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A World That Doesn't Know

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posted on Feb, 21 2017 @ 09:47 PM
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Is it impossible to imagine a world where people don't know?

Think about it. It's quite odd - yet deeply mysterious - that the book of Genesis (BreiShiTh in Hebrew, meaning literally, '"beginnings") stipulates a world created in 6 days, with a day of rest on the 7th.

What is work? The thermodynamic explanation of work is a process that releases energy. So, if I pop some coal into a furnace, the smoke/pressure released can be captured for work i.e. to turn a wheel system to get a choo-choo train moving.



In living organisms, work is released when one process interacting with another process results in the transfer of energy. Metabolism is the name the biological sciences give for the transformation of energy that occurs within an organisms body as it takes in external molecules and reconstructs it's dynamic through-put. Indeed, it is now accepted that a physical organism is the 'accumulated' structure that has built along a particular evolutionary line as a means to process energy.

Of course, this is not all we are, but the fact that we are systems bound by the second law of thermodynamics i.e. requiring external energy to maintain our metabolic processes i.e. our structure, does not mean we work like other systems. In fact, organisms - while obeying the second law - simultaneously defy it by aggregating into large structures halfway between chaos and order, at a point called "far from equilibrium". To say that the organism 'aggregates structure' means that energy becomes dynamically entangled into a structuring dynamic as the most economical way to dissipate energy. In other words, conditions on Earth are ripe for living - not too chaotic (like venus) or static (like mars): but just the right atmospheric conditions obtain on the surface of the Earth to give rise to macrocosmic organisms.

Coherency Driving for Coherency



You could say that the Universe, on Earth, has been given the requisite conditions to reach what I consider to be an important boiling point: the emergence of sociality. Sociality brought into the evolutionary narrative (or dynamic) a situation where materially emergent agents (organisms) begin to relate to one another through the illusory externality created by agential cuts i.e. a organisms emerged, it then could seem - via the 'portal of sensory detection', that the world was split into subject-object i.e. ineluctably dual. Clearly, however, this is not the case.

Centripetal forces within material processes are central to much of the life-dynamic - but with the emergence of social animals, the quality of warmth started out as the "adjacent possible" condition to bridge one organism with another organism i.e. cuddling as a way to conserve energy loss. Mammals - and the evolution of the myelinated nerve cell - forced a new metabolic condition that in turn compelled the ingenuity of the embodied organic agency to discover a solution. Coming together with other such agents - huddling, evolved in a rat-like organism. But overtime, central-neurons (in the brain) began to regulate these chiefly metabolic connections in a way that made seeking connection to be dynamically - and affectively - desirable. The evolution of endorphin and dopamine systems brought the drive and and pleasure conditions of the experiencing agency onto dynamical convergence with other creatures undergoing the same dynamical processes. Thus - an ontological "third" - the social group - developed atop the individual behavior of the agentially separated organism - but the condition of absolute separability, of course, is an illusion: the social is as ontologically real as an organizing vector for the unit as the units physical structure generates a state of separability.

But what is the unit - what is the social vector? It is the whole - secretly placed away within the potentiality of emergent forms.

It emerges in between things, but do not imagine some physical "place" for this reality. It is, rather, a quality which emerges, such as the care that forges an organisms existential being with another organism with the same need. It is the play that manifests at metabolic surplus: the play that celebrates the gift of life - living - moving, dynamically changing and discovering new configurations, innovations and different forms of being.

It is awe. The awe which takes in the world as a massive, seemingly infinite realm of possibility - with bits of incredible order - life - integrated into other lives, amidst a system of relations - the Earth - that we come to see as embodying an intelligence and will that amazes us.

Why do I subscribe ontological significance to fun, care, and awe? As emotional vectors, we can all agree that these affects motivate our desires as beings. Play - in being the oldest - is considered ontological 'primitive', inasmuch as it doesn't disclose knowledge of the other. Play is the apogee of narcissistic relation to the world, but of course, it is as much a Human need as it is a need for dogs. Advancing in being - or coherency - does not entail dropping the existential quality of play, but in contextualizing its utility in the life process, which means, "knowing when its appropriate and not appropriate to play".

Care is deeper and central to the life narrative. It is there as the phenomena of love - and I do not claim that it is easy to demarcate love from play (every parent who plays with their child feels both at once) or love from awe; only to say that there are 3 discriminable affective vectors which emerge in between the organism and the other.

Awe, however, bespeaks an existential relation between the agentially enacted organism's subjectivity and the world perceptually received through his sensory organs. Awe is the most enlivening and most coherent 'agency' within us - and indeed - I would argue awe performs a role within our functioning that, overtime - if managed to be maintained in Human society through its transmission channels (institutions) - would generate an organismic coherency that - I sense - may bring us to a state of coherency that existed in the far Human past.

Of course, the idea of the "far human past", and the effect of Human organismic coherency in relation to ontological reality, is not well described in the above paragraph. The work of the biophysicist Mae Wan Ho, the philosopher Ervin Lazslo, and recent ideas by Stuart Kauffman, suggest that a) what has happened in the past is not lost, but preserved in some abstract form; b) this relates to the quantum vacuum and quantum gravity and c) what has existed maintains itself as a potentiality so long as a system exists somewhere to embody it.



posted on Feb, 22 2017 @ 01:12 AM
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1) Do you consider rape a need for play? What if someone or body else did? What would you think of them??
2) If you encountered something inhuman, and it dominated you, would it matter about thermodynamics or that it did not experience a need for anything but that with specifically you at that moment? Is this human? Lack of human? Can one be sure really, trowling the net? I mean that it sounds like you are trying to convince yourself, more than is a psychological treatise?? Just your use of the word human I've never encountered before?
3) Systems interact. Is the world full of motion? Inertia? Are you trying to distance yourself from that that is human.
edit on 22-2-2017 by mericks74 because: (no reason given)



posted on Feb, 22 2017 @ 04:00 AM
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posted on Feb, 22 2017 @ 07:39 AM
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a reply to: Astrocyte

You got some really neat ideas about the ontological nature of reality. I am currently working on a paper that will explore the idea that it is 'process', not 'substance', that is the general foundation of reality. (Note the use of quotes shows that I have a specific philosophical meaning for those ideas).

Anyway, I find that the world is not some eternal substance, that is matter, but a process in which energy is in constant transformation. Here are two videos that sum up my ontological worldview. The first one is short but concise, and the second has plenty of good info that might be useful to you and give you a few more thinkers to ponder over.





I am going to look into Mae Wan Ho, Ervin Lazslo, and Stuart Kauffman for my paper, but I would like to keep this discussion going because I feel that most people get stuck in holding onto their ontological positions as fundamental and thus they go off to use science to try and prove themselves right. Karl Popper says this is pseudo-science because the real aim of science is to try and disprove a theory, but not to disprove it entirely, but to help change and shape it to a more accurate picture of reality. My example of this is gravity, we had to change our fundamental understanding of space and time to get a better theory of gravity. So, to get to quantum gravity perhaps we need to do that again.

Cool topic and thanks for sharing,





posted on Feb, 22 2017 @ 09:22 AM
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Awe, however, bespeaks an existential relation between the agentially enacted organism's subjectivity and the world perceptually received through his sensory organs. Awe is the most enlivening and most coherent 'agency' within us - and indeed - I would argue awe performs a role within our functioning that, overtime - if managed to be maintained in Human society through its transmission channels (institutions) - would generate an organismic coherency that - I sense - may bring us to a state of coherency that existed in the far Human past.

"That a mother in a safe space produces a strikingly different brain and child physiology than one who Is anxious clearly illustrates nature’s model imperative. The mother is the model of the eventual child on every level and a new life must shape according to the general models life itself affords. For, as is true in all cases of nature’s model imperative, the character, nature, and quality of the model determine to an indeterminable extend the character, nature, and quality of the new intelligence that manifests."

As is probably quite obvious, I'm currently reading through "The Biology of Transcendence" by Joseph Chilton Pearce and would highly recommend it!




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