Today’s muse, what are we building?  I have been writing around the edges of this idea recently, but I would like to try and be more direct about my working assumptions in this piece. I suspect they will govern my writing/thinking here for a number of years, if not decades.  Here they are, and I am sure I will be refining them over the coming months:

1. While tool use has been seen in other species, there appears to be no evolutionary precedent for tool use on anything like the scale of human capabilities, this makes us special, on earth at least.

2. This special capability was "given" to us to build something greater than the species, that perhaps transcends life on this planet, and perhaps, even the biological paradigm we arose from. I know this sounds like sci-fi, at least for now I am using "given" in an evolutionary sense, not in a higher consciousness sense.

3. We as individuals are akin to cells, just as I can imagine how hard it would be for a cell to "know" the larger organism it is part of, or part of a process of, we individual human "cells" will find it difficult to "know" the the larger "organism" or "organic process" that we are a part of.  Use of the biological term here is strictly by way of analogy, I do not intend to imply that the larger process is actually organic, or not.

4. There is a lot of talk about what is commonly called the Gaia hypothesis, frequently described as the view of the Earth as a single organism, my working assumption is that "the building" transcends this concept.  If there is a single organism, it may be serving the role of "petri dish". I may be guilty of species self-centeredness, I would like to plead Nolo contendere as I am also saying that we as individuals are like cells, or maybe ants…

5. There is also a lot of popular discussion about whether or not we are creating some kind of networked "super mind".  Jamais Cascio has a nice survey piece titled Get Smarter in the July/August 2009 Atlantic, though the author also throws in lot’s of lower level stuff too.  One of my operating beliefs on this quest, is that anything that is high on our individual "cellular" consciousness is probably only a portion of the building, or in this case, another tool, though certainly a collective one.  If we are really "brain" cells, look how fast we are growing in this graphic, Human Population through History 1 A.D. to 2020.  (Reminds me more of cancer than anything else, but I digress.)

There is something humbling in the idea that we as individuals are the equivalent of cells being used to build something that, almost by definition, we cannot know.  For me it is looking around the edges of life, the edges of consciousness, that may illuminating as to what we are being used to build.  I find it intriguing, and not at all surprising, that it is physicists who are starting to see parallels between collective human behavior and the atom.