Chemical Conscience..

I was recently going thru my file of report cards and certificates, when i chanced upon my primary school report cards. Lots of memories were brought back from tht time. I remembered how the teachers used to hate me for being very slow and dull. Part of the reason for tht was tht i had a habit of regularly dozing off on the last bench, and its of course human to take some time to awaken from ur deep mid-morning slumber; ya even when the teachers shouting at u at the top of her voice jus trying to wake u up. This , my regular daydreaming bouts and my answers which were completely alien to my school teachers resulted in my landing into the school counsellor's office almost every week. The counsellor it seems realized my "true potential" and called my mother for a visit. "Mrs. Chinoy, ur child is extremely brilliant, but he just doesnt apply himself..". Ya rite.. as if i were some kinda paint..

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One of my statements in the post Illusion... didn't go down too well with some readers. The statement was something along these lines -

" the modern skeptic would however refute Descartes' definition of thinking saying even tht was a set of chemical reactions..massively complicated but just that..chemical reactions; and thus even thoughts can be decieved"

The cause of discontent was the fact tht i had called thinking,perception,comprehension,etc "just" a set of chemical reactions and nothing "more".. Whereas infact we being "living " beings with a conscience should have some kind of a soul or subconscious or something which transcends the physical.This debate is again a very interesting one with a few amusing consequences.

The first signs of life on earth were in the form of certain organic molecules , which slowly combined to give progressively higher "life forms" , and here there is no doubt that these "life forms" were nothing but rudimentary chemical reactions which were self supporting. Thus slowly over the centuries and millenia, these fundamental life forms gave way to algae, then bacteria, then sea life which in turn evolved into land roaming creatures and so on.

The final step in the human evolution was the transition from basic primates to the advanced form that we are today. Now, the question arises, is there any one point of time in this evolutionary history of billions of years, where we can point and say- "okay heres where we developed a conscience, or soul" ?? Evolution is just the process of increasing the complexity(Generally..though its not a rule.. the term evolution is assumed to encompass 'devolution'..so increasing complexity is just a trend and not a rule.) of the rudimentary reactions that all life started off with. and so all developments or advances that a species makes are just certain basic chemical changes in the way the substances in the body react. So this leads to the conclusion that even if we did develop a "soul" or "conscience" in the process of evolution.. it is purely chemical.

Why do we attribute life with "divine" properties? Isnt everything we do just a set of chemical reactions? Why is that "something-more-than-just-physical" required? Every thought,every action,every emotion, every desire is the byproduct of a set of chemical reactions. We are no different from a group of molecules reacting in a test tube; its just that we undergo a trillion differnt reactions every moment and are self sustaining. but u wudnt call an active electrolytc cell "living" wud u?? after all it cant emote, cant express, commuicate or show any properties tht are synonymous with our definition of life. But what is our definiton of life?? expression and feeling of emotions?? motion??... all these are reproducible chemically.. happiness can be induced using endorphins, passion using aphrodisiacs, excitement and energy using steroids.. thus even the basic defining feature of life-emotions can be simulated with chemicals.. is a soul really required now? an extraneous metaphysical entity which could be cited as the cause of these emotions? If we still insist on a soul or a conscience, then it wud have to be of chemical origin to explain the above observations.

We are nearing the creation of perfect AI - Artificial Intelligence. A piece of coded hardware given a power source, would be able to think as intelligently as any of us and independently. It wudnt be programmed to think in a particular way- it wud just be given a "brain" with which it wud be able to think independently from scratch, learning via observation,just as a baby would. If this "robot" would now learn to express emotions, we wud still not accept them as "true" emotions. after all how can a lifeless piece of junk running on electricity emote? The question here is how are these emotions different from our own? they are induced by certain electronic circuit variables, while ours by a certain set of chemical reactions. Why are our emotions "true" while the robots' "unreal"? Why do we not accept the robots movements and emotions as signs of life? even the robot would learn to defend itself against any form of danger.. even the robot would learn to react to various situations like us..and thus show all the characteristics we attribute to life. but we would still refute the argument saying that the robot lacked a conscience which we humans possess.

Is artificial different from natural? how? In the future if research on cloning,stem cells, etc makes us sufficiently technologically capble of producing entire living beings.. would these have a conscience? if yes then again it wud have to be chemical as it is artificial and wud lack the "divine touch".. but then these living beings would behave in exactly the same manner that we do, how then wud we differentiate between 'artificial' and 'natural', 'divine' and 'chemical'??(of course w/o using the belly buttons!)

The debate i have presented above is pretty speculative and a little on the vague side. This is partly because i lack enough background in biology and related matters. But the entire essence behind the debate is philosophical in nature and thus i have attempted to put it forward.

*Since this post is getting a bit too long, it shall be followed up with a subsequent post in a couple of days..till then chew on this..*

Cheers