emotional

Nature is mindless -- it doesn't work with an end in mind. That insight is at least as old as Spinoza. The whole point of materialism is that of matter over mind: matter was first, mind evolved from it later. The main foundational error of all theisms is the assumption that mind, intelligence, existed from the beginning.

Humans can do all those things. It's not counter to intuition. I term "mysterious" what is counter to intuition. The fact that the Earth is round and not flat is counter to intuition and therefore mysterious. The fact that we're the product of no plan is counter to intuition and therefore mysterious. What's mysterious about humans is that their great blob of matter called the brain can achieve consciousness and do all those things. Mysterious is "the magic of matter" -- how the properties of matter change once you add a few protons and electrons. Humans of themselves aren't mysterious; as a part of Nature they are.

Harumi

Emotional,

What about human emotions?

I've always wondered why emotions exist at all. It often makes people do stupid things. At other times it also serves to make them better people. But for the most part, it hinders. Don't you find that mysterious? As humans, we have some of the most complicated emotions out there. But what caused it to appear at all? What is the point of it? We hardly need it to survive, but now that we have it, it's hard to live without it.

As human beings, I feel that we are the most mysterious of all, because we are the source of the mystery. Nature doesn't care whether or not we feel awe at it or not. But we feel awe at it, and that's what gives it its characteristics. It's all us. Us, humans.

I suppose that's why humans feel so separate from everything else.

andy_d

Do you live in a big city? If so, take a look around you at what people are doing. I'm constantly mystified at and amazed by my fellow humans. Strange, fascinating things, humans.

Marlowe

Oh, that's a philosophical/ theological concept that bugs me! I ditched most traditional religions early because of just that. However, there's got to be some natural explanation for the emergence of that thought - I tend to chalk it up to our awareness of death which nothing else seems to have. I'm beginning to think that caused a radical alienation of our perception of ourselves and nature.

Yea, an opening to talk about my favorite theory, Complexity. There's this whole new scientific theory emerging (largely from the Santa Fe Insitute - see their current papers) that captures a lot of why paradox is built right in. I don't want to bore anyone with a long explanation, but Complexity is exploring the way life, and any other complex adaptive system, exists on the edge of order and chaos. The really fun thing about Complexity is, even as it explains things, it only makes them seem more mysterious in the grand sense.

Heh! I love it. I often explain pantheism to people by saying "We are cells in the body of god."

What would constitute such a life force, I wonder? I tend to believe in, if not a 'force' then a process that's inherent to the universe. One of the big things that attracted me to complexity is a book by one of the Santa Fe Institute scientists, 'At Home in the Universe' by Stuart Kauffman. He called it that because he's found out that the processes that lead to life are kind of inevitable given the structure of things, which is why we are at home in this universe.

I think a lot of the 'puppetmaster' complex is just that not everyone is a great abstract thinkers (nor should they be - abstract thought is a little overrated in some ways) and so anthropomorphism goes on. It's really rather harmless in principle. Now if folks would only follow what their own sacred texts actually say, everything would be much better.

How do you know? Seriously, if nature did have an intention, what makes us think it would at all be obvious to us? It's like the cells thing - if we are cells, can a heart cell, busily contracting, have any idea that it's part of me getting up to go to the coke machine? (Would it be hideously diasppointed to find out that's what I was doing? Would it understand 'coke' or 'machine'?) Or what if it's not about intention? Think of an artist creating - there's an impulse to create, experiments are tried, and what comes out as the end product (which isn't really an end because more than likely the artist is going to create something else next) is only tangentially related to the initial concept which was unformed.

You can also think of mind as anything that processes information, not something that has intention. Frankly, I know myself and other people well enough to know that what we call intention is more like, well, blundering along minute to minute. And the amount of information I can process is miniscule compared to the amount of information that was (and is) processed for life on earth to emerge and continue.

Is that counter to intuition, or counter to our limited to perception? We're small and think that what we see should be the whole of existence. When we seea little more than what we saw before, we call it counter-intuitive. Having been raised on astronomy, I had a hard time processing the thought that the earth being round is counter-intuitive because I was taught that, of course, the earth is round. Once you know about Relativity and the curvature of space, flatness becomes counter-intuitive, so maybe it's a matter of perspective. Just a thought. Still, always nice to chat with someone else who 'gets' the divinity of nature!

emotional

If nature worked with an end in mind, like an intelligent designer, it wouldn't leave useless evolutionary leftovers, such as pseudogenes and vestigial organs. The fact that each of us humans have a leg muscle (called the Plantaris Muscle) which in us is useless, but in apes serves to flex all toes at once, is a striking indication of how nature does things on top of one another, without thinking ahead.



When I was small I had a hard time accepting a round earth. We sleep on flat beds, not on balls, so it made sense to me that the earth should be flat too. Where do you see it curve, anyway? It took Magellan's voyage and photographs from space to convince me of that counter-intuitive fact.



All scriptures, be they Bible or Qur'an or Upanishads or Tao Te Ching, are products of humanity, for we know humans can devise such things; but the products of Nature, especially the writ of DNA, is undisputed to have been made by humans. There is no divine revelation but what is put in front of us.

Marlowe

You're missing my point. If nature worked with an end in mind (which I'm not saying it does, because there isn't an "end", it's a process) - it wouldn't be a human end, so it might be as counter-intuitive to you as the earth being round. But then again humans also do things one on top of the other leaving left-overs, so I'm not following what you see as the defining difference between having a mind and not having one. Can you explain to me how humans live their lives with an end in mind and how that differs from the way Nature operates? Because it seems to me that human thought is a process and what I refer to as Nature's mind is also a process, so I'm not getting the difference that you're perceiving.

In a lunar eclipse. On the beach of an ocean, you can see a slight curvature, especially if you observe a boat moving over the horizon. From a plane it can be observable. In the mathematics of Relativity. And of course, pictures from space.

Once you've seen a photograph from space, doesn't a flat earth become completely counter-intuitive? One ounce of data beats a ton of theory. You constructed a theory based on flat beds, but one photograph from space should be enough to show that you didn't have the relevant data. Are you saying that after seeing a photo of the earth from space you still find a round planet counter-intuitive?

I'm afraid you lost me completely on this. Yes, sacred texts were written by humans. I think you're saying the DNA was definitely not made by humans, which is pretty obvious since humans were made by DNA. I don't know what you're driving at with "There is no divine revelation but what is put in front of us." The Tao Te Ching was put in front of me. That it came from a human (a product of nature) isn't going to cause me to downgrade it in terms of what I have to learn from it just because it came from a human. A product of a product of nature is natural in my opinion, and as valid a teacher as the stars.

Nowhere357

Is it a force, or is it a process? I think if it's a force, then it must be detectable as energy in the natural universe?

Is the existence of order and complexity an indication of a life force?

Thought experiment. A person and a pile of bricks in a closed system.
Experiment 1) The man is unconscious and just lays there, dies, turns to dust.
Experiment 2) The man WILLS himself to get up, assemble the bricks into a wall, then he dies and turns to dust.

Does life add higher complexity to a system? And if so, Does higher complexity represent energy in any way?

emotional

Humans are very much supernatural agents in a natural universe. See how they've changed ecology in the recent period. Humans are a part of Nature become non-natural.



Once you have learned the facts scientifically, intuition no longer assumes a role. When I say a flat earth is intuitive, I mean that any untaught person would assume a flat earth and not a round one.

I disagree with you completely. The Bible and the Tao Te Ching are not natural products (see above for what I said about humans being supernatural agents). Humans books are a result of human thought; human thought may ultimately be rooted in a natural process (the evolution of the brain), but human thought is not natural. When I talk about the sacred creation of Nature, I exclude human creations, and I include only the natural building-process of life. "What's put in front of us" is the natural universe, not the human-created ramblings of human scriptures. Nature is holy, human scripture not holy.

Harumi

Emotional,

I suppose then, if an alien race comes to visit us (hypothetically) then they'd be supernatural and their thoughts unnatural too?

Can you justify your claim that human thoughts are unnatural?
Where did such an idea come from?

Very lost,
Harumi

Marlowe

Possibly, but who's to know what's a real force that we've detected and what's not? I'm reading a book called "Fire in the Mind" that makes the very good point that we are constantly making up forces to explain things and make them fit our theoretical framework - like the strong nuclear force. The truth is we have no idea why a bunch of positively charged protons would bunch up and not be repelled by their like charge, so we say - hey, there must be a force there!

Complexity Theory is a little different from other sciences because instead of looking at structures affected by forces, it looks at processes, and has already found mathematical proof of them. But examining any of this in general involves making choices - kind of like an object/ ground relationship. Look at it one way and it's a force affecting objects, look at it another way and it's a process working.

Experiment one) all chaos, except for the bricks I guess, which are more ordered than mud.
Experiment two) gets into complexity theory really. Since the universe is supposed ot be running down, all things leading towards entropy, how can we ever will ourselves to get up or build walls or make bricks? It's all contrary to the Second Law of Thermodynamics that things are constantly getting more disordered.

As for whether life adds complexity, supposedly, yes. Life does exist at a higher level of complexity because it tends to have more diverse components, interacting in more diverse ways than non-living matter. Complexity as a property tends to be defined as irreducible information, which gets into information theory which makes my head hurt so bad I want to bang it into a wall repeatedly. Needless to say, while banging my head against a wall I don't give very good explanations.


One - if humans are "supernatural" in a natural universe, how did a natural universe give rise to supernatural creatures?

Two - when plants first appeared on earth they radically changed the planet's ecology. Prior to their appearance the earth's atmosphere had almost no oxygen. Once plants colonized the planet they started pumping out this highly toxic element, until over 20% of the atmosphere was made of a noxious gas. (I know we generally don't think of oxygen as toxic, but it knocks electrons from anything it can, which does damage. Earth creatures have evolved numerous mechanisms to bind these free radicals and detoxify them.) Humans haven't changed things nearly that much (yet). Various geological and galactic forces have five times caused 95% of all species on earth to go extinct. Humans haven't done nearly that much. So, why do you see us as supernatural but plants and geology aren't?

Is a bird's nest natural? If it is, then why isn't a human construction natural? How is human thought not natural? What is the basis for any radical separation of humanity from nature?