My comment on Susan Blakemore’s discussion with Jordan Peterson on Do we need God to make sense of Life

Ms Blakemore’s thought is rather flaky along with that of Mr Dawkins. The idea of Richard Dawkin’s MEME is in fact Piaget’s ‘Cognitive Phenocopy’ which entered scientific literature in 1967 in his book ‘Biology and Knowledge’ and further in 1971 in ‘Adaptation and Intelligence – organic selection and the phenocopy,’ many years before Dawkins appropriation. Where Blakemore and Dawkins fall down is they cannot see how the phenotype precedes the genotype in the exploratory nature of organic and cognitive evolution and adaptation simply because they don’t actually understand how adaptation works.

In Object Orientated Programming parlance the Phenotype is an ‘instance’ of the Genotype ‘class’, and is drawn out by accommodation to the particular environment and as such modified or ‘extended’ (has new features). Then if it is an appropriate adaptation it is added back (assimilated) into the class so that the class is thus modified and updated. What is important here is that the modification occurs within the lifetime of the individual to further facilitate the ‘process’ of adaptation and gene expression (Embryology and Stem cells show this to be true.) Adaptation and evolution is not down to some arbitrary random mutation but because LIFE is a wholly directed, intelligent ‘process’ and as such this intelligence manifests at the fundamental level of the genome.

Consciousness exists in an amoeba and a protozoa: organisms that are single cells and that have no nervous system. What they do have in common is an electrical system, which is the process resulting from the interaction of molecules. Consciousness therefore is a fundamental ‘electrical’ process resulting as a by-product from the interaction of molecules at the quantum level. That is where God is. “Look under a stone and you will find me”. Secondly Jesus said the Kingdom of Heaven is within us all. We are all aspects or part of Divine ‘consciousness’… this is also what higher order consciousness is…the miracle of self-awareness and self reflective thought in an ‘organic electrical system’.

If consciousness is therefore a fundamental aspect of matter interacting with matter at the quantum level, it must therefore be more fundamental than life itself. Life can then only be defined as the manifestation or expression of consciousness on the material/physical plane above that of the quantum.