The Rock

In all the shifting values and judgments, the reasons to respect or reject: the Stand-up Guy, the Friendly Zionist, the Economic Cannibal, the Unreconstructed Rebel, the Heart of Gold, all the angels and anathemas, there is one first thing I require of people: you do what you say you're going to do. That's the rock upon which I build a friend. It is what I ask and what I offer. Where I fail I make no excuse, where you fail it is marked. Everyone falls. You get up and learn to walk. It is an old judgment, an old rock, tagged with graffiti, ringed with dog shit and latte cups, clambered over and pissed upon, mocked and disregarded: there.

originally 1/15/12

Patch me through to the Real You

Some joker quipped that water invented man to move it uphill.*  Was that the glimmer of some larger comprehension? Science now tells us that there are ten times more bacteria in the human body than there are human cells. Ten times.

One tenth of what we are is human cells - eukaryota; nine tenths is microorganisms - prokaryota. This - thing - inside our body also has a hundred times more genes than there are in the human genome. They form a complex bacteria colony that biology calls a microbiome.

"We" are ten trillion cells hosting a hundred trillion bacteria. The hundred trillion headquarter in our gastrointestinal tract but colonize the whole body with specialized strains. They swarm over our skin, mouth, eyes, small intestine. If you wore goggles that picked up only bacteria, you would see a human form entire in its eerie microbiotic glow.

Most of these bacteria have no known beneficial or harmful effect - they don't do anything to or for us, apart from providing fuel and maintenance, as you would for any vehicle.  They help in breaking down carbs for digestion and fighting off invaders. 

But for them, we - our body, mind, and spirit - are wholly functional. Everything we do for ourselves we do for them. We get them where they want to go and do what they need done so that they can survive and flourish. We feed them, house them, transport them, provide them with information - everything we get for ourselves is at their service. 

They don't work for our benefit; we work for theirs. So who's boss?

We walk the world doing, seeing, thinking, creating - feeling - and all of that serves the hundred trillion; keeps them warm, safe, fed, and carries them across the land, over the sea, through the air; they have flown us to the moon.

But the big idea here – the vertigo paradigm shift – is that the bacterial organism inside us - is not a "they;” it is a “me.” As our cells compose us, those ten-to-the-13th bacteria are the components of a single living self, as real, more real, than your you and my me.

This idea emerges, this Galileo moment; that you - your "you" - are a transportation system for a microbiological superorganism, a life form whole and aware.There is more of it than there is of you. There is this enigmatic microbial presence within and throughout your body and brain that is your possessor and your reason for being. Your flesh and bone, your nervous system, senses, cognitive and emotional responses, language, motivation, your ego, your self...are all inventions for the convenience and well-being of a dark presence so cryptic and alien we don't recognize it as an entity. It is the real You.

These things in us; we have no idea what they want. Beyond survival and reproduction. We don't know what they feel. You want to say, "Not much. They don't think, they don't feel, they're prokaryotes, for god's sake, they don't even have nuclei!" 

Increasingly, the scientific community is coming recognize superorganisms - ant colonies for instance - as unities; as intelligences. An ant don't know nothin', he just drives to Walmart and comes home with the Cheetos. But something larger is giving him specific, sophisticated, instructions. The collective community shows that it knows what it's doing; it is aware. 

Gradually, we humans begin to recognize that we're not so special; other creatures see, feel, know more than we credit them. Parrots know what they're saying; they make jokes. They are us too.

How sentient is it, that shadowy self we live to serve? How awake? Generations coming will re-define what "conscious" means - the process has begun in earnest these last two hundred years. 

"Wait!" you erupt, "there may be more bacteria in us than  nucleus cells, but we have the weight, the mass, the volume! 

Let's say you get in your SUV and drive to Best Buy for an HDTV. A squirrel, a dog, a crow, and a paleolithic human watch us coming. What are they going to think they're seeing? The massive growling beast bearing down on them, or the little round thing dimly visible behind its plexiglass forehead? Let's say you stop and get out to see if you killed that squirrel; which are they going to perceive as the real beast; the squishy little forked thing that squeaks or the hulking hard thing that growls? 

The SUV has the weight, mass and volume, but we know it is only the transport; we are the driver. Same with the microbiome within. It is behind the wheel.

Human thought, communication - our language, our mind - are appliances to the Biota; our body their tools. We are their high-speed data connection, their full-spectrum prosthesis and their pimped-out ride. We are their environmental control mechanism. 

You look for a purpose in life? A reason to be? The gurus are right. Look within yourself.

No wonder we missed it. No wonder we search in vain. They're everywhere in all of us and we didn't even know they exist. Until now.

I'm thinking there will be a little resistance around town to the concept of humanity as a clueless bionic omnibot for escherichia coli. 

"Free will? You telling me we don’t choose to choose what we want to choose?"

Yes? Based on what? Those gut decisions? That warm sense of rightness down in there, that fire in your belly? Orders. Straight from HQ; that's where they live. That's Rome, Moscow, Babylon, Beijing, is the belly. And the mind? That's binary code, a set of sub-routines controlling the autopilot. Only contingently aware.

Hell, we can't help being eukaryote supremacists. We were brought up that way.  It was engineered into us to maintain system integrity. But don't worry, you can still see yourself as your own reason for being. That's what they want you to think.

Do I really believe any of this wild speculation? Yes, I don't know how much, but I think I'm onto something. The "Galileo moment" is about simplicity - the planets around the sun makes a much cleaner design than the solar system around the earth. Same thing here. Better math.

Does the biome within us have a soul? Probably not, not what we mean by that. The concept of the soul is an anthropic artifact. Their ideation, if they have one, is entirely incomprehensible to us, the Total Other. 

As I understand it, hologenome theory has us evolving together with our bacteria, as a single organism - but they were there first; prokaryotes preceded eukaryotes, so we evolved under their care.

Are we talking about a non-mutualistic extracellular endosymbiotic comensalism? Yes. Maybe. 

I wonder if they worry that their human technology may become sentient. Eventually.  

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_microbiome


*“Human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another.”
Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction

**The technical definition of a superorganism is "a collection of agents which can act in concert to produce phenomena governed by the collective,"

Some scientists have suggested that individual human beings can be thought of as "superorganisms"; as a typical human digestive system contains 1013 to 1014 microorganisms whose collective genome ("microbiome") contains at least 100 times as many genes as our own [12] (see also Human microbiome project)

Wikipedia, Superorganism