Can The Simulation Hypothesis Explain Human Enigmas?
Despite the account in the Biblical Book of Genesis, humans could
not have been created by an omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent
supernatural deity. When it comes to the human species and human
anatomy, Intelligent Design is conspicuous by its absence. What
infallible, immortal intelligence superimposes the reproductive system
and the waste elimination system in a cheek-by-jowl manner? What's the
intelligence behind tonsils and the appendix? If you have a bad back do
you blame God? You should if you put your trust in Genesis.
There are a number of traits that appear to suggest human uniqueness, though I maintain these traits are not a step-function but a continuum, albeit a line that still places humans well in front of most if not all other animals. That "well in front" bit is still anomalous.
I won't detail our anomalous physiology in terms of our bipedal gait without the benefit of a balancing tail (1); our loss of fur (2) and our sky-rocketing IQ (3) other than to note that if these traits conveyed such evolutionary advantage as to have these adaptations reinforced down through the generations, then why haven't any of our primate kissin' cousins like the chimpanzees, gorillas and monkeys followed suit? It's all very anomalous.
I will instead concentrate or focus on roughly half-dozen or more other facets of humanity's anomalous existence which defy logical explanations starting with the most unique part of our physiology, our face.
FACIAL FEATURES
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We come in breeds. The proof of that pudding stares you in the face everyday as you observe the racial variety of people around you. I don't recall anything in the Biblical Book of Genesis that explains this, so maybe God had nothing to do with this - assuming the existence of a bona-fide supernatural creator God of course in the first place - though I stand to be corrected on the lack of a Biblical explanation by appropriate authorities.
Since all humans are one species because we can all breed with one another, and since we presumably originated from small beginnings (population wise) in Africa, all humanity must have been in the beginning akin to one not-quite-so-big melting pot. We were a uniform cup of coffee - one species; one race. Then we started spreading out throughout the world (minus Antarctica) and for some unexplained reason diverged into different breeds or ethnic classifications or races. The Big Question is - as Big Questions always tend to be - WHY?
But here I want to focus on facial features. Facial features: How do you help finger and identify the suspect in a crime? Well you try to provide an identikit profile - facial features. Of course you could say the criminal was white - that fits a lot of people; the criminal was male - that fits a lot of people; the criminal was short - that fits a lot of people; the criminal was fat - that fits a lot of people; the criminal was bald - that fits a lot of people. You could say the criminal was white, male, short, fat and bald - that still fits a lot of people. But, match the face to the perpetrator - you've got your man! Apply that to an animal - say a man-eating tiger or a crocodile or great white shark. How do you finger which tiger or crock or shark is the man-eater? By facial features - I think not.
However, I received a comment from a friend who said: "About crocodile individuality; tour guides get to know individual crocodiles and give them names! I actually made the comment last year on a boat cruise, "don't all crocs look the same?" and I was told no, they are as unique in their body marks, bumps, etc. as people!"
However, my reply was along the lines that obviously people who work closely with animals day after day can tell them apart via their bumps and scars and size, etc. but rarely by their facial features. I can tell my cats apart that way too. But here's a test: In one folder are the photos of ten crocodile faces each with a name; in a second folder are photographs of the faces of ten human Caucasian males all the same age, each with an associated name. You get five minutes to study the ten crocodile faces with their associated names and five minutes to study the ten human male faces and their names. One crocodile is named Fred; one human male is named Fred. Ten minutes later you get one minute to identify the facial photo of Fred the crocodile; one minute to identify the facial photograph of Fred the human male. Care to take bets as to which identification of Fred (crocodile or human) will be way easier?
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Fact: We are a facially diverse species. Humans tend to recognize humans, especially humans they haven't actually met, via their unique facial features. In police line-ups and in courtroom identifications it tends to be the face that gives the game away. You'd be hard pressed to distinguish between cockroaches or alligators or brown bears or penguins based on their face. However, if you work really closely on a daily basis with say chimpanzees or just about any other vertebrate species, their minor facial details come to the fore and you can tell them apart. The bottom line in any event is that animals can tell those of their own species apart and that's what counts.
But unique facial features are a relatively human anomaly. Apart from identical twins, no two humans from the neck up look the same, and thus this is how we tell human identities, once seen, apart. We tend to tell animals of the same species or breed (if applicable) apart by size, colour, skin/fur patterns, abnormalities, or else we don't distinguish who's who at all. To me, all magpie faces look the same. The question is why humans have unique facial features and not the rest of the animal kingdom?
In fact, let's single out not just individual facial features, but the broader context of racial facial features, especially Asian facial features. It is not difficult to tell when you see someone, even in a B&W picture or film, whether or not they have Asian ancestry. Their facial features give the game away. Now that evolutionary inspired facial adaptation had to have happened post our out-of-Africa migration less than 100,000 years ago. That's not much time in evolutionary terms. But even if it were, what's so different or unique about the Asian environment(s) so as to evolve in humans' typical Asian facial features, say vis-à-vis the Australian environment and her indigenous aboriginals who also have distinguishable but different facial features versus Europe, the European environment and Caucasian facial features vis-à-vis Polynesia and Polynesian facial features, etc. Something is screwy somewhere! I can't see how this aspect of human biology can be accounted for by Darwinian natural selection. I fail to see how differing facial features, like Asian facial features, can arise from just being in and adapting to differing geographical landscapes, in this case the rather large diversity of Asian landscapes.
However, it's easy to program in those differences if we are in fact simulated virtual reality beings. Our Supreme Programmer just allocates these characteristics for those in this region; somewhat differing characteristics for others in another region, and so on.
THE WHITES-OF-YOUR-EYES
If you look at another person, you can see the whites-of-their-eyes (and thus the adage "don't shoot till you see the whites-of-their-eyes). Our whites-of-the-eyes are anomalous in that apparently no other animal* show them, and based on all the animals and birds I see around my local environment, as well as photographs in various wildlife books, that certainly seems to be the case. So why do we show the whites-of-our-eyes? There would appear to be no rhyme or reason for this natural human evolutionary (if it was a natural selection) trait. The whites-of-our-eyes: how very, very odd. Like racial facial features, this whites-of-our-eyes trait might be one of those virtual reality programming quirks
* Cats for example have whites-of-their-eyes, only you have to peel back the skin surrounding their eyeballs to see the whites-of-their-eyes. Looking at a standard cat, you'll fail to see the whites-of-their-eyes.
SLEEP
Okay, on average more likely as not you got some sleep within the past 24 hours. The question is, what actual part of you was asleep? It clearly wasn't your heart. It clearly wasn't your lungs, or your kidneys or your digestive system. Your organ systems have to keep functioning. Now in fact you are not a single organism, or even a collection of organ systems, but a colony of organisms which we call cells. Now clearly none of your cells were asleep at the switch when you were asleep. All of your body's cells are required to be on the job 24/7/52. So if no part of your cellular structure sleeps, again I ask what part of you actually sleeps when you are asleep? And what might this say about your ultimate reality?
I had a correspondent comment to me about the hypothesis that sleep could be an illusion. They said: "What is the bit of us which sleeps, it can only be our awareness; nothing physical. That all has to keep working or we'd fall off the perch."
However that makes absolutely no sense at all! How can nothing physical undergo a physical transformation (from awareness to non-awareness), as in going to sleep? It's like saying that mathematics goes to sleep or beauty goes to sleep or time goes to sleep or Wednesday goes to sleep. How can a non-physical part of you know when to shut down without any connection to the material you? Does it operate independently of the physical you? There is no unconnected non-physical part of you. Your awareness isn't a nebulous nothing but has to be ultimately grounded around physics and chemistry and the biochemistry in and of your cells, especially your brain cells.
You are aware that you are reading this right now. Why? Light from the screen enters your eye and gets converted to electrical impulses and via the optic nerve gets carried to, and interpreted by your brain. You cannot have awareness therefore without the physics; chemistry and biochemistry all at work inside of you, therefore inside of your cells which are apparently active 24/7. That sensory awareness apparatus isn't just for external stimuli (like light) but for internal stimuli (as in I've got a headache) which also includes all of what is conscious inside your mind (I think I'd better get dinner ready).
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It would appear therefore that it must be your sensory apparatus, your awareness apparatus, that sort of shuts down when you go to sleep, but not to the tune of 100% - that's not good survival strategy therefore a physical process like a very loud noise can jolt you into an awakened state again. So are we saying that all your sensory apparatus cells are 100% functional yet somehow in reduced awareness mode? How that can be achieved, and in literally seconds in that awake-asleep transition, eludes me.
So again, what part of you, what physical part of you, is actually asleep?
The sleep process is decidedly a physiochemical one. There's nothing nebulous or non-physical about it. The proof of that pudding is that if you ingest too much alcohol, you end up sleeping it off. If you eat a large meal, you tend to get sleepy. You can take of course sleeping pills in order to fall asleep. If you want to prevent falling asleep there are drugs to assist you, like caffeine. Then too, you can just take a cold shower. The Internet is full of helpful advice about all of those do's and don't's to do or not to do if you want a good night of sleep.
You might drift off to sleep and gradually wake up, but that transition of awareness to non-awareness, and non-awareness to awareness is near instantaneous, which must put restraints around the actual physical processes at work.
The question keeps arising, what part of you is asleep when you are asleep? Not only don't your body cells sleep (since they are unicellular organisms in their own right - see below), but most of that which makes up the bulk of you - from tapeworms to the bacteria in your gut and the germs that infect you and that circulate in your blood stream - never sleep either.
The fact that sleep is mysterious is in itself mysterious considering that you spend roughly one-third of your brief existence here on this planet in limbo-land. Other bodily processes aren't nearly as mysterious. Eating and digestion isn't mysterious. Going to the bathroom isn't mysterious. The mechanisms behind your locomotion aren't mysterious. Reproduction isn't mysterious. The common cold and flu as well as hundreds of other afflictions aren't mysterious. Aches and pains aren't mysterious. The mechanisms behind the eye and the ear aren't mysterious. But sleep is mysterious.
So where in the animal kingdom does sleep begin keeping in mind by the way that there's quite a difference between sleep and rest; between being asleep and being dormant. When you're dormant you are just in a state of suspended animation awaiting the return of favourable environmental conditions before you can carry on carrying on. The distinction between sleep and hibernation isn't all that clear. Hibernation just seems to be a very long or prolonged period of sleep.
It seems pretty clear that unicellular critters don't sleep. It's hard to imagine even multi-cellular animals like sponges or jellyfish or earthworms and clams as ever being fast asleep. Do the insects saw logs or just rest? Sleep is rather a dangerous thing to do in that you might miss out on a meal that comes swimming or crawling by, or worse yet, you might become a meal while dozing off so I imagine that many species don't utilize the sleep function.
Whatever the dividing line, that line in the sand between those that sleep and those that don't sleep should tell us more about the mystery that is sleep.
Many things are claimed to be illusionary and some things are like optical, auditory, and tactile illusions. Free will is often claimed by some to be illusionary; ditto consciousness. Time is another concept thought to be illusionary. Even your apparently real reality might be an illusion. Clearly your dreams are an illusionary form of reality. Perhaps your sleep is equally illusionary. One can easily imagine a character in a video game retiring at the end of a hard day of fighting off the zombies and going to sleep. But is that character really biologically sleeping? No. Like just about any other facet of reality, software can simulate it, so our reality of sleep might just be an apparent or virtual reality of sleep if one decided to postulate that we are really video game characters; virtual beings existing (not 'living') in a Simulated (Virtual Reality) Universe.
I sort of feel like the character in the movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" when he's building that sculpture of the Devil's Tower but doesn't know why. "This means something. This is important." he says, but he doesn't know what. Well this sleep puzzlement means something too, it is important, but I haven't figured it out yet.
Sleeping is a strange thing indeed. But if sleep is actually an illusion, then perhaps it's a programmed illusion - one programmed in by our hypothetical Supreme Programmer.
FREE WILL
You would probably have to argue that none of the billions and billions of your body's cells that collectively make up you and make you, you, has free will. All of your body cells just do what they are chemically programmed to do. That would also apply to that subset of cells that we call brain cells; all of those cells that collectively form the organ we call the brain. But if none of your cellular components, including your brain cells, have a free will, why should the sum total of those components have free will? The sum total of your liver cells equals your liver. Your liver has no free will. By analogy, your heart has no free will. Your bones have no free will. Your skin has no free will. So why should your brain, or the mind within your brain, have any free will? And if none of your organs have free will, you do not have free will. Again, you have been programmed to believe in an illusion, and I'd be the first to admit that the apparent of personal free will is a very compelling one indeed. But that doesn't make it so.
SAVANTS
Of all the human beings present and accounted for in the here and now, our individual mental abilities don't range too far one side or the other of normal. Okay, there are some who can barely write their name or tie a shoelace, and then too there are those in the Einstein class. But there are a certain very, very tiny number of humans who have some highly selected mental abilities that even those in Einstein's class can't match. These abilities usually revolve around the ability to 1) calculate at computer speeds mathematical puzzles or equations that would have taken Einstein minutes to hours to solve or 2) memorize fantastic amounts of data, as in the wording of tens of thousands of books with absolute precise recall. Related, some have absolute photographic memories in that they can recall the minutest details of their experiences many decades after-the-fact. These mental 'giants' are normally termed autistic or psychological savants whose abilities apparently come with their genetic nature; or then there is acquired savant syndrome where some sort of trauma/injury results in turning normalcy into something extraordinary. That alone would suggest that we all have these talents. All it might take is an unfortunate accident or head injury to bring it out. However, one must ask, of what possible evolutionary value in Mother Nature's landscape is it to be a savant? The savant phenomenon is unexplained. Perhaps software can account for it since evolutionary pressures, anatomy and biochemistry apparently can't.
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DISEASE
The human species has to invest a lot of time, effort and energy into caring for and raising their offspring since they don't produce, on average, that many of them - unlike say fish who spawn multi-thousands of baby fishes per breeding cycle or plants who produce multi-thousands of seeds per season then just cast their fate to the wind, or currents. Thus, a 'goal' of natural selection or evolution should be to ensure what few human infants are born live to reach not only reproductive age but go beyond in order to care for and raise the next generation. Thus, it would appear that the sorts of diseases that can carry us off post that period in our lives (after we've bred and raised our young) shouldn't be able to do us a mischief prior to that or while we're in the middle of that critical reproductive and infant rearing period. Alas, quite the opposite of what we'd expect is the case. For tens of thousands of years infant mortality was extremely high. Infants, children, teens and young adults could come down with all the sorts of fatal illnesses that could and would known off senior citizens like smallpox and cancers. This I consider an anomaly since those who were killed off young wouldn't survive to reproduce and those who did should have passed on their relative immunity to their offspring. Evolution should have weeded out susceptibility to the sorts of diseases in the relatively young that would resurface once the reproductive and rearing era was over. In other words, the young should be near universally healthy (fatal accidents of course are outside of this discussion), only succumbing to diseases when past their prime, as in modern day phraseology over-the-hill-and-off-the-pill. It would appear however that no such software program was installed in the young, or rather disease software wasn't programmed to discriminate on the basis of age.
DEATH
There would seem to be on the surface no absolute reason or requirement for us to die as long as we kept entropy at bay by keeping up our energy supply along with the proper amount of chemistry (including fresh water and breathable oxygen) required, as long as we avoid fatal accidents, including being murder victims!
Yet death is the one area science (or medicine) hasn't conquered. Longevity has tended to increase, mainly due to a massive reduction in infant and childhood mortality, but also because we can minimize risk factors that are contributing factors to an early kicking of the bucket. But no matter what, we can never reduce risk to zero. You have a certain risk no matter what you do of catching the common cold; having cancer(s) develop; coming down with Alzheimer's; or succumbing to heart diseases. Again, no matter what you do, or don't do, no matter what your genetics or your race or your sex or your environment; you're going to eventually shuffle off to Buffalo. Medicine and all the best advice your local GP can give you isn't going to grant you immortality.
That's explainable if death is a part of your virtual reality software programming. You can no more avoid death than a calculator can avoid giving you an answer of "forty-two" when asked, "what is seven times six?" The saving grace is that there might also be a simulated (virtual reality) landscape named "The Pearly Gates (Complete with Seventy-Two Virgins)"!
ARCTIC MIGRATIONS
The consensus among physical anthropologists is that modern humans, Homo sapiens, migrated out of Africa as a relatively small band and then spread out to the west, north and east to colonize what we now call Europe, Asia and Australia, some 60,000 to 75,000 years ago. Presumably at that time we were all one race; we had lost our fur; there was little or no population pressure. Our early birds could pick and choose the best environments. You made a bad choice, pack up (easy to do as hunters and gatherers), and try next door. What you wouldn't do is migrate into some absolutely awful environment and make the best of bad situation when you didn't have to. So, how do we explain humans migrating into Arctic regions; tundra landscapes and loving it? What possible incentive would there be to live in what we call Siberia, Scandinavia, northern Canada or Russia's far north, even Alaska when southern Europe and vast swaths of tropical Asia and the Subcontinents were available? Something is screwy somewhere. I mean when you think of a 'summertime and the living is easy' sort of paradise do you picture Iceland or Hawaii; the Mediterranean or Siberia; Alaska or Tahiti? If we wouldn't migrate there and call the tundra our home as a first choice, perhaps it was all due to those cards the software program dealt us way back then.
(1) Trait number two is that we alone walk upright without benefit of a balancing tail. However, this too is a matter of degree since some primates, and other mammals (bears) and birds (penguins) do have the ability to use and can use a bipedal gait, albeit used sparingly. Penguins in fact waddle more than walk, and on average prefer to glide over the ice on their bellies using their flippers to propel them along.
(2) Trait number one is our "naked ape" status relative to the other 183 or so species of primates. However, as we all well know, we are not absolutely hairless, so the difference is one of degree.
(3) Trait number three is our very high IQ. However, again there is a continuum between bacteria and humans. It would be wrong to suggest that every other animal has the IQ of an amoeba. Many primates, many birds, the whales and dolphins, the elephants, even the humble octopus has a reasonable IQ.
There are a number of traits that appear to suggest human uniqueness, though I maintain these traits are not a step-function but a continuum, albeit a line that still places humans well in front of most if not all other animals. That "well in front" bit is still anomalous.
I won't detail our anomalous physiology in terms of our bipedal gait without the benefit of a balancing tail (1); our loss of fur (2) and our sky-rocketing IQ (3) other than to note that if these traits conveyed such evolutionary advantage as to have these adaptations reinforced down through the generations, then why haven't any of our primate kissin' cousins like the chimpanzees, gorillas and monkeys followed suit? It's all very anomalous.
I will instead concentrate or focus on roughly half-dozen or more other facets of humanity's anomalous existence which defy logical explanations starting with the most unique part of our physiology, our face.
FACIAL FEATURES
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We come in breeds. The proof of that pudding stares you in the face everyday as you observe the racial variety of people around you. I don't recall anything in the Biblical Book of Genesis that explains this, so maybe God had nothing to do with this - assuming the existence of a bona-fide supernatural creator God of course in the first place - though I stand to be corrected on the lack of a Biblical explanation by appropriate authorities.
Since all humans are one species because we can all breed with one another, and since we presumably originated from small beginnings (population wise) in Africa, all humanity must have been in the beginning akin to one not-quite-so-big melting pot. We were a uniform cup of coffee - one species; one race. Then we started spreading out throughout the world (minus Antarctica) and for some unexplained reason diverged into different breeds or ethnic classifications or races. The Big Question is - as Big Questions always tend to be - WHY?
But here I want to focus on facial features. Facial features: How do you help finger and identify the suspect in a crime? Well you try to provide an identikit profile - facial features. Of course you could say the criminal was white - that fits a lot of people; the criminal was male - that fits a lot of people; the criminal was short - that fits a lot of people; the criminal was fat - that fits a lot of people; the criminal was bald - that fits a lot of people. You could say the criminal was white, male, short, fat and bald - that still fits a lot of people. But, match the face to the perpetrator - you've got your man! Apply that to an animal - say a man-eating tiger or a crocodile or great white shark. How do you finger which tiger or crock or shark is the man-eater? By facial features - I think not.
However, I received a comment from a friend who said: "About crocodile individuality; tour guides get to know individual crocodiles and give them names! I actually made the comment last year on a boat cruise, "don't all crocs look the same?" and I was told no, they are as unique in their body marks, bumps, etc. as people!"
However, my reply was along the lines that obviously people who work closely with animals day after day can tell them apart via their bumps and scars and size, etc. but rarely by their facial features. I can tell my cats apart that way too. But here's a test: In one folder are the photos of ten crocodile faces each with a name; in a second folder are photographs of the faces of ten human Caucasian males all the same age, each with an associated name. You get five minutes to study the ten crocodile faces with their associated names and five minutes to study the ten human male faces and their names. One crocodile is named Fred; one human male is named Fred. Ten minutes later you get one minute to identify the facial photo of Fred the crocodile; one minute to identify the facial photograph of Fred the human male. Care to take bets as to which identification of Fred (crocodile or human) will be way easier?
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Fact: We are a facially diverse species. Humans tend to recognize humans, especially humans they haven't actually met, via their unique facial features. In police line-ups and in courtroom identifications it tends to be the face that gives the game away. You'd be hard pressed to distinguish between cockroaches or alligators or brown bears or penguins based on their face. However, if you work really closely on a daily basis with say chimpanzees or just about any other vertebrate species, their minor facial details come to the fore and you can tell them apart. The bottom line in any event is that animals can tell those of their own species apart and that's what counts.
But unique facial features are a relatively human anomaly. Apart from identical twins, no two humans from the neck up look the same, and thus this is how we tell human identities, once seen, apart. We tend to tell animals of the same species or breed (if applicable) apart by size, colour, skin/fur patterns, abnormalities, or else we don't distinguish who's who at all. To me, all magpie faces look the same. The question is why humans have unique facial features and not the rest of the animal kingdom?
In fact, let's single out not just individual facial features, but the broader context of racial facial features, especially Asian facial features. It is not difficult to tell when you see someone, even in a B&W picture or film, whether or not they have Asian ancestry. Their facial features give the game away. Now that evolutionary inspired facial adaptation had to have happened post our out-of-Africa migration less than 100,000 years ago. That's not much time in evolutionary terms. But even if it were, what's so different or unique about the Asian environment(s) so as to evolve in humans' typical Asian facial features, say vis-à-vis the Australian environment and her indigenous aboriginals who also have distinguishable but different facial features versus Europe, the European environment and Caucasian facial features vis-à-vis Polynesia and Polynesian facial features, etc. Something is screwy somewhere! I can't see how this aspect of human biology can be accounted for by Darwinian natural selection. I fail to see how differing facial features, like Asian facial features, can arise from just being in and adapting to differing geographical landscapes, in this case the rather large diversity of Asian landscapes.
However, it's easy to program in those differences if we are in fact simulated virtual reality beings. Our Supreme Programmer just allocates these characteristics for those in this region; somewhat differing characteristics for others in another region, and so on.
THE WHITES-OF-YOUR-EYES
If you look at another person, you can see the whites-of-their-eyes (and thus the adage "don't shoot till you see the whites-of-their-eyes). Our whites-of-the-eyes are anomalous in that apparently no other animal* show them, and based on all the animals and birds I see around my local environment, as well as photographs in various wildlife books, that certainly seems to be the case. So why do we show the whites-of-our-eyes? There would appear to be no rhyme or reason for this natural human evolutionary (if it was a natural selection) trait. The whites-of-our-eyes: how very, very odd. Like racial facial features, this whites-of-our-eyes trait might be one of those virtual reality programming quirks
* Cats for example have whites-of-their-eyes, only you have to peel back the skin surrounding their eyeballs to see the whites-of-their-eyes. Looking at a standard cat, you'll fail to see the whites-of-their-eyes.
SLEEP
Okay, on average more likely as not you got some sleep within the past 24 hours. The question is, what actual part of you was asleep? It clearly wasn't your heart. It clearly wasn't your lungs, or your kidneys or your digestive system. Your organ systems have to keep functioning. Now in fact you are not a single organism, or even a collection of organ systems, but a colony of organisms which we call cells. Now clearly none of your cells were asleep at the switch when you were asleep. All of your body's cells are required to be on the job 24/7/52. So if no part of your cellular structure sleeps, again I ask what part of you actually sleeps when you are asleep? And what might this say about your ultimate reality?
I had a correspondent comment to me about the hypothesis that sleep could be an illusion. They said: "What is the bit of us which sleeps, it can only be our awareness; nothing physical. That all has to keep working or we'd fall off the perch."
However that makes absolutely no sense at all! How can nothing physical undergo a physical transformation (from awareness to non-awareness), as in going to sleep? It's like saying that mathematics goes to sleep or beauty goes to sleep or time goes to sleep or Wednesday goes to sleep. How can a non-physical part of you know when to shut down without any connection to the material you? Does it operate independently of the physical you? There is no unconnected non-physical part of you. Your awareness isn't a nebulous nothing but has to be ultimately grounded around physics and chemistry and the biochemistry in and of your cells, especially your brain cells.
You are aware that you are reading this right now. Why? Light from the screen enters your eye and gets converted to electrical impulses and via the optic nerve gets carried to, and interpreted by your brain. You cannot have awareness therefore without the physics; chemistry and biochemistry all at work inside of you, therefore inside of your cells which are apparently active 24/7. That sensory awareness apparatus isn't just for external stimuli (like light) but for internal stimuli (as in I've got a headache) which also includes all of what is conscious inside your mind (I think I'd better get dinner ready).
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It would appear therefore that it must be your sensory apparatus, your awareness apparatus, that sort of shuts down when you go to sleep, but not to the tune of 100% - that's not good survival strategy therefore a physical process like a very loud noise can jolt you into an awakened state again. So are we saying that all your sensory apparatus cells are 100% functional yet somehow in reduced awareness mode? How that can be achieved, and in literally seconds in that awake-asleep transition, eludes me.
So again, what part of you, what physical part of you, is actually asleep?
The sleep process is decidedly a physiochemical one. There's nothing nebulous or non-physical about it. The proof of that pudding is that if you ingest too much alcohol, you end up sleeping it off. If you eat a large meal, you tend to get sleepy. You can take of course sleeping pills in order to fall asleep. If you want to prevent falling asleep there are drugs to assist you, like caffeine. Then too, you can just take a cold shower. The Internet is full of helpful advice about all of those do's and don't's to do or not to do if you want a good night of sleep.
You might drift off to sleep and gradually wake up, but that transition of awareness to non-awareness, and non-awareness to awareness is near instantaneous, which must put restraints around the actual physical processes at work.
The question keeps arising, what part of you is asleep when you are asleep? Not only don't your body cells sleep (since they are unicellular organisms in their own right - see below), but most of that which makes up the bulk of you - from tapeworms to the bacteria in your gut and the germs that infect you and that circulate in your blood stream - never sleep either.
The fact that sleep is mysterious is in itself mysterious considering that you spend roughly one-third of your brief existence here on this planet in limbo-land. Other bodily processes aren't nearly as mysterious. Eating and digestion isn't mysterious. Going to the bathroom isn't mysterious. The mechanisms behind your locomotion aren't mysterious. Reproduction isn't mysterious. The common cold and flu as well as hundreds of other afflictions aren't mysterious. Aches and pains aren't mysterious. The mechanisms behind the eye and the ear aren't mysterious. But sleep is mysterious.
So where in the animal kingdom does sleep begin keeping in mind by the way that there's quite a difference between sleep and rest; between being asleep and being dormant. When you're dormant you are just in a state of suspended animation awaiting the return of favourable environmental conditions before you can carry on carrying on. The distinction between sleep and hibernation isn't all that clear. Hibernation just seems to be a very long or prolonged period of sleep.
It seems pretty clear that unicellular critters don't sleep. It's hard to imagine even multi-cellular animals like sponges or jellyfish or earthworms and clams as ever being fast asleep. Do the insects saw logs or just rest? Sleep is rather a dangerous thing to do in that you might miss out on a meal that comes swimming or crawling by, or worse yet, you might become a meal while dozing off so I imagine that many species don't utilize the sleep function.
Whatever the dividing line, that line in the sand between those that sleep and those that don't sleep should tell us more about the mystery that is sleep.
Many things are claimed to be illusionary and some things are like optical, auditory, and tactile illusions. Free will is often claimed by some to be illusionary; ditto consciousness. Time is another concept thought to be illusionary. Even your apparently real reality might be an illusion. Clearly your dreams are an illusionary form of reality. Perhaps your sleep is equally illusionary. One can easily imagine a character in a video game retiring at the end of a hard day of fighting off the zombies and going to sleep. But is that character really biologically sleeping? No. Like just about any other facet of reality, software can simulate it, so our reality of sleep might just be an apparent or virtual reality of sleep if one decided to postulate that we are really video game characters; virtual beings existing (not 'living') in a Simulated (Virtual Reality) Universe.
I sort of feel like the character in the movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" when he's building that sculpture of the Devil's Tower but doesn't know why. "This means something. This is important." he says, but he doesn't know what. Well this sleep puzzlement means something too, it is important, but I haven't figured it out yet.
Sleeping is a strange thing indeed. But if sleep is actually an illusion, then perhaps it's a programmed illusion - one programmed in by our hypothetical Supreme Programmer.
FREE WILL
You would probably have to argue that none of the billions and billions of your body's cells that collectively make up you and make you, you, has free will. All of your body cells just do what they are chemically programmed to do. That would also apply to that subset of cells that we call brain cells; all of those cells that collectively form the organ we call the brain. But if none of your cellular components, including your brain cells, have a free will, why should the sum total of those components have free will? The sum total of your liver cells equals your liver. Your liver has no free will. By analogy, your heart has no free will. Your bones have no free will. Your skin has no free will. So why should your brain, or the mind within your brain, have any free will? And if none of your organs have free will, you do not have free will. Again, you have been programmed to believe in an illusion, and I'd be the first to admit that the apparent of personal free will is a very compelling one indeed. But that doesn't make it so.
SAVANTS
Of all the human beings present and accounted for in the here and now, our individual mental abilities don't range too far one side or the other of normal. Okay, there are some who can barely write their name or tie a shoelace, and then too there are those in the Einstein class. But there are a certain very, very tiny number of humans who have some highly selected mental abilities that even those in Einstein's class can't match. These abilities usually revolve around the ability to 1) calculate at computer speeds mathematical puzzles or equations that would have taken Einstein minutes to hours to solve or 2) memorize fantastic amounts of data, as in the wording of tens of thousands of books with absolute precise recall. Related, some have absolute photographic memories in that they can recall the minutest details of their experiences many decades after-the-fact. These mental 'giants' are normally termed autistic or psychological savants whose abilities apparently come with their genetic nature; or then there is acquired savant syndrome where some sort of trauma/injury results in turning normalcy into something extraordinary. That alone would suggest that we all have these talents. All it might take is an unfortunate accident or head injury to bring it out. However, one must ask, of what possible evolutionary value in Mother Nature's landscape is it to be a savant? The savant phenomenon is unexplained. Perhaps software can account for it since evolutionary pressures, anatomy and biochemistry apparently can't.
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DISEASE
The human species has to invest a lot of time, effort and energy into caring for and raising their offspring since they don't produce, on average, that many of them - unlike say fish who spawn multi-thousands of baby fishes per breeding cycle or plants who produce multi-thousands of seeds per season then just cast their fate to the wind, or currents. Thus, a 'goal' of natural selection or evolution should be to ensure what few human infants are born live to reach not only reproductive age but go beyond in order to care for and raise the next generation. Thus, it would appear that the sorts of diseases that can carry us off post that period in our lives (after we've bred and raised our young) shouldn't be able to do us a mischief prior to that or while we're in the middle of that critical reproductive and infant rearing period. Alas, quite the opposite of what we'd expect is the case. For tens of thousands of years infant mortality was extremely high. Infants, children, teens and young adults could come down with all the sorts of fatal illnesses that could and would known off senior citizens like smallpox and cancers. This I consider an anomaly since those who were killed off young wouldn't survive to reproduce and those who did should have passed on their relative immunity to their offspring. Evolution should have weeded out susceptibility to the sorts of diseases in the relatively young that would resurface once the reproductive and rearing era was over. In other words, the young should be near universally healthy (fatal accidents of course are outside of this discussion), only succumbing to diseases when past their prime, as in modern day phraseology over-the-hill-and-off-the-pill. It would appear however that no such software program was installed in the young, or rather disease software wasn't programmed to discriminate on the basis of age.
DEATH
There would seem to be on the surface no absolute reason or requirement for us to die as long as we kept entropy at bay by keeping up our energy supply along with the proper amount of chemistry (including fresh water and breathable oxygen) required, as long as we avoid fatal accidents, including being murder victims!
Yet death is the one area science (or medicine) hasn't conquered. Longevity has tended to increase, mainly due to a massive reduction in infant and childhood mortality, but also because we can minimize risk factors that are contributing factors to an early kicking of the bucket. But no matter what, we can never reduce risk to zero. You have a certain risk no matter what you do of catching the common cold; having cancer(s) develop; coming down with Alzheimer's; or succumbing to heart diseases. Again, no matter what you do, or don't do, no matter what your genetics or your race or your sex or your environment; you're going to eventually shuffle off to Buffalo. Medicine and all the best advice your local GP can give you isn't going to grant you immortality.
That's explainable if death is a part of your virtual reality software programming. You can no more avoid death than a calculator can avoid giving you an answer of "forty-two" when asked, "what is seven times six?" The saving grace is that there might also be a simulated (virtual reality) landscape named "The Pearly Gates (Complete with Seventy-Two Virgins)"!
ARCTIC MIGRATIONS
The consensus among physical anthropologists is that modern humans, Homo sapiens, migrated out of Africa as a relatively small band and then spread out to the west, north and east to colonize what we now call Europe, Asia and Australia, some 60,000 to 75,000 years ago. Presumably at that time we were all one race; we had lost our fur; there was little or no population pressure. Our early birds could pick and choose the best environments. You made a bad choice, pack up (easy to do as hunters and gatherers), and try next door. What you wouldn't do is migrate into some absolutely awful environment and make the best of bad situation when you didn't have to. So, how do we explain humans migrating into Arctic regions; tundra landscapes and loving it? What possible incentive would there be to live in what we call Siberia, Scandinavia, northern Canada or Russia's far north, even Alaska when southern Europe and vast swaths of tropical Asia and the Subcontinents were available? Something is screwy somewhere. I mean when you think of a 'summertime and the living is easy' sort of paradise do you picture Iceland or Hawaii; the Mediterranean or Siberia; Alaska or Tahiti? If we wouldn't migrate there and call the tundra our home as a first choice, perhaps it was all due to those cards the software program dealt us way back then.
(1) Trait number two is that we alone walk upright without benefit of a balancing tail. However, this too is a matter of degree since some primates, and other mammals (bears) and birds (penguins) do have the ability to use and can use a bipedal gait, albeit used sparingly. Penguins in fact waddle more than walk, and on average prefer to glide over the ice on their bellies using their flippers to propel them along.
(2) Trait number one is our "naked ape" status relative to the other 183 or so species of primates. However, as we all well know, we are not absolutely hairless, so the difference is one of degree.
(3) Trait number three is our very high IQ. However, again there is a continuum between bacteria and humans. It would be wrong to suggest that every other animal has the IQ of an amoeba. Many primates, many birds, the whales and dolphins, the elephants, even the humble octopus has a reasonable IQ.
Science librarian; retired.
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