A scientific approach to ghosts

We are time's symbiont. Humans have been all along. All of life carries the imprint of time in its purposeful integration of new and helpful genetic information, mutations, new metabolic processes, and greater complexity. Granted this integration makes sense in the face of an environment that divvies up success by the way a life can or cannot maintain itself and, in turn, pass on the genetic and epigenetic information that it has acquired though its life-time to a succeeding one.

To consider the story of earth, from its condensation from a cloud of stellar material, to its spherical compression into a planet, and finally to its development of environmental conditions that could precipitate the kinds of molecular and chemical interactions that are the basis for life, the presence of something outside of mere happenstance is possible. A basic pattern of chaos to complex organization has occurred if we only look at our planet from its birth to its present. Nothing in science, to me, disputes the existence of an existence, a consciousness outside of the fabric of this universe. It disputes the literal interpretation of the Biblical narrative of God's creation. More importantly we have to ask why life is so oriented to the violent and acquisitive act of catching other life, killing it, and incorporating its molecules as food through ingestion. For the life of the predator, this act is essential. More generally, for the life of the heterotroph this is coded into its cellular processes. And few, like our biomolecular cousin, the euglena, are capable of waging both war or peace on its environs.

Life is violent as long as we treat the membrane separating one cell from another to be an essential assumption for defining life and defining it discretely so. What that does is establish boundaries, demarcations of one entity from another. But so long as most all boundaries must be transcended for the sake of sustaining any one cell we should question the discretion that we infer when we classify units of life.

Ontological quibbles aside, the presence of ghosts was hinted to above. This notion that time, and especially time with purpose, that is existence, is passed on. Something is so miraculous and yet so everyday to reproduction. Through this process two organisms exchange genetic information. For humanity this occurs inside the female as sperm flagellate toward the egg, penetrate its wall, and begin meiosis. Boring biology class details, sure, but this process is something as old as the hills that creatures have been doing for millennia. And through this process life has marched progressively on, through time, and carrying the wisdom of its survival with it.

This brings me to human culture. One professor described it as 'our instinct.' That is a fitting description for something that, outside of our conscientious deposition or ignorance of it, becomes the self-evident world, the common sense through which we go about our lives. And let us stop just for a minute to focus upon language, speech, meaning. Words and their meaning are learned, and through this we become social creatures, members of a culture, and consequently learn who we are. Through the adoption of language we don't merely pick up a shovel because language is more than simply a tool. It is a mode of existence, through time, and that's the key to my argument concerning ghosts. When we speak, whether we intend to or not, we conjure up ghosts of the past that we have learned to agree with. For Mikhail Bakhtin this tendency in speech to carry multiple voices was heteroglossia. When we speak our speech reflects a history of contention over meaning, various perspectives, sometimes the trauma of a past that has never been felt personally. In my country, the flag, political words like 'socialism' can conjure up very specific and learned emotional reactions that speak to something that language can do. A word, as a learned memory, can carry that long-gone world along with it.

When I say we are surrounded by ghosts I don't speak of those Victorian, diaphanous specters that haunt places. I speak of the living imprint that we carry in our speech, a living imprint when we speak among others, that is simply out of our hands. Interpretations vary. Valences vary. What we say and what we mean, and how we confirm, please, upset, or confuse others is a component of that messy world of speaker-specters that populate our discourse. By saying we are time's symbiont I mean simply that speech and memory are means of gathering and passing time from the past through to the present and into the future. This mode of ferrying time is the actions of consciousness and consciousness is substantiated by time itself. It takes time to reflect upon what or who I am, and it took time, lots of time, to develop a sense of what/who I am, where I am, and what it all means for me. Time is the fabric of our consciousness because our consciousness takes and uses time in order for it to register itself in the material world through speech, meaning, action, ultimately culture. The development of DNA as a blueprint for an organism is, itself, a grand miracle of molecular assembly and association. From a sea awash in a biofilm of molecules of increasing complexity our organisms come. After countless trillions of molecular interactions under varying circumstances a molecule arises that can recreate itself indefinitely. After countless trillions of molecular interactions more these complex proteins for self-replication become hosts inside simply lipid membranes. Shortly thereafter, the membrane-encased self-replicating protein developed into the cell that became the building block for all life. And to look at a newborn child one is looking at a monument to those old oceans, those trillions upon trillions of chance and sometimes molecularly purposeful interactions.

The body, it's an ancient spaceship barnacled by countless other forms of life. It keeps traveling through space and through time, piloted by its long-dead inhabitants who effect action in the current occupants through meaning, identity, worldview. These imperatives, this will to meaning, this drive to survive is the domain of those ghosts of time that influence us.