Zemerge Project

You might say something like I am a person, a human being, a sentient being.

I posses intelligence, I can experience the passing of time, or change, and I can remember the past and imagine a future, I seem to have autonomy over my actions – or free will as far as I know, I experience emotions, I observe through my senses, and I posses this consciousness – which enables me to think, imagine and to ask this question in the first place.

I navigate around in this physical form we call the human body which is made up of more then 100 trillion biological units called cells, so I guess I could say I’m a colony of cells? each of these cells have specific instructions (or more like recipes) encoded in their DNA – which is a discreet (close to digital) string of a protein patterns arranged in several very long series of strings – this DNA holds the steps to guide the cell (along with RNA) in making new proteins that determine all of our biological traits, so collectively all these cell instructions create the whole functioning me.

There are certain cells that develop very differently, we label them as brain cells, the ones that create the neocortex develop an emergent neural network that enables us sensory perception, generation of motor commands, spatial reasoning, conscious thought and language.

So am I purely my consciousness? or am I this vehicle .. this colony of cells? or both?

What is great is there are others like myself, navigating around other 100 trillion cell island colonies.

It’s great! I get to communicate in various ways and we get to work together on shared common goals, we socialize, and we get to discover ourselves and others like myself and what this place is that we all cohabit.

During my lifetime I might hook up with one of these colonies that has a certain different set of cell instructions and a different neural network, I’ll send an envoy of my specialized half recipe cells into the other colony while both colonies enjoy a chemical fix to the emotions. This envoy usually dies off but every once a while one extremely lucky representative cell of mine will meet another very special half instruction cell from the other colony. At this point they merge and mix together both recipes for a new blue print to produce a new unique cell colony.

So in short I am this beautifully complex biological cell colony that experiences what it has become.

I am an entity that exists somewhere in the middle of the informational spectrum between randomness and pure order – the chaotic critical point that creates the very dynamic and complex structure that I call myself.

But have you ever wondered how you got here – in the most biologically fundamental sense? and what will you leave behind when you are gone? how has your existence changed the human genome for generations to come?

First let’s start from you and trace back in time. This is you, and let’s just assume you were born in say 1980.

You have two parents born in the 50s, the DNA instruction set that molded you into existence comes from the combination set of your parents instruction sets.

Each of your parents have themselves two parents (your grandparents) that came into existence the same way you did back in the 20s.

So continuing backwards and assuming a generation takes on average 20 years from now on, you get 8 grand-grand parents at the turn of the century.

Then 16 grad-grad-grad parents, and continuing your ancestry this number doubles with each generation resulting in 512 at the end of the 18th century, [over 16k ancestors in the 17th century, and over a million ancestors in the middle of the 16th century! and over a 274 billion ancestors at the beginning of the 13th century,] a ridiculous number a millenia ago, and just a silly number two millenia ago!! With this exponential trend you would have more ancestors then there is observable particles in the universe (~10 to power of 78?) back around 5300 years ago!!!

Clearly there is an assumption overlooked in this logic? This assumption is of course assuming that each of your ancestors is a unique individual living in the past. In reality the farther in the past you go back in your lineage the higher the ancestral saturation (or coalescence of the genome) you achieve within the population. So what does this mean?

Well it means that a normal looking family tree looking like this, with the next generation … can become looking like this!

Now I know what your thinking – my family tree has certainly none of that! But with couple extra generations back then the previous illustration I would almost guarantee that all of our family lineages start looking like that, how am I so certain?

Lets see, back in the time when Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas, or 23 generations ago so 2 to the power of 23 which is over 8 million, at the same time Europe had an estimated population of 70 million people. So as you can see in reality there are patches of duplicates in your ancestry tree and the more frequent they become – it becomes statistically impossible the more farther back in time you go not to have them.

Look at it in another example, George W. Bush and Barack Obama are 11th cousins – yes that is not surprising at all, I’m pretty sure I’m 11th cousin away from a significant chunk of the human population – except who has records going back to 17th century of their family tree anyways? remember at the beginning of the 17th century all of us had a linage of about 250K leaves in this family tree – the chances that you and I share one of these leaves – is fairly high!

In 2003, Douglas Rohde of MIT produced a paper describing a complex computer simulation performed with human migration patterns and population sizes of the past to paint the picture of the intermingled human family tree and to find our common ancestry.

Some of his conclusions are that the most recent common ancestor of everyone living today (so a person in the past that everyone alive today can call them their direct ancestor) may have lived between 300BC and 100AD. Furthermore, given that some populations were remote and intermingling did not happen as frequent, he estimates that back in 5400BC everyone alive was either an ancestor to ALL of us, or to no one alive today – so if you pick a random person from 5400BC they are either ancestor to every single living person today – or they are a extinct branch where no one today is an ancestor to them – in fact he estimated that once you go beyond 5400BC we are all descendants of around 60% of the population while the other 40% becomes extinct lineages.

There is a saying that if an ancient Egyptian had sex 5 mins later then everyone one living today would be different! since we would all be descendants of his child and his child would be ever so slightly different – and as you are aware of the chaotic butterfly effect – small changes in the past can seed wild shifts in the future outcomes.

What does this mean about you and the future, well just place yourself in the shoes of the Egyptian and now realize that you have the power to effect the entire human population of the far future!

As you can see, your family tree becomes intermingled after some time and becomes to look like a mingled bush rather then a tree.

Zooming out you can imagine how your specific genome has coalesced over some time period from the entire past population and will likely saturate everyone in the far future. In a way all of us come from the same identities – and return back to become the same identities – I often like to forget about my ego, and return to a though process placing myself as the whole manifesting an instance and then returning into the whole – try pondering that!

Zooming out even farther you can imagine how new species are forked when two bushes are separated from long time isolation of the species genome.

There is nothing mysterious or profound by the mechanism by which genes propagate throughout a species, it is simply an inevitable emergent chemical algorithm that continuously improves the recipe of the species genome to suit its environment. Positive and rewarding recipe changes propagate and eventually saturate the entire species, and negative or harmful genes slowly fade out and are pushed out of the species genome.

As you can see we really are one global human extended family, and to extend further just one organic family that includes all living beings on this planet, so lets treat our own family members like they should be treated – with equality, respect and dignity.

There is something else we can learn from this, as you can see living organisms in a way use the scientific method to plot direction, through continuous genome recipe verification and improvement against the physical environment – no one decides or votes which genes propagate, no ones opinion matters, nature simply follows its algorithm of continuous relentless testing and verification and adaptation to its environment by continuous coalescing and recombining the species genome. What if we were to mimic some of these natural algorithms to plot the direction for our social-cultural direction, to solve the modern problems our society is facing today and ascend to our diverse, creative and adaptive future using the same algorithms life has taken us here so far.

The molecular DNA is the recipe of organic life, its a set of instructions that molds each living being from the environment. This recipe is mixed, mutated and modified from generation to generation – each recipe is tested during the course of a lifetime, improvements to the recipe multiply it, and inefficiencies are phased out – it is the ultimate algorithm of optimal preservation strategy of self-continuity.

In the most abstract view life is an exotic form of emergent complexity which has its beginnings from quarks to atoms to molecules to biological cells. Life’s most intriguing innovation is the neural network of the brain – an evolving organ of ever increasing complexity until it reached a emerging threshold to spawn consciousness, self-awareness and abstract thought process that we are all too familiar with.

Recently these neural networks reached the shores of the next stage of emergent complexity – the emergence of the meme hive – a whole network of information existing artificially in the mass collection of the neural networks that spread, mutate, and mix each meme. Every thought, idea, symbol or practice – either spoken, written, drawn or typed – every single piece of information that ever came out from these neural networks and was transmitted to another is the meme hive. This meme hive no longer requires the organic neural network organs to persist, it can spread, mutate and mix within other mediums, this will continue to progress to a singularity of the memes, a threshold of self sustaining complexity that can be described as artificial intelligence, and perhaps in the far future it will continue to thrive and emerge into another new layer of complexity.

Peering through the meanings and concepts of existence and complexity one can only ponder the ultimate meaning of the universe at least from our viewpoint – and one theme stands out that persisted from the beginning of time to the unimaginable future – and it is emergent creativity.

So if you were to say what is your purpose in life, what is the ultimate goal and satisfaction that is pure in its essence and aligned with the universe at its every core – it is to be creative! to create ideas and mold the environment! create art, music, tools & technology and expressions … and being creative with others! to expand the meme hive and let it flourish as we are a product of this creativeness.