Gardens-in-a-Petri

"Billions and billions of bacterial landscape architects pruning -- no less in environments poisoned with antibiotics -- other bacterial landscape architects, dead or alive, to form dazzling arabesque parterres. The self-organizing embroidery of organisms in constant Darwinian mode." [Link found via News of the dead]


This kind of reminds me of a conversation I had the other night about the nature of God. This is the basic premise, which me and a friend originaly developed in a 4am philosophy session a few years ago.

The brain consists of billions of individual neurons. Each is relatively simple and predictable by itself, but out of that very ordered yet complex interaction of billions of neurons, arises the experience of consciousness. I see these complex interactions of relatively simple elements everywhere I look. For example, it is no new idea that society has a mind of it's own, some might call it the collective consciousness. Social forces are beyond the scope of any individual person. People are the neurons in the mind of society. Social, political, ideological and artistic movements are thoughts in this mind.

In the grand scope of the entire universe, you have some inconceivable number of particles interacting with each other. Is the universe on some level conscious? The collisions of galaxies and the deaths of stars, do these constitute radical movements of thought in the massive mind that is the universe? I can't accept the idea that God is some dude in the sky judging good and evil, but I could accept this massive mind being labeled God. After all, isn't there that whole thing about God being the alpha and the omega or whatever....kinda fits. In this way, everything is part of God. Consequently, I wouldn't think that this God really gives a shit about issues like gay marriage and such. The whole of human race would be merely an insignificant thought in the deepest corner of its subconscious.

Anyway, how did I end up on this tangent? In the image above, there are billions of bacteria. Each is a pretty basic unit just doing what it's programmed to do, but together something extraordinary occurs.