I am?
August 25, 2010
I’m taking a class right now whose title is “God is, I am”. The purpose of the class is to foster a deeper personal relationship with God (I enjoy this type of stuff).
In order for the title of the class to make sense, we must assume there is something called “I” which we can identify, separately from everything around it. If you stop to think about this, this concept of “I” is pretty amazing.
Different people have different beliefs about what we call creation and what we call evolution. I (there I go again) very strongly believe these are two different words for the same thing. Saying “creation” isn’t “evolution”, to me, is like saying circles aren’t round. When one takes this perspective, creation is an iterative process of ever increasing complexity. Life on Earth emerged almost as soon as the Earth came into being. Yet for about four billion years, the most complex life on Earth was single cell algae. Did this single cell algae have a sense of “I”? Was it aware of itself? We think not. However, we know for certain that our species clearly does have this sense.
Does all “simple” life lack this sense while all “complex” life has it? I put the words “simple” and “complex” in quotes because there is nothing “simple” about a single cell. Cells are incredibly complex, but a single cell organism is much less complex than a 50 trillion cell organism (which is you by the way). At what point does life become aware it exists? Become aware that is an “it” and a “not it”? Develop a perception of “self” in contrast to it’s environment? I’m not sure when this occurs or how, but it seems clear this is where the sense of “I” starts to make sense.
Yet, while this sens of “I” appears to occur when life becomes complex enough, there is nothing withing a 50 trillion cell organism that “is” the sense of “self”. There is no “self” organ. There is no “identity” part. If we were to perform a detailed and careful autopsy of a dead body, we would not find anything within the body which we could identify as the “identity” of the person.
Every individual cell has a birth, a life, and a death. The life span of individual cells is shorter than the lifespan of the person within whose body these cells live. The body of a mature person does not contain a single cell that existed when the person was born.
So what is this sense of self and where does it comes from?
