How God Makes Our Cells Work
Have you ever wondered how your body really works? Science tells you that your body is made up of trillions of tiny cells that do all sorts of different things. So how do they all work together and not do the wrong things?
Inside our cells are long lists of templates for making proteins. Each cell has the same list; they are called genes. But what tells the cell when to make each protein? One cell might make 1000 times more of one type of protein, and the next door cell might make 1000 times more of a different sort of protein. Something controls protein-making that is different for each cell.
Genes are turned on and off by long loops of causation. This means that one thing affects another which affects another which affects another, until the first thing is affected again. Imagine a string of dominoes that go in a circle. If you tip one, each one knocks over another one until eventually the domino falls back at the start. Making proteins is like that. If there is a need in the cell for a certain protein, the loop of dominoes falls faster and the cell makes more proteins. If there are already enough of that particular protein, the dominoes fall slower.
The problem is that these loops don’t just stay inside the cell. If I go into a donut shop, it changes the proteins my cells make. First I smell the donuts, then my mouth waters, then my stomach grumbles, then I reach for my wallet, then I eat some donuts, then I get a little fatter. Each of these things happens by causing my cells to make certain proteins.
If things like donuts and donut shops are in the loop that makes my proteins, then it means that there must be some logic to the way our bodies interact with the world other than the list of genes. Otherwise our cells would be going haywire when we change environments.
Epistolution solves this problem by saying that everything in our bodies is an oscillator. An oscillator is like a circle of dominoes that knock each other down and then stand back up after they fall and just keep repeating over and over, falling in a circle round and round. Each chain of dominoes affects other chains of dominoes, and they fall in circles, and so on. The logic to this is that when an oscillator gets used, it gets stronger, and when it isn’t used, it gets weaker and eventually falls apart.
Think about the muscles in your legs. If you use them they get stronger, but if you never run or lift you get weak. If your leg is in a cast for weeks your leg will get really skinny. Epistolution says that most of the body is made of oscillators like this, that are strengthened by use and weakened by disuse.
This may be the reason that we so easily form habits and even addictions. This may be the reason why we see optical illusions. This may be why we sleep, to repair the used oscillators and rearrange the unused ones. This may even be the reason we experience beauty.
The old-fashioned name for the idea that the whole universe is controlling our bodies is the word “God.” We have religious myths that describe God as an old man, but the real idea is that all of reality is linked together by causal loops, and we are part of that reality. The world triggers our oscillators by pushing on our sensitive parts, like our eyes. We have a part of our brain called the SCN that is extremely sensitive to light. When we see bright light in the early morning, this group of cells sets in motion a long chain of reactions. We get restless in bed, our temperature rises, the heart speeds up, we have to pee, we get hungry for breakfast. The SCN is a clock that sets the clocks in every organ of the body to the time of day and makes them all synchronized.
If you stick your hand on a hot stove, your nerves trigger and your hand jumps back. That reflex is a powerful oscillator synchronizing you with your environment. You can’t force yourself to keep your hand on a hot stove even if you want to. Your whole body is built to react against that. When you first learned where stoves are hot and not to touch them, you discovered a better way to live by accommodating reality.
If everything we do, even deep down in our cells, is a result of our environments triggering us, it means that all beings are connected. In a certain way, we are all sharing parts of our bodily mechanism with each other. Epistolution explains why we have evolved to share knowledge and to work together to help one another find better solutions, even for dogs and cats and wildlife and for bacteria in the ocean and for viruses and for plants. It means that this instinct to learn and find better, more moral ways of being is an intrinsic part of being alive. All beings on earth must share this instinct because it is what keeps every cell on earth alive and not dead. It means we can’t avoid improving ourselves and our world, because if we did our bodies would literally fall apart.
