Carbon

All good systems seek to maintain themselves. If they do not, they cease to be systems, so any behavior that it not self-maintaining is, by definition, bad. At the same time, the system maintenance must be able to change quickly enough so that the environment does not destroy it. An atom is a system, and a darned good one, as it has generally worked quite well for many billions of years, depending on how you tell time in Riemannian space. It fails in places like singularities, but as Reason itself breaks down around singularities, that's really not much of a failing. The reason for the success of the atom is that it is tightly bound to the environment. Its appendages into the environment, electrons, are small enough that they can hear raised voices from the Planck distance, the most basic unit in the reality grid. In other words, if change is occurring, it's hard to make a change so small that an atom can't hear it. Furthermore, being so small itself, the atom does not neet Project Managers to communicate the change to all its parts, although occasionally there are spin-offs and mergers.

The electrons themselves are sensitive to probability. If the fourth dimension is time, and probability is a sort of ill-defined fifth dimension, then things like electrons and gravitons are the movers and shakers in this odd sphere. Mass is concentrated probability, and it slowly gathers things to it, forming suns and planets. Chemicals bind the escaping energy of the cosmos into stuctures that hold that energy in a pattern, gathering more probability as the universe wonders exactly how that energy is going to get out, like an audience at a Jenga game. The structures grow into systems, and eventually systems like you and me can begin wondering about how these structures came to be in the first place. We do this because we can see the "might-have-beens", the crucial fifth dimension that allows us to navigate around things like trying to commute past high schools with nothing but a two lane access road.

So our system, life, has seen itself in the mirror. Congratulations. Science can now continue, but life's next step is a bit more difficult, as it involves organizing systems into the extremely contentious supersystem we call "society", or "culture", or whatever it is they are calling it in this year's intro to anthro textbooks. We need to think about this because, as anyone who witnessed the twentieth century can tell you, the work done in this area has been lacking in rigor.

Living systems are the best analogy we have for society's integration of complex systems (humans). We can start with the rise of genetic material from mobs of mere molecules 3,800 million years ago. It is important to realize that there were an Enron-sized pile of fuck-ups even at this early date. Even after a life system was established, wild imbalances in the system resulted in environmental destruction unmatched even today (see "Oxygen Catastrophe"). Unlike carbon atoms, however, we supposedly have an information exchange between human beings that is capable of correct the larger supersystem and the behavior of the subsystems, i.e., you and me. Also unlike carbon atoms, we have ideology, religion, and the Heritage Foundation. Humans win by default, as we have not yet destroyed all life with poisonous gas. Nuclear weapons are far prettier, in any case, and the only art carbon atoms are interested in is jewelry.

Since we've established that human beings have at least the capacity to be smarter than carbon atoms, let's move up a level, to another established system. The human brain is, arguably, a self-correcting system (most of the time) that can get most of its ducks in a row when the environment changes - without destroying its internal structure (almost more than half the time). It does this via a host of control mechanisms, most of which are located, stupidly enough, in the same office block as those housing our Mortal Sins. When your hypothalamus is trying to route hemispheres occupied with the Ontological Argument for the Existence of God, it is going through that one time in fifth grade that Lesia let you put your hand up her skirt. The reason for this is that your brain's first priority is your system first, and your supersystem second (although current research indicates that some folks are preselected for sacrifice in a human population, it is not the norm).

Being a free carbon atom is nice and all, but the supply of information reaching you is negligible in comparison to the information flow your friends are getting on the quantum highway inside their huge RNA molecule. It doesn't make sense to be a carbon atom. You abandon being an atom because you see much bigger things in your future (literally) as part of a system. The body did the same thing with its neurons, via cell specialization, the hypothalamus and assorted control mechanisms. Human society has done it with a successive grouping of social constructs so myriad that I am not going to google them all. It doesn't even matter what they are all called. What does matter is that the supersystem must be able to navigate five-dimensional space in a symbolic fashion, and dodge the symbolic semi running a red light.

So human society needs better information exchange and a new hypothalamus or organizing structure, but that means saying things about religion and ideology that I really don't want to get into here. We're already well down the road on the information exchange part, but a rigid control will make a rigid supersystem, unable to make timely changes. We traditionally haven't had to worry about information and reactionaries in the same space, but suffice to say we've seen a new sort of religious fundamentalism, one that isn't afraid of the internet, electronic survellance and ID tags. I don't want Dr. James Dobson to write the hypothalamus of 21st century humanity, because 1) I think it would be a suffocating world, and 2) I don't think his ilk have the vision of a carbon atom, much less that of blue-green algae.