Rico Penguin

  I’ve been on a journey of sorts through my life, to prove to folks that likely nothing is black and white. Now honestly, could something like “How many people are you?” be that complicated of a question? I mean obviously, you are one person, I am one person, it seems so simple.

  Well lets go on a very short journey, through an entirely plausible series of events, merely limited by current medical technology. I’ll then ask a few simple questions and we’ll see how straight forward they are.

  For reasons unknown, Markus, has entered a hospital to have a peculiar surgery done. The hospital is going to cut Markus completely in half from tip of his head to his groin. The brain itself can survive as damaged as 50%, which means that a perfect cut with optimum tools and technology would leave two halves that only are limited by the organs that remain. We would need to either build or donate an extra heart and any other organs that are not perfectly split. Essentially the ‘open’ side would then be closed with a bionic enclosure. Nothing fancy, an apparatus that helps enclose both sides so that now we have two living halves that both function.

  My first question is a simple one. What would each side know? Would one side be able to speak and the other not? Does the brain store certain information in a raid between both halves? What would the halves say to one another?

  Perhaps some deeper more philosophical questions. Would the halves themselves feel one another? In theory if we have a soul we would be dealing with one entity that now experiences two separate sets of sensation. What metaphysical ramifications come from each not communicating with the other?

  Now I ask you. Given this situation that could quite easily happen with some small gains in the medical field. Is this just one person or two people? If you argue that it is one person, would you arrest one half if the other (unbeknownst to it) robbed a bank? If you didn’t arrest both of them then you are acknowledging that they are both separate people.

  But now we have a new question. At what point did we take one person and make them two? What was it that defines a person? Is it simply the bridge between the two hemispheres? Or is it merely how many functioning bodies are present. In the face of the split man you have taken one functioning body and made it into two with a few modifications.

  So that’s my conundrum. A problem that could be so easily fixed by just having a brain that does not operate when the hemispheres are disconnected from one another. This of course isn’t my finest work but the simple scenario and questions should keep folks busy which is what is important.

  People often ask the question of “Why are we here?” Which I believe I’ve touched on before but most recently it popped a similar thought into my head. To be succinct “Why Not?” Of the massive number of possible formula’s for universes that could possibly exist each has the same chance of existing as every other universe.

  Mathematics, Physics, Biology, and every other science that I don’t fully understand are based specifically within our own universe. It is one of those tautological “It is because it is.” kind of situations. So we are no more special than any other possible universe, sure we have life as we know it, but that is a self fulfilling setup. Anytime we find life it’ll be life as we know it because we have found it and thus we know it.

  Life as we know it has changed over the entire span of human existence and was different before we existed. Life as we know it will continue to change and if we discovered another universe (or even another planet) with different life following rules that we do not fully understand we will now have a new understanding of life as we know it.

  All that separates life in this universe from another universe that may or may not exist from being under our oh so wonderful “life as we know it” tag is us finding it.

  Because of this I see nothing special about this universe which makes me wonder. So it isn’t a question of why we are here, there is no reason why we shouldn’t be here. Not all why questions are necessarily ones that have an actual answer. Just like “Why do people generate more energy than the sun.” I can’t take credit for that revelation, Richard Dawkins had a similar one “Why are Unicorns Hollow.” Just because you can ask it doesn’t necessarily mean it is a valid or important question.

  My question isn’t necessarily better. I realize the irony or hypocrisy in me asking it, but I am finding it odd to assume that life shouldn’t be here. There is no better chance of any other universe than this one, and everything that makes it special is only special because it involves us in some manner or another.

  As a point of clarification before closing this little thought, I don’t hate our reality, in fact I find it very awesome, but I don’t need some unanswerable question to justify that feeling. Since we exist I see reason enough.

  The following is not necessarily fact, indeed this is just a thought experiment on why I’m not too amazed that there is life or that life can manifest itself from a universe that is seemingly non-living.

  I am unsure of the exact mechanics of DNA and RNA. Nor do I know if these are the most basic of building blocks for life. However I am going to assume, for the sake of argument, that they are. If they are not you can quite easily, without breaking the point, replace their names with the actual names of the basic building blocks of life.

  If you were to take the chemicals that naturally occur upon Earth that are responsible for these basic building blocks and you placed them in a large vat. Lets say a vat the size of a stadium, something far smaller than the size of the Earth (almost ridiculously so) and you left them to constantly react to one another every moment of every day, for years and years, I am certain that you would in return find yourself with extremely simple life.

  This life would have an intelligence, however it would be absolutely basic. The operations of generating energy and replicating would be all that it does. Why? Well even non-living elements on the periodic table are (misnomer alert) instinctively searching to complete their outer electron shell. There is an inherent motivation to have a full ring and it is an ever present reality in our Universe. This basic need moves right on into life, the ever present desire to consume energy in order to complete operations that sustain a stable life pattern that gives the longest period of time to replicate and repeat this action.

  This function is so fantastically simple that it requires little in the way of blind faith to accept. It essentially is the spawning of a billion light switches that have binary modes. They have two extremely basic functions and they repeat these functions over and over.

  It is through this process of repetition and the ever present reality that nothing can (to our or at least my knowledge) perfectly replicate itself that we received change. These simple creatures began to have errors in their coding that resulted in extra operations becoming present. These extra operations, just like newer mechanical gadgets, presented even more gears to break. The more complicated anything gets the more there is to worry about after all.

  These compounding functions, of replication, error, and growth result over a period of time to what we see today. It is not difficult to believe either, when watching bacteria replicating at nearly breakneck speed I find myself wondering just how many sneezes are going on in the process. How unrelated the bacteria a few days later are from their great ancestors of the days prior (assuming the bacteria has a short lifespan of course).

  The shorter the lifespan of an organism the more present are these mechanisms I believe, because the shorter the lifespan of an organism, the more quickly it consumes and reproduces thus providing far more chances for replication and error. I’m sure this is not breaking science news for anyone but it is something I was thinking about recently. The point however is that at the most basic level of life. You really just have the same operations that are committed (at least in concept) at the electron level of elements. They are attempting to complete a simple circuit to establish a level of stability. It is this simple action that is present even in the non-living that drives all of life. Not necessarily the only thing, but I’m quite sure that the primary need of any organism is to maintain a stable energy level since every other operation after that requires it. You can’t exactly mate if you are dead…usually…ok there was that one time…wait…nevermind I’ve said too much.

  I hope you enjoyed this thought experiment. Tonight I will also be publishing my final version of the Alabaster Bonobo: Tides of Chaos. If you ever needed a reason to dislike Microsoft here it is: They have Wal-Mart in their dictionary but not Bonobo.

  It is often said that God sent the Devil to Hell as punishment for defying him and attempting to overthrow the kingdom of Heaven. Sure this makes absolutely no sense at all but lets just run with it and assume that it does. So with this in mind the Devil has established a very powerful trait, the Devil defies God. This fact enrages the Lord and thusly he reacts win the same manner as any Tyrant and banishes the Infidel.

  The story goes that the Devil is behind all the pain we go through. Sure Eve tricked Adam into eating the Apple but it was the Snake (Devil) that tricked her. So the idea stretches on to say that the Devil is hurting all people to get back at God for being an asshole who can’t take a little insurrection.

  I would think that there is a much easier way to get back at God. In fact an action that would be so infuriating that there would likely have to be a new even worse punishment (perhaps being made non existent). This would be not harming people, or even worse still helping them. In doing so the Devil would be defying God once again and would create a system where Heaven would be depleted of its members and the Devil would then essentially own his own Heaven. It would infuriate the one asshole he never could get a long with and it would absolve him of doing exactly what his old leader demanded.

  What I find almost incomprehensible is the idea that the Devil has not already thought this up. Considering the fact that I am merely a mortal and the Devil was originally an Angel of Heaven (the top angel wasn’t it). This leads me to ask the question of whether or not the Devil (if existent) is actually already doing this. If this is the case then it follows to ask who is causing all the pain in the world?

  What better way to get people into your following than to hurt those around you and put the blame on someone else. It is entirely possible that God, being defied by Satan again, has no other option but to hurt people in order to maintain the belief that Satan is harming folks and to perpetuate the system God originally put in place to get people into the club.

  Now this might sound preposterous however it really does fall on some pretty simple facts. These tactics have been used in Governments in Human History and it has been proven that the best way to Infuriate someone you can’t kill is to disobey them and to showcase just how powerless they actually are.

  Also doesn’t help that all of the mass murders in the Bible were perpetuated by God. Unless someone found a verse that says that the Devil was killing innocent babies, creating mass floods, and murdering hundreds of thousands of people to prove a point.

  When discussing cloning there is a general question of whether or not the new clone would retain the memories of its parent organism. Generally speaking I can think of absolutely no reason why this would be the case however it got me thinking.

  I believe I’ve discussed before the fact that the right side of the brain and the left side of the brain can function while entirely separated from their sister lobe assuming they still have all the connections to the body that keep them alive. While these are both in the same body it appears that the person still is a single person.

  What would happen though if we split a person bilaterally from top to bottom and connected each side to the required machinery to keep them alive. Perhaps in a future with advanced cybernetics we could give them half mechanical and half organic. At any rate, my point is this, would each function as the original did? We have created two people out of one person and not only that but each has the ability to function just as the originally did, however half as fast (well not literally but a separated brain does not function as well as a full brain…which isn’t a shock).

  Would each side make the same choices when presented with the same stimuli? How evenly split would the memories of the person be? How well would they function as a team? Do we consider this as two individual people or one person? That final question is the one that is blowing my mind a bit.

  Is a person split in half and still alive a single person or two people? It seems to break the black and white view of a person or an organism in general. It is another case of something seemingly obvious that is in no way obvious. It also is an important question when looking at a mother and the child within her. At what point do we consider them as two individual people, is it because they have each a set of organs? If so would that mean that a person split bilaterally would now no longer be a person at all?

  The things that keep my brain moving are so odd sometimes…

    This is a bit of a thought experiment but I’ve come to think that perhaps the human brain is an example of evolutionary pit falling. I’d use a better term but my brain is kind of not running on all cylinders at the moment itself!

    In the universe there are many objects of varying sizes and gravitational pulls. It would seem obvious that at a certain point that gravity becomes so great that it just continually compounds upon itself and creates an extremely massive singular point. Essentially whenever you are dealing with variable systems there seems to be a real world situation where there is a runaway train effect that creates otherwise seemingly impossible (or extremely unlikely events).

  The Human brain seems to be another example of this. I have a strong feeling that the evolution of the human brain works in a similar fashion. This may be an event that is unlikely to happen again for quite sometime. When the original mutations hit and the earliest humans did grow larger brains (in whatever manner or region that they did) it must have been an extremely helpful mutation. This was much like that first bit of mass past the critical threshold in space. As more and more generations of this species reproduced the changes were reinforced more and more and the brain kept growing progressively larger.

    I imagine larger brains are evolutionarily extremely handy (extreme being the popular theme this post) however they are not biologically primary mutations. There is some sort of required event, perhaps a very large amount of food to help lessen the necessity of other advantages (like strength or senses). The human skull did change allowing more space for the brain and that change was the weakening of the jaw muscles. Perhaps the major food source of Humans changed in some great manner and that change increased the amount of food ingested per human per life.

  It’s an interesting question, while mutations are hardly intentional it does seem that certain mutations do cause absolutely amazing continual mutations that lead to extraordinary organisms.

  Extra Note: I will warn you in advance. If these existential posts are a bit annoying for you the next week might be difficult for you! I’m on vacation so it’s probably going to be a week of thought experiments. I will try my best to make them as inspirational as possible.