Why spit out consciousness?
Let’s suppose that the way to group atoms into molecules, tissues, lives, consciousnesses is as free as blank paper.
Translated using google translate from the original article in portuguese.
On this originally blank paper, what is the current design?
Here on Earth, atoms are grouped together in a way that prioritizes the survival of a super important grouping: the gene.
A set of atoms, organized, the gene.
Me. You. We produce genetic material that perpetuates itself when we have children.
We die. Gene continues.
The genetics of humanity continues.
Individually each human body dies. Shakespeare dies. Einstein dies. I die. You die. Aristotle dies.
But the species’ genes are still very much alive.
Not just genes: memes.
Richard Dawkins called a self-perpetuating piece of information a meme.
We perpetuate memes. Information. From logarithm to language, from poetry to how to build instruments, we perpetuate information.
So a play by Shakespeare, a theory by Einstein, a way of thinking by Aristotle can go on as alive as a gene.
Even after the bodies and consciences of Einstein, Aristotle, Shakespeare, have already disappeared. The idea remains.
Memes and genes are preserved. Culture and DNA.
Go away: bodies and consciousness.
Like a blank paper,
we can consider that the design that organizes atoms, prioritizing genes, discarding bodies, is as much a “Matrix” as the fantasy of the movie The Matrix.
A draw.
A way to organize atoms.
A “Matrix”. Why not?
As invented as the life created for Tom Cruise in the movie Vanilla Sky or the Matrix in the movie Matrix.
With a brutal difference: there would not be a “real” life for us to return to, as there was in the Hollywoodians Matrix and Vanilla Sky.
If we consider the configuration of atoms as totally free, there is no correct method. There is no “real”.
This lack of meaning, of course, is filled by religions that, in addition to fulfilling meaning, organize humanity into groups.
Anyone who is sure that a God created the focus on the gene as it happens today, and that this way of organizing atoms, molecules, tissues, lives and consciousness should not be questioned, do not read on, because in the next paragraphs I will consider that there is not a right, nor a wrong, in the wide possibility of the atoms organization.
Whoever programmed our biology and our genetics — chance, complex interactions, survival of the fittest — programmed the survival of the gene.
The gene is in you now, but halfway through it in your children. And grandchildren.
Consciousness and body wither away in about 80 years, on average. The gene continues.
It is from this reality that — I propose — we can escape.
We can consider this current drawing to be our current “Matrix”.
Why can’t we have a different design?
For example, how about a design in which consciousness — you, not just your genes — perpetuates for a long time?
In this case, we would run away from this “Matrix” in which the survival of genes prevails, while discarding body and consciousness. Like someone spitting out the peel of an orange.
I don’t say this without knowing that it is very close to our reach. The book Lifespan explains therapy with the three genes, “OSK” — oct4, sox2, klf4 — which rejuvenates our gene sheath — our body, our consciousness.
Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon, is already investing in this endeavor.
Why spit out the body and let only the genes live thousands or millions of years?
Could it be that this “Matrix”, plotted by biology, with its partners chance, complex interactions and survival of the fittest, cannot be suffocating us?
This design doesn’t smother our genes. The genes go on for a long time.
But this design suffocates our body. It discards our conscience.
In the current design, we need to train children for twenty years so that they expand the knowledge they inherit into approximately 40 years of working life, before they retire and die. All this while preparing the next generation, trying to improve humanity’s general knowledge between taking children from around the world to school. All together.
This way of expanding knowledge throws a lot of experience away.
What would it be like to have teachers and students with a thousand, ten thousand, a million years of experience?
The information could gain in depth.
Or just for sport: if we can choose to let our conscience have longevity, why not choose?
The genes would still survive together.
We all win: genes and conscience.
Wouldn’t it be nice to get out of the Matrix built by biology? For a life that also focuses on conscience?
Or are we going to get stuck in the Matrix that “fell upon us”?
In fact, we don’t have the option not to evolve.
It’s natural. It’s a matter of time. It’s even, why not, biological.
Because we are fruits of nature. We are also the result of chance, of complex interactions, with survival of the fittest.
Even when we choose to change the Matrix.