Life, the Universe and Everything
Been hanging around Esalen recently?
I don't think you need to get particularly new-agey to think about it and perhaps get your mind blown by possibilities. Perhaps it is "alive", as indeed scope limits our understanding a lot so we might not be able to observe the properties of life in a way we'd recognise any more than a single individual cell could recognise our emergent consciousness. Perhaps, although I wouldn't worry about it too much.
Of course, I think this works best if we keep the hardcore rationalist hat firmly on to think about it. Because if you think "ah, but the world is alive!!" you get a woo-flavoured Gaia Hypothesis that's meaningless because you haven't quite figured out what you mean by "alive" yet and are simply triggering you "life" category without triggering the properties... on the other hand, if you think that emegent properties can appear on larger scales, think China brain, then we have some really interesting possibilities to the universe we can explore.
Also, obligatory: http://xkcd.com/505/
Oh, believe me, I know. I want to take some of the things I've heard at philosophy/theory of mind seminars and add the words "dude" and "like, man" to the end of sentences and see if people can distinguish between them and pothead/New Age gibberish.
Totally going to have to try that.
"Dude, it's like we're all, connected and shit, ya know, man?"
I wrote this last night, but the system crashed on me. Joy!
Anyhow, for me, neb, science actually makes me more poetic. Law, language, and daily cleaning are very pragmatic and rather drole. I can discuss how topic based sentences have 1st order translation issues, or read about meta langauge in a paper and say "yea, cool". But to think that the yellow ball of sun, rising, is soooooo fucking big, that we can see it from millions of miles away, and it throbs so hotly that it keeps us nice and toasty kinda just blows me away. Then to star at the stars and realize I'm actually seeing into the past -- that some of those stars are virtual newborns when I'm seeing their images (and that the've lived 8 billion years since I'm seeing them) just makes me giggle with the poetic side.
Sadly, my writing is competent, and that's about it. Staring out at the stars demands Whitman "Carol of the Words" ability, not just "competent".
Sometimes there is a fine line between poetic science talk and woo (see also gaia hypothesis). Also, relevant.
Fascinatingly relevant series actually.