Life

Scientists have many definitions for life. Most say it reproduces itself from time to time. Many say it grows and is capable of self maintenance. Others say it is sexual. They all try to stay away from the awareness factor. We can say that this is a scientific dogma. That to be a scientist means you have to reach your conclusions about life and the cosmos without taking awareness into account. To consider awareness will mean a departure from objectivity and a degraded product.

Some scientists say there is no adequate definition of life. That, no matter how you define it, exceptions exist. They most commonly refer to viruses to illustrate their point.

Dr. Lynn Margulis gets closest, I would say, when she says or implies that life creates and manages DNA.

DNA needs a definition, though. DNA and its variation, RNA looks like a free floating self modifying program that includes redundancy. The redundancy lies in its duplicate nature. It has two halves that are mirror images of each other. Free floating because it needs nothing else to exist. Just itself, a series of mainly carbon atoms, floating in the ocean. A program that defines the life form of which it is a part. It knows when it is damaged and follows many strategies to repair itself. In fact sex, defined as the recombinant feature of DNA and separated from reproduction, looks like a method of repair. DNA can be damaged, in the sense of losing part of itself, by many features of the environment, perhaps the most common being ultra violet radiation, which it strongly absorbs and leads to the loss of parts of itself. By recombining with an undamaged half of another strand, it gains the ability to copy from its partner those parts of itself that have become damaged.

A computer program isn't alive. Even if it is self modifying, as some are. A computer program, even when resident in a computer memory, is a dead thing and isn't capable of any action. When a processor interprets the program the computer springs into action. But, the computer isn't self motivated, as DNA is. It relies on humans to provide the motivation to do something.

So, DNA looks like a free floating, self modifying, self motivated program with built in redundancy. The self motivated part means it includes its own processor. That is it is self aware and capable of interpreting itself. This is sort of like a computer processor except that the awareness of DNA is of a more general sort. A computer processor is only sensitive to predefined arrangements of bits. DNA is not only self aware but must be aware of its surroundings. Else, how could it locate another strand of DNA to combine with?

We need to define awareness. Awareness is short for self awareness. Awareness has the ability to identify and categorize features of the local environment. That is to say that awareness is capable of detecting waves emanating from the external environment as they impinge upon it. This is, no doubt because these waves produce some alteration in the self aware molecule. Awareness is used to locate items needed for self preservation. It will normally result in the ability to move in order to acquire those items. This awareness is independent of sense organs, though in more complex beings sense organs are devised to make available more information than is available without them.

All molecules have attributes. When a molecule is modified, by adding or subtracting atoms, the attributes associated with it are changed. What I am suggesting here, is that a sequence of carbon atoms, not difficult to achieve by random action in the presence of sunlight, acquires the attribute of awareness. That, when this particular sequence of carbon atoms occurs, it is immediately aware first of itself and secondly through wave action impinging on its parts, of its immediate surroundings. The other attribute we commonly associate with awareness is memory. Memory is a medium in which information can be stored and which is accessible by awareness. DNA is such a medium.

This awareness also has attributes. The most important is the conservative sense that it wishes to continue to exist. Since DNA is self modifying, it also expresses the opposite attribute, liberalism. This self aware molecule, I call Gaia.

Gaia's strategy for survival is replication and evolution. It continuously replicates itself in order to defeat entropy. It evolves in order to enhance its defenses against other environmental features that cause damage to it.

Gaia isn't God. None the less, Gaia is our creator, or if you prefer God's instrument of creation of living things. Gaia knows no more about God than the totality of awareness on earth (another definition of Gaia) does.

Gaia created humans for her own purposes and will not suffer us to foil her goals. We cannot but do her will, though we are separate from her in meaningful ways. Certainly, a master of creation of living forms, like Gaia, would not devise a life form that was capable of escaping her control. No, Gaia has a perfect means of controlling us, and unless we are damaged, we have no wish to escape her control. This method we call feelings. We say feelings come from the heart, by which we mean they are true and are not products of the intellect. Their actual source must be DNA.

This can be seen by thinking about instinct. What is instinct but a feeling? What can be the source of instinct if not DNA?

Gaia uses the stored program concept extensively. The stored program is a repository of information arranged such that, if interpreted sequentially it can produce a desired action where action is understood as a change of state. It is self documenting.