To understand God, just put your mind to it

I’d like to take you on a little journey from small to large, both real and imaginary, with a simple goal.

“What?”

Why, thank you for asking. I’ll tell, but not right now. First, I have to prepare you to have your brain and mind blown, and then do so.

I had the happy coincidence of seeing an idea of mine – more on it at the end – echoed by one of the world’s leading neuroscientists, Antonio Damasio, in his most recent book, “Self Comes to Mind.” Damasio has been studying brain function for more than 30 years, developing an evolutionary model of mind, consciousness and self, with an eye toward understanding the biological advantage (if any) of self-awareness.

He’s an elegant writer and thinker, and vividly introduces the concept of higher-order emotional feelings – our own, for instance – as emergent from behaviors that have been present since single-cell organisms appeared a couple of billion years ago, gaining speed with more advanced critters. Say, worms.

“Consider the nematode,” he writes of one called C. elegans, “a scientifically fetching kind of worm whose social behaviors are quite sophisticated.” Equipped with “a mere 302 neurons organized in a chain of ganglia – nothing to be very proud of,” C. elegans nonetheless displays surprisingly social behaviors, despite lacking anything remotely approaching a mind or consciousness.

Damasio asks the reader to imagine C. elegans from a sociologist’s perspective, withholding from her the knowledge that you’re just describing a worm, and concludes that she might easily detect behaviors as advanced as cooperation and altruism.

Keeping in mind that nematodes are multicellular organisms, with the honor of being the first such to have their genome completely sequenced, let me apply air pump to brain. I’ll remind you that, on the spectrum from smallest to largest thing in the universe, humans are about halfway along.

Now, let’s imagine our fetching C. elegans halfway up the ladder instead, with single-cell organisms such as amoebas and paramecium at the bottom. Humans are now at the top rung. So how do we three compare, complexitywise? The human genome contains about 3.4 billion base pairs, C. elegans, about 100 million pairs, and our lowly paramecium, 50,000-ish. And the evolution from bacteria to cellular life took longer than amoebas to, oh, Creationists.

If you don’t feel your brain/mind inflating yet, I’ll pump a bit harder and tell you that the human body contains about 100 trillion cells, and that the largest known galaxy in the universe, not so fetchingly named IC 1101, contains around 100 trillion stars.

“So where is all this leading?”

Thanks for asking. Damasio’s descriptions took me back to high school advanced biology and my drawings of cells, with their mitochondria, Golgi apparatus and such. This had me recall a marvelous book from 1974 that some of you might still remember, “The Lives of a Cell,” by Lewis Thomas. He tried to find a concept with which to encapsulate Earth’s complexity. No go, until this thought: “It is MOST like a single cell.”

And so to this: If a single cell is akin to the entire world, and the human brain is (as far as we know) the most complex thing in that world, then perhaps that thing can begin to explain itself, as our methods advance.

It gave me goose bumps to read Damasio ask, “How does the brain DO mind?” Because, about six months ago, seeking a functional definition, I wrote this: Mind IS what the brain DOES.

And so, finally, to my goal. Consider this: God IS what mind DOES. No supernatural explanation needed.