BALANCING ON THE BRINK OF NEW KNOWLEDGE

DNA is the code for the Operating System, the apparatus that becomes a body.  It is a great ironic unknown that the DNA in blood cannot be in the red blood corpuscles because they have no nucleus.  In fact, they are not truly “cells,” just little entities for transporting hemoglobin, the oxygen carrier.  To say one is a “red-blooded” American would mean that one had no code in the blood, just oxygen, the essence of air.  It is fuel, can’t think, but makes thinking and coding possible through the collaboration of the brain cells.

Talking about “blood quantum” is a self-contradiction.  The DNA that is analyzed in “blood” is really the white blood cells, the infection-fighting cells.  This is why HIV-AIDS is so difficult — it’s inside certain white blood cells, in the DNA code.

2.  The brain is the dashboard of the nerve system which manages the interface between the world outside the skin and the world inside the skin.  The nerve network converts waves and surfaces of various kinds into electromagnetic signals that can travel on the nerves to either the brain or various specialized sub-stations, maybe attached to specialized organs or cell-structures like ears, noses, tongues, fingertips.  But there are many cells that can perceive and send code, esp. within the skin.  Some are monitoring molecules like insulin or dopamine.  Some tell you whether you are right-side up.

3.  This realization has made scientists think that what is in the brain is a “picture of the world”, only a simulacra that can be quite different from one culture to another, one person to another, or the same person in different moods.

4.  A subset of this is our great preoccupation with the exchange of information, world-views, fictionalized interpretations, and the kaleidoscope of memory, which we begin to believe is not recorded whole in our brains but rather filed in parts that are reassembled on demand.  A product of this enterprise is the appearance of alternative histories of the world, telling quite different stories when freed from the yoke of the dominant culture of academia/
publishing/government.  

5.  Women, slaves, differently colored people, different occupations, jailbirds, indigenous peoples, turn out to develop cultures of their own which often have consequences for people quite outside their groups.  This is one of the themes of “Game of Thrones.”  They can be enemies or allies.

6.  “Thought” as we know it, is the product of connections between cells in the brain, actual filaments that reach through and around the other cells to get to their goal.  If the connection is repeated, it becomes stronger.  This is called the “connectome” and can be illustrated in computer images.  We could not see this without computers and highly sensitive detectors of electro-chemical signals as they travel through the filaments.  But the eventual product is our experience of identity.

7.  The fluid that surrounds all cells everywhere in the body also carries information in the form of freefloating molecules.  During thought, the fluid becomes loaded with info-bit debris, so every now and then thought ceases, the individual brain cells contract, and the interstitial fluids wash through, between, and on down small lymph channels only recently discovered.  This is like the tide coming in through the canals of Venice, removing rubbish and sending in clean water.  If this fails to happen, thinking goes bonkers: hallucinating, not-seeing, making bad connections, getting stuck in moods, maybe even affecting movement.

8.  The brain also has a blood barrier that prevents larger molecules from ever getting in between the brain cells or into the cells.  We’re finding a few ways to get the biggies in there anyway.  Not always a good idea.

9.  Brains on drums.  Rhythm at the heart of existence. http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/the-neuroscience-of-drumming.html

10.  All the “omes” — the double helix “spine” which is like a keyboard which is “played” by methylization turning genes off and on as an “epigenome.”  Then a bacteriome in the gut, interacting and influencing digestion.  Proteomes are the systems of proteins (molecules of a certain kind)  This url is to a list of omics.  http://omics.org/index.php/Alphabetically_ordered_list_of_omes_and_omics   

They are fields, ranges, tranches, sets of phenomena in the body (but the term spreads from there) that are studied with high technology and thick data to reveal relationships we hadn’t known existed at all.  It’s one of the major frontiers of knowledge and a new source of paradigms as well as a penetration of our basic building block: the cell.

These things challenge institutional religion to a death match, but the “spiritual” — the freefloating emerging “art” of weaving experience into a world view has more freedom.  A determining force is the way culture treats new lives, forming children into relationships that encourage exploration versus lives of suppression and paralysis.  Schools are institutions with much potential for evil.  Economic systems that pit people against each other cause culture death as well as numbing the human potential.  Every planetary disaster reveals our weaknesses and may even have been caused by us.

Major economic systems are vulnerable to changes in resources or technologies (omics) and can torture and destroy millions of people.  More insidious changes may be things like what is being called “surveillance capitalism” — the internet compilation and constant communication across nations, beyond monetary systems, converting people’s faces and words into access — is far beyond families using Facebook or schools providing tablets to all students.  The scope for evil/good gets into our brains through our eyes and fingers, through storylines and superheroes and fantasies about animals.  We sit in Indiana watching a green night-screen depiction as our predator drones kill families.

The success of Christianity — its operating system, its DNA — has been due to using the paradigm of family as it was defined by the then-new agricultural society.  Productivity, hard work, the alpha male who grooms his son, the compliant and nurturing mother, and an abiding suspicion of competitors, esp. those in the city, has been valid in the eyes of many people right down to my own parents, who both grew up on farms.  Literary challenges (like the internet) were co-opted early with the Bible.  

All those sources and images have become out-moded now.  The new ones are not quite formed.  We don’t know what comes after the family, or after democracy, or — indeed — after the family.  Maybe after our species.  If your religious premise is the preservation of one’s own life and lifestyle, it is a doomed set of ideas.  If your values are participation and awareness, life can be joyful.  And scary.