Quest for eternal

The Consequences of Being Alive

The Consequences of Being Alive Basis of life No Responses »

Dec 312011

To understand the human nature, first of all we should try to understand, where are we in the bigger picture of life. Ignorance of the terrain can lead to incorrect conclusions.

Humans are live beings, and as such they have several traits common to all life in general. Perhaps, this is the base. All living beings are the branches of the single tree of life. Unfortunately for the self-reflecting human, live matter is the most complicated one. We cannot even easily define the border between live and dead matter. Consider this question: what is the most essential trait of every live being? Is it metabolism, is it replication, or avoidance of death, or perception? These are four essential ones I know of (if You know another, drop a note).

OK, we can start with some clearly known facts. First of all, all life replicates itself. Without replication, life vanishes in death. There are no known live beings that do not replicate, as well as immortal ones. Even viruses, very questionably being alive due to the lack of metabolism, replicate themselves, though they do it only with the means of the host organism. Humans also reproduce themselves.

So then, which is more important for life – the ability to replicate or the urge to remain alive, to avoid death? A being will die anyway, sooner or later, even after a very long life. Even very successful avoidance of death will not perpetuate its species. Even bacteria, theoretically immortal, degenerate and die with age if they do not divide. On the other hand, a species that multiply rapidly enough, can out pace the rate of death, although not always necessarily so. But the chance for survival remains. Seems that the ability to reproduce is the most important feature of life.

How about metabolism? Can a being be alive if it does not possess it? As said, viruses and prions, which are even more questionably “alive” than viruses, reproduce themselves using the metabolism of host organisms. In a way, the metabolism, so necessary for replication, is still there, however in an “outsourced” form. A virus represents a material instruction on how to enter the hosts body and how to copy itself in the context of the host. A prion particle only catalyzes replication of itself, as such it is the shortest loop of replication possible. It does not contain any of the necessary information to build itself from the base materials, simplest amino acids, sugars, lipids and such. Metabolism is only slightly less important, it seems.

Maybe life is information? We could try to define life as information about how to replicate itself in certain circumstances. In this light, every live being can be seen as the necessary information about its replication in certain conditions. An information medium, replicating itself.

This leads us to memes. A meme is a pattern of thinking, that can spread and multiply in minds. In itself, a meme is only information, however contagious and replicating. As it multiplies and spreads via informational means, it displays two essential characteristics of life, namely multiplication and information about itself. Indeed, memes are like viruses. Accordingly, computer viruses have the same memetic properties. Computers are the products of human minds, so it is not surprising that computing environment displays some of the traits of the human way of processing information.

(Side note: could it be that life itself, including our consciousnesses, are only memes in the creator’s mind? Are memes alive?)

And now to perception. As defined, perception is “the process by which an organism detects and interprets information from the external world by means of the sensory receptors”. If we count viruses as live beings, then not every being has one; if we do NOT count viruses, then almost all of them have some perception. Perception is necessary for death avoidance, but not necessarily for multiplication, as in case of viruses. And for the perception to exist, there must be some kind of metabolism.

As it appears, the most basic traits of all humans as live beings are, in descending order of importance:

Ability and necessity to procreate;
Metabolism;
Perception;
Avoidance of death.

The term “avoidance of death” is intentionally used instead of “survival”, because the latter is more broader and much more complex and can in some cases be opposed to the former. For example, when a bee attacks intruder thousands of times larger, death avoidance is lifted for the probable gains in security (survival) of the hive.

A closer look to the four points mentioned above will be taken in later posts.

The Human Nature: Scope of the Problem

The Human Nature: Scope of the Problem Scope No Responses »

Dec 142011

First of all, in order to see the big picture, we must define the scope of the question of human nature. If we limit the scope only to humans as we know them from their human culture and literature, we risk to put ourselves in a limited box of ideas and even prejudices. We would only see the human nature in some cultural contexts.

Any single human does not have the capacity to comprehend the world in all details. But it should be possible to understand the big picture in general.

At the same time, the author of these words should never forget that he himself is and always will be a product of a particular culture and particular circumstances. Namely, European and Christian culture, East European part, Latvian in particular. Everybody of us has a background, defined by culture of geographical area, religion and upbringing.
We are very different, and at the same time very similar in many aspects. To define the scope of human nature, first of all we should look at the common base: we are live beings. Every live being has many similar features in common with other ones. This is the self-evident truth to be taken as a cornerstone for the human nature. Likewise, other universal principles of life as such are to be taken in account.
Isn’t the scope of our task too vast? No, if we want to see the problem in its entirety. The vastness really is the problem of the limited scope of human thinking – mine as the writer, and probably our as the reader. In spite of this, we should try to look at human nature as clearly as we can. This, I guess, is the human nature in action
Humans as a society, or should we say, a collection of societies, have vast knowledge about different aspects of the world. Nobody can even comprehend all the different concepts in circulation. So this vast knowledge is divided in smaller, more comprehensible parts, and called “disciplines” – mathematics, physics, this or that religion, grammar, literature, biology, geology, psychology, marketing, politics, culinary, sports, etc. Nevertheless, the natural world contains all these laws, connections, actions, observations described by human knowledge ALL AT THE SAME TIME. Nature has all the laws of physics, chemistry, sociology and all others, known and many yet unknown, acting without separation in “disciplines”. The world is one and united. Consequentially, all the laws of nature are embodied in our bodies and therefore also our minds. The question of human nature is the question of how the world works in one particular aspect, humans.
As we can see, the field of human nature is huge. It will be very interesting to explore it, if only for the joy of travel…

The profit of knowing oneself

The profit of knowing oneself Uncategorized No Responses »

Nov 132011

If we intend to make conscious efforts in understanding the human nature, it should be good to define why we do it at all. What is the purpose and the goal?

The problem of the human nature is as old as the humans themselves. This seems self-evident at the first glance. It seems that there is a very specific reason for existence of this problem, namely self-reflection. Humans have a rather elaborate consciousness, that can reflect not only the outer and inner environment, but also itself. We think of something and we know that we think, and we can think about the fact that we know. We feel and we not only know that we feel but also feel something about it. We feel something about that we know and know that we feel. And on and on and on. Perhaps compassion and conscience are derivatives of self-reflection.

Only a self-reflecting consciousness can raise a problem of knowing itself. If consciousness is not aware of itself, this problem does not exist.

The benefit of self-reflection of mind is that we can think of ourselves from a viewpoint of a neutral observer. At least, this viewpoint becomes theoretically possible. The more precisely we model the surrounding environment in our thinking process, the more precise we can become in our predictions of future, which is the essence and purpose of planning and effective action. If we think with precision, we can eliminate needless actions and avoid harmless situations in advance. We achieve more with less effort. As most of our future predictions are in one or another way connected with ourselves, and our persons often are key actors in these future predictions, it is essential that we correctly predict ourselves. That means to know ourselves.

As other humans are not merely robots, but with their own capability of reflection and planning, effective and useful future predictions and planning become significantly more difficult. There are too many similar actors with roughly similar planning capabilities striving to achieve their own goals. Knowledge of human nature allows us to make generalized predictions of possible events and be more effective in planning, at least while all or most of other players do not have this knowledge.

The tasks of leadership and management, regardless of scale, demand good knowledge of self and others, because it means planning not only for oneself, but also for actions of many other human beings. People do not follow leaders that are seen as unworthy for leading. Why and how people form groups and choose leaders, also is an extension of human nature.

Is it possible to understand the human nature? Of course it is. Otherwise there would be nobody that could predict others better than someone else. One can make a point that some people have a better inborn and intuitive ability to understand others, and cannot explain logically how to do it. If some do it without knowing “the technology”, this in no way it cancels the fact that humans can learn different skills, including the skill of understanding others.

The task of understanding human nature is the task of self-reflection in increased scale. As we as individuals learn or develop ourselves the self-reflection during childhood, we can also learn the self-reflection of our species and society.

To understand ourselves and others, we must base our knowledge on solid foundations. The biological background of humans is that foundation, and usually is omitted in various teachings. In the last hundred years we have accumulated a huge collection of observations of other species, our knowledge of nature has expanded. We have observed other life forms in their natural and artificial environments, and anthropologists have tried to do it with ourselves. New concepts and insights are inevitable. In some aspects, now we can feel the water we are all swimming in. Very exciting, indeed.

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