Life, the Universe and Everything

Fragment of a discussion from User talk:Armondikov
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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/

Scarlet A.pngbomination04:02, 4 January 2012

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.

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)04:08, 4 January 2012

Totally going to have to try that.

Scarlet A.pnggnostic04:09, 4 January 2012

"Dude, it's like we're all, connected and shit, ya know, man?"

Scarlet A.pngpathetic04:10, 4 January 2012

Dude, there's no such thing as reality, only what our mind constructs from its sensory input. Like, y'know what I'm sayin' here, man?

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)04:12, 4 January 2012

Define reality as "what our mind constructs from its sensory input" and that phrase becomes quite hilarious.

Scarlet A.pngmoral13:48, 4 January 2012
 
 
 
 

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".

Pink mowse.pngGodotEn live15:34, 4 January 2012

Sometimes there is a fine line between poetic science talk and woo (see also gaia hypothesis). Also, relevant.

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)20:56, 4 January 2012