Mr g by Alan Lightman Page A

creatures, beings with minds, were the most fleeting of all. They came and went, came and went, came and went, billions upon billions of lives, each quick as one breath. Atoms converged in their special arrangements to make each precious life, held together for moments, then scattered to dull lifeless matter again.
    Atom for atom, life was a rare commodity in Aalam-104729. Only one-millionth of one-billionth of 1 percent of the mass of the universe abided in living form.

Consciousness
    Although it had happened quite on its own, I was fascinated to understand how
consciousness
had arisen in the new universe. What an amazing and unexpected phenomenon! You start with some dull lifeless material, you let it knock about on its own, bumped around and shaken by other dead stuff, you let it change and evolve by haphazard events, and suddenly it rears up on its hind legs and says, “Here I am. Who are you?”
    Certainly I understood all the energies and forces in atoms. They were just my laws and principles. But
consciousness
—this cooperative working together of individual cells to create a sensation of wholeness, of being alive, of existence, of
I-ness
—was something else. It was a collective performance that went far beyond the individual pieces. It was strange. It was wonderful. It was almost a new form of matter. How had it happened? And how many cells did it take to make consciousness?
    I decided to do an experiment. I loved experiments. While the emergence of consciousness in the universe had required billions of planetary years, I could speed up the process to mere moments. I entered Aalam-104729. Then I scooped up a bunch of the coordination and control cells from a warm sea on one of the newly formed planets—such cells were remarkably similar from planet to planet—and I put them together on a smooth rock on the shore and let them form electrical and chemical connections between themselves. I started with a thousand cells. Nothing. Then I added more cells, a thousand at a time, until I had a hundred thousand, a tiny grey blob of material sitting on a rock. Still nothing. Just random electrical pulses, odd hums and buzzings. It was frustrating. I so much wanted the thing to wake up. I shook the rock. I jostled the grey blob. I even played a bit of music, a frisky bellantyne, hoping to nudge the thing into consciousness. I added more cells. Ten million. Still nothing. A hundred million. Not much, but the electrical activity was getting more interesting. More complex patterns were beginning to emerge, collective patterns I had not seen before. The cells were interacting with one another, but with mostly meaningless blather, like Aunt Penelope’s mutterings. At this point, I had reproduced a couple billion planetary years of evolution. I doubled the number. Two hundred million. Now something unusual was happening! The gelatinous hodgepodge of cells began creating patterns of electrical activity not related to its survival.
Unnecessary
electrical activity. But not random either. The thing seemed to be reacting to itself. A little electrical peep would start in one cell and get passed around to the other cells, each of which would make its own peep, and then all the peeps would start chiming in unison, amplifying one another into a single electrical chirp. This chirp rose and fell, almost like a melody, with complex overtones. After a while, it would die down and the thing would get quiet. And then it would start up again.
    Was this it? Was this consciousness? The thing I was looking for was so subtle, so delicate, and yet unmistakable once there. Clearly I did not expect my little blob of cells to speak to me—indeed consciousness evolved before speech—but at some point the mass of matter would become aware of itself.
    I felt that I was on the verge. I was on the verge, and I just needed to do a bit more. I looked around for some tools to poke the thing with. There. I arranged for a twig to touch the thing ever so