© Sérgio Spritzer, 2021
The imagination haunts us. Everything we perceive depends on it. For example, we see under the microscope how an amoeba orients itself in space in relation to food and other amoebas. When water is scarce, they chemically warn each other and gather together to form a spore large enough to be carried by the wind to another place with more humidity. Finding an environment of their own, the spore breaks up and the individual amoebas go about their lives seemingly on their own. They have some form of awareness of each other's presence, yet this is evident only as the sending and receiving of chemical messages.
It is impossible to imagine the intelligence of these beings just taking them one by one. Amoebas do not have a mind although they interact collectively in the face of a challenge. We imagine viruses as physically individual entities, but we also know that each of these chemical fragments only produces a dangerous infection if they are large in number and with some form of collective intelligence operating between them as an infectious “force”. Isolated has no strength and no danger.
Human beings live their private lives, but come together when challenged by a common goal to be achieved or by an external threat. And then they acquire much more power to think, imagine and do great things.
The relational and composite intelligence between the parts is what makes the difference. Isolated, the potential to produce far-reaching effects fades away.
What is the infective power of a virus? Like the self-preserving power of amoebas, it's not within every bit of RNA, or DNA. the virus's competence in self-preservation lies in the collective competence of these bits and pieces to use human cells to recombine, multiply, and differentiate into new forms. And the immune system's defense is to react to infection through an intelligent interaction between discrete elements such as antibodies and defense cells forming an intelligent defense force.
Both the power of infection and the defense against it lie in the intelligent relationship of the parties. Life and survival seem to be a strategic game between parts operating against each other as a whole.