The Nature of Lane

Like many before me, I have spent a lot of time contemplating my nature, my essence. What is that quality of matter, energy, spirit or other stuff that makes me me? I'm an overly analytical person by nature, so let's use a methodical approach to getting to the bottom of who I am.

Starting at the outermost layer, I am a six-foot, clean-cut, 40-something white male with short dark blonde hair, greenish blue eyes and, alas, a bit of a paunch. I'm gay, in an open relationship with a partner of going on 4 years. I work in the computer field, have interests in more things than I have the time or competence to master, but I tend to express opinions on a lot of those things anyway.

Politically, I tend to have positions that come from a struggle between my head and my heart. I would describe myself as liberal, but also a devout capitalist. I think government can do good, but I think its intentions to do good all too often go awry. I prefer to err on the side of using government power sparingly, as an exception rather than the rule. (Of course, the government disagrees with me.) Obviously, being gay, I am vocal in my support of gay causes, though I don't necessarily agree with every political point of view established by mainstream gay rights groups.

So, at this outer level, I am a person with physical traits, ideas, values and behaviors. Those qualities all seem to distinguish me, in some sense, from other people. I may have many of those traits in common with others, but surely, the particular combination of traits that I might enumerate about myself (the list above being a brief introduction, obviously) make me at least somewhat unique. Yet, none of those feel like me. Even the combination of all those traits, while being recognizable about me, don't feel like they define me. I could grow my hair, lose my weight, start dating women again (doubtful though that might be) or change careers, but I would still be the same person.

Maybe I have to go deeper to find that answer.

Beneath that veneer of traits, ideas, values and behaviors there is an incredible biological machine. Few people have the opportunity to appreciate how absolutely amazing the biology of a human being is. The complexity of its chemistry alone is so breathtaking as to defy comprehension. The design of the circulatory system, in its ability to flawlessly deliver oxygen and nutrients and remove waste products from every one of the trillions of cells in the human body humbles even the most advanced of modern civil engineering projects. The astounding choreography of the thousands of muscles that make possible locomotion, athletics, construction, music, cooking, eating or sex is still only poorly or cheaply imitated by the best robotics. The remarkable acuity of our senses that enable us to revel in the glorious beauty of a sunset, the sound of a symphony, the delight of a fine wine or the warmth of a cuddle with your partner come as close to anything I can imagine to describing the reason to be alive. These senses and muscles are all interconnected by the most sophisticated electronics network ever observed by man as signals are sent to and from the epitome of biological perfection, the human brain.

In all those amazing systems, is there an essence of me? Mostly, they are the same for all of us. I would still be me if I lost a limb or an eye or if I had my liver or heart replaced. There was a woman in France, recently, who had her face surgically replaced as a treatment for a terrible accidental disfigurement. She looked like another person yet, in all other respects, she was still the same person. We are medically unable to transplant a human brain, but one has the sense that doing so would surely cause that person now to be different. All of the thoughts, opinions, memories, values that, in the sense above seemed to make me who I am, are apparently stored, electrochemically in my brain. So, is that it? Am I my brain?

The brain, like the rest of my body is composed of cells which are, biologically, very similar to all of the other cells in my body. Each of my brain cells, like each of my other cells, consists of a cell membrane that holds in its cytoplasm, wherein a collection of mitochondria enable the cell to convert glucose and oxygen to energy and carbon dioxide and a nucleus, which holds 23 pairs of chromosomes, each with bunches of doubly-helical DNA strands and the enzyme machinery to use the information in this DNA to create the proteins necessary to grow and repair it. The specific cells in my brains that contribute to the brain's unique potential to really identify me as me, are the neurons. They are brain cells with the additional capability to collect electrical signals from special sensors called dendrites and, depending on certain electrochemically-programmed rules, occasionally fire electrical signals out the other end from its axons. But since every neuron itself is more or less the same, the magic of the brain's function is in the way these neurons are wired together through synapses, regions that use special substances called neurotransmitters to amplify and conduct signals from one neuron to another. Just as computers rely on their transistors being wired in a certain way, the brain relies on its neurons to be wired in a certain way for the brain to take on its unique personality. (Of course, unlike a computer, who's wiring is fixed the moment it is born, the brain rewires itself on the fly as it learns.)

So, this has some potential to be the essence of me. You can at least see where some of my thoughts, behaviors, even my tastes and values might be, somehow, wired into the configuration of my neurons. Of course, if we were technologically sophisticated enough, we could probably build a machine that performed functions similar to my brain. If we were good, it might be, outwardly, indistinguishable from my brain. If we were really sophisticated, we might even be able to replicate an actual, biochemically perfect copy of my brain. If I had a bad accident, and suffered irreparable brain damage, but happened to have a digital scan of the state of my brain the day before the accident, and they were able to produce a biologically perfect replica of my brain from that scan and transplant my brain to repair the damage caused by my accident (which, it seems to me, would have the additional advantage of removing the memory of the traumatic accident, since those memories wouldn't have existed in that previous day brain), would the recovered patient still be me?

Let's go a little deeper.

My brain (and my hypothetical reconstructed, restored to the most recent backed-up-version brain) are, at the end of the day, made up of stuff that is even more undistinguishing than cells. Each cell membrane, mitochondrium, DNA strand is made up of molecules, which are made up of atoms, which are made up of protons and neutrons and electrons. And space. Lots and lots of space. Most of what we perceive around us, the stuff of the universe, what we call matter, is actually empty space. More, in fact, than 99% of it. The fact that we don't perceive it that way is because we don't perceive matter directly, or anything else for that, er, matter. What we perceive are forces. What we see is electromagnetic radiation stimulating our retinas. What we hear are the electric fields of air molecules interacting with the electric fields of ear drums. What we feel when we press our lips against the lips of our honeys are the electrons of their lips repulsing the electrons of ours, never actually coming completely in contact, even though we are sure that they are.

Our amazing and wonderful senses do us the favor of communicating a beauty about the world around us that, at the subatomic level, isn't actually even there. Our brains, which can only process this information because of the way they are wired interpret a universe that only exists because of the way it is wired. No atom, by itself, has any significance at all. The universe is merely software. A dance of forces between the few bits of actual matter (whatever that means) defines everything we actually experience.

As you dive even deeper, you find that even those subatomic particles are suspect. They might consist, themselves, of quarks, but some scientists are now thinking that they might actually be artifacts of the vibration of minute strings or membranes, abstract entities that don't actually exist in any conventional sense that we could process with our normal biases and expectations about the way the universe works.

If you dive below this, there is, currently, nowhere to go. This might be where one might insert a belief in souls and God, or a pantheon or some other new-age concept. I won't offer an easy answer like that. I don't object to the beliefs that others have in this area and I respect them deeply. But I don't share them. The best god for me is an unknown god. The mystery of existence is its own deity. I don't need anything more. I am here, essentially me, for reasons that I can only speculate about, but, in fact, choose not to. I do believe that I am me in some metaphysically unique way, and, because I believe that my core beliefs are my reality (just as your core beliefs are your reality), I accept that as good enough. Unexplained. Questions unanswered.

You can expect from me a regular dance around any presumption of absolute knowledge about topics, even ones I claim to have expertise in. Among those attributes of me that are, perhaps, most distinguishing, are that I simply don't accept absolute assertions, nor do I make them. I will state opinions, often vehemently, but you will never doubt that they are my opinions. I will justify those opinions using my own clearly declared values, reaching across, where possible to values that I know most of my fellow citizens of the world can relate to, but never presuming that what I believe is factual in any absolute sense.

Humans want answers. When they can't find them, they often make them up. It is part of their nature to want to understand the universe around them. Some understanding, even a comfortably false one, is better than no understanding at all. But you won't find that here. I will, invariably ask more questions than I answer. My aim is, in fact, to teach the value of being satisfied with the lack of certainty that is the single certainty the universe offers.

I don't know if this is a key to happiness, but I know that demanding certain answers to unanswerable questions is a guaranteed path to frustration.