It seems odd to me that the one thing we all take for granted is the one thing whose explanations crumble when we turn to the torch to it. Take life for example, what is it, exactly? They say life begins with the cell. The cell performs functions that are characteristic of life. They replicate, they grow, they consume their environment, build some internal stuff and then excrete what they can't use, and they respond to their environment.This may be a good test to determine if something is alive or not, but it does not explain what life is. In fact, it strikes me as very much a rigid 1950's type of definition. I think life must be in the atom and subatomic particles yardy-yarda-ya and so on. I will try to explain this contention here.

I'll tell you one thing that all living things do that fascinates me, and that is they act to preserve themselves. Bacteria when engaged by the immune system will fire off a ton of antigens to intercept antibodies, much like trying to intercept heat seeker missiles. They will change the antigens on their coats so that the antibodies made to kill them suddenly have no target. They will hide in parts of the body to evade the immune system. They will play with the bodies chemical messenger systems to confuse the hell out of the immune response. This is one tiny example in a massive sea of like behaviours. Do you think it's fair to say, that even at a cellular level, there is not just self-preservation, but also a degree of sentience that defines life? I don't expect that one clumsy example to convince you too much of anything and certainly not of sentience in atoms.

Let me change channel on you and jump to plants. I love those big dumb plants. I love how, just as one of many examples, they can create a flower, that for all intents and purposes seems like the female mate of a bee or wasp or something. It looks like and smells like and is convincing enough to trick the insect into believing it is the other sex. Now these insects try and mate with the flower. They crawl all over it, getting up to their elbows in pollen as they procreate with it. And so the pollen is carried away to do what pollen does.

But hold on, what the hell? A blind tree creates a flower that looks and smells like another insect to such an extent that the insect mates with it, all for the purpose of sticking pollen onto it? Darwin says Natural Selection? Somehow that seems a little feeble. Let's look at this process again. Firstly, the plant, in order to create the flower must know that the pollen it is creating is being taken by insects. It must know that those insects are then going to go to another flower far away and that the pollen will fall off there. It must know the shape, size and smell of the insect, in order to attract that insect. It must in fact know this to such an extent that the insect is fooled. And it must understand the ploy that by getting the insect to hump the flowers brains out, pollen will stick all over it.

That all of these factors in this combination occur randomly is a little doubtful. You would have more chance of randomly firing a pebble into outerspace and hitting a target on Pluto the size of a ping-pong ball. No, the tree is sentient. It knows. How it knows, I don't know, but it must know.

Here's some more weird stuff. There's a parasite that infects rats. It makes the rats unafraid of cats. The cats eat the rats, which is just as well, as the cat is also a vector of the parasite. Hmmm. Sentience, but how? Is it a handy coincidence? You may argue so, but there is also a different parasite that affects snails. It gets inside the snail and changes the snail's behaviour and appearance. The snail begins pulsing in bright fluro colours and climbs to the highest branches of a shrub in the middle of the day (as opposed to hanging out on the underside of leaves in the darker hours). The result is that birds see the snail, think these pulsing snails are caterpillars and eat them, which is just as well because the birds are also a vector for the parasite. How the hell does the parasite know how to take over the internal machinery of the snail, change it's behaviour to climb to the top of the tree during daylight, and that by doing making these changes it will then look from the outside like a caterpillar which will increase its changes of being eaten by a bird, which is its next host? Lucky twist of Darwin's tumbler? I doubt it, it has to be sentience. But how?

But, let's back up again. I know you must be getting a bit bored of my examples, but I'm nearly there. Please be just a bit more patient with me. Life begins at the cellular level. What is a cell? It is nothing more than a fatty membrane with some proteins in it and a bunch of carbohydrate and protein molecules tumbling around inside, catalysing reactions that can be replicated in the test tube. In multicellular organisms the cell membrane is little more than a partition to separate chemical reactions. When I search the cell, I can't find life. Even DNA or RNA is just being turned on or off or transcribed as a result of a chemical messenger system. Their is no sentience.

And yet, as I just explained, there is sentience at a level that doesn't make sense- that can't be accounted for except through invoking a series of consecutive Darwinian lotteries. It is an awareness by the cell or cells of what is happening around them and an ability to adapt to counter it or manipulate it- to preserve its existence. Now, you could argue that this is also just a series of increasing elaborate chemical cascades that evolved over billions of years to preserve the cell, but my question is why? Why does a cell want to preserve itself? Does it have a higher purpose? It is just a bunch of chemical reactions. Why would chemical reactions once you wrap a cell membrane around them suddenly want to preserve themselves in the here and now, and furthermore through the arrow of time? Why do they want to replicate themselves and live forever? Is there a pot of gold at the end of time? Just be chopped up already, who cares? But using ourselves as examples, we know how strong the urges for self-preservation and offspring are. The cell, it seems, has these same imperative urges.

Out of the inanimate and uncaring, has life been born? I don't believe it has, and this is where this little discussion starts to go down the rabbit hole. To postulate that wrapping a plasma membrane around a bunch of complex chemical reactions suddenly creates life and sentience is preposterous. I believe in the curves you learnt about in high school maths that approach zero, but never hit it, always getting closer and closer for infinity but never crossing the zero threshold. Out of nothing comes something? No. Out of the infinitesimally small comes the observable.

What I am proposing is that the sentience must be there all along. For us to have sentience, and I'm pretty sure you'll agree we do, and for our cells to have sentience, sentience must also be present in the molecules that make those cells and it must be in the atoms that make those molecules. What that looks like when we get down to that level is anybody's guess, but it should be something we can test. There is certainly a sentience above us, that we have created, just like cells create the organism. We call that sentience the economy or society, and it acts to preserve itself too. When I win the next billion dollar Powerball, which according to my calculations should be in the next couple of weeks, I will be setting up Sentient Laboratories to investigate this very theory. Come and join me. I'd love to hear your comments and all the reasons you think I'm wrong.