recall precise feelings about emotive events but I can say how I was feeling. I was sad, angry or happy. It's the word that comes back to mind not a reliving of the experience.
So if a foetus can't recall from a memory because it hasn't any words, does it matter that we so readily abort them? Morals were never my strong point. The moralistic person must take a strong polar stance denying to others their right to determine their own actions. Yet the moral person is the basis of all society, so morality has to be addressed no matter how inconvenient. I think that all people, moral or otherwise, would feel that aborting a foetus is not something desirable. The modern dilemma is the associated necessity of abortion within the broader social context. That the foetus has no memory is at least of consolation to those who choose that route. But no memory does not mean no sensation. Perception may be missing but sensation is there, instantaneous though it may be. Perhaps there is some other form of memory outside of that associated with the brain. The body as an organism can have a primitive memory. The body's allergic response to certain substances is such a memory.
None of these things help define at what point a new life is born. Conventionally it was taken to be the moment the child exits the womb but with advancing science this moment can take place earlier and earlier in the gestation period. Ultimately total ex-utera babies will be possible making the point of life the moment of fertilisation. There is a major moral problem looming. But I am more concerned with the philosophical question as to when a being exists - when does the conscious and unconscious mind boot up? Because this is a very special moment in time when another Big Bang-like event occurs, if you take that each person may live in a solipsistic universe. What are the processes that lead to the turning on of cognitive life in the foetus or in the ex-uterine baby? Science has no answers for this most special of moments. It cannot even agree on when it happens. Undoubtedly it is linked to brain and nerve development but at what point the brain takes over the functioning of the organism is still a mystery.
Maybe there is no special moment but rather a gradual take over just as the memory only kicks in slowly with speech definition. As the foetus develops, the various organs develop and are built up in stages. Then like a commissioning stage in an industrial plant, each organ checks its functioning and its communication lines with the nervous system and the brain. The early life of the organism is not independent but is working towards it, frenetically testing and commissioning all the various parts and then when all have passed minimum requirements and when the organism is cut off from the life protecting mother, they all crash into operation. The early independent life of the organism is crazy with each new system running itself in. This takes all the capacity of the young brain initially, leaving little room for processing sensations other than the requirement for food to power all the organ functions. As things settle down the organism becomes more aware of its environment and of its place in it. It gets the first impression of its own special place in the environment - the first inklings of self awareness set in. The world is a simple place of me and not me. The person has been truly born. Yet there is no need to say exactly when the person was born because the birth is spread over time - different elements developing at different times. A person doesn't become a person in an instant but like all living things grows as the systems, of which he is made of, grow.
There are two well defined instants in a person's being - fertilisation of ovum by sperm and the moment of death. The first instant represents a continuum with the past. The parents genes are passed on and become the template for new life. At death there is no continuum. The body obeys the second law of thermodynamics and decays into a higher state of entropy - dust or ashes.
If we take the model of life creation as a template for the origin of all things, are there any parallels of enlightenment? The Big Bang may be part of a continuum but there is no evidence of a duality of forebears other than in the increasing simplicity of the Planck-scale early universe. Could there just be two primal particles at the super high temperatures of the early universe of grand theory of everything? Could these particles represent a continuum from other universes being the seeds left from these parallel worlds? Could the nature of these seeds have the complete laws of reality embedded in them, from which our cosmos would evolve and ultimately give rise to life on earth? Is sexual reproduction a fundamental of our universe or just a chance earth evolutionary success?
When considering the physical world of substance we tend to get embroiled in physics and mathematics but we live in a biological world. Our very being is bio-oriented. Yet we tend to ignore the bio world when we try to comes to terms with reality. Reality is likely to be more biologically based than physically based. Physics and chemistry have already been united by modern particle theory. The unification with biology may well be a more important step in explaining consciousness and therewith how we see the world. How we see the world very much coincides with how we explain the world. Our observations of reality are theory laden. We must be critical of the theory if we want to perceive objective reality.
But is this new complicated quantum theory leading us up the garden path? I have struggled to come to terms with its mathematical and physical complexity. I have had to change my mind-set from the classical world where I can see and touch reality and replace it with a postulated world that I can never hope to actually see with my eyes or touch with my hands. All I am left with are second hand interpretations - lines on a photoplate from a cloud chamber, interference patterns, measurements of position or momentum. They are ghosts of the hidden reality. It may be that we have evolved only to see the classical world. Our evolution into the future must equip us for the quantum world. We have only had computers for several decades and yet they seem so normal to young children who take to them without question. The mind-set of the modern child accepts such wonders as television, mobile communications, giga storage personal music devices. In the sixties, the number of electrons in a transistor ( the heart of the computing of an electronic device) was in the order of many millions. Now the number can be counted in the hundreds. Nanotechnology will be an accepted part of the world for the current and future generations. This is incredibly important because information is physical. It has mass and it consumes energy. Before it was the mass of books and the energy used to print and bind them, now it is the ever decreasing-in-size transistor and the energy to store vast arrays of data. In the future the information store will be so vast that data banks will be the greatest energy consumers on the planet. It is possible that there will not be enough energy on the planet to satisfy the demands of information generation.
Because of Moore's law that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every eighteen months, the separation between transistors is rapidly approaching quantum dimensions. The next leap of technology will probably be quantum computing making use of quantum behaviour such as superposition, interference and entanglement. Quantum computing may mean that complex computations may be performed with the aid of parallel universes - the additional computation being worked out in many parallel multiverses! The size of our universe places an upper limit on the size of any simultaneous computation. There are about ten to the power of eighty atoms in the observable universe yet a certain algorithm called the Shor's algorithm demands ten to the power of five hundred operations. Quantum computation may help humankind discover a whole new sea of information that hitherto had remained unnavigable and uncharted. A young person starting from such a mindset may not be shackled by the classical blinkers of the past and present. He will see with new enquiring eyes and his understanding will far outstrip the our current limited efforts.
Stars Trek made the idea of beaming matter over distance a daily occurrence on television. Quantum theory demonstrated that the idea was not that mad after all. Quantum teleportation has already been carried out over short distances but it is information that is being transported. The teletransportation of a human being would take more than ten billions years in classical terms. Qua
ntum computing may make this a more realistic possibility in the distant future.
In a way the survival of the species depends on the development on teleportation at speeds greater than the speed of light. The vast distances of the cosmos mean that they are forever beyond us with such a speed limitation. When the energy supplies of our solar system run out for us, we may be forced to set off for the nearest solar system suitable for life. Without something like teleportation we will not make it.
These thoughts had raced through my mind. So caught up in them had I been, that I didn't notice the sudden change in the weather. A dark menacing cloud had appeared over the sea and was slowly making its way landward. I felt the electricity on the air and immediately grabbed my clothes. I had just finished dressing when I felt the first drops, heavy and warm on my skin. I thought of making a dash for the tent but I knew there was no time. Best to make for the old shed that had already provided shelter during the last downpour. I ran across the stones that were now showing dark spots of wet