It’s levels to it, you and I know
— Kendrick Lamar
Seduction is effective because our minds cannot help but imagine what lies underneath.
What is hidden intrigues. For the detective, it’s the details overlooked by the commoner. For the spouse, it’s the cues pointing towards infidelity. For the victims and the vulnerable, it’s the mask that hides the face of the superhero or the villain.
Scientists spend their entire lives unravelling nature’s hidden secrets. It therefore starts with a guess. Lady luck dons her lingerie, ready to tease the persistent researcher. She goes at it, either frustrating them or giving a clue to what lies underneath her body-embracing outfits. And like an excited youngster, the scientist will preach to the world what nature revealed in secret.
But first, it starts with a guess.
We then develop models to establish the verity of our guess. More often than not, we will be completely wrong. The scientific process and critical thinking weed out the impossibilities as we gravitate towards the common attractor of truth. This journey is of an unknown distance. To get to the truth, we must continue moving.
What becomes apparent throughout this trek is that what is hidden is layered. This much is clear in various areas. What I shall discuss is a mixture of what we know and the guesses I have made in this continuous journey. In the words of Kendrick, “It’s levels to it.”
First things firt, the…
Organism
The organism is a bounded pocket of energy that resists death. It portrays features we feel that do traverse every other organism. A core material where information is passed from one generation to the next. By the mid-20th century, we had established that it was DNA.
A monk, patently aware that boredom was the alternative, began experimenting with peas. He then developed rules that governed the inheritance of traits. These patterns became known as Mendelian inheritance. The world began to look pretty obvious, until we began peeling more hidden layers.
Today, several factors are inherited in non-Mendelian ways. Mitochondria are maternally inherited. No independent assortment. No segregation. Maternally dominant.
What’s more, the founders of the double helix believed that a gene, the heritable sequence of DNA, coded for proteins that executed the dynamic functions of a cell. But underneath this layer lay another fact — other strips of DNA coded for molecules that were not necessarily proteins, but influenced cellular functions.
MicroRNAs, histone and cytosine tags, and topologically associated domains influence the openness and functionality of the DNA. It’s turtles of hidden layers after hidden layers of turtles. The more we find out, the more we discover just how much we had assumed.
Here’s where I establish my guesses.
A cell from a single complex organism such as yourself has the same genome as it did when the gametes fused. Allegedly. But no cell is the same as the next. On the skin, the neighbouring cells are always in their own worlds, literally. A gene-centred view makes it apparent that genes are geared to find ways of making it to the next generation, and a cell wishes to reproduce another version of itself.
But if the very adjacent cell is in no way similar to the next except from a superficial perspective, why should a cell wish to make a version of itself if it will be different? So much of what happens inside a cell is context-dependent that reproduction of one cell will be different from that of the neighbouring one. This logic underpins my hypothesis that a cell’s primary goal is to persist, not to reproduce. Reproduction is a means of handling an increase in size during moments of abundance.
And the more I explore this idea, the stranger it becomes, because this unique and context-based string of functions is tightly related to another stranger idea…
Consciousness
We have no better definition of consciousness than felt experience. What it is like to be an organism. But as for different forms of life, biologists do not agree on which have consciousness and which don’t. Part of this disagreement is the reason we have 300+ theories of consciousness, with no clear means of falsifying this large body of guesses. Consciousness is apparent but remains hidden.
One leading theory, Integrated Information Theory, suggests that a light diode has a speck of consciousness dust. Since information reduces uncertainty, a diode is either on or off. So when it lights up, we know what is up. This information is integrated in a way that reduces uncertainty, and we have one bit of information.
Arguments have been launched against this theory, although it offers a framework for testing it, unlike other theories, such as mine, which suggests that consciousness can be understood from a lens of probability.
I have argued elsewhere that consciousness is hidden but remains integrated, in the way an organism is organizationally closed but thermodynamically open. Closed because you can tell that you are you, even when you look in a mirror or after you have changed your hair. Open because you need energy to survive.
Consciousness, in my books (which I haven’t written, but you get what I mean), only exists in the presence of a boundary. Cells have boundaries. AI and LLMs don’t. I call this the boundary condition of consciousness.
Creating a clear boundary between oneself and the universe is the first step towards establishing an awareness of a difference between yourself and the rest of the universe. It’s the first step towards having an integrated version of self. And thus, there exists a map that is robust for every living organism. That is, every organism exists as a system, and anything external to it is its universe.
Your universe is different from mine, but there are overlaps. Locality, the physical principle, allows you to see what I see, smell what I smell, and touch what I touch. Evolution made it easy for us to make these observations about our environments. But through the map, your universe is different from mine. It accounts for the subjectiveness of consciousness.
Furthermore, I have shown there exists a form of duality between the physically living organism and the consciousness that mimics another duality that we observe in …
Light
Light is another interesting feature of our shared universe. It has a constant speed across all inertial frames, a stunning feature that has proven consistent ever since Einstein used this bit of knowledge to establish the theories of relativity. Light, it came to be known, was hidden and continues to be so, even though once we see it, we should see the light (pun intended).
At first, we thought light behaved like a particle. But it seemed that it was a feature of wave collapse. It only turned into a particle when we observed it. Kind of like our pets (I don’t have one, but imagine I did), which feign ignorance when we observe them. Don’t believe me? Watch the movie The Secret Life of Pets or The Sheep Detectives.
Thomas Young then, for reasons we shall never know, decided to test light’s properties using two slits. To his surprise, light had more hidden layers underneath this particular property. Light behaved like a wave. The wave-particle duality of light.
Richard Feynman then wondered — what if we had more slits? It should behave in the same way. But what if the slits continued infinitely? Wouldn’t that mean that light traverses all infinitely possible paths to move from point A to point B? And wouldn’t light still preserve its wave-particle duality? Yet another hidden layer.
Light remained intact, like a packet, even though it went through infinite paths as it moved. Louis de Broglie took it further. He then used this hidden property to establish that it applied to other particles too. The wave-particle duality of matter is now without question.
I have used this idea, borrowing an olive branch from one field to explain another, in creating a crazy hypothesis. I have made an argument that light behaves like an organism. I have tried to avoid anthropomorphising, but once you notice the similarities, it becomes difficult not to.
And for a long time, the hidden business underneath the cell was made impossible because of our apparatus. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek broke this barrier by discovering the microbial world. More powerful microscopes, first using light and eventually electrons, revealed that the world of the cell is more hidden than we could have imagined.
Suppose that light is the same. Why should we not question this possibility?
At some point, the world’s leading scientists believed the atom was the most fundamental particle. The very word means indivisible. Our apparatus improved to peel the hidden layers. Why should we believe light does not have such a layer?
Complexity teaches us that various properties of systems are emergent and cannot be reduced to the primary components. Sweet taste, for instance, is not apparent in carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, but it is there in sugar. Light could display its features robustly, despite a world that may, for all we know or care, be very different at a sub-light level, if at all it exists.
Our findings on hidden layers hidden within the hidden layers mean we should not think we have uncovered every layer. The standard model, for all its accuracies, could have been a robust result of strong emergence seen in what we presently call the fundamental particles, one of which is light.
The more we studied the extremely tiny, the more it revealed about the astronomically large, because we learned that light could move extremely fast, but past a certain barrier, it could never escape the powers of a …
Black hole
Black holes fascinate me. They fascinated Sir Roger Penrose. They occupied the mind of Stephen Hawking up to his death. And they have pushed me to consider the very strange, partly because in itself it is very strange.
Black holes share the same features as the electron — charge, mass and spin. Like light, we don’t know if there is any world underneath the electron that we are not privy to. And as for the black hole, we don’t know what lurks underneath the event horizon. Hidden layers after hidden layers.
This boundary intrigues many researchers, evidenced by the numerous theories of what lurks beyond this event horizon. If you get in head first, you may get spaghettified because the pull of gravity on one end of your body will be greater than the other. But we know the human body cannot get spaghettified. In this world. In the world inside the black hole? Deduction on one side may not necessarily translate to the other, but we have no reason to believe it shouldn’t.
That is, besides the fact that it is hidden. There it is again. That word. And the black hole has hidden so much from us that I wonder if it too behaved like an organism. This is how I have built my argument.
The first condition for making an organism is a boundary. This boundary is evidence of a physical system that is organizationally closed and thermodynamically open. A black hole is organizationally closed. The presence of the event horizon shows this. It is thermodynamically open. Material can fall inside it and fail to leave.
Like an organism, it has a boundary. And like organisms when we first began seriously studying them, what lurked underneath was mysterious. This is the state of all black holes. We don’t know what’s hidden.
But for a moment, I want us to think about it in this way. Since black holes are formed when unique stars that have achieved a certain threshold (Schwarzschild radius) collapse in on themselves, every black hole is unique, much like every cell in your body is unique. The goal of a cell, from my earlier argument, is not to reproduce, but to persist. A black hole achieves this most astonishingly by evaporating extremely slowly and keeping its organizationally closed structure relatively intact.
And by establishing a boundary, unlike LLMs, black holes could, in principle, be conscious. I know, it sounds absurd. But it already qualifies as having features similar to organisms. It has a form of astronomical metabolism. We know that cells are metabolic by the heat they release. Black holes release colossal amounts of energy.
To generate energy, you must consume energy. Like any organism. For you to read this, you must have had a meal, converted into chemical energy, processed by your brain, and now differ with what I have just said, because it seems absurd. I don’t blame you. I had to twist my arm to text these words.
And it may not have a genetic code, but we tend to believe all living organisms have DNA. There are, however, problems with a DNA-first world. This system may be a tricky one to imagine, because forming complex molecules and preserving them is difficult without other complex molecules or systems to preserve them. This is the basis of Eigen’s paradox. To form a complex molecule such as DNA, we need complex molecules such as enzymes to make it in the first place. But to get these enzymes, we need the DNA. What gives?
Anyway, if the DNA didn’t appear first, then it is likely the RNA did, and there are problems with an RNA-first world. To form RNA, we need metabolism. Metabolism is a means of making energy. This needs to be well concentrated in a bounded system. And we have arrived at a system much like a black hole.
See?
Or maybe, I should say, “Don’t you see?”
What I’m trying to say is…
I get way too petty once you let me do the extras
Indeed, I can stretch a concept just to see how far it can lead me. Stretching is what is needed for knowledge to grow or for a concept to break down.
What I have done is show you how a hidden world can be layered, where the hubris of thinking you have figured things out may not be the best approach.
A more interesting life would be to continue pushing and asking if there is another layer underneath.
History tells us that there might be.
The best armour to carry with you?
A set of guesses.
Sit down, be humble
This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube