Endless Questions

What is a human being made of? Fundamentally I mean. If you go deep down to the basic elementary units of homo sapiens sapiens. What would you find? My answer would have been matter. Atoms. Neutrons, protons and electrons. Quarks. Photons. The same subatomic particles that make up the rest of the universe. But if this is the basis of what we are, then why are we different? Different concentrations? Different mixtures of these basic particles? Could be very plausible. After all, no two people have the exact same DNA.

But that still doesn't answer the initial question. What are we physically? You could say it's our atoms, but then again there's that theory that says that after 7 years each and every atom we had initially, has been exchanged by another identical one. So as we go about our day, we exchange a carbon atom for another, we leave an electron and pick up another one passing by, we exchange phosphate groups, so that after 7 years, there's nothing left of our original particles and then the cycle starts all over again.

But can we even say that there's a particular carbon or hydrogen or oxygen atom out there that is solely ours? I read in a book once (I think it was "First you build a cloud" if I remember correctly) that we are more like a wave than a structure by itself. Meaning that we are not so much constituted of individual particles, but by the links and the bonds between them. A wave is a vertical movement of particles and as it travels towards the shore (thus it travels horizontally), it constantly changes particles. But the movement that it confers to each new acquired particle is identical to that of each and every previous particle. Therefore, a wave is an independent entity with no material constitution. It is merely a repetition of patterns and movement. And that's what we are as well: a repetition of chemical reactions and bond formation. Nothing stays fixed and the only thing that stays constant is the pattern. In a way, we are like a dish that constantly recreates itself, but never changing the initial recipe.

So then where does our consciousness come from? What is so different between me, a cat and a lamp? Why can I think this very instant, the cat can only follow instincts and the lamp can't even move? Well you can say that the lamp is a solid and therefore cannot move even if it was conscious. Ok fine, what about water or mud then? They certainly have the capacity of movement, but they don't unless something interacts with them. Maybe it's like the formation of atoms. An extra proton and electron makes up an oxygen atom with completely different properties compared to nitrogen. So more is not only quantitative, but also qualitative. However, since a 25 story building is by far bigger and has more matter than me, but that still doesn't give it the ability to move or think (at least as far as we know), we could say that it is the complexity of the structure and not its size that brings about this fundamental difference.

However, that still doesn't convince me. A computer can be fairly complex but that doesn't give it a consciousness. In Western cultures, we associate consciousness and the ability to think with the brain. But animals have a brain or some sort of a nervous system and you don't see dolphins or dogs inventing the theory of relativity. What part exactly of our brain makes us different? And what is it about the brain that makes it so special to begin with? After all, it's just a bunch of chemical reactions that conduct an electrical current. Any house has a hellish amount of wires going through it plus whatever appliances we plug in and since here in Canada almost everything runs on electricity, in what sense is this different from a human brain (putting aside the fact that our brain has a lot more "wires" than a house)? What about our brain enables it to coordinate an entire body, all the while helping us interact with others in society and letting us reflect upon our existence and discover the world that surrounds us?

When I was in high school I learned in biology that a human being is made up of cells and in chemistry that the basic building blocks of matter are atoms (which then make up molecules). But these two views seemed contradictory and somehow I was missing the link between them. Then I took a course in molecular biology and finally, upon studying the cell, I found out that cells are made up of molecules and thus atoms, and the connection between the two was made and these different views of the world were reunited. In the same way, I am now trying to relate the physical existence of the brain, which is that of molecules, chemical reactions and electrical currents, to the more esoteric, but nonetheless real existence which is the consciousness and the ability to form thoughts.

Somehow, I feel like the consciousness is to the brain what virtual particles are to a proton in physics. But at the same time, I have a hard time believing that this reasoning can go beyond the level of a metaphor since there's no Uncertainty Principle for objects as big as a brain (hell, even a cell is too big to fit in the Uncertainty Principle) and therefore that excludes the possibility of a virtual particle for the brain. And even if it were possible, the only resemblance between a virtual particle and a conscience is their lack of material existence and nothing more (though, now that I think about it, some virtual particles have mass so even that doesn't hold true).

On the other hand, the exchange of virtual particles makes up a force and therefore has the power to pull particles together. So maybe consciousness is an exchange. One of my chemistry teachers once told me that energy was represented by movement (as abstract as that may seem...and anyway I was never fully satisfied with that explanation) and I always thought that the formation of thoughts was actually a connection that was made between two neurons. However, how those connections are formed I have no clue. You could say that they are influenced by our outside surroundings and the signals that we collect through our senses, but then could you say that the only difference between an ordinary person like myself and Einstein is our experiences? Somehow I find that doubtful since there was nothing extraordinary about the life Einstein lead. Then can we say that some people are predestined to be geniuses? Is it in our DNA? But then how is that expressed in our phenotype? Because DNA is useless unless it's expressed in some sort of physical form, be it a protein or an eye color. So then how is the DNA of a genius expressed? Does he have a bigger brain or more neuron connections?

I can't give any definitive conclusions on this topic since all I can do is come up with hypotheses. However, this is what I find so fascinating about the human brain. We can see it, we can touch it, we can cut it up in pieces, we can put it under a microscope, but even with all that, we still know less about it than about subatomic particles which can only be studied through collisions in a cyclotron and through an analysis of electromagnetic traces on a sheet.