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Belief Trumps Reason
Death Makes Life
"God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. --- from Empedocles, fifth century B.C.
"Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; to lie in cold obstruction and to rot." (William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure)
We generally fear death. Not to deny we may reach a point in our lives where life becomes difficult and we do not cherish it so much. Losing those we love may leave us feeling empty and more accepting of the thought of death. But (Margulis and Sagan - What is Life?): "If we did not fear death, we might be too quick to kill ourselves when troubled or inconvenienced and thus perish as a species. Belief in life's importance may not be a reflection of reality, then, but an evolutionary reinforced fantasy that prejudices believers to do what is necessary, bear whatever burdens to survive."
"...Sentience is the capacity to perceive and feel things..." (Animal Ethics Encyclopedia) Plants are not considered sentient and persons who are comatose are not considered sentient at that moment. To have sentience one must have the capacity and feelings to suffer. It generally implies having a brain or nervous system. Sentience is comparable to consciousness.
ALL living things may not be sentient, but MUST have perception. Put simply, Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan wrote in What is Life? "All living beings, not just animals, but plants and microorganisms, perceive. To survive, an organic being must perceive--it must seek, or at least recognize, food and avoid environmental danger."
"We all inherit a shared perspective bequeathed by our ancestors..." (Margulis and Sagan)
And, the notion that life has meaning is evolutionary. Our mind is a benefit to our species enabling successful survival and reproduction. But it is also predicated on religious myths and philosophical memes that co-opt reason and reinforce the will to live.
We wake up each morning to a world of hurt. The pain is all around us. We take an anthropomorphic view, but all life experiences birth, reproduction and dissipation. Life is often referred to as a gift. A better description would be to refer to life as food. We are being harvested. The specter of life is to be consumed as food.
What is similar to all life is a means of reproducing. It has been suggested that RNA preceded DNA reproduction and perhaps it did because RNA can replicate without DNA but DNA cannot replicate without RNA. RNA contains ribozymes which with enzymes produces proteins and ALL life as we know it shares the same chemistry. Pollock (94) in Signs of Life wrote: "...we are related enough to a duck and an orange that we can eat them both."
We are carbon based life. DNA is a helix of the building blocks of life: the code which is a recipe for constructing and maintaining life. The three components necessary for life -as we know it- is energy, water and carbon; all of which is found throughout the universe.
Most of our energy comes from the sun but now we know energy also comes from the core of the planet as hydrogen sulfide which provides energy for life which survives without the sun, i.e. thermophylic bacteria and other organisms which live in the depths of the oceans.
There are some theories that life arrived on in meteorites or comets. 70 separate amino acids have been discovered in meteorites and contain all the essential ingredients for life. Meteorites and comets have impacted the earth throughout its history and the force of these impacts transformed amino acids into the proteins necessary for life. And some theories [see Harper, Nova TV series, WGBH 2005, Origins: How Life Began] suggest bacteria, the precursor of eukaryotes arrived from outer space transported here by meteorites and comets.
Life is both prey and predator. My best friend(s), my dogs, have the predatory behavior of their ancestral wolf. My predatory behavior is tied to survival. Hostility and war is as natural as life is old (in our frame of reference). My dogs have hierarchy and dominance behavior, which they display with each other, when they are not playing or sleeping. We just kill our enemies who are those who compete with us for territory and resources - which has been the history of groups since time began.
Dogs stalk, chase, grab and bite each other. Predatory motor patterns are obvious behaviors in animals and we are just animals with a larger brain and we assume an awareness of these things, which evolved as our defense against predators and our offensive strategies and the success of our species.
Of course different animals display different patterns and so do we because we are by the way, just animals ourselves, in spite of some who think humans are a higher form of life - which we are not.
We are human-centric organisms and are too often oblivious to the pain of other animals. Some cultures eat animals we would never think about as food. And the females of several species also eat their mates after they copulate with them. This happens with spiders and some other animals. The males actually welcome being consumed by these female spiders because it ensures that their sperm will have longer to fertilize her and eating the male spider is a distraction so the female doesn't move on to another spider until she finishes her meal. I wouldn't exactly call it love, but maybe to a spider it is. It most assuredly is the ultimate in love making. I like sex but not that much. But you know humans have some weird sexual perversions also and can be very self-destructive.
Death makes possible life. That is certainly the case with spiders as noted above, but it is also essential to all life.
"Biological recycling is the worm that munches leaf litter into microscopic bits that are then further degraded by bacteria into nutrients that later can become tree leaves again Death makes life..." (Tyler Volk, What is Death? -a scientist looks at the cycle of life-)
"From a human point of view, it is our somatic selves--embedded in which are things like mind, personality, love, will--that we cherish most and that define us, to ourselves and to others. We think of reproduction as only one of many activities we can choose to engage in. Perhaps this is not surprising, since it is a point of view arising in the somatic part of ourselves--in our minds. We have used our minds to invent complex belief systems to explain death. None of these paint a picture of ourselves as excess baggage; none cast us simply as tools for transmitting DNA. Yet when we trace the origin of our death beyond mind and belief, to its true beginnings---the death of individual cells---we come to a rather harsh and unflattering conclusion: the irrelevance, in the grander scheme of the universe, of our somatic selves. No wonder belief so often trumps over reason." (William R. Clark, Sex & The Origins of Death)
What we don't know is
how much of what we perceive is actually an illusion and how much of
it is real?
If I had a choice and the time was now (not over 50 years ago), the new wisdom would certainly be a strong motivation for me to build my life around astrobiology. Everything I have had to learn about the cosmos has been an evolution in the knowledge we have acquired in just the last few decades.
I was curious enough 50 years ago to become a Ham operator. Radio was new and television experimental. I built everything, including my first computer with resisters and capacitors. There were no transisters or circuit boards then. I worked for presidents and for the top field officers in the War Room in the Pentagon because I was informed by the latest "state-of-the-art" electronics, and worked with the engineers who built their crypto and wide-band communications systems. I was there at the White House when they installed their FIRST television system. It was delightfully stimulating, but nothing like what we are doing now. I was there at the White House when Sputnik orbited around the planet and because of the president ushered in a new age of technology. My uncle received the first computer, the ENIAC, from the U of Pennsylvania and I was enthused and amazed when it was demonstrated - enough to want to have my own computer when nobody knew what to do with them except the calculations they were doing at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds and later in the Pentagon with their diode multipliers and tubes doing what today is done with computer chips.
Physics actually begain with gravity. Einstein was my hero at Princeton
and he changed the way we thought about everything - building on Newtonian
theory which haunted physics up to his time. Today it is Quantum physics
and strings and membranes which are on the mind of many scientists and as
more questions have been raised than
answered.
Most of the universe is composed of Dark Matter. We are not exactly sure what it is.
And how much of what we perceive is actually an illusion and how much of it is real?
How we See the Multiverse in Space and Time
Starlight which passes a heavenly body bends just as space and time is warped by gravity and words spoken by the current president of the United States, Barach Obama, is deceptively skewed.
Pluto is no longer a planet and neither should Obama be the chief executive of the U.S. Mistakes happen. Shit happens! Those who were taken in by the Kenyan born fraudulent chief executive prove once again that we are a flawed species easily fooled and intelligence is the illusion. And, truth and reality is a delusion.
Gravity curves space and Homo sapiens believe what they want to believe. It seems as-if we are stationary; just as it seems to a rational person that the land we're standing on is flat; but it isn't. In orbit we are falling but we fall around a mass or we may fall into it, just as it falls into us. Mariners navigate a path on a curved body of water. Their route is along a curve circle. The universality of gravity is all objects respond in the same way; they follow the path of least distance in curved space and time.
And as you stand on Earth you are pulled by its core as the earth falls toward the sun. Because the earth has inflationary momentum and all mass in the universe is stretching it never quite gets to the sun. In billions of years, it will.
"At this very moment, our galaxy is hurtling toward the Virgo cluster of galaxies at a couple of hundred kilometers a second, faster literally than a speeding bullet. Virgo is pulling us into its gravitational field. At the same time, our galaxy continues to rotate sedately: The invisible hand of gravity ties together the 100 billion stars that mke up the galaxy. Our dear old sun stays within this hurtling swarm of stars only because of its attraction to all those other stars, just as our earth stays within the solar system because of its attraction to the sun. On an evewn smaller scale, we say tied to the earth by gravity, with nary a fear of falling off. On a grander scale, as the universe tries to expand to even larger size, every bit of matter it contains is trying to rein the universe in by pulling gravitationally on every other bit of matter..." (A. Zee, Einstein's Universe: Gravity at Work and Play, Oxford U Press, 1989)
Everything you see in the night sky is moving. Planets move around stars and stars move. Galaxies move. Everything is moving. We understand most of this movement because of gravity and Einstein. When I took my first course in astronomy it was an extension course from the university of Utah (I think it was Utah, if my memory still serves me correctly?) before there was even an internet. I didn't do so well. It was not easy studying the celestial bodies by mail. There was a lot to learn but not nearly as much as we know now. It would of course be easier today because the science has changed; that is, it is more complete. Telescopes are better and many of them are now beyond the earth's atomosphere and use more than visible light to look at the cosmos.
"...Galileo Galilei was the first person to collect data on falling objects (actually balls rolling down a sloped platform). From these data he produced an equation that showed falling objects travel in parabolas." (University Lowbrow Astronomers University Lowbrow Astronomers Gravity, Part 2: Newton, Hooke, Halley and the Three Body Problem. by Dave Snyder in Reflections: April, 2006)
Before the telescope philosophers and astronomers were limited to theories, math, and some of what they could see with the naked eye and much of what they could not and some of it was speculation but intuition rarely worked the way It also took giant telescopes and new and different observations from space to see stars, planets, comets, nebulae and it took these new ways of looking at these things, i.e. xrays, gamma rays, microwaves, lasers and looking at the entire spectrum of visible and invisible light, etc. to really see the universe which may be multiple universes and different time frames for looking at globular clusters, galaxies and universes and perhaps multiverses. We don't even know yet what gravity is and even natural law is characteristically different for really small things. Quarks exist but nobody has ever seen one. What in life is just an illusion and what is actually real?
Hank Roth
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Today is Saturday February 04, 2012