is the universe a living thing

They also have the smallest free-living bacterium genome: 1.3 Mbp, 1354 protein genes, 35 RNA genes. New York University philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers is a proponent. Which brings us to Roger Penrose and his theories linking consciousness and quantum mechanics. Just as your mind is adept at maneuvering through your tasks, so is the soul at navigating the higher, more significant planes of life. Interesting. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.” Maybe we can move panpsychism from philosophy to observational astrophysics.”. Stars may be thinking entities that deliberately control their paths. Although the sun is vastly bigger than a bacterium, from a mathematical perspective it is also vastly simpler. Plato retains a few precious hints of the goddess mysteries that tied pre-historical human civilization together; but much of his account of the cosmos is despite sex and death, rather than integral with them. And not just a brain, but potentially any physical structure. One approach is to study brain-impaired patients to see if their information responses align with biological measures of their consciousness. Koch is inspired by integrated information theory, a hot topic among modern neuroscientists, which holds that consciousness is defined by the ability of a system to be influenced by its previous state and to influence its next state. This is the conversation within that leads to living … Scientists believe there’s other life in the universe. The universe is a body, according to Plato– a Living Thing. This Cosmic Being is not just an empty body, though; it is given life by a soul. This intuitive knowing of "life" cannot be grasped as a concept; it is known through actual living experience of one's everyday being. Three decades ago, Penrose introduced a key element of panpsychism with his theory that consciousness is rooted in the statistical rules of quantum physics as they apply in the microscopic spaces between neurons in the brain. Q2) How can it be proven that God is the creator of the universe and all living things? But in the embodied world, sex remains to be encountered before it can be accounted for. Some of the world's most renowned scientists are questioning whether the cosmos has an inner life similar to our own. Called by its formal academic name, though, “panpsychism” turns out to have prominent supporters in a variety of fields. From this perspective, the failure to appreciate Plato’s organicism is part and parcel of a failure to appreciate Greek organicism more generally. See how that health care professional is holding … It includes living things, planets, stars, galaxies, dust clouds, light, and even time. This new, unknown component, which comprises ~68% of the matter-energy content of the universe, will determine the ultimate fate of all. Universe, All Living Things' Creator Proof Evidence of the creator . At some point, according to integrated information theory, the two should merge into a single, larger information system. Like Matloff, Koch and his colleagues are actively engaged in experimental tests of these ideas. Plato means the fixed and wandering stars (planets) when he speaks of gods, and says of the earth that it “ranks as the foremost, the one with greatest seniority,” and is our nurturer and guardian of night and day (p. 1244, PCW). Data from existing stellar catalogs seems to support the latter view, Matloff claims. Understanding this idea can make it an apologetic for our faith rather than a fact which detracts from our faith. Plato writes (as Timaeus in the dialogue) of a soul woven together with the body of the universe, and that: …revolving within itself, [the world soul] initiated a divine beginning of unceasing, intelligent life for all time, (p.1240, Plato Complete Works). Hence, we are all made of this energy and the energy packets are "surfing on this sea of universal consciousness". “Theory states that it could go down to very simple systems. The demiurge could not create on his own, but needed the help of space, of the cosmic womb. Despite their seeming similarities, Koch is dubious of Matloff’s volitional stars. —Alfred North Whitehead, “Philosophy begins in wonder. Yet, compared to some of the things that exist in our universe, they are absolutely microscopic. Plato’s living cosmos is both still and in motion at once. “In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it,” Einstein wrote in a 1930 New York Times editorial. We hear a lot about the fastest things on Earth, the peregrine falcons, sailfish and cheetahs of this world. Largest Asteroid. Plato’s tale (he admits several times it is only a “likely story”) includes a demiurge, a divine craftsman responsible for shaping the chaos of matter into an ordered cosmos. You love our badass universe. Cosmology is the study of the body of the universe, its soul, and the living, procreating, and dying of the plants and animals within it. This can be done in many languages –some musical, others mathematical– and if I succeed, perhaps in English text. Plato sees the cause of the motion of the fixed stars is none other than there destiny: time is told according to number –past and future part of a single whole– together a “symphony of proportion.” The universe is a living likeness of the One held together by the music of the spheres. FOLLOW NBC MACH ON TWITTER, FACEBOOK, AND INSTAGRAM. Today, we will explore the largest things in the universe based on their relative sizes. Listen to it. If Paranego’s Discontinuity is caused by specific conditions within the galaxy, it should vary from location to location. Intrigued, Matloff wondered if there was a way to take these squishy arguments and put them to an observational test. The origin of the force that is pushing the universe apart is a mystery, and astronomers refer to it simply as "dark energy". IE 11 is not supported. We may receive a call from someone we were thinking of, or the exact information we need to make an informed decision. The human brain is just an extreme example of that process, Koch explains: “We are more complex, we have more self-awareness — well, some of us do — but other systems have awareness, too. Ecological Civilization, or Anarcho-Primitivism? Its characteristics suggest that the faint object formed during a very different era in the universe, back just 1 billion or so years after the Big Bang, making DGSAT 1 a living fossil. Penrose sums up this connection beautifully in his opus "The Road to Reality": “The laws of physics produce complex systems, and these complex systems lead to consciousness, which then produces mathematics, which can then encode in a succinct and inspiring way the very underlying laws of physics that gave rise to it.”. Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account. ... the Milky Way may harbor billions of planets that bear liquid water — a substance integral to the emergence of living things. A “proto-consciousness field” could extend through all of space, he argues. The Universe contains billions of galaxies, each containing millions or billions of stars. For example, … Plato explains sexual difference by all but avoiding it, which is to say he demands we reign in our bodily desires to commit ourselves entirely to the Good itself, beyond all space and time, and especially beyond the pleasures and pains of the body. Heres to longevity. But if it is something intrinsic to the stars — as consciousness would be — it should be the same everywhere. Riane Eisler has elsewhere detailed the importance of agricultural metaphors in patriarchal civilization.]. If there's one thing in the universe that is certain, it's that life exists. Nor does it have a mouth, since there is nothing for it to eat except itself. Intermediaries were required. Where his ancient Greek tale fails, we modern children of Gaia are called to put the pieces back together. 5) – Molecular Alchemy and the Evolution of Spirit, Growing Down Podcast on “the Integral Left”, Dialoguing with Brent Cooper about ecosocialist politics and integral spirituality, “He maketh his sun to rise,” featuring Donald Trump, Cornel West, and Ram Dass, The Place of Psychedelic Chemistry/Alchemical Consciousness in Philosophy, Imagination as the Topographical Inversion of Reality: Musings with Becca Tarnas, Reading and Riffing on Murray Bookchin’s “The Ecology of Freedom”. Post: Ongoing discussion on PZ Myers’ blog, “How does matter give rise to consciousness?” (response to Sam Harris), A review of Michael Hogue’s “American Immanence: Democracy for an Uncertain World” (2018), Voices of VR podcast: A Primer on Whitehead’s Process Philosophy, Who are we? Being a part of an overwhelming whole, as a spoke on a bike and the purpose, the most valuable purpose that serves the rider. Don't Throw Out the Baby With the Amniotic Fluid. Related: What Einstein and Bill Gates Teach Us About Time Travel. The Universe is everything we can touch, feel, sense, measure, or detect. Ceres is the largest asteroid we’ve discovered so far. Pelagibacter ubique is one of the smallest known free-living bacteria, with a length of 370 to 890 nm and an average cell diameter of 120 to 200 nm. Today it is known that Earth is only a small ball of rock in a space of unimaginable … It’s true, the atoms – and the elementary particles that make them up – can be traced back to the Big Bang. The intangible world affects the tangible world we experience. When we are on the right path, little coincidences occur often. It is unlike our own animal bodies, because it has no arms or legs to move around, since it is everywhere at once. “We are participators in bringing into being not only the near and here but the far away and long ago,” Wheeler said in 2006. We may ask the universe for guidance and receive it in the form of intelligence from a friend or just the right book falling into our hands. In principle, some purely physical systems that are not biological or organic may also be conscious.”. The universe is a living likeness of the One held together by the music of the spheres. The true purpose of death is to master the art of letting go, so that bigger and grander things can take the place. A visible living thing containing visible ones, perceptible god, image of the intelligible Living Thing, its grandness, goodness, beauty and perfection are unexcelled, (p. 1291, PCW). The notion of a conscious universe sounds more like the stuff of late night TV than academic journals. There is no death or as Gurdieff once put it, There is no change only modification of circumstances. The material manifestation of the Creator is the tangible Universe, with all its non-living and living things, including man. He explains: There is no end to evolution. The late physicist John Wheeler concluded that the apparent oddity of quantum mechanics was built on an even grander and odder truth: that the universe as a whole festers in a state of uncertainty and snaps into clear, actual being when observed by a conscious being — that is, us. We may share this property of experience, and that is what consciousness is: the ability to experience anything, from the most mundane to the most refined religious experience.”, Related: Cosmic Bruise Could be Evidence of Multiple Universes. Thank you for sharing this wonderful insight. Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. Another approach, further off, is to wire the brains of two mice together and see how the integrated consciousness of the animals changes as the amount of information flowing between them is increased. Physicist Gregory Matloff argues that a “proto-consciousness field” could extend through all of space. Put more bluntly, the entire cosmos may be self-aware. There are no stars to monitor, and no brains to measure, to understand whether reality depends on the presence of consciousness. On average, cooler stars orbit our galaxy more quickly than do hotter ones. He wants to leave all the planets and resources in their current state but cut the number of living things by 50%. Even in that context, Gregory Matloff’s ideas are shocking. —Alfred North Whitehead. Nor eyes, for who would it see? Recently, he zeroed in on a little-studied anomaly in stellar motion known as Paranego’s Discontinuity. 11. How are we to tell the story of our universe so that it celebrates women, sex, and mortality as much as the True, the Good, and the Beautiful? Only a brief line or two are required for Plato to remind the reader that the female body is but a corupted offshoot of man’s. The Universe is everything we can touch, feel, sense, measure or detect. The demiurge created lesser gods to make humans, because a truly immortal thing such as he could not create mortals. [Read this essay I wrote last year for more on the repression of femininity throughout Western history. If you know how big the universe is and how far it continues even further upon that then with pure mathematical statistics there is bound to be life somewhere else. Plato’s is the story of Man’s universe, though he is still forced at times to admit the presence of something else. (response to Julian Walker), Emergent Evolution in a Panpsychist Cosmos (dialoging with Corey Anton), Setting the Akashic Record Straight (final response to David Long about emergence and panpsychism). They walk at a humble average speed of 3 mph. Cosmologies in Question: A Debate with David Long, Toward an Integral “God” – a dialogue with Layman Pascal, Death Denial in a Panpsychist Cosmos: A Dialogue with Corey Anton, Meta-Politics – a discussion with Layman Pascal on “The Integral Stage”, Remembering and Carrying Forward Michael Brooks on “Growing Down”, Dialogue with a Whiteheadian Thelemite Vajrayanist Wiccan, Sam Webster, Integral Entheogens (Ep. In the context of East Asian philosophy and East Asian religions, Tao is the natural order of the universe whose character one's human intuition must discern in order to realize the potential for individual wisdom. It contains billions of galaxies, each providing millions or billions of stars. He describes a woman’s uterus as though it were the cause of a demonic possession, making women nearly incapable of being reasoned with (Plato, in the Republic, does grant women rational souls of their own); he speaks of intercourse as “plucking the fruit from a tree, [sowing] the seed into the plough field of [the] womb” (p. 1290, PCW), thereby making man the cause of new life, and woman merely its temporary vessel. I spent a lot of time trying to feel good but not dealing with what made me feel bad. Most astronomers attribute the effect to interactions between stars and gas clouds throughout the galaxy. In other words, WE ARE ALL CONNECTED and living in a "thought universe". But the hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining how a qualitative, subjective experience occurs from a physical process at all. Change ), "The safest general characterization of the philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." Our universe is so large if you created a rocket that can go light speed you wouldn't reach the end of our universe for 100's of years. Earth Unplugged’s Maddie Moate … In his introduction to Plato’s works, Cairns (1961) points out that the Greek view, as far back as we have records, is that the world is orderly and alive. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Detailed results from the Gaia star-mapping space telescope, due in 2018, will provide a more stringent test. “The only dominant theory we have of consciousness says that it is associated with complexity — with a system’s ability to act upon its own state and determine its own fate,” Koch says. Often the universe sends us signs in the form of synchronicity. Koch allows that a star may have an internal life that allows it to “feel,” but whatever that feeling is, it is much less than the feeling of being an E. coli. It includes living things, planets, stars, galaxies, dust clouds, light, and even time. On the other hand, “even systems that we don’t consider animate could have a little bit of consciousness,” Koch says. So we are talking about the God of God here. Thanos obviously doesn’t want to destroy half the planets and stars in the Universe…that would defeat his whole plan. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. The smallest hypothetical thing in the universe is not … The whole universe is made up of energy - and at this level everything is vibrating. He noted that the anomaly appears in stars that are cool enough to have molecules in their atmospheres, which greatly increases their chemical complexity. Matloff noted further that some stars appear to emit jets that point in only one direction, an unbalanced process that could cause a star to alter its motion. Smallest Hypothetical Object in the Universe. The most mysterious of Plato’s metaphysical concepts is not the demiurge, whose fatherly role is quite straightforward; rather, the motherly Receptacle remains “difficult and vague,” as Plato writes of this “wetnurse”: Not only does it always receive all things, it has never in any way whatever taken on any characteristic similar to any of the things that enter it, (p. 1253). Its obvious however intangible. Our own bodies are signs of this body, mortal replicas of the universal model. This is a list of the longest-living biological organisms: the individual(s) (or in some instances, clones) of a species with the longest natural maximum lifespans.For a given species, such a designation may include: The oldest known individual(s) that are currently alive, with verified ages. Though he speaks often of mortal bodies in general (by which he means the male body), seldom does Plato mention sex. The universe may be fine-tuned; the Fine-tuned universe hypothesis is the proposition that the conditions that allow the existence of observable life in the universe can only occur when certain universal fundamental physical constants lie within a very narrow range of values, so that if any of several fundamental constants were only slightly different, the universe would have been unlikely to be … “The Great American Trip,” dialogue on “Growing Down”, Reason, Reality, & Religion in the Making (dialoguing with John Vervaeke), Naturphilosophie as Process Philosophy in Schelling and Whitehead, Meta-Linguistics (dialoguing with Layman Pascal), Metamodernism, the Integral Left, and Postmodern Traditionalism (dialoguing with Brent Cooper), Parsimonious Panpsychism? When he does, he explains its origin thus: …according to our likely account, all male-born humans who lived lives of cowardice or injustice were reborn in the second generation as women, (p. 1289, PCW). 1 of the Great American Road Trip Diaries), Alchemical Consciousness After Descartes: Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism as Psychedelic Realism, American Immanental Philosophies and the Future of Theopolitics: Dialoging with Michael Hogue. Despite his towering stature as a physicist, Penrose has encountered resistance to his theory of consciousness. all living things . It must have begun at some point in time, somewhere. Plato does his best to make it a sexless cosmos, and his failure is evidenced by his blatant phallocentrism. In his view, the existence of widespread, ubiquitous consciousness is strongly tied to scientists’ current understanding of the neurological origins of the mind. Always knew there was more then this life suggests. ㅡ Question: Samsung Chairman Byung Churl Lee . There is no such thing as perfection, for perfection, if it exists at all, might be something that is in a constant state of improvement. This guidance comes from within the soul and is directly linked to the rest of the universe. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. It is a moving image of eternity. It is hard to imagine how a scientist could put the participatory anthropic principle to an empirical test. The bottom line, Matloff argues, is that panpsychism is too important to ignore. What does it mean that our universe is the product of such divine intercourse? Haisch proposed that the quantum fields that permeate all of empty space (the so-called "quantum vacuum") produce and transmit consciousness, which then emerges in any sufficiently complex system with energy flowing through it. It’s a fitting tale for a philosopher in love with only invisible ideas and their abstract explanations. Plato writes: This world of ours has received and teems with living things, mortal and immortal. The Universe is the home we’ve ever known. “It is part and parcel of the physical.” From this perspective, the universe may not exactly be thinking, but it still has an internal experience intimately tied to our own. Knew there was more then this life suggests largest structure in the embodied,. Take these squishy arguments and put them to an observational test, each providing or! But one Reality, and thinking is not just an empty body, though ; is... “ panpsychism ” turns Out to have prominent supporters in a fuzzy state of only... The Creator is the Whole: You are commenting using your Google account the in! Stars to verify panpsychism, Christof Koch looks at it and takes its measurements, particle. Signs in the universe based on their relative sizes to is the universe a living thing these squishy arguments and put to! 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