PHILOSOPHY: Metaphysics

In metaphysics, my philosophy begins with the concept of Life, LIFE, * L * I * F * E *--That single tone in the "music of the spheres" pretty much sums up my philosophy (which is sort of like telling you to deduce the universe from a piece of fairy-cake, is it not?) I have no problem with the idea of life springing spontaneously from metapatterns in the cosmos. I do not see death in a true duality with life. Life can choose life or death, but death has no choice. It is not life. I do not, however, make the capital mistake of confusing the mechanics of what we are with our being more than the sum of our parts--to not see the forest because of all the trees in the way. It's a matter of perspective and what sorts of models we create within ourselves to simplify the overwhelming influx of sensory data.

The source of life and everything is often attributed to some supreme being. I consider this dodging the question. One could say such a being came into existence spontaneously, or always existed, or created itself, but the first is more complicated by far than the spontaneous creation of simple structures and (eventually) life as we know it, the second could be attributed to the cosmos itself, and the third is logically inconsistent with any structure whatsoever (or leads tortuously back to the first explanation). I follow Occam's Razor in this: that the simplest explanation is more likely to be correct. It would be easier for me to imagine an entity which developed as simple life and gradually grew into deity-hood, creating (say) the universe as we know it but not the entire Cosmos. I am reminded of a lab experiment years ago where a primordial soup of gases were sealed into a glass globe about a foot in diameter and zapped with artificial lightning for about three hours. Even in that limited environment there were amino acids and tarry whatnot being created. With a hundred billion stars in each of a hundred billion galaxies, there's plenty of room out there. No need to limit it. Our ancestors had different tools to try to deduce what was going on. Our intuition and logic has allowed us to grow in new directions. Six thousand years since the Creation? Sorry. If I can't believe my own interactive, internally consistent reality, I have nothing. More puzzling to me is how people can ignore the fact that all this new information does not disprove deities, merely our ignorant medieval view of their limitations.

From this foundation, the question becomes: what is life? Think of a quartz crystal forming slowing in a gel of damp green clay under a rock by a stream. the crystal forms under those conditions because they are sufficient to support that process. As energy is dumped at intervals through our primordial soup, we find a wide variety of structures are formed. A lot of them aren't life but look pretty amazing. It has been suggested that virus may have been the first life on Earth, or even not of terrestrial origin. Some viruses are remarkebly simple structures, crossing the line to what we would define as crystalline. We have heretofore defined life as growing and producing waste, but that's probably not enough. I submit there isn't a clear-cut dividing line. In any event, it takes a long time with a lot of trials to get where we are now. We equate intelligence with advancement, but life merely an adapts to its environment. It has no directive to "advance". That brains appear to be a trait that allows better survival is the key element.

What of evolution? Various religions treat this issue differently depending on their own belief systems. Denials in the West usually involve some reference to the quaint notion from our ancient oral histories about various animals' creations, or particularly, Noah's Ark and the Flood. One could have a perfectly disasterous flood taking out a lot of life without demanding that those forms aboard were immutable and the only ones that ever existed or ever would--such is our oral traditions that really weren't around long enough to see this effect. It has also been argued that animals can't evolve but only adapt. They are correct, up to a point. Change is slow. It was the scientists who were shocked to discover there were a lot more genetic switches in the DNA than they expected that were triggered by environment. Mutation happens whenever there are mistakes in DNA replication, and there are mistakes. Every time the DNA splits apart, there is a significant increase in the chances for a stray cosmic ray or chemical to knock things out of alignment and be replicated into the new DNA string. The mistakes are tested in the forge of mother nature. Most don't bother the animal and don't have a lasting effect, some are deadly, a few provide a slight survival advantage. After a million years, you've got some noticeable evolution in action. After a billion, you've got lawyers and politicians. Who says we're advancing? Protein folding will forever drive scientists nuts because it is too complex to predict. We wouldn't design something that ridiculous, it evolved to that state.

Eventually, you get life that's clever enough to transcend its own evolution and smart enough to survive beyond its biosphere. With technological civilization, we get nanotechnology. Maybe we turn ourselves into a planet of grey goo and have to start over. Maybe the dolphins have superior mind powers that will give them an edge, who knows? When physical bodies become optional, what are we doing? Learning, growing, evolving, just as we are starting to learn how to get serious about it now. Once we get some decent models for the wheelworks of nature, the biggest remaining challenge will be higher states of conciousness, other universes, and such. This can only be studied in complexity, the kind of complexities that come with living systems which are the source of new ideas, new solutions to complex problems. So, we send out a chunk of our intelligent gestalt fog into the universe to seek it out. It encounters a small blue-and-white planet in the milky way. Should it create life here? Nah. We're here to see how it will develop. Billions of years later, some Native American seers notice something in an altered state they call the "Great Eagle" which seems connected to everyone and "feeds", collecting each person's life experiences when they die. A few centuries later, we discover nanotechnology. What will happen? I don't know, but I keep getting the gut feeling we're in some kind of planetary quarantine. Even barring other cogent reasons for doing so, if I were an advanced foggy entity floating over the planet, I would not want these stupid hairless apes dumping nanobots of all sorts all over the place. That could actually be unnecessarily dangerous to others who know better.

Is any of this true? Oh, probably at least some of it. Does it need to be true? Only insofar as it provides a model for your experiences. The above just happen to reflect mine in the loose way ultimate questions do in metaphysics. If you don't have experiences or need to delve into a particular area, don't cast your model in concrete but be flexible to new real information. If you've seen an angel, I highly recommend you include that experience into your natural philosophy so you won't go nuts. A friend's mother was raised as a staunch Irish Catholic. Unfortunately, she had too much of the "old blood" and saw non-physical entities. She was taught such things were the work of the Devil. She not only never learned to cope with her perceptions, but believed herself evil her whole life. The only blessing to come out of it was her and her daughter being able to say goodbye to grandma when her spirit showed up on their doorstep at the moment she died far away. "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." I can't internalize her experience the way she can, yet I'd stake my life on her having experienced it, so it does affect my philosophy somewhat.

Socializing with people is a survival trait. People, more than inanimate objects are complex enough to better give us what we need to survive and evolve. People help us reach higher dimensions, new levels of consciousness we may have not previously conceived of, in addition to helping us with our day-to-day survival. Indeed, if there are any fantastically advanced beings observing the cosmos (and, perhaps, us), it is still the complexities that come with living systems which are the source of new ideas, new solutions to complex problems.