My Personal Pronouns are “It” and “Its”

by Bill Lauritzen

I am a machine. According to all of the available, and reproducible, evidence a complex adaptive system selected by nature to help reduce the energy difference between the cold, dark side and the warm, sunny side of the Earth — much like a tornado reduces pressure differences in the atmosphere.

I was both hardwired and programmed to survive and reproduce in the pre-agricultural environment of my ancestors: to search for food and potential mates, to watch for predators, and to compete and cooperate with my fellow humans. This programming was (and is) modifiable by my environment, both my early environment of sunlight, food, bacteria, etc., as well as my later environment of parents, siblings, neighbors, teachers, etc.

If you opened me up, you would find machines of various sizes, from the large heart to the microscopic molecular machines of cell division. Pulleys, levers, pumps, valves, tubes, connectors, cords, electronic conductors, etc., as well as molecules made of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, etc., and nothing else.

Some would say that I am a “strict materialist.” However, Einstein showed that energy and mass are the same. E = MC2. So I prefer to call myself a strict “energist.” I am a long tube, made of energy, and I trade energy with the universe around me. Some of this energy is moving extremely fast, as photons, microwaves, radio waves, etc., and (to oversimplify) some of it has been temporarily “frozen” into what we call “matter.”

“What about free will?” you might ask.

It’s a difficult, perhaps unanswerable, question and the Law hungers for revenge.

So we feed It.