Small stuff

Despite the “overpopulation” some people fret about — which really has more to do with the disproportionate damage a very few of us wreak — all of us, people altogether everywhere, add up to just a tiny fraction of Earth’s total living matter.

Scientists reckon that the total biomass of shrimp-like Antarctic krill, Euphausia superba, weighs in at something over 500 million tonnes. That’s about twice the estimated entire tonnage of the whole of humanity.

The total weight of Earth’s living organisms has been estimated at about 75 billion tonnes, and we’re just one third of one per cent of that: as biomass, we are all of us just a speck. Bacteria — creatures too small to see without microscopes — and plants account for most of the world’s tonnage of living matter.

And, when we weigh all of what we deem “living” matter against what we know of the “non-living” components of our planet, the amount is infinitesimally tiny. Guesstimates are that living stuff adds up to maybe 0.00000000126 per cent of the Earth’s total mass. Not a lot, in other words.

While we can talk about all of these “living” things and the ecosystems they form and the ways they sustain each other, it’s a lot harder for us to talk about the nature of life, and its meaning.

And, when we come to consciousness, we are pretty much stumped. It’s not being alive that gives us such a buzz, it’s being conscious of it. But we don’t really know quite what consciousness is, how it comes to be, or even the proportion of our own Earth’s biomass that possesses it.

Some scientists say consciousness is unique to people; more and more are coming to see it churning away in other species. Some say consciousness is just an odd coincidence of the nervous system’s real work, a kind of neural noise of no biological significance at all, a bit like gas pain in the digestive tract.

Some scientists share Francis Crick’s view that “…‘you’, your joys and sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and freewill, are no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules”.

One current theory is that consciousness happens when enough parts of the cortex light up simultaneously. On the other hand, a British biologist, Brian Ford, has written about apparent consciousness at the level of the single cell. After translating the signals of individual nerve cells into sound clips, he heard, not the clicking of a switch, but sounds “with the hypnotic quality of seabirds calling”… “there is a sense that each (signal) spike is modulated subtly within itself, and it sounds as if there are discrete signals in which one neuron in some sense ‘addresses’ another,” he wrote in a 2010 New Scientist article. “For me, the brain is not a supercomputer in which the neurons are transistors; rather it is as if each individual neuron is itself a computer… if I am right, the human brain may be a trillion times more capable than we imagine, and ‘artificial intelligence’ a grandiose misnomer.”

This is a variety of the array of attitudes and notions that most clearly draw attention to the boundaries beyond which the wheels of scientific empiricism begin to spin and determinisms wander off to the fun park.

But, as René Descartes pointed out with his oft-quoted premise “I think therefore I am (cogito ergo sum)”,  consciousness — a reflective sense of ‘self’ — is the only reality of which we can be absolutely sure.

It may not seem like a lot to cling to, but it’s all we have. And human consciousness is the medium through which every detail of anything that any of us might say about the “real world” is transmitted from one person to another — whether we speak it, write it, paint it, webpage it, enact it, mathematise it or gesture it with a loaded gun. Human communication is between one discrete consciousness and another. We haven’t yet drawn other species too deeply into our conversations, so we don’t engage much with whatever their views of things may be.

Beyond human consciousness, everything is conjecture and conjecture exists only in consciousness.

And conjecture, the play of ideas, can make life a whole lot of fun.