Purpose and Desire by J. Scott Turner

Author:J. Scott Turner
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-08-03T04:00:00+00:00

9

One Is the Friendliest Number

The first difficult problems we will try to tease apart are individuality and the nature of the organism. These might seem not to be problems at all, simple facts of life, but they are actually problems of perception. We perceive life in ones. The discrete individual is the central fact of our existence and of our relationship to the world. Descartes said it most succinctly: Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am.

There are two profound truths in this aphorism. The first is what grabs most peoples’ attention—the equivalence of “think” and “am.” The second and less obvious truth is the assertion “I am.” “I” am the central fact of the universe that is “me.” To be sure, I look around “me” and see a bounty of other “I’s,” that is, other individuals who are universes unto themselves, their own existences being the central fact of their lives to them. Nor does it stop with my fellow humans. I have an individual dog, Calloway, and two individual cats, Feral Fawcett and Influenza, each of which are also curious universes unto themselves. Calloway, when he is not sleeping or eating or frantically worrying over his toys, looks at our cats and sees two playthings to challenge and chase. Feral Fawcett and Influenza look at Calloway and see a renegade force of nature that they must, like priests, relentlessly keep in its place with hissy incantations and slashing genuflections. It goes farther still. The wild turkeys, the deer, the occasional coyotes that wander through my property, the fruit trees I cultivate, the Norway maples and sumac that I must constantly keep at bay—all are individuals in their own idiosyncratic ways. Life’s ordinal number, it seems, is one: the autonomous, coherent, integrated, adaptable, responsive, intentional, intelligent stream of matter, energy, and information that is wrapped up in the pretty package of the individual.

I am also an organism, and this raises an interesting question: are organisms and individuals the same thing? Am I an organism because I am an individual? Or vice versa? We often seem to conflate the two concepts, as when we speak of the “individual organism.” As you delve into the matter, though, the equivalence of individual and organism begins to look a little iffy.1 Without understanding the relation between the two, how can we point to an evolutionary origin of either? If we define the organism, as we commonly do, as a tangible individual comprising a multitude of genetically related cells functioning together as an autonomous whole, then the organism came onto the scene rather late in the evolution of life on Earth. We see the first glimmerings of it about nine hundred million years ago, finally emerging in full flower only around the beginning of the Cambrian Period, around six hundred million years ago.2

This sounds like a long time ago until we reflect that two-thirds of the entire history of life on Earth had already passed by then. Before that, Earth was an exclusively prokaryotic planet, teeming with bacteria.

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