Forms of life, forms of mind
The understanding that we are essentially collective intelligences – real Selves, but composed of smaller competent agents (not passive parts) has many implications for the notions of “life” and “death”. Some of these are covered in this paper. Here, I wanted to draw some connections between an interesting development in cell biology and recent work in synthetic morphoengineering.
An exciting new research area is emerging – the thanatotranscriptome. In brief, cells from a human or non-human animal, at death, start to turn on expression of specific new genes. Why do cells turn on new genes? Why these specific genes? What, if anything, do they do? What is the evolutionary significance of this? Is it adaptive, or a side-effect of some other aspect of animal biology? There is an excellent team of scientists studying these and other questions; find their work here:
I have an idea about why this occurs. I think the cells are preparing for a new life – in another world, at another scale. In the case of aquatic animals, this plan is not at all crazy. For mammals and birds, it’s quixotic, with realistic expectations not having caught up yet with their evolutionary change of environment and lifestyle. To understand the idea, consider the following.
