutes life? It's been a real eye opener. And this sequestered area of knowledge attacks its big question at the opposite end. Everywhere else, people start small and simple and then go large. Math; you start with 1 + 1 = 2. Chemistry; you start with the atom and it's constitutive parts. Economics; you start with supply and demand and go from there.

Biology is just the opposite. Biology doesn't start with the fundamental unit of life. It can't. We have no idea what constitutes life. We can't measure it finitely. We can't even decide on a qualitative categorization of life and non-life.

Let me clarify. We very well can deduce that a human is very much alive, and a rock is very much not alive. We can classify in that way, but we have no idea where the line is drawn. Cells are alive. Okay, what about mitochondria? Mitochondria is a component of the cell that has it's own DNA. It is essentially a symbiotic parasite from millennium ago. Is it alive? What about viruses? Prions? Where does life end and objects begin?

Since it can't pin point what life is, biology starts with the interaction of lives. Biology starts huge. the whole world. It plots the interactions of every organism on this globe. From this, things get divided into communities and populations, eventually getting down to individuals. We can break down individuals into living organ systems, then organs, then tissues, and finally cells. We know what is necessary for life, but we don't know what constitutes the stuff.

And can a line be crossed where a living organism can still be animated, but ceases to living? What if someone's conscious gets implanted into a machine. Would that person be alive? Would he be a person? He retains the sentient capabilities of people, but just lost every biological requirement for life.

When do you cease to be one thing and become another? Consider this: the human genome has over 3 billion nucleotide pairs. Of those, over 3 million of those nucleotides have come from outside sources. Over one percent of our genome was injected into our ancestors by viruses and other means. Our DNA, as far as we can tell, is what separates organisms and species. Your DNA varies so you're different from everyone else in the world. Our DNA as a species varies so we aren't like any other species in the world. But over 1 percent of what makes us human is no longer human.

There was once some conjecture on what this foreign DNA has done to us. Has it done anything? Was it useless DNA inserted into where it would do no damage? Or was it vital DNA that has changed who we are? One person hypothesized that perhaps the evolutionary jump that we attained in intelligence may be due to this foreign DNA that was inserted haphazardly into us.

What if the defining human characteristic, intelligence, isn't human at all?

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