20 - 003 Life is just complicated chemistry.

It is life itself that is so exciting a subject. From the cell replication from fertilisation into a new life to sadly the cancerous nightmare of faulty cell reproduction resulting in death. To all the faults that can be present from life’s conception to those triggered by the living of the life itself. From the preventive measures both ecological, personal and medicinal that can keep a good life on track to those that can be used to restore and prolong life when things go wrong. Much of this leads to a very unusual way of thinking about life and the universe itself. This is a recurring theme for me that everything boils down to just a set of simple rules. Sometimes called the unity of knowledge it has been given many different names by many different gurus, researchers, thinkers and academics. For some reason I like Edward O. Wilson’s name for it – Consilience. This is possibly because I had never heard of the word so it offers an air of mystery. For me significantly he was a biologist who thought like a digital technologist. This will be at the deep end of thought for many but so many minds have eluded to it that it has to be a worthy objective because it creates such a small target at which to aim your thoughts. Like a digital computer life is built up from very simple components built up in very complex ways. Just like a digital computer can be pulverised down to tiny particles which can be at an atomic level defined as chemical elements so can the human body when dead and cremated be similarly defined in terms of chemical elements. So just like the digital computer we are made up from chemical matter. No more or less. Just some chemicals. So the these chemical elements in one case build up say a smartphone whilst in another case they are used to build up a human being. So at a chemical level there is not much of a difference between them. Life is simply a matter of chemistry. The difference is in the construction of these chemical elements where the complexity of the build has gone further in the case of the human being than that of the smartphone. In the case of the human being the plans on how it should be built are defined by the DNA based human genome. Although based upon combinations of pairings, similar to the two (On and Off) used to support digital computers, it is further complicated by a double helix structure linking these pairings. But importantly the human genome can be digitised into a data structure which can be processed by a computer program. Whilst in the case of the smartphone it was never properly designed as such but it has been thrown together from a random set of components, concepts and ideas. The smartphone has a very crude and poor DNA genome equivalent. But the smartphone and the human still share a lot of common ground even if they are built differently. But the significant difference is this essence of a life generator. I think of it as the life battery that generates life itself. So it is all these aspects we are looking to explore including some very esoteric subjects discounted by the scientific community like radiesthesia and telepathy which have always held a fascination for me.