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action to make a tail, a flagellum, that enables the cell to swim to a new environment. Then, having provided itself with the means, it simply keeps swimming until it either finds a better home or perishes from its efforts.
Such a procedure involves the quite complicated cooperative interaction of many components--amounting to a considerable degree of non-zero-sumness. It also produces a complex structure that was not there before, a whip-like flagellum that the cell can manipulate to give itself mobility. In any such change, the 2nd law of thermodynamics insists that the total disorder of the system had to increase.
E. coli did this by burning highly ordered molecules of stored 'food' to simpler, more disordered things like carbon dioxide, water, and heat. Behind the scene, a bewilderingly complex ordered sequence of events occurred driven by the cooperative effects of non-zero-sum interactions.
We humans tend to think of ourselves as 'higher organisms.' But from an energy efficiency viewpoint we are quite crude compared to our brothers the plants. Complexity, the product of the dynamics of non-zero-sumness, can appear in many forms, some of them being information. The moment we bring information into the equation we can recover our status as 'highest living organism.' When we add information processing and ordered cooperation between individuals, our status heightens even more.
It requires the study of only one of thousands of these intricate control systems in living organisms that operate under the guidance of sophisticated information processing and negative feedback controls, to convince any rational person of the quite incredible, almost infinite complexity of even the simplest of living cells.
Multiply that infinity by another infinity (or two) and we might approach the complexity required to sustain a 'primitive' hunter-gatherer society in the face of competing systems 'designed' to reverse the roles and the hunter to become the hunted. Wright thinks that the basic sequence, the conversion of non-zero sum situations into mostly positive sums commenced happening at least 15,000 years ago, then repeated many times. As natural selection pushed us up the evolutionary ladder, so new technologies kept arising, permitting richer forms of non-zero sum interactions--and here we are today, riding in airplanes, sending e-mail, and living in what looks like the beginnings of a global village.
Wright has another target--to seek the hidden potential in the complexity he analyzes in order to reveal the possibility of an external and intelligent agency of control that he calls 'God' (but with a humble apology for his absence of qualifications to describe or explain God's ways). "I'm using 'God,'" he says, "as a convenient shorthand for something vaguer--the point being just to ask if there are signs of any divinely imparted meaning in the evidence before us. Granted directionality in the sense of growing complexity, is there any directionality along with what you might call a spiritual or moral dimension--or more simply, is there anything at all that might be called spiritual or moral?"
Wright notes that in the modern era the popular view among 'intellectuals' became that existence is pointless--plus a firm belief that there are solid scientific grounds for doing so. This paradigm assumes that modern science, by solving the mysteries of life, has actually demonstrated the absence of any higher purpose.
"What these people need," says Wright, "is a good stiff thought experiment. Imagine another planet on which life evolves. Little bits of self-replicating material (equivalent to our genes) encase themselves through natural selection in a particular armor that exhibits behavioral flexibility. One species in particular--coincidentally a brainy, two-legged organism--becomes capable of exceptional feats like communicating with subtlety, creating artistic masterpieces, watching TV, playing computer games, and so on.
"These organisms have another characteristic--they lack totally in consciousness, sentience, awareness. It isn't like anything "to be like one of them. And yes, fire burns their hands and they are designed to pull them away to avoid damage. But they do not feel pain--or happiness, or anything.
"They look and act just like us except everything is without passion or pride. They are just robots with an unusually good skin."
Such a world lacks those things that many of us believe make life meaningful--devoted love, allegiance, our triumphs and failures, the thrill of accomplishment, etc. Worse, their world is totally lacking in a sense of moral meaning.
These imaginary organisms of an imaginary world are really replicas of what many behavioral scientists assert us to be--machines that do as they do because they cannot do otherwise.
"Ask yourself this question," says Wright. "Is there anything immoral about unplugging your computer? If not, how could there be anything immoral about 'unplugging' your neighbor by some convenient means if he/she is just an insensate organism and happens to be a nuisance to you for some reason?"
This is the kind of world we would live in if words like right or wrong had no meaning.
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