I've discussed before observations, such as Marsden Boise, many years ago, about the "curiously laminated" structure of life. In other words, living things seem to be composite entities, made up of smaller living things -- at least humans are made up of cells, or maybe we are made up of systems and organs which are made up of cells.
So, this is a familiar concept. Corporations are made up of divisions which are made up of departments which may be made up of teams which are made up of people ... which are made up of cells.
So are corporations alive, then? Probably, but "life" has a nuanced meaning. Corporations certainly satisfy all the descriptions of life in Biology 101 -- they consume energy, adapt to their environments (perhaps poorly), can reproduce, and are ultimately made up of cells. They are capable of dying and growing. They are also capable of merging of course, something humans don't do, but slime molds do.
So what? Is this just fancy definitions?
So what is that the different levels of "one" living thing, modeling the same way Ken Wilbur does, are inter-related and yet, locally, appear to have a significant independence from each other. They certainly operate in different worlds, with different "operations".
The world seen by the US President is different from that seen by a CEO is different from that seen by a worker on the factory floor is different from that seen by a cell. They care about different things, worry about different things, almost completely disjoint so long as everything remains healthy.
It's when things get not healthy that the inter-actions become vivid.
For humans, we do seem to have, looking downward, an animal level with a life of its own, that goes on pretty much independently of "us" and only occasionally appears to exert 'animal urges' on us. ("appears" is a key word here, as they affect us 100% of the time, but we don't see it.)
There is much written about people "getting in touch with" their own bodies. This seems to make sense to people without further explanation or theology. There are techniques, from Yoga to biofeedback to dance to Transcendental Meditation to make that process work faster or better.
Similarly, looking upwards, we belong to a whole nested hierarchy of higher-level living things, from potentially a family to a tribe or neighborhood or culture or country or corporation, or many of those all at the same time.
We can only speculate about how high the pyramid of Life goes. Just as communication and peace with our lower selves seems necessary for peace and health, communication and peace with our upper selves seems necessary for peace and health.
Not too surprisingly by this model, talking upwards ("to God") is about as perplexing and difficult as talking downwards ("to our body as a whole, or to our cells").
For one thing, we are used to thinking about "objects" and "events", but to our cells, if experienced at all, these are "contexts", not objects within the cell's context or events it could possibly have a name for. Cells do not fret about their children getting into Harvard or their 401k's.
Similar, the things even CEO's spend their days worrying about -- mergers, long-term strategy and product placement, etc -- mean very little to individual humans, except as contexts.
So, even more so with God, or whatever one calls all of the levels, going upwards above us, to whatever limit or infinity they rise to. As the levels get higher, the timescales get longer, and the geographic scales get larger. Fish in the open ocean don't notice the tide, it's too big to notice,
and takes too long. Our cells probably don't care much about "next year". Surviving the next few milliseconds is their focus.
So, can we generalize here? Is there anything we can say about communicating up or down the chain of life, aside from that it's hard, and the higher you go, the slower and larger the events of interest become?
It's a good question. I suspect that as one moves up the scale, the math and biophysics shifts from obession with contents, as with isolated billiard balls, to obsession with context and relationships. This happens in both General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, looking very far up and very far down.
That said, the Search For Extraterrestrial Life is probably looking in the wrong place, looking for rapid changes in contents, (electromagnetic wavaes) for messages, when it might be looking for changes in the contexts, such as a broadcast of "grace" or "healing".
The nouns and verbs may be off a bit, but the point is, up or down, they won't use the same nouns and verbs that "we" do.
We need to adjust for that fact, and look in entirely different places for different kinds of "messages".
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