Math is a self-referential abstract system. You cannot analyze math and get matter. Neither can any material construct generate math. Math is always an abstract idea in the mind of the beholder.
Math has no actual existence. However, there is one abstract self-referential system that has real existence – consciousness.
You cannot analyze consciousness and get matter. The moment you cross from your experience of perceptions to electronic fields or emergent systems or neurons or chemicals, you are no longer talking about a perception. None of those things entered into your consciousness, only the perception. And consciousness is only what we perceive; hence self-referential.
Do not confuse causation with analysis. Your two parents caused you, yet analyzing your body yields only pieces of meat. Analyzing a perception may yield a frame rate and individual senses and background noise, but it does not yield molecules.
Consciousness is supernatural, non-material. Can the material cause the non-material? Only by some supernatural intervention, or else a supernatural property inherent in the material itself (pantheism).
Therefore I conclude that animals are simply automata. Kindness to them is recommended for the sake of the human’s soul who would otherwise experience mirror neuron empathetic pain and psychopathic hardening. However kicking a dog is essentially no different than kicking a toaster. There is no consciousness to experience the pain, only a biological distress signal.
HOWEVER…
When we look at the alien bio-engineering of the Starchild, we are forced to suspect that the Melonheads were also engineered. It’s the same story of insanely advanced alien characteristics blended with human ones. From there it becomes obvious that Cro Magnon was engineered.
Thankfully, it seems that Neanderthal still evolved. That extra .5 – 1 billion base pairs points to eons of K-driven ice-age evolution. Which doesn’t prove there weren’t interventions, but does indicate a significant organic component. And this is backed by a good transitionary fossil record between early and late Neanderthals.
So it would seem there are one or more forebear alien races, intervening on Earth and leaving behind DNA hybrids.
And what else is the story of Genesis, but one of genetic engineering? Why create a man first? Because we’re mixing alien (Y) DNA with local primate (X) DNA. Then we create a woman by duplicating the man’s new X chromosome. Thus many of us could have an Earthly “mitochondrial Eve” and a Heavenly Father. Literally.
Of course, the Cro Magnons are not primarily expressing alien DNA, but rather a blend of rearranged great ape genes. Ouch.
Continuing with this genetic engineering theme, Adam is created in a “garden” on a planet over which he’s given dominion. Later his family goes out they encounter other “men”. So what if the “garden” was full of plants and animals genetically engineered for domestication (the same ones we have today)? And what if Adam was a Melonhead, and the other “men” were the rest of the hominids?
In fact, these first Melons probably had more domesticated animals than we do today. Can you imagine hunting with cheetahs as well as dogs? There’s reason to think their inbreeding isn’t natural.
Under this model, we have a planet that is “seeded” with homologous alien DNA, ala the beginning of Prometheus. After that, it is occasionally “tended” to move things in the right direction.
THEREFORE…
This has implications on a number of subjects.
#1, it casts doubt on the idea that the god who created Homo Sapiens is the same God who created the universe. While the capacities of the World-Gardeners, hereafter called the Fore-Melons, are very impressive, they do not include the “snap your fingers and make it exist” type of magic that the Creator of Genesis possesses. Otherwise, they would not bother with gradual genetic engineering. Most importantly, the fact that their DNA successfully blended with our own shows that they were material beings, not deities.
A dogmatic Christian could reply that the DNA introduced was simply a physical expression of the “image of God,” rather than the actual DNA of the creators.
Maybe so, who knows. But then how can there be two species of apparently equivalent power, doing the same thing? Because we have Starchildren AND Melons. It certainly messes with monotheism.
Things would be simpler if one or the other was demon spawn. But it appears that pure Melons and Starchildren are both significantly NOBLER than average humans.
I don’t found my faith on the accuracy of Genesis, but the legacy of Jesus Christ. If it turns out that we are the product of a cosmic chain of decline, the failed science project of the bastard children of bastard children, well, that certainly rhymes with Genesis and the doctrine of Original Sin, even if it’s not exactly the same thing.
The Fore-races were created somehow, after all. This doesn’t eliminate God, it just pushes him back. The blow is far heavier for the Darwinists, whose cosmology does not include an, ahem, war in heaven.
DISTURBINGLY…
This points to a very hands-off God. He’s letting the Forerunners design races of conscious beings. Can you imagine the immeasurable impact on all the self-aware souls trapped in the resulting bodies?
Consciousness is such a strange thing. One easily starts thinking about the word “unfair”, in relation to genetics. If the material world doesn’t generate a consciousness, then genetics are simply luck of the draw.
And where does the line for human start? Where does self-awareness start? At what threshold is a consciousness popped into a biological toaster?
These are absurd questions. There can be no line. It must be a gradation. Which means that consciousness, self-awareness, must also be a gradation.
This is supremely unfair. It is always our cherished belief, as Americans, as Westerners, that consciousness is the shared birthright of sapient humanity. To deny this doctrine is anti-equalitarian, anti-Christian, anti-human. We MUST all be equally human, at least in this essential respect… right?
But then there’s the cruel possibility that to a Fore-Melon, we may be as non-self-aware, as non-human, as animal, as the apes are to us. When they kick us, they regard it as no more significant than kicking a toaster. Sure, a biological distress signal is released, but there’s no conscious being there to experience it.
I don’t want to believe this. I refute it as I write it, by comparing large-skulled high-IQ people to pygmies or aboriginals or Down Syndrome kids or all the sad samples of retardation.
On the one hand, we can believe that all humans have some flash or glimpse of commonality, of something spiritual and real experiencing life, rather than pure biological reactions. But I also know that there is a vast qualitative, as well as quantitative difference, in consciousness and therefore in spirit. All women have nipples, but not all women have glorious breasts behind them. And an ape nipple might as well be a man’s.
Even in myself, when I sleep I am barely there, when I’m KO’d I’m not at all, when I’m ill and zombied; do I exist?
We are back to the question of the line. At some point, there is nothing there. At some point, there is something there.
Unless, perhaps, the “nothing” is a Newtonian illusion. Perhaps a thin layer of background “something” persists, in the incomprehensible fashion of advanced physics, a sheet that warps like gravity. Such a thing need not be God, but merely part of creation – the spiritual physics.
Doesn’t the Bible say that “the Earth groans like a woman in labor?”
Perhaps, in the style of Vox’s angelic orders, which proceed from inchoate instinctual vapors to teeming fairies all the way up to seraphim, consciousness is a continuous gradient. And biological brain computers are simply spiritual catalysts, which warp the spiritual fabric to form little singularities, like black holes on the gravitational sheet. Thus Judgment is the winnowing, the separation of the wheat from the chaff on this spiritual plane.
In a way, this is scary. It means that God has no shortage of applicants to choose from. He will select the useful and discard the rest.
Yet also, it would not be too cruel, if many of those partially formed consciousnesses, which never individuated before blending back into the general noise, were neither judged nor observed.
Thus it behooves us to be kind to animals, yet in the grand scheme exhibit the same indifference as God, who clearly is no vegetarian.
It also gives meaning to the legend of Tiamat. Perhaps Gaia, the World Spirit, was once conscious and willful. By defeating the water god, the chaos serpent, the Creator god gained the material with which to fashion the world. Perhaps the primary use of that material was not physical, but spiritual.
Another implication – we finally understand why many megalithic societies practiced human sacrifice. This spiritual fabric has bleedthrough effects. Intense human experience, especially death, releases energy which feeds spiritual entities. They were literally feeding their masters.
Thus we finally understand the purpose of Earth, and the reason for supernatural interest in humans. We are biological supercomputers harvesting the remnants of a dead god, recycling them into usable form for the war in heaven. A resource useful to both (several?) sides.
Call it what you want. A mining colony. The Matrix. God’s plan. Plankton. Just make sure you don’t wind up lunch.
I have wandered far from my Sunday school days. But as for the New Testament, my faith stands firm. Jesus Christ is the man I follow, and the Father he points to is the one I serve. If there are other, darker gods, they are my enemy, and I like our odds.
Update:
It occurs to me that there may be a bright line for real “humanity” or consciousness – the genetic code that created hominoids from apes. Perhaps buried in this alien/divine DNA injection, there is the code for a soul.