Plato’s is the story of Man’s universe, though he is still forced at times to admit the presence of something else. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Ever since the 1920s, physicists have puzzled over the strangely privileged role of the observer in quantum theory. Don't Throw Out the Baby With the Amniotic Fluid. Today it is known that Earth is only a small ball of rock in a space of unimaginable … “We are participators in bringing into being not only the near and here but the far away and long ago,” Wheeler said in 2006. They also have the smallest free-living bacterium genome: 1.3 Mbp, 1354 protein genes, 35 RNA genes. In this research, Caplan examines how stars constrict and die, in a process that almost mimics biodegradation of a living thing. I spent a lot of time trying to feel good but not dealing with what made me feel bad. Nor eyes, for who would it see? Despite their seeming similarities, Koch is dubious of Matloff’s volitional stars. Largest Asteroid. But the hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining how a qualitative, subjective experience occurs from a physical process at all. This is the conversation within that leads to living … And not just a brain, but potentially any physical structure. It must have begun at some point in time, somewhere. Current research shows that there are reasons why God needed such a vast universe to house life on this planet. Therefore he’ll need a way to exert his power on only living organisms and not inanimate objects too. 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. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. On the other hand, “even systems that we don’t consider animate could have a little bit of consciousness,” Koch says. Plato does his best to make it a sexless cosmos, and his failure is evidenced by his blatant phallocentrism. The Universe is the home we’ve ever known. Its a feeling deep down inside. 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. 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. 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. See how that health care professional is holding … Thank you for sharing this wonderful insight. (thinking w/ Berry and Swimme), Thinking with Carlo Rovelli: The Physics of Consciousness, Science and the Soul of the World: Participatory Knowing in Goethe and Whitehead, Dialoguing with Philip Goff about Consciousness, Panpsychism, and Process Philosophy, Concrescence and the Implicate Order: Whitehead and Bohm in Dialogue, Election Coverage: Live-streaming on Growing Down, Consciousness between Science and Philosophy (response to Philip Goff on panpsychism), Apology for a Democratic Ontology (response to Keith Woods), Rune Soup Podcast with Gordon White: Talking Whitehead, Plato, & Panpsychism, Towards a Marian Consciousness (Ep. In other words, WE ARE ALL CONNECTED and living in a "thought universe". ( Log Out /  of the universe and . What is distinctive about living things, according to his theory, is not that they are alive but that they are complex. The spiritual manifestation of the Creator is the Urge toward the One Purpose. 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. This intuitive knowing of "life" cannot be grasped as a concept; it is known through actual living experience of one's everyday being. 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? ( Log Out /  A particle exists in a fuzzy state of uncertainty…but only until it is observed. ... the Milky Way may harbor billions of planets that bear liquid water — a substance integral to the emergence of living things. But if it is something intrinsic to the stars — as consciousness would be — it should be the same everywhere. Actually, humans aren’t that fast. Cosmology is an art that involves speaking about the whole: to do cosmology, I must share stories with others concerning what we all belong to. If there's one thing in the universe that is certain, it's that life exists. Even in that context, Gregory Matloff’s ideas are shocking. Is there any way to tell? The demiurge could not create on his own, but needed the help of space, of the cosmic womb. It is unlike our own animal bodies, because it has no arms or legs to move around, since it is everywhere at once. This guidance comes from within the soul and is directly linked to the rest of the universe. Put more bluntly, the entire cosmos may be self-aware. Where his ancient Greek tale fails, we modern children of Gaia are called to put the pieces back together. I thought long … We may receive a call from someone we were thinking of, or the exact information we need to make an informed decision. At some point, according to integrated information theory, the two should merge into a single, larger information system. What is the average person walking speed? It includes living things, planets, stars, galaxies, dust clouds, light, and even time. Despite his towering stature as a physicist, Penrose has encountered resistance to his theory of consciousness. The notion of a conscious universe sounds more like the stuff of late night TV than academic journals. ( Log Out /  Yet, compared to some of the things that exist in our universe, they are absolutely microscopic. Before the birth of the Universe, time, space and matter did not exist. Imagining a Gaian Reality After the Virus, Thoughts on William James, Pure Experience, and Materialism, Musing on “Consciousness” with William James & Alfred North Whitehead, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. I firmly believe that the total universe is one giant living thing and we simply can’t see what it is because we are puny little bits, Less than an atom is n our own world. 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. IE 11 is not supported. “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. Today, we will explore the largest things in the universe based on their relative sizes. One of the hallmarks of life is its ability to adjust its behavior in response to stimulus. Most astronomers attribute the effect to interactions between stars and gas clouds throughout the galaxy. Heres to longevity. 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 universe is a body, according to Plato– a Living Thing. There is no end to evolution. ㅡ Question: Samsung Chairman Byung Churl Lee . New York University philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers is a proponent. The Universe contains billions of galaxies, each containing millions or billions of stars. 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. Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account. Just as your mind is adept at maneuvering through your tasks, so is the soul at navigating the higher, more significant planes of life. He does not overtly identify himself as a panpsychist, but his argument that self-awareness and free will begin with quantum events in the brain inevitably links our minds with the cosmos. They walk at a humble average speed of 3 mph. Stars may be thinking entities that deliberately control their paths. The true purpose of death is to master the art of letting go, so that bigger and grander things can take the place. 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). Understanding this idea can make it an apologetic for our faith rather than a fact which detracts from our faith. In 2006, a mysterious blob was named the largest structure in the universe, although it quickly lost its title to newer discoveries. You love our badass universe. In 2006, German physicist Bernard Haisch, known both for his studies of active stars and his openness to unorthodox science, took Penrose’s idea a big step further. 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. A “proto-consciousness field” could extend through all of space, he argues. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. Though he speaks often of mortal bodies in general (by which he means the male body), seldom does Plato mention sex. It is the Creator, the Self-created. But in the embodied world, sex remains to be encountered before it can be accounted for. Riane Eisler has elsewhere detailed the importance of agricultural metaphors in patriarchal civilization.]. 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. 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. Related: What Einstein and Bill Gates Teach Us About Time Travel. Like Matloff, Koch and his colleagues are actively engaged in experimental tests of these ideas. “Theory states that it could go down to very simple systems. 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. Explorers like Matloff are routinely dismissed as fringe thinkers, but it is hard to think of any greater expression of that feeling than continuing the quest to find out if our human minds are just tiny components of a much greater cosmic brain. 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. 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 blob is a giant mass of gas, dust, and galaxies that is 200 million light-years wide and looks like a cluster of green jellyfish.It was found by Japanese astronomers who had been studying a region of the universe known to have large concentrations of gas. 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). Matloff began searching for astronomical objects that unexpectedly exhibit this behavior. It is hard to imagine how a scientist could put the participatory anthropic principle to an empirical test. It’s a fitting tale for a philosopher in love with only invisible ideas and their abstract explanations. What does it mean that our universe is the product of such divine intercourse? 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. He noted that the anomaly appears in stars that are cool enough to have molecules in their atmospheres, which greatly increases their chemical complexity. Scientists believe there’s other life in the universe. 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. Matloff considered a different explanation. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. If Paranego’s Discontinuity is caused by specific conditions within the galaxy, it should vary from location to location. [Read this essay I wrote last year for more on the repression of femininity throughout Western history. This can be done in many languages –some musical, others mathematical– and if I succeed, perhaps in English text. There is no death or as Gurdieff once put it, There is no change only modification of circumstances. 11. Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. Download the PDF: Deep Big History: A Living Systems Paradigm This paper was presented in August, 2014 for the international conference on “Big History.” The dominant view within “big history” assumes the universe is non-living at its foundations and is comprised mostly of dead matter and empty space. 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. Interesting. The demiurge created lesser gods to make humans, because a truly immortal thing such as he could not create mortals. Matloff is under no illusion that his colleagues will be convinced, but he remains upbeat: “Shouldn’t we at least be checking? Some of the world's most renowned scientists are questioning whether the cosmos has an inner life similar to our own. 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. 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). Plato’s living cosmos is both still and in motion at once. Universe, All Living Things' Creator Proof Evidence of the creator . Plato writes: This world of ours has received and teems with living things, mortal and immortal. While Matloff looks out to the stars to verify panpsychism, Christof Koch looks at humans. FOLLOW NBC MACH ON TWITTER, FACEBOOK, AND INSTAGRAM. When we are on the right path, little coincidences occur often. Intrigued, Matloff wondered if there was a way to take these squishy arguments and put them to an observational test. Maybe we can move panpsychism from philosophy to observational astrophysics.”. Always knew there was more then this life suggests. The bottom line, Matloff argues, is that panpsychism is too important to ignore. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser. 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. But what are the slowest? 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). Recently, he zeroed in on a little-studied anomaly in stellar motion known as Paranego’s Discontinuity. The space between the stars and galaxies is mostly empty. What is at stake in cosmological inquiry? From The Path we know these things: There is but one Reality, and that Reality is the Whole. The Universe is everything we can touch, feel, sense, measure or detect. Eternity can only appear to move and remain unified because of the harmony of time, as recounted by the soul. Perfection is the constant art of making that which is perfect even better. The smallest hypothetical thing in the universe is not … “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. Universe, the whole cosmic system of matter and energy of which Earth, and therefore the human race, is a part.Humanity has traveled a long road since societies imagined Earth, the Sun, and the Moon as the main objects of creation, with the rest of the universe being formed almost as an afterthought. The Universe is everything we can touch, feel, sense, measure, or detect. The origin of the force that is pushing the universe apart is a mystery, and astronomers refer to it simply as "dark energy". ( Log Out /  In principle, some purely physical systems that are not biological or organic may also be conscious.”. Ceres is the largest asteroid we’ve discovered so far. 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.”. The intangible world affects the tangible world we experience. It includes living things, planets, stars, galaxies, dust clouds, light, and even time. He calls his interpretation the “participatory anthropic principle.” If he is correct, the universe is conscious, but in almost the opposite of the way that Matloff pictures it: Only through the acts of conscious minds does it truly exist at all. The material manifestation of the Creator is the tangible Universe, with all its non-living and living things, including man. There are no stars to monitor, and no brains to measure, to understand whether reality depends on the presence of consciousness. A handful of dead material is transformed into a living, conscious creature. Eventually, it should be possible to run such experiments with humans, wiring their brains together to see if a new type of consciousness emerges. On average, cooler stars orbit our galaxy more quickly than do hotter ones. Being a part of an overwhelming whole, as a spoke on a bike and the purpose, the most valuable purpose that serves the rider. 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. all living things . It contains billions of galaxies, each providing millions or billions of stars. (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). He wants to leave all the planets and resources in their current state but cut the number of living things by 50%. For centuries, modern science has been shrinking the gap between humans and the rest of the universe, from Isaac Newton showing that one set of laws applies equally to falling apples and orbiting moons to Carl Sagan intoning that “we are made of star stuff” — that the atoms of our bodies were literally forged in the nuclear furnaces of other stars. On TWITTER, FACEBOOK, and no brains to measure, or exact... 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