In Self I Am I said that all living beings have the same foundational sense of I-am, of self.  Here’s my thesis in this essay: a living being is a whole self and all his material parts work together to maintain that whole self.  Self is a quality of wholeness.  

 

Homeostasis is the scientific word for it.  Homeostasis, by definition, is a state of equilibrium maintained by self-regulating processes.  There’s magic in that stale old definition, in the word, self.  The organism regulates himself.  I am me and I act with agency and with purpose, to keep myself together.

 

The magic is that every living being keeps himself alive by actively maintaining an order of complexity that seems beyond our human capacity to understand.  The complexity of the whole feels almost infinite, and worse, when we drill down to the parts, the complexity of each part feels almost infinite.  Consider that a single protein maps in space (based on its geography) and in time (based on the movement of that geography), and there are countless ways that the protein can interact with the molecules around it.  Or consider that a single membrane that receives a hormonal or other signal, might have billions of possible states depending on its environment.  Now consider that these are itty-bitty parts of an organism of trillions of cells, where all parts of the organism affect all other parts all the time in constant feedback loops.  Lastly, consider that old material parts are constantly being swapped out for new ones.  Modern, scientific ways of thinking can’t explain this stability within a cacophony of change.  It’s the biological essence of a living being.

 

I recall Stephen Talbott’s example of Caenorhabditis elegans.  C.elegans is a simple, little worm that scientists have studied more than any other organism.  Mr. Talbott quotes Sydney Brenner (Nobel prize winner for his work on C.elegans), who says that, despite having mapped every cell in C.elegans at every stage in development, he still can’t explain what’s going on.  He says “It’s everything going on at the same time.”  He says there’s no explaining C.elegans; there’s “just describing what there is” (from What Do Organisms Mean? The New Atlantis, Winter 2011).

 

Little C.elegans is a stable form of life, so clearly, he’s keeping his sh-- together.  How?  Homeostasis, which is the first act of the self.  A living being is an active process of self-making and it’s everywhere in him, in the whole and in the parts.  All the parts, from DNA to cellular processes to cells to tissues to organs: they all move together to fulfill their purposes within a unified whole.

 

We can’t explain C.elegans when we look at his parts because that’s not who he is.  He’s a whole being, not a machine.  We compare ourselves to machines, but we’re not that.  People make machines by manufacturing their parts separately then assembling them.  A machine begins and ends as dead parts.  In contrast, a living being starts whole, as a seed or germ, then the whole differentiates into lesser wholes (like organ systems) and into parts (like proteins), and throughout, the parts identify with the whole.  The material parts seem alive and filled with purpose as they go about their jobs for the living whole.  Even new parts that I ingest into my body become mine, for example, the meat formerly employed by cow comes to work for me. 

 

Each part is loyal to its purpose in the whole, in fact, it’s unnatural and wrong for a part to act selfishly.  Witness cancer.  In the X Files episode entitled Humbug, Agents Mulder and Scully were investigating a series of strange deaths in a town inhabited by circus freaks.  One such circus freak had a large tumor at his midsection.  No big deal... except that the tumor would disengage from his body and secretly crawl around killing people.  Here’s what was happening: the man was drinking himself to death with hard liquor, and the tumor needed a new home, so it sought out other people and burrowed into their abdomens, not to kill them but to find a new host.  Imagine being rejected by your own tumor!  In the end, the tumor tried to burrow into another circus freak, but unfortunately for the tumor, that circus freak's specialty was eating anything and everything.  Hasta la vista, tumor.