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.