Abiogenesis: a misconception of consciousness
In prebiotic earth life is theorized to have formed in place like hydrothermal vents of the oceans, sea shores, or inside the earth's surface where there was an influx of compounds like hydrogen, ammonia, methane, etc and heat that provided the energy for the interactions of these compounds to form complex organic structures that form the lipid layers, protein, nucleobases, nucleotides, peptides, etc that essentially led to the formation of the first instances of organic life on this planet.
If you look at life , especially less complex life forms. You could easily see a pattern hidden there. Essentially life forms , since birth, look for chemical compounds around the environment and ingest what's required and excrete what's waste and throughout their lifetime this function continues until it reproduces sexually or asexually and dies.
(Metabolism and DNA replication)
What happens is a certain complex bunch of chemical compounds with a complicated architecture intakes more compounds and discards the unnecessary compounds and all the information gathered about the sustainance and efficiency of this process is passed on to the another compounds it makes that grows into an evolved version of it.
The act of lifeforms and their relationship with it's environment and the function of reproduction and DNA replication is a whole complete process of the universe.
These life forms are not separate beings experiencing the universe they are the universe experiencing itself.
The universe being made of matter compounds like sulphate, phosphate, water vapour, carbon, methane, etc and these essential compounds only make up what we know as prebiotic life.
For example, if u take a box of hot water and add chemicals like methane, ammonia, hydrogen, water vapour, etc and add a little electric discharge , you would witness the formation of structures like amino acids.
These chemicals formed are not a separate entity experiencing the environment, the whole set up is Essentially the environment and the structures formed is the environment experiencing itself.
This state of experiencing the environment by the elements of the environment can be said to be a certain form of consciousness.
The first lifeform ever created say LUCA.(Last Universal Common Ancestor) or it's prehistoric ancestors were simple single celled organisms with lipid walls, and internal structures resembling organelles and RNA structures.
They had their own form of consciousness that can be deduced from their responsiveness towards their environment and capability of RNA replication.
But would it be right to say consciousness itself originated from an abiogenetic process??
Is consciousness only an ability posessed by organic lifeforms?
Consciousness by definition is the phenomenon of awareness and responsiveness of an agent towards it's subjective environment.
So I simply ask, is an atom not conscious of it's subjective environment? Say other atoms and interactions between them like intermolecular forces of repulsion and attraction? Van Der waals forces?gravitational forces?Etc
Or is an electron not conscious of electrostatic forces? Electromagnetic forces? Gravity? etc
Consciousness wasn't formed through abiogenesis, it wasn't formed when the first "living cell" appeared. A living cell is an example of a well structured organic molecule that shows awareness and responsiveness. It was the genesis of complex consciousness not consciousness itself.
I suppose every thing in the universe has a sense of consciousness to some extent and through complex interactions these elements of the universe form more complicated structures essentially forming consciousness as we know it in humans.
It is the birth of complex neurological awareness known as human consciousness that gives rise to an anthropocentric view of existence but in truth apart from physical bodies and psychological accumulation of memories, egos and archetypal structures our fundamental nature as humans is the sense of consciousness. Something that gets repeatedly formed from generation to generation. And there is no difference in this sense of consciousness whatsoever.
Now as per my first explanation I can conclude that humans are an example of the universe experiencing itself.
But I find it rather beautiful, one rock ball in a void of space with the right environment and chemical composition gave rise to consciousness on various levels of evolutionary lifeforms.
Comments
Post a Comment