Cosmogony. Just because we’re in the midst of a pandemic and the mainstream media is busy sowing panic rather than useful information is no reason to abandon our quests for answers to fundamental questions. So take care, isolate, hydrate, keep clean, and contemplate, while you have so much spare time.

Sooooo:

If sentience is a byproduct of complexity and we are at least a link in one or more chains of sentience, perhaps the most primal link (although whales, porpoises, elephants, simians and other biological cousins might “think” otherwise; even, perhaps, the survival kings: tardigrades and cockroaches), then mightn’t it be probable that we are not the only link, and as cells are links in who we are, then we, either individually or as a species, are also links in chains of more complex sentient entities?

Certainly many “religions” believe so. Historically, most have posited this or something like it without, perhaps, our current theoretical bases. “Gaia” immediately comes to mind: our planet as an organism is certainly more complex than we are, after all, it includes us individually and collectively. Sociology seems to posit that we humans form a sort of super entity in groups, as do insects: bees, ants, wasps and termites come to mind. Is Gaia then, as some suspect, perhaps sentient too? And if Gaia is sentient, why not the solar system, or star clusters (unfortunately it appears our sun is too antisocial for that), or galaxies, or, assuming the M variant of string theory is correct, universes and finally, even the multiverse?

At any rate, consider this: it appears much more likely that if divinity exists it would involve a plethora rather than a singularity, although, as is too often the case with us and our relationship with the cells that comprise us, perhaps divinities that ignore the lesser sentient entities that make them what they are.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2020; all rights reserved. Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia although he has primarily lived in the United States of America (of which he is a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at http://www.guillermocalvo.com.