Rational Reality

EXCERPT FROM PART ONE 

1. RATIONAL REALITY: VéRITAS UT SE HABET OR THE KNOWN UNKNOWNS

What can science tell us about the universe and ourselves?

The suicide of cells happens to be an ordinary event and even a necessary part of the animal biological process. The death of a single cell brings with it the inevitable fate of certain death in multicellular organisms. Even scarier is the realization that we are not only programmed to die but that we lodge the very mechanisms that will make sure we disappear in our anthropomorphic bodies. Biologist William Clark explains in his book Sex and the Origins of Death that this was not always the case. The earliest single celled monerans reproduced asexually through a process called fission. It is a process in which a given cell autonomously reproduces its own DNA and “then divides into two perfectly coequal clones of itself, each clonal offspring receiving one copy of the DNA. These cells mature, and each produces two healthy, coequal clones in turn.” In other words, these monerans were immortal.

Of course, they could run out of available resources and die, but they lacked the one feature that brings death to cells with sex and all multicellular organisms: senescence. In Clark’s words, senescence is “the gradual, programmed aging of cells and the organisms they make up, independently of events in the environment.” Therefore, it is no coincidence that the appearance of programmed death through senescence occurred simultaneously with the emergence of sexual reproduction. 

Sex, in this context, refers to the exchange or the blend of genetic information, and reproduction means the action or process of copying cells. Sexual reproduction of cells required longer periods and a lot more energy, but once it materialized, it ruled the reproduction over successive life forms. Why? Because sexual reproduction increases genetic variation, which helps us to cope better with the ever-changing environment. At the same time, it makes repairs and elimination of genetic errors possible. We cannot forget that sexual reproduction was responsible for the formation of multicellular organisms…

Paradoxically enough, sex and death play a major role in our greatest fears, the beginning and the end of our existence. From an early age, we are pervasively preoccupied with gender differences and death without realizing that sex and death are the foundation of our complex nature and human existence. We spend our lives building walls against the awareness of reproduction and death. We do our utmost to deny that these concepts exist in our lives and behave in a way that indicates that we are ashamed of our sexuality or think we would live forever. Have you ever joked that your parents only had sex X amount of times, equaling the number of children they have? It’s in our very essence, in our language. In more than one language, our reproductive organs quite literally translate into “shame parts.” In German, it is Schamteile, in Spanish las vergüenzas or Afrikaans skaamdele. No wonder sex is stigmatized and that victims of abuse and rape often choose not to speak out.

EXCERPT FROM PART TWO   

1. RATIONAL REALITY (I think, THEREFORE I exist)

About the limits of rational thinking and its consequences

In 150 A.D., the Alexandrian astronomer and mathematician Ptolemy developed the Ptolemaic system clearing the way to geocentric cosmology. He assumed that the earth was stationary in the center of the universe, and the rest of the planets traveled in uniform motion, in circles superimposed on circles or epicycles. For 13 centuries, we believed that planet earth was the center of the universe and that living organisms worked like this universe where each part got assigned a specific place and function.

It wasn’t until Nicolaus Copernicus rocked our world by proposing that planet earth was orbiting in imperfect circles around the sun and turning on its axis once a day. Whoa, for the first time in history, we were not in the center of the universe! Later, in the seventeenth century, Newton and his apple formulated the law of universal gravitation. Assisted by the Cartesian system of coordinates, he gave us a mechanical perspective of reality based on set ratios. As a result, we started to think mechanically about the universe and ourselves and believed that the cosmos and our bodies were perfectly greased mechanical artifacts.

A century later, Darwin told us that animals and humans share a common ancestry through his theory of evolution. What a bummer! We realized that we were not special creatures created by God but just another animal with enhanced performance organs. We started to look at nature and ourselves differently and more dynamically.

Then, Albert Einstein came along and gave us the theory of relativity that challenged every notion of the world as we knew it. He presented us with a universe not made of basic objects but rather as a dynamic flux of events and processes. Finally, quantum theory ratified, rectified and expanded some aspects of Einstein's relativity theory, once again reframing the world and the universe as an undivided whole where all parts of the universe are merged, interconnected and united in one totality. A world in which one seemingly insignificant action or word can forever change the whole universe. 

It is the time when digital technology is conquering the world, and we see ourselves reduced as complex biological computers, self-regulated by algorithmic codes based on probability. However, as plausible as it sounds, it is misleading. Even if human organisms follow the logic of algorithms, they are not algorithms themselves. A human body is made of palpable tissues, organs and systems that do not blindly obey simply any line of functional code while ignoring the context of operation. Besides, algorithms are predictable and inflexible. They are not best suited to explain how creatively entropy and homeostasis push human organisms to organize their chemistry. That is why AI has been unable to generate feelings and affective states. AI has been capable of distilling and isolating intellectual processes. But it did so while hiding behind big data that are not necessarily correlated with complex contexts. This of course includes entropic and homeostatic processes. If capable at all, AI using algorithms will take quite some time to decipher what feelings are and how they are created. And we have not even started to deal with concepts such as imagination, beauty, love, suffering or death. As Einstein said, “I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking.” But the story of rational science goes on. We will continue to see ourselves as a reflection of our own intellectual discoveries unless we make the executive decision to avoid falling prey to our own rational traps. These rational reality pitfalls are often too familiar for us even to realize its flaws.     

Other 99.9% Realities