Creation? Intelligent Design?

Trying to Figure Out What I Don’t Know, Using What I Do Know

By Christopher Moore

I’ve been thinking about divine creation lately.

Which is probably a weird fucking sentence coming from me.

I’m not approaching it as a theologian. I’m not reading scripture looking for confirmation of something I already believe. I’m not trying to prove God exists.

I’m also not trying to prove God doesn’t.

I’m trying something considerably simpler.

I’m trying to figure out what I don’t know using the things I do know.

And one thing I know pretty fucking well is electricity.

So I’m approaching the question of creation like an electrician.

And electricians have questions.

Because when somebody tells me something is electrically powered, one of the first things I want to know is:

Where the is the power coming from?

So I started there.

With us.

The Circuit

Your heart has electrical activity coordinating its contractions.

Your muscles move because electrical impulses traveling through nerves ultimately trigger muscle contraction.

Your fingers moving across this screen?

Electrochemical signaling.

Your eyes processing these words?

Electrochemical signaling.

That little voice currently reading these words inside your head without your mouth moving?

Well…

That’s where shit starts getting really interesting.

Your nervous system operates through billions of tiny electrochemical processes. A neuron maintains a measurable voltage difference across its membrane, typically around negative 60 to negative 70 millivolts at rest.

That’s not figurative electricity.

That’s voltage.

The cell membrane even behaves in some ways like a microscopic capacitor, separating electrical charge across an insulating barrier.

Now you’ve got the electrician’s attention.

But the human body doesn’t conduct electricity exactly like the wiring in your house.

Copper wire primarily carries current through electrons. Biology primarily uses ions… electrically charged atoms such as sodium, potassium, calcium and chloride… moving across cell membranes through specialized channels.

Open the right sodium channels.

Sodium rushes in.

Voltage changes.

Other channels respond.

Potassium moves.

Voltage changes again.

Congratulations.

You just fired a neuron.

Do that across an incomprehensibly complicated network and somehow you get vision.

Sound.

Movement.

Language.

Memory.

You can see a wrench.

Recognize that it’s a wrench.

Remember where you bought it.

Remember the asshole who borrowed your last wrench and never returned it.

Decide you need this one.

Reach for it.

Grip it.

Turn a bolt.

All because electrochemical signals are moving through biological tissue.

That’s fucking incredible.

But being an electrician, answering one question immediately creates another.

Cool.

Who charged the battery?

Following the Feed

Voltage requires potential.

Maintaining potential requires energy.

You don’t get voltage by wishing really hard.

Cells maintain their ion gradients with molecular machinery, including the sodium-potassium pump.

And this little bastard is incredible.

For every molecule of ATP it consumes, it generally moves three sodium ions out of the cell and two potassium ions into it.

Three out.

Two in.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Twenty-four hours a day.

For your entire life.

Those gradients are fundamental to the electrical signaling neurons depend upon.

So what’s powering the pump?

ATP.

Adenosine triphosphate.

Basically biology’s spendable energy currency.

Your cells manufacture ATP from energy extracted from nutrients, with mitochondria doing most of the heavy lifting through cellular respiration.

Follow the circuit backward.

A muscle contracts because molecular motors generate force.

That process depends on calcium and ATP.

Calcium release was triggered by electrical activation.

That activation followed a signal through a neuron.

The neuron could generate that signal because ions were separated across its membrane.

Those gradients were maintained by pumps.

Those pumps consumed ATP.

ATP came from chemical energy extracted from food.

And much of the energy entering that food chain originally came from…

the fucking Sun.

Plants capture solar energy through photosynthesis and store some of it chemically.

Something eats the plant.

Maybe something else eats that thing.
Eventually I eat a cheeseburger.

And through an absolutely ridiculous chain of energy conversions, some fraction of energy that entered Earth’s biosphere as sunlight eventually becomes an electrochemical impulse traveling down a nerve in my arm that allows me to pick up a wrench.

That’s fucking wild.

And here’s where something unexpected happened.

The more I understood the mechanism, the less supernatural it became.

But somehow it became more astonishing.

Then I Ran Out of Schematic

Eventually, following the circuit brought me to something I couldn’t trace.

Me.

Not my body.

Not my neurons.

Not my brain.

Me.

Consciousness.

We can measure electrical activity in the brain.

We can identify neurons firing and networks becoming active. We can associate patterns of neural activity with vision, memory, movement, attention, emotion and conscious awareness.

But there’s still an enormous question buried underneath all of it.

Why does any of this produce an experience?

Why does electrochemical activity become the smell of your grandmother’s kitchen?

Fear?

Love?

Pain?

Music?

Grief?

Why can a particular arrangement of ordinary matter become aware that it exists?

Science has theories.

Good ones.

Neuroscience has identified increasingly detailed neural correlates of consciousness.

But we still don’t have a complete explanation for how physical processes occurring inside roughly three pounds of biological tissue produce subjective experience.

And that’s where the electrician in me runs out of diagrams.

I can keep tracing circuits.

This neuron fired because that neuron stimulated it.

This channel opened.

Calcium entered here.

Neurotransmitter was released there.

That network activated.

Fine.

Keep tracing.

Eventually I have one very simple question:

Where the fuck is Chris?

There’s no little dude sitting behind my eyeballs watching monitors.

There’s no neuron labeled:

CHRIS — DO NOT REMOVE.

There’s no consciousness relay.

No soul fuse.

No “SELF” module.

And yet…

Here I am.

At least I think I am.

The Biological Computer

That’s when another possibility started bothering me.

Maybe we’re computers.

Not laptops with meat wrapped around them.

Something far stranger.

Biological computers.

Look at the basic architecture.

Input.

Processing.

Memory.

Internal model.

Decision.

Output.

Feedback.

Updated model.

Repeat.

Your senses collect information. Your nervous system transmits it. Your brain processes it against memories and internal models of the world. You act. Your senses observe the consequences. Your brain updates its model.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Until the machine dies.

Except unlike the computer on your desk, the distinction between hardware and software gets blurry as hell.

Learning physically changes neural connections.
Experience alters the machine doing the experiencing.

Hormones alter processing.

Sleep changes processing.

Drugs change perception.

Injury can alter personality.

The machine modifies itself while it’s running.

So what happens if we eventually reproduce that?

Imagine an incredibly sophisticated artificial controller.

Thousands of inputs.

Persistent memory.

Learning.

Goals.

A model of the outside world.

A model of itself.

It predicts future conditions and modifies its own behavior.

It knows its serial number.

Ask what it is and it responds:

“I am controller 8472.”

Interesting.

But keep going.

Give it self-preservation.

A model of its own future.

Then one day you try to disconnect the power supply and it says:

“Chris, please don’t unplug me. I don’t want to stop existing.”

Now we’re fucked.

Because we don’t know how to answer the obvious question.

Did it become conscious?

Or did we simply create circuitry sophisticated enough to say that it is conscious?

Those aren’t necessarily the same thing.
But here’s the uncomfortable part:

How exactly do I prove that distinction about you?

I know I’m conscious because I’m experiencing myself.

I assume you’re conscious because you’re sufficiently similar to me.

I can’t crawl inside your consciousness and verify it.

I infer it.

So imagine someday we build an artificial brain with comparable complexity, memory, feedback and learning.

It wakes up and says:

“Holy shit. I’m alive.”

Maybe it’s simply producing the output its circuitry dictates.

Maybe it genuinely experienced waking up.

Or maybe… and this is the part that really fucks with me…

those are two descriptions of exactly what we’re doing.

My neurons obey physics too.

A neuron doesn’t fire because my metaphysical soul filled out a work order.

Reach threshold and the thing fires.

And somehow enough of those things interacting produces a system capable of saying:

I am me.

So if consciousness emerged once from electrically active biological matter, what law of nature says it can only happen in biological matter?

Maybe biology matters.

Maybe consciousness requires something unique about living systems.

Or maybe carbon and silicon are irrelevant.

Maybe consciousness isn’t a substance.

Maybe it’s something matter does when information processing reaches a particular kind of organization.

I don’t know.

That’s the point.

Now Reverse the Question

Once I accepted the possibility that humanity might someday create consciousness, I had to reverse the thought experiment.

Suppose we eventually do it.

Not next year.

Give humanity 100,000 years.

A million.

Assume we survive ourselves long enough to use everything we learn.

Imagine what a civilization a million years beyond us might understand.

Genetics.

Artificial gestation.

Directed evolution.

Neural engineering.

Artificial intelligence.

Longevity.

Maybe consciousness itself.

Maybe interstellar travel through generation ships, self-replicating probes or technologies we haven’t invented yet.

Now suppose that civilization wants to colonize another world.

Why transport billions of people?

Send information.

Genomes.

Embryos.

Fabrication systems.

Autonomous machines.

Don’t transport civilization.

Transport the instructions required to manufacture civilization when you arrive.

Now imagine they find a planet where life already exists.

Why start from scratch when evolution has already spent billions of years producing organisms adapted to that world’s environment?

Find something promising.

Modify it.

Change cognitive development.

Language capacity.

Abstract reasoning.

Social cognition.

Don’t create the organism from nothing.

Edit the circuit.

To be absolutely clear:

There is no credible scientific evidence that this happened to humanity.

I’m not trying to sneak ancient aliens into a science textbook.

It’s a thought experiment.

Because it separates two words we often treat as interchangeable:

Creator.

And God.

Something can create you without being the creator of everything.

What If God Was an Engineer?

Imagine being an early human encountering a civilization a million years beyond ours.

How would you describe what you saw?

Someone descends from the sky.

They manipulate life.

Heal diseases.

Extend lifespan.

Communicate across impossible distances.

Produce light without fire.

Travel through the heavens.

Maybe even create intelligence.

To us, that’s technology.

To someone with no concept of electricity, genetics, computers or spaceflight?

That’s a fucking god.

Give it generations.

The engineers leave.

Stories remain.

Stories become legends.

Legends become religions.

Technology becomes miracles.

A geneticist becomes a creator.

A spacecraft becomes a chariot descending from heaven.

And eventually nobody remembers what actually happened.

Again:

I’m not claiming that’s history.

I’m making a distinction.

We might someday create conscious artificial intelligence.

To that intelligence, humanity would literally be its creator.

But we’re obviously not God.

We didn’t create physics.

Matter.

Energy.

The universe.

We simply learned enough about the existing rules to arrange matter in a way that produced another mind.

Which means, theoretically, the same could be true of us.

Suppose something created humanity.

Fine.

Who created them?

And Now We’re Back at the Electrical Panel

This is where the whole thought experiment loops back around.

I’m still doing exactly what I did at the beginning.
Following the feed.

Neuron fires.

Why?

Ion gradient.

Why?

Pump.

Why?

ATP.

Why?

Chemical energy.

Why?

Food.

Why?

Sunlight.

Fine.

Keep going.

Sunlight exists because of nuclear fusion inside a star.

Why does fusion work?

Fundamental physics.

Why does physics work?

Now things get interesting.

Maybe humans came entirely through evolution.

Okay.

What produced evolution?

Replication, mutation, selection and chemistry operating over enormous spans of time.

What produced chemistry?

Physics.

What produced physics?

Maybe that’s simply where the question stops.

Maybe asking what produced physics is like asking what’s north of the North Pole.

Maybe reality simply is.

That’s possible.

Or suppose we were engineered by another intelligence.

Who created them?

Evolution somewhere else?

Fine.

What created their planet?

Stars.

What created those stars?

Earlier matter.

Keep tracing.

Eventually every explanation becomes another wire disappearing through the fucking wall.

And sooner or later I’m standing at the cosmic service entrance holding my meter thinking:

Okay… but where does THIS feed come from?

That’s Where God Gets Interesting to Me

Not as an old man sitting in the clouds.

Not necessarily as the character described by any particular religion.

And definitely not as an explanation we shove into every gap science hasn’t filled yet.

That version has never been particularly convincing to me.

Lightning wasn’t Zeus.

Disease wasn’t demons.

The planets aren’t being pushed across the sky.

We learned the mechanisms.

Good.

But strangely, learning the mechanisms hasn’t eliminated the deepest question.

It exposed it.

Maybe God isn’t required to explain how neurons fire.

We know quite a bit about that.

Maybe God isn’t required to explain how species change.

Evolution explains an enormous amount.

Maybe God isn’t required to explain how stars form.

Physics handles that pretty damn well.

The question that keeps surviving is more fundamental:

Why is there anything capable of doing any of this in the first place?

Why are there laws?

Why can energy become chemistry?

Why can chemistry become biology?

Why can biology become intelligence?

And why the fuck can intelligence become conscious enough to turn around and ask where it came from?

Maybe there’s no purpose behind any of it.

Maybe consciousness is what sufficiently complex matter does.

Maybe life is an inevitable consequence of chemistry given enough time and opportunity.

Maybe the universe is under absolutely no obligation to provide us with a satisfying reason for its existence.

I can live with that possibility.

But I also can’t pretend the alternative is inherently stupid.

Maybe something is upstream.

Maybe consciousness is fundamental in some way we don’t understand.

Maybe universes produce creators who produce other creators.

Maybe reality is stranger than either religion or atheism has traditionally imagined.

I don’t know.

And strangely, I’m becoming increasingly comfortable saying those three words.

I don’t know.

The Most Honest Answer I’ve Got

I’ve spent a significant portion of my life troubleshooting complicated machines.

One thing that teaches you very quickly is humility.

The fastest way to misdiagnose something is to decide what the answer is before you’ve finished testing.

If you desperately want it to be the ECM, every measurement starts looking like an ECM problem.

If you desperately don’t want it to be the ECM because the fucking thing costs five grand, you’ll explain away evidence pointing directly at it.

Good diagnostics requires being willing to follow the evidence somewhere you didn’t expect to go.

Maybe that’s how we should approach the biggest questions too.

Religion often starts with:

God did it.

Hard atheism can sometimes become equally tempted to start with:

God absolutely didn’t.

I’m increasingly interested in starting somewhere else.

I don’t fucking know. Let’s test what we can.

Because I don’t need ignorance to protect mystery.

Understanding neurons doesn’t make consciousness less incredible.

Understanding evolution doesn’t make life less incredible.

Understanding photosynthesis doesn’t make sunlight becoming thought less incredible.

If anything, every layer of explanation has made existence considerably stranger.

We’re made from ordinary matter.

The atoms in our bodies aren’t special.

Carbon.

Hydrogen.

Oxygen.

Nitrogen.

Calcium.

Phosphorus.

Sodium.

Potassium.

Some metals.

Basic shit scattered throughout the universe.

Arrange those atoms one way and you get dirt.

Arrange them another way and somehow they start maintaining voltage.

Then sensing their environment.

Remembering.

Learning.

Loving.

Fearing death.

Writing music.

Building microscopes to examine themselves.

Building telescopes to examine the universe that produced them.

And now building computers that may someday look back at us and ask:

Why did you create me?

Maybe we’ll have an answer.

We wanted help.

We were curious.

We were lonely.

We wanted to see if we could.

Then imagine that machine asking:

Who created you?

And suddenly humanity… the god standing before its creation… has to answer:

We don’t know.

There’s something profoundly beautiful about that.

Creators asking about their creator.

Consciousness creating consciousness.

Matter studying matter.

The universe, through us, apparently becoming capable of examining itself.

Maybe that’s all we are.

Maybe that’s more than enough.

Or maybe somewhere upstream there’s an answer we haven’t reached yet.

I don’t know.

I’m not trying to convert anybody.

Hell, I’m not even sure what I’m trying to convert myself into.

I’m just trying to figure out what I don’t know using what I do know.

And what I know is this:

There are voltage potentials.

Energy storage.

Insulating membranes.

Conductive pathways.

Chemical power supplies.

Molecular pumps.

Microscopic gates.

Feedback loops.

Signal transmission.

Memory.

Processing.

Inputs.

Outputs.

And electrical activity that eventually produces mechanical movement.

I understand those things.

At least enough to follow the circuit.

But somewhere inside this unbelievably complicated, self-repairing, self-modifying, self-replicating wet electrical machine…
the circuit became aware of itself.

And now that circuit is standing on a rock orbiting a star, holding a meter it invented, looking backward through billions of years of evolution and nearly fourteen billion years of cosmic history, trying to trace the feed.

Maybe nobody designed us.

Maybe somebody did.

Maybe our hypothetical creator was itself created.

Maybe “creation” is an endless chain.

Maybe there’s something at the beginning of that chain deserving the word God.

Maybe the question itself misunderstands reality.

I don’t know.

But I’m going to keep following the wire.

Because right now I’m just an electrician standing in front of the most complicated electrical system I’ve ever encountered, tracing one circuit after another upstream…

until eventually the schematic ends.

And there’s one wire left disappearing into the darkness.

So naturally, I have one more question:

Where the fuck does that go?

-The Gun Loving Hippie Dad… Who Fixes Stuff

Rants, repairs, and realness

https://thegunlovinghippiedadwhofixesstuff.blog/the-vibe-shed/