The Development of Organs of Awareness

     The ability to actively react to external conditions, (rather than remain totally dependent on circumstance for survival), creates a tremendous survival advantage. Driven by this advantage life’s increasing complexity has produced an array of advanced sensors and complex neurological systems that are common to most living forms and are a naturally selected priority.  These observe/ react capabilities are physically grounded in cellular genetics but when the process reaches a level of complexity where random reactivity is possible, the ability to step beyond simple physical processes is created, and a new arena for natural selection is opened. A more careful examination of the activity of the simple protein flagella of prokaryotic bacteria and the more complex activity of the flagella of eukaryotic cells may indicate a sensory purpose for them as well as motility. Flagella activity can be stimulated by an external prompt to swim upstream toward a source of sugar, and the motor activity may be a precursor to other more complex chemically reactive organs. 

     When a simple living form reacts to an external stimulus directly, by using a genetically ingrained biomechanical mechanism, the sensory response connection is direct. In slightly more advanced life forms, with the ability to recognize nuances in stimuli, and respond with several options, the response is not direct and a choice must be made. Having the capability to be more discerning through increased sensory capabilities and the ability to react selectively, adds an additional survival advantage. This new arena for natural selection I call; active awareness, (as opposed to passive awareness).

     Like all of life’s forms and processes, active awareness has developed slowly through the trial and error process of natural selection. Drawing a definitive line between simple reactivity and the complex reactivity of aware choice is difficult. The development of life, like nearly all natural processes is a continuum, and is incompatible with our naturally selected method of conceptualization by grouping. In order to overcome this limitation, and fully understand our surroundings, and ourselves, we continually expand our conceptual groups to be ever more inclusive. For us to gain a more complete perspective, including awareness as a naturally selected essential component of all life is essential.

     Life developed slowly from natural chemical processes into reproductive chemical units, into simple single cells, into more complex cells, into cell congregations, into complex cell congregations, and into multi cellular forms. Life developed in a continuum, and driven by survival advantages, added increased cellular complexity and increased awareness. Awareness and physical complexity are co-joined and completely interdependent, but active awareness, the ability to choose, has become a separate player in natural selection and an equal partner with genetic selection. Life’s physical aspects are connected to awareness by sensory and neurological organs. From the simplest to the most complex arrangements, this connection between life’s physical and aware states, continually offers up new possibilities for natural selection, and gives favored status to advanced sensory organs and advanced states of awareness.

     The ability to sense a variety of environmental conditions and respond appropriately improves a living form’s chances of avoiding elimination. Surface receptors in a single cell that are responsive to chemicals at high levels of concentration add survival value. The ability to sense the same chemicals at much lower levels of concentration, or the ability to discern changing levels of concentration, add an even greater survival value. Natural selection has filtered out the less discerning and favored those capable of measuring and monitoring in greater detail. Multi cellular life, from the early layering of single celled families to the telescopic eyes of birds of pray, have had their organs of awareness naturally selected because of their advantages, and with time and effort we should be able to trace the development of most advanced organs of awareness back to their origins.

    Without sensory organs, awareness is an empty state. With sensory organs awareness improves in intensity and sensitivity and allows life to examine its surroundings in more detail and from many perspectives. Each species collects and creates a different image of its surroundings using its own unique sensory and neurological capacities. Each of these living images is but a small glimpse into the totality of reality, and is limited by the capacity of sensory receptors and neurological processing centers. The totality of all internal living images creates an ever expanding all inclusive view as the universe awakens, but the view remains fractured by life’s individuality. Life senses its surroundings one individual at a time because individuality has been naturally selected as nature’s best method of experimentation using genetic drift, and natural selection, but advanced states of awareness are trending toward group awareness as language begins to unite life’s individual perceptions.

     Sight began as a simple cellular sensitivity to light, hearing as a simple cellular sensitivity to vibration, smell and taste as simple reactivity to nearby chemicals, touch  as a simple reactivity to pressure and temperature. Natural selection has brought us to our present advanced ability to sense our surroundings using complex organs of awareness because of their great survival advantages. The survival value of advanced awareness is so influential in natural selection that one could speculate, that the evolution of body parts for subsistence and mobility are subordinate to the evolution of awareness, and serve only to provide transportation and nourishment for sensory organs and advanced neurological capacities.

     Several single celled species of phyla dinoflagellata have eye spots with a light sensitive layer of carotenoid pigments covered by a clear zone. One species, Erythropsidinium pavillardii, has a more complex oculus that it apparently uses to detect pray. The oculus of this species has a pigment cup covered by a fluid filled chamber and a lens that can change shape, and the entire ocellus can be protruded from the cell and point in different directions. These are very primitive single celled creatures that existed in the late Proterozoic without a well defined modern cell nucleus, and yet they developed rudimentary organs of sight from their chloroplasts. Even at this primitive stage in the development of living physical forms, natural selection was filtering into existence cell appendages, undulipodium, for mobility and ocellii, for vision. The early introduction of organs of awareness as an essential supplement to genetic selections of form is also evidence by the early evolutionary partnership between the gene, (the unit of transfer for physical traits), and the meme, (pronounced meem), the unit of transfer for acquired responses. More about memes, later. 

   

Primitive Awareness

     Without any sense of surroundings, or internal conditions, life is only a complex set of co-joined molecules capable of using a chemically coded structure to select, attract and order molecules as a way of duplicating themselves. The bio-mechanical reproductive process of cell division is not simple and developed very slowly over millions of years.  Life isn’t simple. Life’s basic processes aren’t simple, and we are a long way from explaining how organic molecules first joined to start performing this amazing trick.  

     The creative processes we observe in both the micro and macro physical world around us exhibit patterns of hierarchical steps of increasing complexity. Electrons, protons and neutrons join to become atoms. Atoms join to become molecules and molecules join to become chemical substances which in turn join to become the stuff of nature and life. If living forms follow these same hierarchical patterns of developing complexity, we may be able to deduce a sequence of events for the advent of life and awareness that we can test scientifically. Nature appears to test combinational possibilities ad hoc and without end. Throw basic materials and basic forms of energy into an empty space with unlimited time available and let the experiment begin. With a nearly infinite amount of experimental material, unlimited time, and a few joining forces, all possibilities will eventually be tested. From our limited perspective this seems to be a very inefficient process, but we are observers created by the very process we are observing. Criticizing the efficiency of the process that formed our ability to criticize the process is certain to be futile.  The book of natural creation is open. We have been given the tools to read nature’s book, and it is an amazing story. Science is closing in on the details of life’s beginnings, but while this tedious process takes place, we can skip ahead and peek at a few possibilities using the unscientific method of deductive investigation.

     We observe organic molecules in abundance on and off the earth, and could easily assume that nature flooded the Universe with these molecules in order to insure the advent of life. To support this assumption we have discovered that two of the essential elements needed for life, water and amino acids, have been delivered to our planet directly from space by comets and meteorites and have been produced naturally on earth by lightning cursing through volcanic clouds. Any claim that the production and delivery of life’s essential compounds as purposeful however, becomes suspect when the great abundance of molecules created by natural processes is appreciated. Without empirical evidence, any imposition of hidden intent can lead us to false conclusions. Amino acids are called organic molecules not because all amino acids are attached to life but because all life on earth uses various forms of amino acids. The fallacious syllogism; (All white horses have four hooves; I just saw an animal with four hooves; therefore it must be a white horse), illustrates this logical error. If life is a natural result of ascending complexities, it seems reasonable that living forms would be made from available materials. With enough basic molecules necessary for life populating the environment, and with a propensity to join naturally when prompted by an occasional stimulus, it seems reasonable that all joining possibilities would eventually be tested. We can reasonably assume that the hierarchical complexity we observe in other aspects of nature also exists in the joining of the basic ingredients of living forms, including the development of a state of awareness.

     When we observe reactive behavior in very simple living forms we observe single celled life reacting to contact, responding to light and adjusting to changes in their chemical surroundings. In each case a specific part of the cell is responding to an external stimulus. Living cells at this stage are already complex, have had their complexity naturally selected and contain many internal components. If a general vector for the development of life through natural selection could be drawn, it would point in the direction of increasing complexity. From naturally formed amino acid chains to the human brain, complexity adds survival advantages.

     The next step in complexity, beyond single celled life began as early cell congregates exploited the advantages of loose cell groupings, Congregates of cells with slightly different reactive characteristics created a symbiotic survival improvement over a separated existence. In Earth’s early atmosphere of methane, carbon dioxide, sulfur and sulfuric acid, some cyanic bacteria formed themselves into layers to survive and exploit these early conditions and flourished in such abundance they poisoned the entire atmosphere with the by-product of their respiration, (oxygen). As life adjusted to a new atmosphere, grouping tendencies gained additional favor and cell congregates became more complex. As additional congregational diversity continued to be a useful survival technique cells, in close proximity within these congregates, began to communicate with each other through simple chemical exchanges. Responsiveness to external conditions improved as light sensitive cells began to alert their neighbor cells to an opportunity or a threat. Survival advantage developed further in early cell congregates as responses were added to identify vibration, pressure, temperature, and chemical conditions. The complexity vector of natural selection begin pointing at increasing awareness very early in life’s development, and the seeds for both rudimentary sensory organs, cellular communications and neural control centers were all on nature’s early selection list.

              

Awareness, An Essential Element in Evolution

AWARENESS DEFINED

     Awareness is the essence of our being and is evidenced in all life but like the air around us, it remains invisible and unnoticed. Without physical attributes awareness has, until recently, eluded serious scientific inquiry. Recent investigations into sensory organs, the neurological centers that process sensory information and the evolution of these organs are beginning to expose another aspect of life that is broadening our perspectives. Beyond more limited concepts, like intelligence and cognizance, we are beginning to realize that awareness, as a larger concept, is indispensible to life’s continuance, is at the center of our existence, and defines all of life’s activities. Awareness is the reason the flower opens to greet the sun and the power behind human inventiveness. It is the essential attribute of life that helps to insure its survival, it is the capacity of a living form to monitor and react to internal and external stimuli, and is the essential attribute that gives life meaning. It is produced by and is dependent on life’s physical organs, and although it has no physical attributes, it can be measured, studied, modified, augmented, created and destroyed. It has evolved in concert with life’s physical forms, has an evolutionary history of its own and has been an equal partner to genetic evolution from the beginning. In Man, awareness has gained a dominant position over genetics in natural selection, and if we are to understand evolution in full measure, and maintain control of our destiny, we need to account for awareness as equal in importance to physical forms.

Awareness as an essential element in evolution

     Elements of awareness have been noted and examined for centuries. Human behavior, animal behavior and the emotions of both man and animals fill the earliest of written records. Darwin began to categorize animal behavior as he referred to instinct, reflexes, and emotions as ways in which animals respond to events and situations. Other attempts to give animal and human awareness a base for scientific inquiry include the study of mimicry. Darwin devoted considerable time to giving examples of mimicry and to presenting the views of various naturalists and their interpretations and definitions. A concept for an ephemeral entity called a “mime” was introduced in the twentieth century as the behavioral counterpart of the physical “gene” claiming it was a major contributor to the evolution of behavior. As a deductive starting point this concept held promise but lost momentum when popular writers applied the mime solely to human behavior patterns to promote utopian social orders. In spite of this early set back, the potential for the concept of mimicry to help explain natural selection in advanced life forms remains viable and is worthy of reexamination. To appreciate awareness as separate from biological processes requires a conceptual disconnect from the chemical/ mechanical view of science. Awareness is intrinsically linked to the biological and genetic aspects of life but has its own attributes and contributes to survivability in ways that cannot be explained mechanically. The simple reactivity of single celled life has evolved to become the complex choices of animals and the contemplative moments of man. These advanced states of awareness cannot be explained by genetics or simple reactive responses. Choices made and contemplative conclusions reached within these states impact survival equally or more strongly than genetically imparted autonomic responses. The advanced complexity of cellular form, advanced sensory organs, and the growth of neurological centers for the processing of sensory inputs, has produced a level of existence that exceeds its mechanical biological state.

     Just as multi cellular life exists at a level above, but not separate from, single celled life, awareness exists at a level above, but not separate from, biological forms. Without awareness, even in its most primitive state, life is not viable. The state of being alive requires more than just the abilities to collect and produce energy, separate itself from its surroundings with a membrane, and reproduce. Life requires the ability to interface effectively with its surroundings in order to collect the nutrients and energy needed for sustenance and this interface, in its simplest form, is the progenitor of awareness. Awareness at its most primitive level is only chemical mechanical reactivity. Add sunlight to a chloroplast and living energy is produced. Drift into an area of chemical nutrients and thrive, drift out and die. Develop the ability to survive periods without sunlight or nutrients by becoming encysted, or by suspending certain internal processes, and survivability is improved. These reactions require the ability to sense changing conditions, either by an internal or external monitor, and the ability to react. These simple reactive changes of state are primarily chemical/ mechanical responses, but they are also the first evidence of an ascending level of awareness. Each small improvement in a living form’s ability to sense and react to changes in its environment improves its chances of survival, and promotes the natural selection of advancements in aware states.  The ability to sense and interpret, chemical surroundings, the intensity of light, vibrations, temperature, electrical fields, magnetic fields, motion, and one’s internal conditions, all have the potential to improve survivability. Evolved organs for advanced awareness are the result of successive small improvements in awareness, accumulating as survival advantages. Awareness cannot be separated completely from the complex biology that produces it, but awareness exists as a new state of existence, created by the advancement of bio-mechanical complexity, to a level of randomness that allows reactions beyond direct bio-mechanical responses, or simple chemical reactions.