The Universe - Hierarchies defined(2)

Now the model is nice and all but it does not entirely show how the universe is really made up. It just assumes hierarchies exist and goes from there.

It shows that apparently everything is defined by a quantum mechanic, but as I said earlier, once you get above a few levels of complexity you cannot explain the object. This is why chemists stay in their realm of chemistry even though it effects all matter that we know. Now I am afraid that the last post was getting a bit too abstract so I will begin to use real examples to show that this hierarchy is both relative, hyper dimensional, and effectively neither quantum nor continuous (or both depending on the perspective). As everything is in fact relative, the starting point I choose to define much of this hierarchy is rather arbitrary. So I will pick one and go as far as i can conceptually go in both directions.

My chosen starting point is the single cell in an organism. As a whole it effectively works as one organism(as seen in single celled organisms) but it used as just a part of an tissue in an organ in a body of the whole organism (all of which are intermediate hierarchies). Now lets say this organism was a human. That human is part of a family, which is part of a neighborhood, part of a city part of (occasionally) a state, which is finally part of a country. This country is finally part of a group for the most part is the entirety of the human race. The human race is a part (albeit a large one nowadays) of the global environment which is the arrangement that is particularly one step above us as a whole. But what of the other parts of the global environment, being all the other species in the world, as well as the physical conditions of the world(atmosphere content, average temperature etc.) These simply are other arrangements that are part of the world but came from a different hierarchical path. In any case the global environment is a complex entity on the earth which is a planet among others part of this solar system, which is part of the galaxy, which is finally part of the universe. Here we get to our stopping point because at this point no one has an explanation past this point of hierarchy as much as some believe they do.

Now I will go back and go the other direction. I started with a single human cell and now I will break it apart. The cell has individual live support systems consisting of organelles, one being the nucleus. The nucleus contains DNA information (one of the most detailed entities in existence). This DNA is consisting of all of its parts including nucleotides. These nucleotides consist of the basic elements which finally come down to the subatomic particles. These subatomic particles are treated with quantum rules. Interestingly enough though, we do not really know the make up of these subatomic particles in great detail. It has been proposed through string theory that they are consisting of hyper dimensional strings but we neither can conceptualize this, nor has it entirely been proven. In the end the theory is that matter is a complex formation of the elusively arbitrary concept of energy. Energy however is the basest object that we can conceptualize, and we have barely any base understanding of its makeup. We get to another point where it is too difficult to definitively define a smaller object than energy.

Now this outline seems to run on, but understanding of the hierarchy was necessary. It shows a number of important points in the continuum that can be quantized. These in turn can be seen as the only important parts of the universe while everything else are bridging connections between them. At this point, from simplest to most complex it seems they are energy, atoms, DNA, and finally the brain*. Two points must be made, with this idea, to make sure all the correct questions are made, it should be assumed there is another increment below energy, and yet another increment (which may or may not exist in time yet) above the human brain. The other point that must be made is that in truth the brain is not really the step above DNA, it is instead the medium for which the increment exists: The Idea. This concept is by far the most important one I will use in the Blog, and is therefore beyond the scope of this particular entry.

The importance of these discrete objects is that it leads to the ability of evolution. Evolution has in general become associated only with DNA, but as it will be shown, when made more general, the rules of evolution apply to everything and anything with the ability to be created in one way or another. This will be left for another article.