WATCHMAKERS, BLIND OR OTHERWISE

In Richard Dawkins book, 'The Blind Watchmaker, which became very popular among a gullible public,  Dawkins builds a watch as follows:  a screw, which tells time, is added to a lever, which also tells time, thereby making a screw-lever contraption that tells slightly better time; which is then added to a cog, which also tells time, making a scew-lever-cog which tells even better time, until the watchmaker winds up with a mechanism that tells time as precisely as a well crafted watch.  Of course in reality, as opposed to the world of Dawkinsian novellas, everything that a watch maker assembles does not tell time by itself, in fact serves no function what so ever, until the entire watch is assembled.  This means, of course, that anyone who undertakes to make a watch, sighted or otherwise, must have a foreknowledge of where they want their endeavors to end up; a foreknowledge which guides the selection and shaping and combining of materials, with the goal of making a watch in mind.  With nothing in mind, in fact with no mind, watches cannot possibly be made. That is why paleontologists, as they sift through ancient layers of rock, will find varieties of fauna of remarkable complexity, especially at the molecular level, where all the major biological functions, no matter what organism they are found in,  require a stunning level of molecular complexity and precision; but those same paleontologists never find inorganic material randomly forming themselves through upheavals of tectonic plate shifts, volcanoes, rock slides, avalanches or floods, into refrigerators, typewriters, or even spears or axes.  No!  Spears and axes come much later.  Spears and axes are evidence of intelligent design; but the presence of bacteria, almost four billion years ago, bacteria which replicate, digest, grow, have systems of homeostasis and metabolism, have a way of sensing their environment, a way of excreting wastes, all of which require such complexity that they are studied in microbiology departments at the finest universities all over the world, in which the best of these microbiology students and teachers are garnering Nobel Prizes every year for their endeavors (If the bacterium was so damn simple, what is all the fuss about?); yet, this presence of bacteria in the world of Darwinian and Dawkinsian fantasy, offers to these delusional people no proof of intelligence what so ever.

Dawkins keeps babbling about how people are comforted by a notion of God.  God is a notion for some people and an experience for many others. Those people for whom God is a notion derive comfort by it simply because it comports with what they already believe and what their friends and neighbors believe.  They find the comfort of being part of a like minded group.  Yet exactly the same thing holds true for Darwinia and Dawkinsia.  Even though Darwinians and Dawkinsians hold a cynical world view, a view in which there is no inherent value of living beings, and the only thing that matters is living longer and having more children; they are comforted in exactly the same way that religious people are comforted by reading the Bible.  When they read any Darwinian or Dawkinsian stories, no matter how cynical the world view is,  they are comforted because it comports with what they and their cynical colleagues already assume they know and further convinces them of their superiority in the face of those knuckle draggers, those deluded people, who do not subscribe to the empty, dry, joyless beliefs of Darwiniana and Dawkinsiana. The absence of love, of connection, of a deep joy and gratitude for life, is replaced by this materialist cynicism, but it is a cynicism that is shared by their materialist friends and associates, and in a dark, joyless way, is comforting in the same way that shared religious beliefs are comforting (but, of course, it is neither bonding nor joyous  in the way that shared religious experiences are bonding and joyous).

Although I believe that I probably come from a different place spiritually than most Intelligent Designers, I have enormous respect for the scientific work that they do and for the valiant courage that they display every day by speaking the truths that they have uncovered.  They do this at a great cost to their professional standing, to the security that they can provide for themselves and their families, and even, at times, in the face of organized hostility by the ignorant Darwinian and Dawkinsian masses, at a great cost to their personal safety.  It is most definitely not the quest for comfort that has led them to pose serious, scientific challenges to the current orthodoxy.

Dr. Stephen C. Meyer relates the story of a prominent paleontologist from China who came to the United States to give a lecture on the Maotianshan Shale, a treasure trove of Cambrian rock,  and the startling diversity and complexity of fauna that had been fossilized there.  Toward the end of his lecture he raised his hand with his fingers spread out and pointing upward and said that Darwin hypothesized a tree of life that looks like this; with a common ancestor (his forearm), very gradually accumulating diversity, beneficial mutation by beneficial mutation,  so that the tree gradually separates into the various classes, and phyla of animals (his upward and spreading fingers).  "Yet the Maotioanshan Shale turns the Darwinian Tree  upside down," he said, and turned his hand so that all the fingers were facing straight down.  Here we see a whole wide variety of complex fauna from twenty three different phyla, with no direct antecedents in pre-Cambrian rocks; in fact no direct antecedents anywhere.  All of this menagerie of creatures with intestines and complex eyes, and spines and exoskeletons and mouths and anuses and nervous systems, seems to spring up from nowhere.

At this point a Darwinian in the audience rose from his seat and hostilely challenged the Chinese paleontologist, Dr. Chen.  "You come from an authoritarian government.  Do you feel comfortable criticizing Charles Darwin in that environment?"  His comment was followed by a thick and palpably tense silence.  The unflappable Dr. Chen replied, "In my country you can criticize Charles Darwin; you just can't criticize the government.  Here, in America, you can criticize the government; you just can't criticize Charles Darwin!"

DNA, OUR MODERN REPLICATOR?

"Another rare voice of reason has entered the evolution debate. Matt Chait presents a very cogent explanation of a third option, that needs to be considered by anyone who is interested in the entire science vs. religion question. 

Chait's Blog, Beyond Evolution: Is There God After Dawkins? suggests an answer to the question that neither of the warring sides are likely to find appealing. Which means he's probably closer to the truth than either. Some of his posts are lengthy and involved, but it is a 'must read' for anyone who has given some thought to this issue."   Michael H., The Daily Grail                                                                                                                                    

Modern, neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory centers on the arrival on this planet of the replicator, defined by Richard Dawkins in his book, 'The Selfish Gene,' as a molecule that replicates by itself. This is the central creation miracle that starts the whole process of Darwinian evolution; an event so improbable that James Watson, one of the discoverers of the double-helix formation of the DNA molecule, declared it to be a 'miracle.' Watson's research partner, Frances Crick, contemplating the seeming impossibility of such a thing happening on earth, preferred to think of it as happening on another planet or moon and surviving, embedded in a meteor, an explosion that carried it from another solar system (ours was way too young, according to Crick, for such a pre-biotic evolution to have had the many millions of years necessary for all the separate and precise components of a replicating molecule to randomly assemble); so this pre-biotic evolution took place in another solar system, survived the enormous impact of an explosion strong enough to carry it out of the gravitational field of that solar system, survived a journey of many generations through unbearable heat, unimaginable cold, terrifying poisonous radiation, the complete lack of food sources, and the heat and percussion of an earth landing, to establish itself on this planet. This wacky scenario, called panspermia, was more plausible to Frances Crick than the current one being espoused by Richard Dawkins.

Let's put that aside for a moment and look at grammar. Grammatically, can a molecule replicate by 'itself'? Does a molecule have a 'self'? And what do we mean, mystics and materialists alike, when we use the word self?  The word self connotes a living being who is capable of initiating activity and experiencing desires. This is not my belief system, by the way. This is simply how we actually use the word. For instance if we have an infant, we, the parents, proudly tell our family and friends each and every activity that our young darling was able to accomplish by herself. "She stood by herself!" "She took her first step ('by herself' may or may not be included, but always implied)!"  He said "Dada!" Everyone who has kids has done this and everyone who hasn't has suffered through endless recitations of the accomplishments of other people's children. But the reason that the parents are thrilled is that their baby has just done something new and done it by her or his self.

Not true for the family car, the furniture, the house or any other inanimate object in one's possession. In fact if you have an acquaintance who begins bragging to you how their power mower started by itself, how their car just went for a drive by itself, how their house just expanded and built a whole new wing by itself, etc., that would be a good reason to call the proper authorities and send someone over to determine if your friend was now a danger to himself or others. I should mention here some modern technology that is advertised as doing things by itself. For instance, there are cars that may soon be on the public market that 'drive themselves.' This is true only in a limited sense. These cars do not drive themselves in the same way that we drive ourselves. Of course, we need equipment (a car) to drive ourselves anywhere. But we initiate that drive because we desire, for whatever reason, to get somewhere or just to have the pleasure of a drive. A car that drives itself, does not initiate the drive (thank God) but is merely the instrument for taking you where you want to go and when you want to go there. The car cannot take you where it wants to go, because the car, although it is a machine, is an inanimate object that does not experience anything, does not desire anything and does not initiate anything. Only living beings do that, and it is only of living beings that we can accurately say, " She did that by herself," "She always wanted to become a lawyer and she did,"or "He felt like taking a walk."  Living beings feel like doing things.  Inanimate objects, including machines, do not. It is only of living beings that you can ask why. "Why did you do that," would be a very natural thing to ask your roommate, but a very unnatural thing to ask a butterdish that just smashed to pieces on the floor. Animals also have selves; again not because of our belief system, but because of our grammar, because of the way we talk about them. "Snuggles doesn't like to be fed this early." "Fido always loves to go to the dog park." Rightly or wrongly, we talk and behave as if animals have feelings, experience things and desire things. And we can reasonably brag about how our pets did things by themselves. "Scruffy was lost for a week, but somehow he found his way back to our house, all by himself."

Now we do sometimes say of machines, our car for instance, "She likes to be driven at least once a week." What we mean by that is that if 'she' is not driven that often, then the battery will lose its charge, or something else will happen. But what we don't actually mean, unless we are ready for fifty-two hours in a mental institution, is that our car experiences things, is actually unhappy when it is idle, and in a much better mood when it is moving. What we really mean is that we like the car to be driven at least once a week because we don't like to call the tow truck when the car is not driven once a week.

So let's get back to the creation event of neo-Darwinist thinking; the miraculous, random accumulation of a molecule that had the remarkable ability to replicate by itself. And, by the way, it is this replicating molecule that is not only the theoretical origin of neo-Darwinian evolution, but it is the entire reason for the existence of neo-Darwinian evolution. According to Dawkins we, that is living beings, are merely the temporary vessels for housing DNA. What we experience in this life and the way that we experience it doesn't matter a whit. What is of real significance are the genes that we have and how we are able to pass our genes on to the next generation (true success if we do; true failure if we don't).

To our knowledge, the only things that have selves, or, if you prefer different language, the only things that are capable of initiating, accomplishing and experiencing activity, are living beings. So when we say that a molecule began replicating by itself we are already conferring on that molecule the status of a living being. The Darwinian creation myth doesn't just begin with a molecule that could suddenly replicate by itself, it begins with a molecule that is suddenly alive. Now neo-Darwinian theorists will disagree. They will say that there was a very long evolution of replicating molecules before there was anything that we could call life. The truth is the earliest life forms that have been discovered by examining ancient rock layers for fossils or for traces of ancient life, were photosynthesizing and chemotrophic bacteria that lived very close to four billion years ago, when this planet had just cooled down enough so that the water on its surface was not boiling. Chemotrophs that lived way below the surface of the water near thermal vents are supposedly the very oldest living creatures. They survive in water that is way above the boiling point (but not actually boiling because the boiling point is much higher far below the surface) because of the extra bonding of their protein molecules. How could such a creature accumulate in an environment where each separate part would last no longer that the time it would take to boil an egg? In fact, exactly as long as the time it would take to boil an egg.

And speaking of time, when did this pre-biotic evolution take place on this planet? It seems like single celled life was already here and thriving the moment the surface water stopped boiling, just under four billion years ago.  Originally, Darwinists thought that this pre-biotic evolution must have taken place for fully half that time, two billion years, and the development of post-biotic evolution took place for the next two billion. When bacteria were found to be almost four billion years old, evolutionary theorists suddenly recalibrated and determined that pre-biotic evolution could have taken place in ten million years. Interesting.  When Einstein noticed that Isaac Newton's predictions were off a hair when light traveled in the vicinity of a large star, he came up with a whole new way of looking at space and time.  When neo-Darwinian evolutionists were off by 99.5%, they just slipped in a completely different number and no one blinked. In fact, it was evolutionists who determined that the early earth atmosphere had no oxygen. Was this based on any proof, any meteorological or geological evidence? No. It was merely based on the idea that pre-biotic evolution could not have taken place in an oxygenated atmosphere because the organic material that was supposedly floating around in these pre-biotic soups would have oxidized in the presence of oxygen. In other words, we readjusted our understanding of the early earth atmosphere to fit a theory rather than coming up with a theory based on the evidence. But now there is evidence, and there most certainly was, at least small amounts of oxygen, in the early earth atmosphere. There were also a whole raft of conditions that would have made pre-biotic evolution impossible, including ultra-violet radiation, continual meteor bombardments, hugely powerful and frequent volcanoes, etc. Also, there is absolutely no evidence that organic material ever existed on this planet prior to the organic material found within those first photosynthetic and chemotrophic bacteria.

Of course that was then.  What about now?  Is DNA our modern replicator? The whole neo-Darwinian theory is based on this assumption. But, is DNA a molecule that replicates by itself? Absolutely not! DNA replicates in conjunction with a whole cell's replication. Its replication is initiated by the arrival within the nucleus of certain very complex protein molecules that are released when a cell begins the replication process. Which brings us to another word whose meaning I would like to discuss before we go any further with the debunking of DNA as a 'replicator,' and that word is 'molecule.' A molecule is any stable grouping of two or more atoms. That is a category that is so broad as to be almost meaningless.  If we  consider the fact that in our everyday lives we rarely have any interaction with individual atoms, then every stable object we encounter could be considered a molecule, including iphones and the Taj Mahal. Of course it seems ridiculous to refer to something as technically precise as an iphone and something as exquisitely designed as the Taj Mahal as a molecule, but it is, I contend, equally ridiculous to refer to DNA, helicase, DNA polymerase, and many other mega protein molecules, whose exquisite precision of design and complexity surpasses both iphones and Taj Mahals, as molecules. 

Why were these marvelously complex creations referred to as molecules in the first place? I believe it is because of the schizophrenic attitude of the neo-Darwinian scientific establishment regarding biological complexity. On the one hand evolutionists don't want you finding out too much about the fantastic complexity of living bodies and living cells because that might lead you to the obvious conclusion that living bodies and their countless synchronous processes were the product of a transcendent intelligence and not the result of random copying errors and natural selection. On the other hand, evolutionary scientists take great pride and possessiveness about the complexity that they do understand, so they can brush off unanswerable questions about evolution with a "yes, of course I know the answer, but it's too difficult to explain to a layman like you" type of response.  Referring to enzymes, proteins and DNA as molecules makes them sound rather simple. I mean, if there are trillions of protein molecules in every lamb chop, how complicated can they be? On the other side is the obvious fact that molecular biology departments and graduate schools are springing up like weeds all over the planet, and their graduates are garnering the lion's share of Nobel Prizes every year. If it's all so simple, what's all the studying, all the research and all the fuss about? Here is a very 'simple' animation, simple because many parts are left out, of DNA replication in prokaryotic cells, the 'simplest' of cells; a process that has been going on for nearly four billion years: 



                       ,   

Here is another animation, still simplified, but much closer to what the process actually looks like and in real time:

                                         

As the narrator said, "numerous components have been deliberately left out to avoid confusion."  Among those components are: the laying down of starting stretches of RNA nucleotides to which the DNA nucleotides are attached, because DNA polymerase cannot start new chains, but only add to existing chains.  Then, the RNA stretches are removed and replaced with  new DNA stretches; also the proofreading of the new nucleotide strand as the polymerase doubles back to check on the bonding of the two strands.  If the bonding is off at any point, that means that the wrong nucleotide was placed on the new strand, so the polymerase backs up, enzymes are used to detach the wrong nucleotide from the chain and the correct nucleotide is inserted in its place; and disentangling, since all this work is done in the incredibly close confines of coils of DNA that are folded over and over each other.  When the coils get tangled an enzyme cuts one of the tangled strands, removes the other strand and re-attaches the strand that it cut.  And all of this, the laying down and removal of RNA stretches, the proofreading and the disentangling, plus many other functions, are all done at absolutely lightning speed.

I remind you that what you just watched is bacterial DNA replication; before there was man, before there were dinosaurs, before there were land animals, this is the exact same process that was taking place in photosynthetic and chemotropic bacteria almost four billion years ago at the so called 'simple' beginnings of life.  I could also show you equally remarkable animations of DNA transcription and DNA translation, but you can look them up yourself.  Just google DNA transcription animation and DNA translation animation.  All of these, at a level of complexity and precision that exceeds many times what you are able to see in the animation, were part of the precise, electronic equipment absolutely necessary to allow the first living beings to even have a life. How in the world can you imagine life 'beginning' as a competition among viable organisms, if the organism needs this much complexity and precision to become viable in the first place?

I remind you that if you call yourself an evolutionist then you believe that all living creatures from dragon flies to elephants to redwood trees to humans, and all the amazing organs and complexities within them, had their origin in copying errors made by this very equipment whose functioning you just watched.  (And I did not forget about natural selection.  Natural selection is, as the name implies, a selection process, not a creative process.  It selects among existing alternatives.  It does not originate or create anything.)  If you subscribe to such a theory that is your business, but after you have explained in detail how such a thing could have happened, which no one has ever even begun to have done on a molecular level, particularly when you consider that replication errors which take place on the molecular level  have absolutely nothing to do with the shapes of organs, organelles, or any visible contours of the body, both internal and external, but have to do only with amino acid changes within a protein molecule, supposed changes that take place within an existing gene with not even an attempt  to explain the formation of a new gene; even after you have explained all that, which you never will; then you would still have to explain how this fantastically precise and elaborate equipment got here in the first place.

We call DNA a molecule even though our DNA is composed of billions of individual nucleotide molecules strung together. A more accurate word would be an electronic component, a component of an amazingly complex charged system which supplies all the materials needed to grow, and all the equipment needed to maintain, a living body. The DNA is the component where all the coded recipes for the protein materials, at least the amino acid component of these materials, which we call genes, is stored. That is actually what DNA does. It stores the amino acid recipes for proteins, and it stores them passively, I might add. Other components are needed to copy these recipes, to select which recipe (gene) is to be copied and when, to direct the copied recipe to the equipment where the recipe will be translated into amino acids; components to link the amino acids into a chain, to add other molecules to the chain, to splice molecules from the chain, and components needed to fold the chain and to direct the finished protein product to the place in the body where it is needed.

Without this entire network of synchronous components, DNA is useless; a computerized library of recipes with no one or nothing to read these recipes, no one or nothing to copy them  and bring them to the larder where the coded recipes could be translated into amino acid ingredients; in fact there are no amino acid ingredients; no larder where the ingredients would be stored, and no kitchen or kitchen equipment to prepare the recipe if there were ingredients. To think of DNA as having an independent existence, as replicating by 'itself;' a molecule, if you like, of stored coded recipes for proteins, of this helpless molecule spreading through the 'pre-biotic seas,' when it has no way of manufacturing proteins and no body to manufacture the proteins for, has got to strike even the most dyed-in-the-wool evolutionist as absolutely ludicrous. That is why it is so much better to refer to DNA as a component, because it communicates the accurate meaning that DNA is electronic, is an enormously complex piece of equipment and depends for its functioning on a whole system of other charged and enormously complex components.

I should mention the other part of this neo-Darwinian fantasy.  The 'replicator' is floating in a pre-biotic pool of organic molecules, including protein molecules.  It is in these imaginary pre-biotic pools (no evidence of any such thing, of any organic material on this planet prior to the arrival of bacteria has ever been discovered) that the 'supposed' replicators competed and evolved.  Competed for what, I would venture to ask?  For food sources?  Do molecules eat?  Do molecules need to eat?  How in the world do we suddenly have hungry molecules?  And what do they need food sources for?  Do they have systems to break down and digest these food sources?  To convert them into what?  Into replacement cells for a body that they don't have?  Molecules continue to exist as long as their bonds are not broken.  Are these replicating molecules trying to become better survivors?  In order for them to become replicators, as the fantasy goes, they had to have stayed in tact for millions of years, the exact same molecules; because, don't forget, this is prior to life, so there are no new generations.  These would have to be the exact same molecules that started accumulating millions of years ago and somehow survived countless volcanoes, meteor bombardments and tectonic plate shifts. How much better at surviving could they get? 

And exactly what is floating in these pre-biotic pools?  Are there protein molecules there?  How could that possibly be?  Every naturally occurring protein molecule that we have ever encountered has been manufactured through the genetic processes of transcription and translation with the components of DNA, RNA, RNA polymerase, DNA polymerase, helicase, TRNA molecules, ribosomes, and others.  Every protein molecule is a three dimensional machine whose shape, series of charges and chemical make-up are designed for a specific function within a living body and are manufactured specifically to fulfill that function, and that includes the proteins that are stitched together in laboratories in the hopes of being re-inserted into a living body and fulfilling a specific function there.  

Amino acids cannot form chains in water, yet the belief is that that is exactly what was happening in these pre-biotic tide pools.  They cannot survive in sunlight, in the presence of oxygen, cannot withstand heavy jostling (first think of whipping a meringue from egg whites, which quickly denatures all the proteins in the egg whites and makes them stiff, then gradually work your way up to volcanoes, meteor bombardments, and tectonic plate shifts).  The more familiar you are with the complexity, delicacy and specificity of design of protein molecules and the ingeniously protected, metabolized, homeostatic environment in which they are manufactured, an environment as different from the environment of the earth outside of living bodies and the environments created in high tech laboratories as the environment of Jupiter differs from the environment of our own planet, the more laughable this fantastical theory becomes. 

Why would people adopt such an absurd theory of a creation and evolution based on replicators, and why would so many people readily accept it?  It is because they have been so indoctrinated in the idea that evolution equals science, that anyone who questions evolution, who even thinks about it deeply rather than blindly accepts it, has to be either a fundamentalist knuckle dragger or delusional in some profound way.  Yet if they believe in such an obviously nonsensical theory, it is they who are delusional; they who are so committed to not seeing transcendent intelligence, unfathomable beauty and precision in the world around us, that they seek desperately to adopt any belief system that portends to explain the origin and development of life without the intercession of intelligence, no matter how ludicrous those explanations are.  

If you have taken the time to seriously consider the above paragraphs, then you have to conclude that Richard Dawkins, the Emperor of Neo-Darwinia, has no clothes; that his evolutionary  pronouncements on the origin and development of life are as fanciful as any other creation myth or fairy tale, whether a religious fairy tale or a scientific fairy tale.   

I know that hundreds of you read these words every day.  There must be some Darwinists among you.  I have just ruthlessly attacked your belief system.  Aren't there any among you who will defend yourselves and show me the error of my ways?  I look forward to your comments.

YET MORE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

So here comes a whole new raft of novels and movies about artificial intelligence machines taking over the world, clamoring for their civil rights and falling in love with or rebelling against their human creators. Oh, God, what disheartening nonsense!  It is disheartening because it belies the absymal lack of understanding in our society of just what it means to be a human being, in fact, to be a living being.

A living being is consciousness.  By that I do not mean that that being has the ability to recognize pictures of herself or picture or articulate any particular thing about herself or the world around her.  I simply mean that living beings experience the world around them and desires things in that world.  They do not necessarily (I am talking about all of life at the moment) know they are conscious, know they are experiencing anything, know anything, in fact, in the sense of their ability to articulate that knowledge either to others or to themselves. Yet they all know, without articulating it or having any thoughts about it,  they all know the things  they are attracted to, and things they want to avoid, what food sources they prefer, what temperatures they feel comfortable in, when it is too hot; when it is too cold; and they all know pain which leads them to want to stop that experience and avoid it in the future, and they all know pleasure which leads them to want to continue that experience and re-experience it in the future.

Artificial intelligence machines, robots, computers, anything that humans create and manufacture, except when they are procreating and giving birth; anything else does not have consciousness, knows absolutely nothing about anything, experiences absolutely nothing and desires absolutely nothing.  They are all electronic machines running on an electronic code.  They are programmed patterns of electricity that work when they fit, or are compatible with other patterns of electricity.  The electricity does not know that it is part of a code.  The electricity does not know that it is recognizing patterns.  The electricity does not know that it is electricity.  It is a stream of electrons.  What could it possibly know?  What could an electron know?  We learn things when we observe the machine and see which patterns are recognized and which patterns are not, but the electrons themselves,  not the human interacting with the electronic machine, but the machine itself, knows nothing. What could a billion electrons know?  What could an electron be conscious of?  What could an electron desire?  Yes, the electrons can be programmed so that when they have more success with a certain pattern of electrons they use that pattern more.  But there is nothing in that electron that is thinking, "Wow, I had some success with this program, so I'll try it some more."  There is no 'I' in this electronic equipment that experiences anything.  There is no pleasure when it solves a problem; there is no defeat or frustration when it fails to solve a problem.  An electronic machine does not care whether it is on or off, whether it is functional or broken.  An electronic machine does not care about anything.

An electronic machine has no interest in its human masters.  An electronic machine does not know that it has human masters.  An electronic machine does not know that it is an electronic machine.  It is patterns of electrons; and electrons, whether arranged in patterns or not, know nothing.

Now once the patterns have meshed and a problem is solved, the machine may include an audio device which comes on when it receives a certain electrical pattern and says, "I did it" in a proud sounding voice.  It may even, if it has a face, have another electronic gismo that turns the corners of that face upward into a smile when it says "I did it."  But again, there is nothing in that machine that knows it succeeded, or that takes pride in its success,.  In fact the machine is not even an 'it', which is a unitary consciousness, which all living beings are and which all non-living machines are not.  Everything that a robot is programmed to do is a simulation to give the impression that the robot is experiencing something or desiring something when it is not.  A robot could even say, "I need a charge."  It says that when its battery is low, but it does not need a charge.  You need to charge it because you may want that robot to keep serving you and keep you company, but the robot has absolutely no interest in doing either of those things.  The robot will do them, simply because it is programmed that way, but not because it wants to.  The robot has the same experience if it is on or off, if it is used constantly or has never been removed from the box that it arrived in; and that experience is no experience. So the robot does not need a charge.  You need to charge your robot because you want it to do things for you.

Consciousness is the background, the non-physical bowl within which you experience your experience and desire your desires.  It is not a thing.  You are not a thing.  You are context, not content.  You are not a 'that' but a 'that which'.  You are that which experiences and desires.  I have written a lot more about this in other posts.  The important thing here is that you are consciousness, you are an experiencer and a desirer, and a machine, any machine, even an artificial intelligence machine, even your own biological brain/body machine (although it has a consciousness, an experiencer, a desirer, a Self, attached to it); the brain/body without the Self, as in a non-conscious comatose body/brain on life support, like all the other machines, electronic or otherwise, experiences nothing, knows nothing and desires nothing.

Why doesn't someone make a film about that?


So what do you think of this?  Is this stupid?  Is this crazy?  Is it brilliant?  And why do you think that?  Please let me hear from you.

BEING AND ORGANISM

You are a living being.  You have an organism.  Confusion about what we are as opposed to what we have infects every aspect of our society.  Let's get clear on it.  Everything about you that is measurable and observable; everything that medical doctors diagnose, that biologists observe and measure, that genealogists categorize; the blood you send to the laboratory and the fingerprints and the genome and all the ways that people who don't know you have of distinguishing you from other people, all of that is part of your organism.  That is all part of what people see when they look at you from the outside, whether with the naked eye or with scientific instruments.  

Regarding one's life from the inside out is an entirely different matter.  From the inside out you are you, a being, an experiencer and a desirer.  The way you experience the world is affected by the structure of your organism and the condition of your organism, but you are not your organism. You are that which experiences your organism,  experiences the world through the intercession of your organism, and desires things in the world many, but not all of which, originate in particular biological conditions of your organism.  But your organism experiences and desires nothing.

Your stomach is not hungry.  There may be certain chemical conditions in  your stomach that you translate into the experience of hunger, but it is you, the living being, that is having that experience.  Your stomach, like all matter, experiences nothing.  There may be all sorts of chemical reactions and muscular contractions happening in your intestines and around your midsection, which are either the result of you feeling certain things, or which cause you to feel certain things, but your 'gut' feels nothing.  You feel things which are connected to activity in your midsection, but your midsection is unaware of what you are feeling;  has no interest in whether it is tight or relaxed, loose or firm, or whether you are exploding with passion or enjoying deep and peaceful serenity.  And your midsection doesn't care whether it is helping you digest food, whether there are blood and nerves and digestive fluids coursing through it, or whether there is nothing coursing through it, whether the being, that is you, has departed, and it is now providing an evening meal for a group of hyenas.  Your midsection is matter.  It experiences nothing.  It is interested in nothing.  It is matter. 

There may be millions of electrical pathways being charged in your brain at this very moment, and these pathways may be recording your thoughts, or they may be leading to other neurons that hold information associated with those thoughts, but your brain is not thinking.  Your brain is matter, and matter does not think.  Those electrical patterns must be translated at every waking moment into conscious thoughts.  Who is responsible for this miraculous job of instantaneous and constant translation from electrical and chemical patterns into actual thoughts?  I will leave the answer to that question up to your imagination, for now.  But it is you, not your brain, not your organism, that is experiencing the thoughts associated with these electrical firings and chemical reactions. You, a living being, who experiences and desires, you think.  Your brain may help you record your thoughts, help you remember your thoughts and define your thoughts, but your brain does not think your thoughts.  The brain is matter and matter does not think.  

Your genes may control the kinds and qualities and amounts of proteins that your body manufactures, and govern your physical traits, but although the genes may shape to a great degree the way in which you experience the world, it is you, and not your genes, that experiences that world.  Genes are strings of nucleic acid molecules.  They are matter and matter experiences nothing.  Your eyes translate photons into electrical impulses which form patterns of electrical charges in the brain.  This is not sight.  This is no more than a video camera does. A video camera does not see its pictures.   You do that.  And your eyes and optical nerve and optical cortex of the brain do not see the world around you.  You do that.  You, not your eyes, are the seer of your sights.  You, not your ears, are the hearer of your sounds, the taster of your tastes, the thinker of your thoughts, the doer of your deeds.  Your amazing body, with its amazing brain and sense organs are the equipment that allow you to do that in the specific way that humans are able to do that.  Just like tigers and stingrays and tulips each have their own amazing equipment that allows them to experience the world in a tiger way or a stingray way or a tulip way.  You are the ground of being, the context of your experience and your desires.  You are not a that, but a that which; that which experiences and desires.

And scientists cannot see you.  No one can.  Oh, we can see how you express yourself through your face and hear how you express yourself through your words, but you, the expresser of these expressions, is not a thing, not a content, but a context and cannot be seen.  And because scientists cannot see you, nor see your experience, they make an egregious error.  They confuse you with your organism.  They conclude that the purpose of the organism is to survive, which is absolutely true; but then they go on to say that the only purpose of the organism is to survive, which is absurd.  Nothing survives just to survive.  If I build a machine I want it to survive at least long enough so that I can use it at least once, but use it for some purpose other than survival.  To build a machine to survive, just to survive is, as I said, absurd, which is exactly the conclusion that neo-Darwinist, materialist scientists reach: life is meaningless and absurd.  But the purpose of life, which eludes the scientist, is to provide a certain kind of experience for the being that occupies that organism.  The reason that all the biological activity that scientists study is focussed on survival, is that the organism is designed to provide this particular experience, this particular way of being in the world, for as long as possible.  And what the scientists do not see, or avoid seeing, is that these processes, these unconscious processes, all serve the conscious being.  The organism is the servant of the being.  Just as the being must serve the organism to provide for the organism what the organism needs in order to survive.  The being inherits a set of specifically designed desires so that, being utterly ignorant of the survival needs of the body, having no formal knowledge of how to take care of this precious equipment, the being simply does what it wants to do, eats what it wants to eat, drinks what it wants to drink, rests when it feels tired, moves to a cooler area when it feels hot, moves to a warmer area when it feels cold, has sex with a member of the opposite sex of its species when it feels horny, and by acting to satisfy this exquisitely designed pattern of desires, it survives and its progeny survive.  In the same way, the organism serves the body.  Whatever you want to do, or your dog wants to do, or a fish wants to do, or a grape vine wants to do, the moment any living being has a specific intention, whole cascades of electrical firings, energy shifts, muscular contractions and releases, gene firings and chemical reactions, shifts in blood or plant enzymes, are set precisely in motion to allow that being to do exactly what it wants at the moment and at the exact rhythm that it wants to do it.

Is this too far out for you?  If anything, it is too far in.  What I am talking about is nothing 'supernatural,' no mysterious substance, no ethereal ectoplasm, or anything that you may or may not catch a glimpse of once in your life time.  I am talking about you, the you that is there at every moment of your life, the very ground of your being.  Closer than your breath, closer than your thoughts, closer than your body sensations.  You are not your body and you never were your body.  You were not the size of a single cell when your organism consisted of one fertilized ovum.  You were not eight pounds when you were born.  You are not one hundred and eighty pounds now.  Your body, your organism is those things.  You are a being which is not a thing, which is boundless.  You may not realize this and live within a claustrophobic prison built of your own unfulfilled desires, but that is a prison of your own making.  The truth is that you are boundless.  You have no height, no breadth, no weight.  There is no limit to what you can understand or experience.  There is no end to you, spatially or temporally, whether you realize it or not.

Now when I say that this body and brain is not a being and is not capable of experience or desire, I don't mean to imply that this is just your equipment. This absolutely precious organism, built with unfathomable complexity and precision, that you have been given is your opportunity to experience this world in a particular way.  This is your organism that responds instantaneously, miraculously, to your every intention.  It is not the random result of some absurdly fortuitous chain of accidental molecular collisions.  It is a purposeful, intentional gift.  It allows you to be in this world in a particular way and to enjoy it and learn from it.  This learning has to do with those desires beyond the purely biological, that you arrive here with.  It is in the pursuit of those desires, the satisfaction of those desires, and the deepening understanding of which desires are important and which are not, that precious lessons are learned.

We live in a society where it is thought that we are the random result of molecular accidents, with no planning, no caring, no purpose involved.  Also that there is no self, no boundless context of experience and desire, that all we are is a combination of genes and brains that we have received in a random game of chance in which some of us are lucky and some unlucky.  In a world focussed on material organisms rather than on experiential beings, no wonder that our main concern is in acquisition, whether of money, possessions, fame or sex partners. No wonder that we treat each other so shabbily.  No wonder that we obsess on this unfair treatment and think our entire lives are dependent on the way others respect us or not.  And this is a world where the reality is that you have the capacity at any moment to close your eyes, be still, go within, and in moments fall back in love with the universe, yourself and all the beings in it; and you can do this at any time you choose.  Can you see the strength and resiliency in that?  You are not that fragile thing that has to enter a room terrified of what someone might say to you or how someone might mistreat you.  You are the boundless self that is not in any real way affected by these treatments.  And these are your spiritual brothers and sisters, whether they realize it or not.  Enter the room with joy, with excitement.  How will this relationship with my new brother or sister, with such similarly magnificent equipment as I have, and with a being which is not only similar to my being, but is actually a different aspect of the exact same being (discussed in other posts), how will this interaction unfold?  Going into a room fearing an insult or going into a room excited to have an enjoyable interaction produce two very different results.  Neither result actually changes you.  You will still emerge from this interaction as perfect and boundless as when you went in, but your momentary experience in the first case has a very good chance of being torturous and, in the second case, has a very good chance of being wonderful.

Is it any wonder that we have to go back over a hundred and fifty years to find any music or writing that could be described as glorious or transcendent?  The passion for the joy and beauty and glory of life that filled Michelangelo and Shakespeare and Beethoven and that resonates so profoundly with us (when we can find those rare modern musicians and actors that know how to play them), where is anything in modern art that matches that depth?  Do you really think that we have no more Shakespeares and Michelangelos because we now know more about life, or because we now know less?  I know that we know more about organisms than they did, but in our fascination with our organisms have we overlooked, degraded or misjudged our actual life? These men looked at the world as a glorious creation and their talents as glorious gifts, which they were.  They believed in destiny and fate and purpose and design and reverence and gratitude.  And, of course, they were right!


Please feel free to comment.

JE NE SUIS PAS CHARLIE HEBDO

There is a terrifying schism in this world between radical fundamentalists of various stripes and atheist materialists.  The schism is terrifying not because of the number of people that have been killed so far, which is tragic but not terrifying.  The schism is terrifying because of the utter lack of understanding between the two groups, a lack of understanding that continues to grow and deepen as the dead bodies and the insults continue to pile up.

Before I attempt to bring some understanding to this schism, let me just declare flat out that Charlie Hebdo's publishing of a picture, any picture, of the Prophet Mohammed is disgraceful  and does nothing but pour more fuel on an already raging fire.  I think I have some idea why Moslems are offended by any depiction of the Prophet, and I will explain that in a moment.  But what I think doesn't matter.  The point is that pictures of the Prophet are highly offensive to millions of Moslems, regardless of their reason.  If someone tells me that what I am doing or saying is offensive to them, is deeply bothering them, then, if I have any respect for that person at all, I will stop doing it.  I don't complain about the limitations on my freedom of expression because I can't use the N word, or the C word or the G word or any number of racial, religious or gender based epitaphs.  Those words offend people, so I no longer use them, period.  Do those words offend me?  In most cases no, but so what?  I am not the person complaining.  I do not have that person's background, culture, religion or sexual orientation.  It does not matter a whit if it is not offensive to me, or if I don't 'get it.'  Others are offended; that's all I need to know.

Why did a million people protest in Paris?  Was it to mourn the death of the editors and cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo and the random slaughter of innocent shoppers in a grocery store, and to make a statement that this kind of wanton violence can never be tolerated as an answer to any offense?  Fine. But if it was to support the continued freedom of a few clever people to offend and poke fun at what is sacred for hundreds of millions of people, that is not something that I can justify.  And especially in this case, where the offended people have born the brunt of Western imperialism and colonialism for centuries.  To march in self-important protest to defend the freedom of a comfortable white intellectual elite to insult these people, many of whom do not have the means to even fill their bellies when they are hungry or to find safe shelter when they are in desperate need of sleep, seems to me to be an exercise not in freedom, but in entitlement.  Then, to put another picture of The Prophet, front and center, on the cover of your next magazine and try to make a world-wide statement about it, seems unconscionable.

The reasons why Moslems are offended by the picture of the Prophet may not be able to be understood by Western materialists.  What Moslems revere in The Prophet is his spirit, a spirit that was, they believe, an open channel to God, to Allah.  The Prophet's body or face is not important, and is not to be worshipped as a substitute for the worship of the spirit, the consciousness of the Prophet, and the vessel that that spirit was for the communication of the Divine.

Now I don't agree with fundamentalism.  The passion of fundamentalists is very real, whether Christian, Jewish or Moslem.  This passion is based on personal experiences of the fundamentalists that are not only very real but are of a depth that is impossible for the atheist/materialist who has never had a spiritual experience, to understand. And what  fundamentalists of all stripes do not understand is that the experience they had which made them fundamentalists is basically the same experience that other fundamentalists of every other religion or sect had that made them fundamentalists.

With any peak experience, you try to recreate it.  You ask, why did I have, or why was I given such an experience?  And the answer that you come up with usually has to do with the particular church or synagogue or mosque that you were worshipping at when the experience happened; or the particular prayers you were saying, or the particular rituals you were practicing.  Contrary to what materialists may think, each of these religions: Christian, Jewish and Moslem, as well as Hindu and Buddhist, are valid, proven ways of arriving at this transcendent experience; which is precisely why they have  all survived in tact for the many centuries that they have all survived.  Nothing survives for a thousand years by the empty repetition of meaningless rituals.  These religions survive because they provide for their ardent followers experiences that are, in and of themselves, tremendously meaningful and which, then, imbue the worshippers entire life with meaning.

It is part of the human ego to want to think that our way is the best way, that our religion is the best religion and our spiritual experiences are the deepest and most meaningful spiritual experiences.  But the human ego is based on the illusion of separation.  In truth, we are all one spirit.  The momentary experience we have when we are able to remove ourselves from our separate, egotistical point of view, the feeling of dissolving into the cosmic consciousness, of freeing ourselves from the boundaries of separation, of being one with the universe and all our spiritual brothers and sisters, is the same experience for everyone who has it.  You cannot experience the joy of oneness and the pride of superiority in the same moment.  The fundamentalist must learn that spiritual experience should lead to embracing not just one's own spiritual brothers and sisters, but all people; those of your religion, those of other religions and those of no religion; in fact, it should lead to the embracing of all of life, which are all manifestations, all aspects, of the one, same cosmic consciousness.

What do we in the West expect?  Do we think that the billion and a half Moslems, many, many millions of whom are ardent followers of the Koran and the teachings of Mohammed, to succumb and say, "of course, do what you want, publish pictures of the Prophet, publish pictures of Allah if you feel like it.  We no longer care.  You won."  Is that what we want?  To take away the belief system which is, in so many cases, the only precious thing in these people's lives that they cling to in a world of terrific adversity, an adversity that, to a great degree, has been imposed by the West?  Must their submission be that complete?  Must we insist on destroying their inner life after we have destroyed their outer one?

And for what?  For the freedom of a few satirists to draw pictures of The Prophet?  What about pictures of Jews with horns?  Should we add insult to injury and have this severe restriction imposed on satirists as well?  Is it too tragic to imagine these comfortable, elite, writers and cartoonists having to go through the rest of their lives not drawing a picture of Mohammed or a horned Jew?  Only so several hundreds of millions of people are spared a devastating humiliation?  If in this conflict your sympathies are with the satirists I accuse you of racism or at least of anti-Moslem religious prejudice.

And if you think that this form of unbridled satire will ultimately bring about a reconciliation through the spread of freedom and different points of view, you are insane.  People that have had spiritual experience, who understand a reverence for life, understand a deep and profound spiritual meaning to our existence, will never learn anything from the irreverent who worship only fame and financial success and who have no compunction about doing or writing or drawing or acting in anything regardless of it's message or its values if it will reward them with the requisite amount of money and/or fame.  For there to be any real reconciliation, it is the reverent who must teach the irreverent, not the other way.

We will not achieve real peace on this planet until all those in the West who have lost their reverence, who have been inculcated in the idea that life is the result of random molecular collisions with no planning, no purpose and no over all design; it is those people that need to resign their position as teachers and become students of those who have found a real spiritual meaning to life.  When fundamentalists realize that the God that they have experienced, even for a moment, is not their God, does not belong to them, is not Jewish, or Christian or Moslem, but is God, the cosmic consciousness, which transcends and traverses every nook and cranny of this universe, and supports all of life at every moment, that allows you to translate, at every waking moment, your desires into actions and your electro-chemical activity into conscious experience; that God, is not better than any other God, because that God is One, not one God as opposed to another God, but One, and beyond opposition.

And the Western atheist, materialists, must realize that they are not their bodies, but that which experiences their bodies; that their brains are something that they have and use, but that they are not their brains; that their brains help them record and define and categorize their experience but their brains do not experience their experience.  They do that.  And that the genetic code is just that, a code, which, like all codes, is a way of communicating intelligent ideas from one intelligent being to either another intelligent being, or to intelligently designed equipment that is able to read that code; and that genes are not, in and of themselves, creators of bodies, just like bricks or lumber are not, in and of themselves, creators of houses.  Gene are merely the recipes for the material requirements of ideas;  ideas which include the molding of those materials into precise shapes; countless shifts in the enormously complex firing patterns of genes; the use of  transcendentally complex and precise systems for transcribing and translating genes into actual protein materials; an enormously complex system of delivering this new protein material to the exact place and at the exact time that it is needed in the growing body; and enormously complex shifts in equilibrium, in the distribution of nerve and blood vessels, and in brain real estate, to enable this "random" trait, or "random" feature to actually be incorporated into the enormously complex and synchronized system which is a living body so that it can be used to the advantage of the being, you, that inhabits that body.

In other words, that life is not an empty, meaningless accident, but a precious opportunity, provided to you by an intelligence, a creative, loving intelligence that is way beyond our ability to understand; so that you can have the opportunity to experience the experience that you are now experiencing and to make the most of it.  And you can begin to make the most of it by revering it, not as an accident but as a sublime and intentional gift.

If only we could get there, and, admittedly that is a long road, but the Divine has created us as humans, not rocks, but humans that  are capable of great accomplishments and thrive on great challenges.  Our challenge is to heal this great divide between ardent fundamentalists and atheist materialists.  Let's begin, and we can begin by apologizing, even on the heels of the random murders in France, apologizing to the hundreds of millions of people that were offended and agreeing, not because it is forced on us, but because of our new and deeper understanding of the passions of others, to never draw a likeness, whether flattering or not, of the Prophet again.

In the aftermath of the events in France, Western countries are now upwardly revising their budgets for defense against terrorism.  Let's add one new item to this budget; an item which will cost relatively little, but may reap for these countries enormous economic savings and  real security advantages; that item is respect.

Please feel free to comment.

THE CONSCIOUS PLANT

In the first part of this post I will be discussing an article that appeared in the December 23, 2013 issue of The New Yorker entitled "The Intelligent Plant" by Michael Pollan.  Quotation marks will mean that quoted material is from The Intelligent Plant unless otherwise noted.  I will summarize a lot of the information in this article, but I encourage you to read it for yourself.  It is, in and of itself and regardless of how you interpret the findings that Pollan reports, a mind boggling and consciousness expanding experience to learn some of the things that our plant neighbors, who comprise 99% of the bio-mass of this planet, are able to do.

Before I get into discussing my take on the material in the article, I want to present some findings that are reported there.  These findings about what plants are able to do, not how they do it and not about what they experience while they are doing it, but what they actually do, are not arguable.  All of the following findings are based on scientifically reputable measurements and observations of plant behavior:

1.  Plants are able to sense and optimally respond to light, water, gravity, temperature, soil structure, nutrients, toxins, microbes, herbivores and chemical signals from other plants.

2. Plants have electrical and chemical signalling systems homologous to those found in the nervous system of animals.

3. Neurotransmitters such as serotonin, dopamine and glutamate are used in the daily functioning of plants; but just how they are used is still  unknown.

4.  Plants have between fifteen and twenty distinct senses including senses at least similar to smell and taste (they sense and respond to chemicals in the air or on their bodies); sight (they react differently to various wavelengths of light and shadow; touch (a vine or a root knows when it encounters a solid object and can sense the presence of a solid object and grow around it without actually touching it); and sound (Heidi Appel, a chemical ecologist at the University of Missouri, played a recording of a caterpillar chomping a leaf for plants that hadn't been touched.  The plants responded by producing defense chemicals against the caterpillar.  Stefano Mancuso, head of the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology in Florence, Italy, found that plant roots will seek out a buried water pipe even if there is no water on the exterior of the pipe, suggesting that the plant somehow "hears" the sound of  water flowing within the pipe).

5. Plant roots can tell if neighboring roots are part of the same plant, or another plant and, if another, a related plant or a stranger.  Normally plants compete for root space and soil nutrients, but when researchers put four closely related Great Lakes sea-rocket plants (Cakile edentula) in the same pot, the plants restrained themselves and shared resources.

6. Plants perceive competitors and grow away from them and respond to potential competitors before being actually shaded by them.

7. Plants have a rich communication with other plants by producing a wide variety of chemicals that are sensed and responded to by other plants.  Rick Karban, a U.C. Davis ecologist has shown that when sagebrush leaves are clipped, simulating an insect attack, the plant will release volatile chemicals which protect not only the clipped plant, but stimulate its unclipped neighbors to produce chemicals to protect themselves from insect infestation.  At the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology researchers are compiling a dictionary of each species' chemical vocabulary. Stefano Mancuso, the head of ILPN, estimates that a plant has an average of three thousand chemicals in its vocabulary and reminds us that the average human student has a vocabulary of seven hundred words.

8.  Plants also communicate with animals.  "Several species, including corn and lima beans, emit a chemical distress call when attacked by caterpillars. Parasitic wasps some distance away lock in on that scent, follow it to the afflicted plant and proceed to slowly destroy the caterpillars.  Scientists call these insects 'plant bodyguards'….A recent study in Science found that the caffeine produced by many plants may function not only as a defense chemical, as had been previously thought, but in some cases as a psychoactive drug in their nectar.  The caffeine encourages bees to remember a particular plant and return to it, making them more faithful and effective pollinators."

9. Plants can be rendered unconscious by the same anesthetics that put animals out: drugs can induce in plants an unresponsive state resembling sleep. (A snoozing Venus flytrap won't notice an insect crossing its threshold.)

10.  When plants are injured or stressed they produce a chemical, ethylene, that works as an anesthetic on animals.

The reason we don't commonly think of plants as "behaving" is that they are sessile (rooted in one spot) and much of their behavior comes from sensing a wide range of environmental conditions and then producing chemicals which we cannot observe but plant scientists can detect, to adapt to these conditions.  Also, their "movement" is in the form of growth.  They grow their roots, branches, vines and stems in different directions to take advantage of environmental benefits and avoid environmental threats.

The focus of Pollan's article is the debate within the plant research community about what, if anything,  plants are experiencing as they behave in ways that looks very much like evidence of learning, memory, decision-making and intelligence and whether we should even use those words to describe plant behavior or if those words should be reserved solely for living organisms with brains.

Charles Darwin became fascinated with plants in his later years and studied them intensively with his son Francis.  He wrote, "It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radicle (root)…..having the power of directing the movements of the adjoining parts, acts like the brain of one of the lower animals; the brain being seated within the anterior end of the body, receiving impressions from the sense organs and directing the several movements." Pollan writes regarding Darwin, "He thought of the plant as a kind of upside-down animal with its main sensory organs and 'brain' on the bottom, underground, and its sexual organs on top."  Since then we have discovered that leaves, flowers, branches and stems are, in and of themselves, incredibly sensitive organs that, in response to environmental signals, produce protective chemicals, signal other plants, and twist, turn and grow in ways that enhance their future growth and maximize their nutritional and energy intake without any as yet discovered observable connection to the radicle or root structure.

One of the problems with debating plant intelligence is that there is so much disagreement about what our own intelligence means exactly.  Does it refer to mental qualities such as reason, language and abstract thought or does it mean simply the ability to respond in optimal ways to the challenges presented in the present moment by one's environment and circumstances?  The first definition seems more brain-bound and is really, I think, a definition of intellect as distinct from intelligence.  Intellect is the ability to try to understand the workings of environments, real or imagined, that one is not currently in.  This curiosity and ability to understand environments that are remembered or imagined may be the province of not just exclusively animals, but exclusively human animals.  Intelligence, the ability to satisfy one's desires in the environment one finds oneself in, varies not just from creature to creature, but from environment to environment.  A weaponless, gadget less pet owner (weapons and gadgets being the result of intellect, of imagining predators or food sources, where they would be located, their structure and behavior); this gadgetless pet owner, as I say,  may have less intelligence, less ability to get her needs met in a natural environment, than her pets.

A lot of the disagreement around plant intelligence, will and memory is semantic.  The Society for Plant Neurobiology, under pressure from the more conservative members of the plant research community, changed their name after two years to the less controversial 'Society for Plant Signaling and Behavior.'  A member of the National Science Foundation said  that the N.S.F. would never fund anything with the words 'plant neuro-biology' in it, but were completely open to fund projects from the Plant Signaling and Behavior Society.  "Neuro" an N.S.F. spokesperson said, "belongs to animals."

At their sixth annual meeting, their fourth under the name 'Society for Plant Signaling and Behavior,' Monica Gagliano, an animal ecologist, made a controversial presentation with 'mimosa-pudica.'  Mimosa-pudica (the sensitive plant) along with Venus fly traps are among the few members of the plant world that react quickly enough so that their reactions are noticeable to the unaided human eye.  If the leaves of the mimosa are touched or the plant is dropped or jostled, their leaves will fold up, presumably a defensive reaction to a perceived threat.  Gagliano performed "habituation" experiments, usually done with animals, on these plants.  She wanted to know if a perceived threat proved over and over again to not be threatening, would the plant learn to stop responding defensively.  Gagliano created a system to drop fifty-six potted mimosa plants from a height of about five inches every five seconds.  "She reported that some of the mimosas started to reopen their leaves after just four, five, or six drops, as if they had concluded that the stimulus could be safely ignored.  "By the end, they were completely open.  They couldn't care less anymore."

"Was it just fatigue?  Apparently not: when the plants were shaken, they again closed up."  "Gagliano…retested her plants after a week and found that they continued to disregard the drop stimulus, indicating that they 'remembered' what they had learned.  Even after twenty-eight days, the lesson had not been forgotten.  She reminded her colleagues that, in similar experiments with bees, the insects forgot what they had learned after just forty-eight hours.  Gagliano concluded by suggesting that "brains and neurons are a sophisticated solution but not a necessary requirement for learning," and that there is "some unifying mechanism across living systems that can process information and learn."

In response to Gagliano's presentation, Fred Sack, a botanist from the University of British Columbia offered, "Bullshit.  Animals can exhibit learning, but plants evolve adaptations."  Gagliano thought that this response made no sense.  "Adaptation is far too slow a process to explain the behavior that I had observed.  How can they be adapted to something that they have never experienced in their real world? (being repeatedly dropped).  Also, some of the plants learned faster than others, evidence that this is not an innate or programmed response."

A paper that Gagliano had written about her experiment had already been rejected by ten professional journals, not because of any of the data, but because of the language that she used to describe the data.  She balked at changing it, "unless we use the same language to describe the same behavior (as animals), we can't compare it."

Pollan writes, "Scientists are often uncomfortable talking about the role of metaphor and imagination in their work, yet scientific progress often depends on both.  'Plant neurobiology' is obviously a metaphor-plants don't possess the type of excitable, communicative cells we call neurons.   Yet the introduction of the term has raised a series of questions and inspired a set of experiments that promise to deepen our understanding not only of plants but potentially also of brains.  If there are other ways of processing information, other kinds of cells and cell networks that can somehow give rise to intelligent behavior, then we may be more inclined to ask, with Mancuso, 'What's so special about neurons?'"

I don't know that I have communicated the intensity of this disagreement which is more clearly expressed in Pollan's article.  The more conservative group feels threatened and the more experimental group feels under attack.  The feeling of being threatened, of the metaphor, the assumptions within which you have been operating and upon which all your writings and research are based, as possibly being wrong or shifting, is terrifying to the scientist who has established himself based on a perhaps wrong assumption (i.e. that intelligence is the sole province of animals).  Although Fred Sack uses the surprisingly contemporary expression, "Bullshit," writings of scientific history are generously sprinkled with mainly Victorian expressions which mean the same thing and whose intensity expresses the threat that lurks underneath: "rubbish!, poppycock!, balderdash!, bilge water!, etc." These terms may seem comically outdated but they were not funny when they were hurled at the daring experimentalists of the past who had spent years of their lives devoted to their ground breaking work.

"Plants have their own excitable cells, many of them in a region just behind the root tip.  Here Mancuso and his frequent collaborator, Frantisek Baluska, have detected unusually high levels of electrical activity and oxygen consumption.  They've hypothesized in a series of papers that this so-called 'transition-zone' may be the locus of the 'root brain' first proposed by Darwin."  "What's going on there is not well understood," says Lincoln Taiz, emeritus professor of plant physiology at U.C. Santa Cruz, "but there is no evidence it is a command center."

Yet is there evidence that the brain is a command center?  There are two hundred billion neurons in the brain.  Where is the command center?  Where is the decision maker? Where is the place where electricity is translated into memories, into thoughts, into the actual sights and sounds and smells and tastes and touches of our actual consciousness?  In Pollan's words, "Most neuroscientists would agree that, while brains considered as a whole function as centralized command centers for most animals, within the brain there doesn't appear to be any command post; rather one finds a leaderless network.  That sense that we get when we think about what might govern a plant  'that there is no there there,' no wizard behind the curtain pulling the levers, may apply equally to our brains."

Taiz adds that the writings of the plant neurobiologists suffer from  "over-interpretation of data, teleology, anthropomorphizing, philosophizing and wild speculations."   The plant neurobiologists counter that what is really anthropocentric is to insist on the presence of a brain and neurons to explain capabilities such as intelligence, pain perception, learning and memory.  They believe that in their study of plants they will find a different mechanism for these abilities which will, perhaps, shed light on the gaps in our understanding of how our own animal neurobiological mechanisms work.

If you are perhaps thinking of defining the plant behaviors that you have just read about as a "tropism" or an "instinct" or an "adaptation" or an "evolutionary strategy,"  all of which are words which mean nothing more than an undefined term used to describe behavior without having to resort to consciousness (which upon serious reflection, as I will explain in a moment, is impossible) then please consider the following two studies:

At the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology researchers used time-lapse photography to capture bean plants, which climb things, growing toward a metal pole placed on a dolly.  This experiment was repeated many times with the pole in different positions in relation to the bean plant and the bean plant planted at various angles.  In each case the bean plant did not grow in random directions and sometimes just happened to hit upon the pole, but grew directly toward the pole; no swerving, no wavering, no randomness whatsoever.  It is clear that somehow the plant knows exactly where that pole is.  There are some theories as to the mechanisms by which the plant locates the pole (plants make low clicking sounds as their cells elongate.  Perhaps these sounds reflect off the pole and they can use a form of echolocation to discover it).  The question which is not addressed either by the plant neurobiologists or the more conservative group is: why does the plant exert all this energy and focus to grow directly toward the pole and then climb it?

Then there is the research by Suzanne Simard, a forest ecologist at the University of British Columbia.  She studies how trees in a forest use an underground web of mycorrhizal fungus which connects their roots "to exchange information and even goods.  This 'wood-wide web' allows scores of trees in a forest to convey warnings  of insect attacks, and also to deliver carbon, nitrogen, and water to trees in need….She and her colleagues track the flow of nutrients and chemical signals through this invisible underground network.  They inject fir trees with radioactive carbon isotopes, then follow the spread of the isotopes through the forest community….Within a few days, stores of radioactive carbon are being routed from tree to tree.  Every tree in a plot thirty metres square is connected to the network; the oldest trees function as hubs, some with as many as forty-seven connections….The pattern of nutrient traffic shows how 'mother trees' use the network to nourish shaded seedlings, including their offspring-which trees can apparently recognize as kin-until they're tall enough to reach the light.  And in a striking example of interspecies cooperation, Simard found that fir trees were using the fungal web to trade nutrients with paper-bark birch trees over the course of the season.  The evergreen species will tide over the deciduous one when it has sugars to spare, and then call in the debt later in the season."

So  why does the bean plant head directly for the pole?  I am not asking how it knows the location of the pole, that mechanism is already being searched for.  What I want to know is where does the energy, the force, come from that produces the directed growth, that moves that vine over dirt and rocks and grass to get to the pole?   Physicists tell us that there are only four forces: gravity, electro-magnetism, the weak and the strong nuclear forces.  Obviously it is not gravity at work here.  The bean plant heads for the pole whether or not the pole is downhill, uphill or at a level with the plant. The bean plant is not 'falling' into the pole.  Certainly it is not electro-magnetism.  The pole is not exerting a magnetic force and pulling the bean plant toward it like iron filings toward a magnet.  And certainly it has nothing to do with the two enormous nuclear forces which are bound within the atoms of the plant and would destroy it entirely if they became unbound for whatever reason.  There is another force which occurs in nature and synthetically in machines which does not violate these other natural forces (that is impossible) but which gathers and focusses energy in a way to overcome natural forces.  Whenever you see a metabolic system at work as in a living organism, or any other form of gathering and focussing energy as in a machine, then you must realize that the force of "desire" is at work.  Machines are built to overcome natural forces so that they can accomplish what their inventors and their constructors and their users want them to accomplish.  Our bodies and our brains metabolize energy  to accomplish two things.  First there are all the activities that take place without our conscious awareness, which allow us to survive and allow us to be able to experience the kind of experience that the cosmic consciousness, or God, wants us to experience, a human body/brain providing a human experience and a caterpillar body/brain providing a caterpillar experience.  And second there are all the conscious experiences that we ourselves choose to experience and which our bodies and brains allows us to experience by metabolizing energy to allow us to behave in ways that manifest those desires.

And whenever we, and I use 'we' to include all living organisms, choose to experience something we do it for one reason, because we want to.  That doesn't mean that we are excited about it.  We may be choosing the best option in a difficult or threatening environment, but still we do what we want to do, expend energy toward getting to do what we want to do, experiencing what we want to experience, because we want to, and this wanting must be an experienced desire.  What else could it be?  How could we imagine an unexperienced desire, a desire without a desirer?  So if I say that a plant is conscious, which I will be saying quite a bit later on in this post,  I am not referring to any intellectual concept such as having a self awareness, or having any piece of knowledge whatsoever.  I am talking simply about the ground of experience, that which experiences, and that which is the milieu of desires.  This ground of experience, in human cases, not the thoughts, but the thinker, not the sights but the seer, not the memories but the rememberer, not the deeds but the doer, this ground of being is consciousness; it also is what you are as opposed to what you think, or see, or remember, and as opposed to what particular equipment, what particular brain or body you happen to have.

And when you define behavior as "instinctual," whatever that means, it is still something that you want to do at that moment.  If you choose to call 'fight or flight' instinctual that's fine with me.  You can use any semantics you want.  But the fighter is still choosing to fight.  An animal that has the "fight or flight" instinct is not fighting or flighting constantly.  That is ridiculous.  It chooses to fight at a particular moment.  The fight, whatever you want to call it, is a conscious response to a particular situation, and it is conducted not "instinctually" whatever that means, but consciously, moment to moment, adjusting to what the competitor that the fighter is fighting with is doing at each moment.  The same holds true for "evolutionary strategies," whatever that means.  Who decides these evolutionary strategies by the way?   Is it the organisms themselves?  Do microbes sit around and have a planning session and decide that gene swapping, for instance, would be a good evolutionary strategy?  Or is it the genes themselves that have these meetings?  And why am I never invited?  What about eating?  Is that an evolutionary strategy?  Eating which, of course, must include the ability to identify food, to desire food, to get to the food or attract the food, to digest the food, to eliminate the wastes from the food; is that all part of one great "evolutionary strategy?"   If so, what were living organisms like before they developed this particular strategy?  Tell me about a living organism that existed before the strategy of eating, or the strategy of metabolizing, or the strategy of a genetic code, or the strategy of transcription and translation, before any of these transcendentally elaborate, complex and specific strategies were "randomly' stumbled upon.  Or maybe it's a "tropism,"  so the bean plant is just bending toward the pole because it is attracted to poles.  Is this a chemical attraction?  Is it the same chemical attraction if instead of a pole it were a wooden fence?  What about a plastic, or glass or stone pole?  If it's not chemical, is it an unconscious attraction to something upright?  If that's the case, in what part of the bean plant is there an awareness that something 'upright' is in the neighborhood?  If it is just an unconscious bending toward something upright, where does the energy come, once pointed in the right direction, to grow up hill, over stones, through dirt, around curves, to get to that pole?

The bean plant wants something to climb, but it did not choose the desire to climb.  We do not choose our desires, at least our biological ones.  We are born, each species is born, with a set of desires, the fulfillment of which, maximizes our chance of survival.  Part of the experience of being a bee is the desire to build hives, to live in hives and to participate in the communal life of the hive.  Part of the experience of being a goose is the desire to migrate and to migrate in flying formations.  Swarm behavior cannot be reduced to algorithms.  Each participant in a swarm is in a swarm because it wants to be in a swarm, in the same way that some of us like to march in large groups, play in orchestras, dance in troupes, fight in armies and football teams; not because of some algorithms even though you might be able to find an algorithm that matches our behavior, but because we want to, we desire, we enjoy something about the power or the harmony or the blending of the individual self with others which happens when we behave synchronously with large groups.  Whatever else you say about it, you cannot eliminate in the participants of whatever behavior you study, the desire, at that moment, to do that behavior, and that is always, must always be, a conscious desire.

You may have noticed that the title of this post is 'The Conscious Plant,' while the title of Pollan's article is 'The Intelligent Plant.'  And it is consciousness that is the elephant in the room, or the laboratory, that hovers there regarding all these proceedings, waiting with unimaginable patience for people, including scientists, perhaps especially scientists, to figure out who they are and how they got here.  Consider this section of Pollan's article:


"'Does the plant decide in the same way that we choose at a deli between a Reuben sandwich or lox and bagel?' Taiz (a member of the more conservative group of plant scientists) asked. 'No, the plant response is based entirely on the net flow of auxin and other chemical signals.  The verb decide is inappropriate in a plant context.  It implies free will.  Of course, one could argue that humans lack free will too, but that is a separate issue.'

I asked Mancuso (a member of the more radical experimental group) if he thought that a plant decides in the same way we might choose at a deli between a Reuben or lox and bagels.

'Yes, in the same way,' Mancuso wrote back, though he indicated that he had no idea what a Reuben sandwich was.  'Just put ammonium nitrate in the place of Reuben sandwich (whatever it is) and phosphate instead of salmon, and the roots will make a decision.'  But isn't the root responding simply to the net flow of certain chemicals? 'I'm afraid our brain makes decisions in the same exact way."


So here we have both the conservative and the radical scientist in complete agreement that our brains make decisions and that they make decisions based on chemicals. This conclusion based on absolutely no evidence whatsoever is shared by almost the entirety of the biological research community, even though the search for the elusive 'command center' proceeds nonstop with absolutely no sightings, no measurements, not even a specific conjecture as to where this 'brain command center' may be located. To this I say, "poppycock!, balderdash! rubbish!"  But seriously folks, my point is that regarding all conscious decisions, the brain does not make any decisions at all.  Prior to deciding what sandwich to eat, we find ourselves experiencing something called hunger.  That is to say that we, as in consciousness, not our brains, but we, experience hunger.  (The brain being made up of neurons, electric charges moving through those neurons and axons connecting those neurons, experiences nothing.  Matter neither cares about nor experiences anything. The brain records my experience, categorizes my experience and helps me define my experience; but it does not experience my experience.) This hunger may be associated with some chemical condition in our bodies, but that chemical condition is translated into the experience of hunger.  Based on this experience that we, not our brains, but we, consciousness, experience, we fire up different sets of neurons in our brain, neurons associated with our memories of eating Reuben sandwiches and eating lox and bagels.  Those memories do not exist in the brain.  They exist in some sort of code of electrons or chemicals  deposits, or microtubules within neurons, or the shape and location of sets of connected neurons; a code which is again translated for us into the remembered experience of tasting and smelling and chewing these substances, a memory that is re-experienced not in our brains but in our consciousness.  (You may notice that during these decisions a lot of remarkable translating and locating of neurons, in fact I would say miraculous translating and locating of neurons, is being done for us, thank God, and I mean that literally!)  And then we weigh, not these chemicals, but the memories that these chemicals arouse and the present condition of our bodies which, again may be based on chemicals but is experienced in consciousness, and based on these experiences, not these chemicals, we make a decision, which is a conscious decision and not a brain decision.  

Don't any of these people realize that we are alive and what it means to be alive?  Scientists both plant scientists and other biologists study my organism, but they do not study me; they do not study the living being which inhabits my organism and which experiences and desires.  They do not study these things precisely because they are not physical things and cannot be measured or observed.  This leads them to absurd conclusions, for instance that the presence of a certain set of chemicals in my organism is hunger, is the exact same thing as hunger.  Really?  Okay, then fill a hypodermic needle with precisely those chemicals and inject it into your sofa.  Will you wind up with a hungry sofa or a mess?  

My organism needs nutrients, needs certain chemicals.  But I, a living being, I don't know that.  That chemical condition is translated into an electrical condition where certain neurons are excited.  This electrical excitation is translated into the experience of hunger so that I, a living being who doesn't know a thing about the chemical needs of my organism, get hungry and get I just so happen to get hungry for precisely the foods that contain the chemicals that my organism needs.  In this way, by being completely ignorant of the chemical needs of my organism, by just satisfying my desires, I also fulfill the needs of my organism.  Pretty amazing, huh?  I would say miraculous, and I thank God for such a system, literally!


We are not automatons; we are not computers.  We do not robotically do what we are told to do by our chemicals or anything else. We eat a Reuben sandwich because we want to eat a Reuben sandwich and that wanting is a conscious,  experienced desire.  We don't just say, "I want a Reuben sandwich," without having any idea why we want it, without having any experience or memory or curiosity that leads us to making that decision.  To somehow leapfrog from chemicals to decision is to bypass experience including the experience of choosing.  In a robot or a computer there is nothing to bypass, but in the relationship between a living organism and a living being, there is the entire experiential life that is bypassed and that is what my life is: my moment to moment experience.

"The plant response is based entirely on the net flow of auxin and other chemical signals."  The tips of plant roots are able to sense gravity, moisture, light, pressure, hardness, volume, nitrogen, phosphorus, salt, various toxins, microbes and chemical signals from neighboring plants.  The decision as to what direction and how long to grow a root is based on all of these.  Saying that this response is dictated by the amount of auxin is like saying:  because there happened to be so much adrenaline in my body I had to run a marathon, rather than saying that my desire to run a marathon created a lot of adrenaline in my body when I needed it; or saying that there happened to be a full tank of gas in my car so I had to drive to New York; rather than saying I decided to drive to New York so I made sure there was a full tank of gas in my car.  Everything is exactly backwards.  You have a body and brain that manufactures enzymes, shifts blood and energy and contracts muscles to aid you in realizing your desires.  It's not that we are the blind, comatose servants of whatever neurons happen randomly to be firing, whatever chemicals happen to be flowing through our blood stream and whatever enzymes happen to be manufactured in our cells at any given moment.  Neurons fire, extra blood flows, enzymes are manufactured and muscles are contracted to serve us in fulfilling our desires.  In plants, auxin and other enzymes are transported to different parts of the plant body to allow the plant to respond to the environment in the way that 'it', the consciousness of that plant, wants to respond to its environment. We, as in all living things, not our brains and not our distribution of enzymes, but we, our consciousness, is the command center.  Our brains and bodies and enzymes are the servants of these commands.

We, and that is all life, including plants, algae, moulds and all forms of animals, are consciousness.  We, again including all of life, have bodies which include brains or some form of electrical signalling system, which are not 'us' but are our equipment; equipment which has been given us, that is consciousness, in order that we, consciousness, can experience this material world in a particular way.  Our bodies and brains or signalling systems are the apparatus through which we experience the world and through which we express our desires and satisfy or attempt to satisfy our desires.  That is, we are not our thoughts, but the thinker of our thoughts.  We are not our words, but the speaker of our words.  We are not our deeds but the doer of our deeds.  We are not our values, but the holder of those values.  We are not our desires, but the desirer of our desires.  We are not our sights, but the seer of our sights.  We are not our sensations but the senser of our sensations.  Everything we have and everything we do is not us.  We are the experiencer of our experience, not the content of our experience.  We are context, not content.  We are consciousness.

And brains and nervous systems do not "give rise to consciousness."  Consciousness gives rise to brains and nervous systems.  Yes, all, or almost all, scientists would agree that "the brain, as a whole, functions as a command center," but I am not a scientist.  You, not your brain, but you, are the command center.   The brain is there for two reasons.  The first is that it is there to allow you to survive; that is, to allow the particular way of experiencing the world that is a function of your particular brain and body, to survive as long as possible.  If you are dopey enough to think that the transcendent complexity of this equipment, the understanding of which our greatest scientists after centuries of exploration and thought are merely scratching the surface of; as I say, if you are dopey enough to think that this transcendent complexity and synchronicity is the result of a random, fortuitous series of molecular collisions, then you can thank evolution for it.  I, as a being with some measure of sanity, prefer to thank God aka Allah, Buddha, Jehovah or the cosmic consciousness.

There are two consciousnesses and only two,  which are really one.  The first is the cosmic consciousness, which is consciousness unattached to a particular body or mind, which we also call God.  That is the consciousness that has set up this remarkable equipment, our bodies and minds, that we all enjoy, or should be enjoying if we lived in a world with a modicum of sanity.  The second is the consciosness that is attached to a particular mind and body.  Being attached to a mind and body gives us the sense of a separate consciousness, but it is only a sense, only an illusion.  We, again including all life forms, are having this separate experience because we want to have a separate experience.  We desire to have a separate experience.  We are attached to this material world through our bodies and minds by a particular set of desires.  Some of these desires are what we call biological.  In other words each living being is born with a set of desires so that what we want to do just so happens to be what we need to do in order to survive and procreate (find the nutrients, water, light, rest, warmth and coolness and, if we are sexual procreators, the partner) even though we are totally ignorant of what we actually need, but just experience what we desire and how to fulfill that desire.  Every living being is born with thirst, which is the desire for water, and hunger, which is the desire for food.  These desires were there from the very inception of life.  These are not 'evolutionary strategies.'  If they were then show me the evidence of any life form that didn't seek out the nutrients and water that it needed, and explain to me how such a life form could survive for enough time for it to procreate and give rise to more thirstless and hungerless progeny.

The command center for all the processes that are not in our conscious control, that are not what we call 'behavior' is God, the cosmic consciousness.  The command center for all behavior, for all conscious activity is us, the separate, or seemingly separate, consciousness.  The instant that we want something, which is every instant of our waking lives, many millions of neurons fire, blood shifts, energy shifts, in the precise way and in the precise sequence that allows us to do whatever it is that we intend to do.  Our behavior is not initiated by firing neurons.  Our behavior is initiated by our conscious intentions which is instantly translated into the precise series of many millions of firing neurons that allows us to do what we intend to do.  These neurons fire because we want them to fire.  And, of course, the same thing holds true for plants.  However their electrical processes work, and however their enzyme transport system works, the movement and manufacture of chemicals within the plant body is initiated by the plant itself, by the consciousness of the plant and what 'it' wants to do.

Admittedly plants are different from animals.  Plants have a sessile life style; they are rooted to one spot.  They cannot approach what they desire by getting up and moving.  They must grow and bend toward what they want.  They cannot move to avoid predators or to attract the things and beings they are attracted to.  They must produce chemicals to protect them from threats and to attract helpers to them.  Plants have a modular structure and a lack of irreplaceable organs allowing plants to lose up to ninety percent of their bodies without being killed.  Since one of the main functions of plant life is the nourishment of animal life, this modularity is an excellent design.  And if plants are here, among other things, for us to eat them, they probably do not experience pain in all parts of their bodies.  Mowing the lawn, from the grass' perspective is probably closer to getting a haircut then an amputation.  When fruit is ripened on the vine it can be gently pulled off.  The fruit is ready to be eaten and the tree or the bush is ready to part with it.  Forcefully ripping fruit prematurely from a tree for international transport and processing is very different and probably does cause the plant a kind of painful experience.  And if you are still doubting that plants are conscious and can experience pain, let's refer back what I mentioned above from the Pollan article.  "…..Mancuso and Baluska point out that plants can be rendered unconscious by the same anesthetics that put animals out: drugs can induce in plants an unresponsive state resembling sleep. (A snoozing Venus flytrap won't notice an insect crossing its threshold.)  What's more, when plants are injured or stressed, they produce a chemical - ethylene - that works as an anesthetic on animals."

Yet the difference between plants and animals, between plants and us, is only superficial.  Let me explain.  As I said, what we are is consciousnesss.  We are the thinker of our thoughts, the speaker of our words, the doer of our deeds.  But whether we are doing or thinking or speaking, we are still exactly the same consciousness, the same 'us.'  There is not one Matt that thinks and another Matt that speaks and yet another Matt that does things.  Whatever I am doing or thinking, I am still the same Matt.  Pain and pleasure are also experienced by the same experiencer.  Childish thoughts, when we are a child, and adult thoughts, when we are adult, are experienced by exactly the same 'us,' the same consciousness.  At the essential level of consciousness, there is no difference, no change from the infant self, to the adult self to the senior citizen self.  The self is not a thing.  Things change.  The self, which is not a thing, does not.  And regarding our fellow human beings, whose culture, background, history, values, language, bodies and brains, are different from ours, the essence of those other people, the consciousness behind that history, culture, brain and body, is exactly the same consciousness, the same self, that is behind our own history, culture, brain and body.   In other words, we are seemingly separate creatures, but only in material and transitory ways.  Essentially, we are not a separate consciousness, but are all aspects of the one cosmic consciousness.  In other words the being that is looking at the world through my eyes and the being that is looking at the world through your eyes and the being that is looking at the world through your cat's eyes, is the same Being. And going one step further, a creature that has no eyes, including the world of plant creatures, is still, in its essence, the same being, the same experiencer that is experiencing its experience as you, the experiencer who is experiencing your experience.

Basically we can divide living experience into three categories:  desire, the  satisfaction of desire, and desirelessness.  I am not talking about the ability to articulate our desires or satisfactions or any thought process whatsoever.  I am talking purely about the experience, which requires no language and no intellect.  We are all, all living beings, attracted to different things and it should be noted that what we desire is not just the thing, but what we really desire is the experience that we think we will have when we acquire that thing.  With food it is the experience of tasting and chewing and smelling that food and the experience of satisfaction that we think we will have when that food is eaten.  Even the most materialistic human craves objects not for the objects themselves but for either the enjoyment of that object or some experience of enhanced self worth that he or she thinks having that object will provide.  The material world, including the material world of our bodies and brains, is the intermediary between our experience of desires (not what we desire, but the desire itself) and the experience of the satisfaction of desires, both of which are experiences and not part of the physical/material world.

The desire for food we call hunger.  The desire for water we call thirst.  The desire for rest or sleep we call fatigue.  The desire for warmth we call being cold.  The desire for coolness we call being hot.  The desire for sex we call horniness.  And the desire to experience connection and love with other beings we call loneliness.  The experience that we will momentarily satisfy our desires is called excitement.  The experience that we will momentarily lose the possibility of satisfying our desires is called fear.  And although we all hunger for different things (each species, at least in a natural state, is designed to desire that food which will best satisfy its biological needs), the experience of hunger, I believe, is very much the same experience even though the object of that hunger can be very different.  And the same is true for the other desires.  A camel may not experience thirst as much as many other animals, but when it experiences thirst it experiences an experience which is very similar if not identical to the thirst experienced by any parched animal or any vegetation in a drought.

Of course the great majority of scientists will see these ideas as  being anthropocentric.  I see the opposite.  I think that the idea that only humans can understand each other's experience, that only humans can experience things with depth, that only humans are relatable as living beings, is the most isolating, virulent form of anthropocentrism.  The thing that may separate humans from other species and from plants is thought and perhaps intellect.  But the absence of thought and intellect in no way diminishes the experience of desire or the satisfaction of desire, in fact, it may enhance desire and satisfaction.  If every ant  goes toward the sugar, is that really desire?  Wouldn't some ants desire something else or not approach the sugar with the same single minded commitment that all the other ants seem to have?  Doesn't that speak to a kind of experienceless instinct?  No.  As I said earlier, if it is not the desire for sugar that is driving these ants, then what force is it?  Certainly none of the four physical forces that I mentioned earlier.  No.  The reason that all these ants, and by the way, it is not all the ants, but all the ants whose job it is to bring food back to the colony.  There are plenty of other ants, the queen and her guards and the maintenance crew for instance, who do not approach the sugar, but remain at the colony awaiting the return of the food gatherers; the reason that all these ants behave in a way that is so uniform and determined is that the desire for sugar is so overwhelming.  They don't have any intellectual chatter which says, "well, yes, this sugar smells great, but there are so many other ants here, maybe I'll come back when it's not so crowded."  Or, "yes, it smells great, but there may be some even better sugar on the other side of the street, and, anyway, I had the same sugar yesterday, I mean how much sugar can you eat," etc.  No.  There is just the pure desire, undiluted by any chatter, just as there is the pure satisfaction of desire.  If anything, it seems, at least in terms of desire and satisfaction, that animals experience things more deeply than we do.

And finally we come to desirelessness, which, I believe, is experienced more commonly in animals and plants than it is in humans, at least contemporary humans.  It seems to be the job of our capitalist economy to keep us continually in a state of desire and, through advertising, to create new desires for things that we do not need at all.  Every advertisement contains within it the implicit message that you will somehow be more complete if you acquire this product, and less complete if you don't.  These ceaseless campaigns to get everyone to improve themselves, to lose fat, gain muscle, build their investments, own a larger home, more equipment, more education for their families, more security for themselves, and to attain an even grander appearing style of life, fills us with a constant gnawing restlessness of unfulfilled desires.  When we experience desirelessness it is often only after a very intense experience of desire satisfaction, and then it lasts only a very short time before the drum beat of restless desires starts sounding in our ears.  But desirelessness is a feeling of deep peace,  a sense of belonging, not just to a particular place and family, but to the universe; that you and the environment that surrounds you are part of the same fabric and inseparable;  and it is this peace that we feel when we are in the company of desireless animals whose needs have been met and who feel no separation from their environment which includes you; and it is this peace that we feel in a thriving forest, a sense that things are the way they should be, that everything is balanced and synchronized, that there is a natural order and design that is beautiful and that we are all part of.  That feeling, I strongly believe, comes not just from humans toward their environment, but from the plant and animal kingdom when they are desireless toward us, when we are among them.  Is this anthropocentric?  If anything it is spiritocentric, a quality that I happily confess to and it would make me feel honored to find out if any of you readers have become more spiritocentric from reading this post.

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