OK, I’m re-purposing here. This is an elaboration of a comment I made on a TED talk by David Bolinsky. He and his team do animations of scientific and medical concepts, and in this talk, he discusses their animation of activity inside a cell. The animation was wonderful for what it was: a Reader’s Digest version, as he calls it. Given that it was a simplified depiction, what struck me was the complexity of intracellular activity.
At one point they’re illustrating the behavior of kinesians (not sure of the spelling), little biological machines that ferry materials from one part of the cell to another. He calls them the Fed Ex delivery guys of the cell. There are around 100,000 kinesians in each of our 100 trillion cells. Add to that the number of bacteria involved in our bodily processes–ten times 100 trillion–each with their own complement of kinesians, and things get truly complex. And kinesians are only a tiny part of the whole picture…
Bolinsky mentioned that we know “almost a percent” of what goes on in a cell. Then there’s the interaction between cells, between organs, and between species–keeping those bacteria in mind. The complexity quickly goes from mind boggling to overwhelming.
I sometimes find myself sitting on the edge of the bed when I first wake up in the morning, thinking things like, “Well, we seem to have decided to get up early today,” or, “We seem to be a bit sluggish today.” I’m not just referring to the multiplicity of neural complexes that are scuffling for control of the organism, but to the multiplicity of bodily processes that are adding their input to the calculation of “who’s in charge now.”
With limited conscious access to the brain activity governing our thoughts and behavior, and equally limited access to the bodily processes that are nudging neural activity this way and that, all our thoughts about who we are and why we do what we do are necessarily “Reader’s Digest” versions. We don’t come close to knowing even one percent of what is going on within our organism at any given moment.
By referring to myself as “we” in my mental commentaries, I’m trying to expand the realm of the version of myself that knows how complex this organism really is; to undermine the over-simplified versions that lead to arrogance and self aggrandization.
Talks like Bolinsky’s give me ever more cause for humility–and humor–about my grand illusions of “self” control. By pursuing and taking note of this kind of input, I nibble away at the inaccuracies of my self perception, and move a tiny bit closer to a more comprehensive understanding of what I truly am.
Complexity Doubled