The Conquest of Dimensions

It is obvious that there exists many definitional ambiguities with regards to the phenomenon that we call "life". Interestingly, in a world where hegemony of description is essentially the seat of power, the term has yet to be completely hijacked by the authoritative establishments under which we live today. Therefore, when I decided to Google "define life", the output was multifaceted, diverse and often vague.

Nonetheless, conversation cannot be stopped short, simply for lack of exact descriptors. Among the many definitions I found, there is the scientific one (defined by the dynamism of biological processes), the pragmatic one (defined as the necessary condition to be 'alive'), the temporal one (defined as the phenomenon that occurs between birth and death), the philosophical one (defined as the existential conundrum within which we all dwell). And among the various other articulations on the net, Terence McKenna provides a definition of life that I would call the psychedelic one:

"All of biology is, in a sense, a conquest of dimensionality. That means that animals are a strategy for conquering space/time." 

dimension
dɪˈmɛnʃ(ə)n,dʌɪ-/
noun
plural noun: dimensions:

1. an aspect or feature of a situation. 
2. a measurable extent of a particular kind, such as length, breadth, depth, or height.

Stage One:
The conquest of dimensions by biological life begins with the very first occurrence of the simplest of lifeforms on this planet. The earliest life (fossils of which are dated back about 4.1 billion years ago) were single celled organisms with very little functionality, other than simple regeneration of cellular material. Their existence in space was essentially static, with no capacity for any form of mobility. Given that these unicellular lifeforms, with point like, atomized existence, lived and died pretty much where they occurred, these creatures in essence existed in a 1 dimensional plane. Their emergence was the first introduction of life on this planet, which began with the conquest of the first dimension - point space.

Stage Two:
As biological evolution proceeded, and the evolutionary process complexified over hundreds of millions of years, there slowly arose organisms that were being prepared to conquer the next dimension. As a consequence of the evolution of unicellular organisms to become multicellular creatures, there developed in them simple motor functions, allowing them to move along a straight line, from point A to point B, thus conquering the second dimension - the dimension of linear space.


Stage Two and a Half:
Before moving forward, let us remember here, that the first billion years of this evolutionary process all occurred underwater. And so it was to be that after the billion year conquest of the first two dimensions, biological life eventually evolved to come out of the water and onto dry land. It can be argued that this was one of the most dramatic conquests of dimension carried out in the early stages of the history of life. With progressive complexification of organisms and the eventual introduction of the amphibians, the possibility arose to breathe on land and to move with limbs. Looked at closely, the conquest of land from water is a dramatic shift in dimensional existence, characterized by a whole new set of aspects and circumstances, within which life would begin to also dwell in, from then onwards. For my analogy, this is the conquest of the Two and a Half-th dimension.


Stage Three:
By definitions obtained from biology and physics, what we understand as the third dimension is the perception of depth in the physical plane, by the visual faculty of higher animals. It was with the development of eyes as sensory organs that biological life was poised to move forward with the dimensional conquest. The development of visual faculties in hunting animals, whereby the eyes were located facing the same direction, made evolutionary sense in order to perceive the depth and distance of prey. Thus we had the conquest of the next dimension - the dimension of visual perspective and 3 dimensional space.

Stage Four:
Finally, fast forward to our dear selves about three billion years later, and we find that the human species has been the main actor in the most recent and dramatic conquests of advanced dimensions in our existent universe. This is the unique human ability for the perception of what physicists refer to as the fourth dimension - the dimension of time. The human story on this planet almost seems to have built up to this magnificent crescendo. And so now it stands that the most advanced biological lifeform on this planet has undergone the most dramatic dimensional conquest thus far, by learning to frolick in this ever so ephemeral, temporal dimension.

And Beyond.....
By conjecture therefore, it seems quite apparent in my mind, that the progressive conquest of higher dimensions is the predetermined purpose of biological existence. If we are to accept this, then questions arise - What are the remaining dimensions that are left to be conquered? What types of perceptual faculties would the next stage of human evolution bring, in order to facilitate the perception of these higher dimensions? Would it be even possible for our humanoid forms to do so, or are we to evolve into something unrecognizable to ourselves?

I am reminded of a quote from Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, where Professor Brand is talking about the "creatures that brought us here" and tells Cooper:


"Look, Cooper, they're creatures of at least five dimensions, to them the past might be a canyon they can climb into and the future a mountain they can climb up... but to us it's not, okay?"

Nonetheless, it does seem as if spatial and temporal dimensions, beyond the few that we are able to perceive within our humanoid bodies, do exist. Relativistic and theoretical physics has been playing around in these dimensions for decades. The seasoned psychedelic traveller as well, one who has cultivated a certain faculty to navigate the deluge of the information stream found in the psychedelic trip, are returning with intimations of the existence of these higher dimensions. It would seem that the destiny of the human species is to evolve our perceptual faculties, to continue onwards with this 4 billion year long process, and conquer the remaining unseen dimensions, that are ever present in the universe, and within the invisible landscape of reality.