BIOLOGY 103 FALL, 2003 FORUM 7

On another point, the comment by Brittany about consciousness involving more than one person.....It's a really interesting idea and I've been thinking a lot about it lately. I think that the ability to be conscious is something that we just have, like the "life essence" we were talking about before. It's not something you can describe, it's just there. However, the ability to be *aware* of our consciousness requires more than one person. In order to be aware of what you're thinking or what you're doing, you need someone else to *make* you aware of it. The only way humanity has a knowledge of the unconscious and the conscious is because interactions with other people have made their thoughts about the subject conscious.
But then, does that mean that animals are aware of their consciousness? It's true that animals have the "life essence" we've been dicussing and they do have other animals to associate and communicate with, but do they have the ability to be *aware* of their consciousness? hmmmmm....

The only problem i see arising form this practice would be the cost. I am sure it would be extremely expensive, meaning that only the very wealthy could have perfect children. People with less money would only be able to pay to get some things corrected like harmful diseases. There by creating classes of people the PERFECT one, the nearly perfect ones, the not so perfect ones... sort of like some people would be Birkin Bags while others would be plastic bags from the grocery store. Some of us would be BURBERRY and others a moomoo from walmart. And i guess we could throw out the notion of "all men being created equal" because that would not be the case... and so we would be able to assert that some people deserve certain rights while others are not entitled to them because they are less perfect human beings. And it would be scietifically true...

Wait, never mind, this is getting a bit to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World... and we all know how that ended. This is also reminiscent of Hitler's goal to create a perfect race... and that was anarchy...
SCRATCH THAT... rrrrrrrr... I hate it when i contradict myself...

In addition, the virus load would be too small for even our "advanced" technology to locate the virus in its earlier stages. It would be like searching for a needle in a haystack. I also don't think that the technology for engineering the bone, and for locating the virus are really comparable either. But I could be totally off base about it...

Also about pain -- many argue joy would not exist without it. We human beings need the contrast to feel anything at all -- all emotions are based on comparisons to other emotions. If we destroy the bad things, then, we'll also kill our ability to feel good. Ultimately (if human beings are around long enough, which is doubtful), we could end up as robots, with no emotions whatsoever. Without this ability to feel emotions, humans would wind up a very different sort of organism altogether -- more like trees.

And that's only emotions. What if sensations and thoughts also depend upon our minds' and bodies' comparing them to other sensations and thoughts? If we eliminate the bad ones here, will we eventually lose our ability to think and feel sensations, too? In this case, we humans would be less than trees. Mindless, Emotionless, we would also lack the basic ability to respond to sensory stimuli -- and even trees have that. All life is diverse and experiences diverse physical and psychical conditions. All of life responds to varying external and internal environments. And if those environments did not vary? If we got rid of our differences, and squashed this diversity of experience, what would we have left? Would it even be accurrate to call us alive?

All this is very extreme, and at the rate people move -- what with all the technical difficulties of interfering with the collosal complexity of the genome -- it won't happen for quite awhile. It may not happen at all, if our species dies off or gets diverted by something else. However, this does indicate the direction in which we are headed, and it's scary: though we'd all (probably) jump to free a person from cancer or lupus or mental illness, what about non-life threatening conditions like allergies -- where, oh where, to we draw the line?

Another strange thing I thought of is that by manipulating the genome, the science of medicine will be going in the OPPOSITE direction from where it has always gone before: toward sameness, rather than toward diversity. All of medicine's efforts to keep the sick and dying alive, to cure the formerly "incurable," has allowed many people to live (and pass on their genes) who would have otherwise died. If the normal process of natural selection had its way, without the intervention of medicine, many of those whom human technology has saved would have died, have been "selected out." Natural selection tends toward decreased variation, preserving only those "well-adapted" to life in their environments. Since medicine can "adapt" those who are naturally "poorly adapted," we have among us people with severe physical and mental illnesses who create art, teach us new things, increase our diversity of experience. Medicine has extended the array of human diversity, of human experience! But now -- in seeking to ELIMINATE the sources of our pain, rather than just TREAT them (as in the past) -- medicine threatens to destroy the variation that defines us. Our intentions, of course, revolve around pain, not diversity. But it's strange that our ways of dealing with pain can affect diversity from both directions.