20 - 009 We are just a complex set of chemicals.

Before we consider further being digital we must understand that we are in fact chemical. This is because we can be exactly defined in our chemical makeup we can then be exactly defined as being digital device. The essence of life is that we are just a chemically made up organism. You may be a reader that finds this difficult to accept believing that something living has some magical ingredient over and above something that is not living. There is nothing magical but there is complexity to a degree that can almost be unimaginable. Not only complexity but the components of this complexity are impossibly small for us to comprehend. Complexity combined with miniaturisation to microscopic levels makes understanding it all very difficult. Plus there are aspects that remain unresolved so those that are unresolved always leave the opportunity for people to imagine that there are dependencies on mysterious unknown forces. I don’t believe in any such forces and that life is nothing but an ongoing chemical process lasting until it ceases to work as a chemical process resulting in death. So to pursue what many of you may seem as a dark and bleak prognosis on life let us get down to some fundamental basics. We need to start using the knowledge that emanates from the physics discipline. Matter is made up from atoms being the smallest building blocks from which our world is constructed. Atoms are like miniature solar systems containing sub-atomic particles of protons, neutrons and electrons. Protons and neutrons are found in the nucleus of an atom. Electrons are found in different orbits or energy levels orbiting around the nucleus. In chemistry we are particularly interested in electrons since chemical reactions involve the rearrangement of electrons. Now an element is a substance made up of atoms with the same number of protons. Elements are the simplest substances known and they are listed in the Periodic Table. Elements exposed to a chemical reaction form compounds. So atoms are held together in compounds by chemical bonds. The compounds that make up living organisms fall into two types:- Inorganic Compounds. eg water (which exists as molecules) and salts (which contain ions such as potassium, calcium and chlorides) Organic Compounds. eg carbohydrates, lipids and proteins all of which exist as molecules. Within the organic compounds from a digital perspective the nucleotides and nucleic acids are the key chemicals that support DNA and RNA since they support genetic inheritance and genetic modification. So as we covered earlier DNA is made up from adenine (A), thymine (T), guanine (G) and cytosine (C). These are the compounds that create the patterns in DNA. Whilst RNA consists of adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C) but instead of thymine (T) it has uracil (U). But what we are not attempting to do here is understand the detail of biological chemistry this would cover many books in its own right and be very complex and scientific. What we are looking to do here in this Digital Human book is establish in your thinking that complex things can be defined by establishing codification for each thing and record all the patterns of these things that exist at any one time. Then as events in the life of the organism unfold see how these codified patterns have changed. Importantly these days also look at the tools and techniques that can be applied to these patterns to change an organism’s life.