On Thursday, October 24, 2013 9:46:54 PM UTC-4, Liz R wrote: > > On 25 October 2013 14:31, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com <javascript:> > > wrote: > >> >> Looking at natural presences, like atoms or galaxies, the scope of their >> persistence is well beyond any human relation so they do deserve the >> benefit of the doubt. We have no reason to believe that they were assembled >> by anything other than themselves. The fact that we are made of atoms and >> atoms are made from stars is another point in their favor, whereas no >> living organism that we have encountered is made of inorganic atoms, or of >> pure mathematics, or can survive by consuming only inorganic atoms or >> mathematics. >> > > What are inorganic atoms? Or rather (since I suspect all atoms are > inorganic), what are organic atoms? > > You have a point - really it would make more sense to talk about organic molecules, however since organic molecules must contain Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen, there's nothing wrong with thinking about those as the organic atoms. I say atoms instead of molecules not to make it easy because my view opens up the possibility of top-down causality. The way that MSR treats top-down causality, it locally looks like retrocausality.
For example, if the era of life takes billions of years to begin, its own beginning serves as an attractor that casts a shadow on the previous inorganic era, because from the perceptual inertial frame of biology, the inorganic era is a preparation. This sentence for example, begins with T-h-i-s. Without understanding the retrocausality of the sentence, those letters have no order, so they could be h-i-t-s, s-h-i-t, i-h-s-t, etc. The approach of cosmology now assumes that mechanistic time is primitive, so that there must be just a lot of random letter combinations that wind up being 'T-h-i-s' on occasion. If instead, we assume sense as primordial, then the entire "This sentence, for example, begins with..." sentence begins as a single idea that is expressed from the top down, to a digital sequence-function stepping along 'time', and a set of letter form-positions spread across 'space'. This is where I get the notion of personal awareness of the 'now' being nested within a super-personal experience of larger and larger nows, while itself hosting a simultaneity of smaller and smaller nows. So yes, on the level of atoms, were there no possibility of biology in the universe, atoms would be 'inorganic', but since the story of biology begins with the some long words made out of C, H, O, and N, then those would be the organic atoms. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
