Tuesday 28 October 2014

Two life forms in one body

People are a symbiosis of two life forms, the XY-Guy and the Identity (I.D.)  I'm calling XY-Guy the behaviour baked into the genes for the organism to survive with food, sex and air.  I.D. is the "I" thing that happens in the same organism.  A few years after being born, every little kid starts calling himself "I" using the same name his neighbours call themselves..    Experience and thought is structured with a life of its own and eventually I.D.'s structured data exceeds the amount of information in XY-Guy's genome.  Both life forms infuse the same organism.

Men and women form couples with a double union.  The XY-Guy is somewhat generic but powerful while I.D. has character and more options.    Their respective goals can be out of sync but somehow, as couples, we blink at those moments and refocus.  It's similar to falling asleep and waking up.  The two different but related worlds aren't quite compatible but they reflect each other and share places in our brain with the help of a little forgetfulness at the door from one to the other.  

I may call my wife honey (a food word) or nibble her ear and at the same time listen to her presentation strategy for a meeting.   At the same moment I admire her kindness to a stranger I can get a bump in my pants.  Two life forms share the leadership with a little blink as they hand off to one another.

This is nothing new.  The cells of our body seem to be alive with several subordinate life forms.  The mitochondria even have their own DNA lineage.    We also exist in two radically different forms at the moment leading up to conception.  Just as a mushroom can exist as a mycelium cloud underground or a gilled lump after a rain,  XY-Guy can exist either as a brainy organism or as eggs and a million spermicules wriggling about with a sense of destiny.   They are alternating life forms (haploid and diploid).

Can Identity reproduce without a body?  This is where AI is heading.

(Semantics:  ID and I.D. make a good word pair but there's too much baggage with Freud's term.)

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