Month: October 2020

“Life” Is Not a Scientific Concept

Not even making an ontological statement just yet, but talking only about the meaning of the concept of “life” as we know it, life is not a class of physical processes as defined by science. Sure, it’s useful to define life in such terms for the purposes of biology, or even necrology, but the term and concept of “life” came about way before science was invented. Given a variety of possible ways to physically define life (such as “life is as organic system that has metabolism, reproduces, etc.”), how would we know which one or ones are valid? We’d select based on what’s obviously, intuitively alive or not, which is essentially what we’ve done.

This is why scientists speculate on the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe that’s nothing like life as we know it. And it’s why we may think of someone whose body is perfectly functional may have more or less life in them, or why we may “see” the life in someone’s eyes. So, life as something intangible and not strictly defined takes precedence over life as something physically defined. Yet for some people the scientific definition of life is somehow taken to supersede the natural one.

Yes, the physical makeup of something is a function of, or correlates with, whether it’s alive or not. If a rock could transmogrify into a cellular organism, it might become alive; if a person turned into a rock, he would apparently have passed on. This merely shows that physical-life patterns/processes correlate with the presence of life qua life. Or more specifically, that the recognition of the presence of life correlates with specific material patterns/processes. It makes sense that we would recognize life only in its expression through certain kinds of material mechanisms, given that the senses we are using to recognize it are our sensate organs—senses of the material. Furthermore, it so happens that those material mechanisms we are willing to call “life” are those that significantly parallel ours—things with DNA, cells, an energy cycle, etc. Plants are alive, we say, but not as alive as organisms that have brains. So, apparently, the further away from being what we are something is, the less alive it is considered to be.

But who knows, maybe a rock is actually a very passive, peaceful type of being? At the very least, though, it could be assumed that, in order for life to have a physical experience, it must express itself through a suitably complex, dynamical and self-sustaining physical mechanism. In other words, bodies and plants could merely be vessels for actual life—hence the aforementioned correlations. In my view, life is a fundamentally magical, non-mechanistic, ineffable, cosmic, and ubiquitous phenomenon—if we could even classify it as a phenomenon.

What the fundamental characteristics are of the physical processes needed to constitute/catalyze life (or, in my view, merely make it apparent) is an interesting subject. A book called The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding, by Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, has some sophisticated and interesting things to say about that.

The underlying point of, or the reason for, this essay is that the co-opting of the original, natural concept of life with the purely scientific, physicalist, mechanistic one deadens our perception and is a reflection of the scientistic culture of our times. This may call for a bit of elaboration, which I do in a few of my other essays.

“Animal” Does Not Mean “Non-Human”

Apparently, some people actually believe humans aren’t animals, and those who do know we’re animals tend nevertheless to see the other animals as being essentially separate, lower entities. But this point of view is radically unobservant, or at least, we’re so used to our own wholly animal qualities that we don’t see them for what they are—how animalistic they are—in contrast to all conceivable forms of being. Take a look at our skin, for example—this fleshy, hairy container of our guts—and realize that it’s the same kind of thing other animals have. Now take a look at our hands, all veiny and bony, with the tendons for the fingers inside the back of the hand extending radially outward, and we have the same number of those as many other animals, especially our closest relatives. Our fingers even have nails at their ends, reminiscent of claws. In even more ways than I can describe, our hands are uncannily just like just like other animals’ hands.

Such analogues to features of other animals extend throughout the whole body, from the level of our DNA—such as the fact that we have 98% of DNA in common with a hamster, and not to mention that we’re even DNA-based to begin with—to our organelles, to our overall anatomy—such as the fact that we have a cranium up top with a brain in it. We eat and digest organisms, chew with our teeth and a mandible, pee from our genitalia, and squat to poop. Your poop looks just like a dog’s. We even become pregnant and painfully give birth to our offspring in the same way as other mammals. Not to mention that the human embryo is visually almost identical to any other mammal’s, and humans’ amniotic fluid contains the same concentration of salt as ocean water, reflecting continental life’s oceanic origins. 

Yet mentally we’re totally different from the other animals, right? Well, our most fundamental drives—that is, to have sex, to breathe air, to eat when we’re hungry, to avoid pain/injury—are the same as for the rest of the animal kingdom. And animals in cages get depressed just like we do, because they have the same basic needs for fulfillment that we do. And monkeys can get jealous too.1 Even male fruit flies intentionally get drunk after being repeatedly rejected by females.2

We’re defined as animals scientifically, we’re not physically distinct from the other animals, we’re instinctually parallel to other animals, and we’re emotionally similar if significantly more advanced. Just about the only significant difference between us and other animals, besides our mostly hairless skin and our bipedalism, is our ability for abstraction—for representational, symbolic thought—which is afforded to us solely by our enlarged neocortical section of the brain. And that’s all our human, Koyaanisqatsi-esque livelihoods are based on. 

To be fair, I would say we are not merely a different variety of animals with extra features: we are a refined sort of animal—physically, emotionally and mentally. We are a pinnacle, or summation, of all earthly life. We’ve been created as the angels of the earth, in essence. We’re Gaia’s brainchild, in a manner of speaking. As such, our intended and essential function is not to dominate, subvert, and exploit all other life (and other natural resources) on the planet; it’s to honor, adore, protect, care for and uplift it.

We’re currently not fulfilling that function. We’re destroying the planet, we’re miserable, and our entire mindset is fundamentally broken. It’s like we live wholly within the map and aren’t connected to the territory. We have a lot more to learn from so-called animals than we might think. Their intelligence is profound and wondrous; we just don’t necessarily recognize its full extent because of our preconceptions of what “intelligence” entails, which are due to our fundamentally broken mindset. It’s rather like judging a fish by its ability to climb a tree. In some ways, we are not “better” than the other animals, but retarded in comparison, and we should humble ourselves before them (and the rest of Nature) in order to learn and help us return to our natural roots and to psychic health and sanity.

  1. Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are, Frans de Waal, Riverhead Books
  2. Learning From the Spurned and Tipsy Fruit Fly, Benedict Carey, The New York Times

For more about how our mindset is fundamentally broken, see Darin Stevenson on YouTube, for example this video, or on Facebook.

The Paradox of Criminal Justice Vs. Mental Illness

Pandy asked about 3 hours ago ·
Is it ok for murderers to escape prison time based on ‘mental derangement’?

The whole “getting off for being crazy” thing is a dilemma that gets right into the heart of our crazy ethics and shows the paradox of it all. We judge and condemn someone for doing bad things when they do it of sound mind, but we don’t when we believe their behavior is influenced by a mental illness. But there’s no clear defining line between being sane and being deranged. It’s a multifaceted/multidimensional continuum. And when does being “deranged” stop being something that afflicts someone as if influencing from the outside and start being an accountable, integral aspect of the person’s personality itself that makes him/her ‘evil’? And one could easily make an argument that to do a really heinous crime necessarily means that someone is deranged, and that therefore nobody should be punished for any crime that’s beyond a certain degree of evil.

This also gets into the important issue of whether punishment is supposed to be retribution or mere protection/determent. If someone’s liable to kill people and you punish them or don’t punish them based on what you think is going on inside their mind, then you’re clearly defining punishment as being about retribution. But as shown above, it’s not clear when someone is to blame or not to blame for their actions. One could even imagine that anybody who ends up having the personality necessary to commit any given crime became that way due to a series of unfortunate causes, and that therefore nobody is ever to blame for anything. It’s also easy to imagine that if you were in some criminal’s exact shoes—their DNA, their circumstances, everything that ever happened to them (including in past lives), and everything—then you could have easily chosen to do the same thing they did. I wrote more about this here: https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2017/02/05/is-hatred-ever-truly-justified/.

And we blame/condemn someone when we believe they did something out of their own free will and not when they had no choice, but yet we believe scientifically that everything either has a determined cause, or is absolutely random, or is some admixture of both. So our own metaphysics (for those who subscribe to the scientistic/academic establishment) precludes the possibility of anyone having any real choice in the matter.

The really odd thing about making punishment about retribution by not punishing people for being mentally deranged is that it makes punishment only about retribution and nothing more practical, like protection of the public or deterrence from crime. Because even if you don’t morally condemn someone who’s a murderer for whatever reason, such as mental derangement, then protection of other people, if nothing else, would call for the incarceration of that murderer. A philosophy/system of punishment without any kind of retribution involved should probably still incarcerate people for the above reasons, yet because system our system apparently involves retribution, we’ve excluded all of the more practical concerns altogether.

Of course, the mentally deranged murderer may be sent to a mental hospital for life instead of prison, and that kind of solves the problem of protection (maybe not so much for the other inhabitants and staff of the mental hospital; and maybe not so much if they get let out after a short time), but then that just raises the question of why not be nicer to all murderers or criminals in general and send them to hospitals instead of prison if that’s such an effective and practical solution, or at least make prisons a much nicer and less violent place. So the fact that the person may be sent to a mental hospital instead doesn’t change the fact that we’re basing punishment on retribution alone to the exclusion of other concerns, at least to some degree.

To directly answer your question, though, I think that every criminal should be given the least possible punishment necessary to protect the public, whether or not they’re mentally deranged.

Addendum:

Here’s a relevant article: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-freakiest-anomalies-regarding-the-brain/answer/Huyen-Nguyen-111. Part of it says, “The spirit of the law is that responsibility for a crime is reduced when a defendant’s cognitive ability is compromised by illness or injury,” but if brainstate causes mindstate, as widely believed, then any disposition that leads to a crime is comprised of some state in the neural network… so what’s the big difference whether that state comprises an injury or was caused by something else?

A Specious Argument for Life After Death

What is death? Is there an afterlife? These are questions we all ask ourselves. The apparency of death is that the person completely ceases existing.. Why? Because their body becomes inanimate. The person no longer responds, he/she no longer behaves. The inevitable decay, from the moment of death, of his or her body into dust is a testament to its having become insignificant. But is this the final answer? One should wonder.. One typically takes for granted that the death of the body is the death of the person. Why? Because we’re habituated to thinking of, seeing, and interacting with said person in terms of their body.

But is the body really “the person”? If we thought of a person as merely their body, then a person who “changes dramatically” should have a marked physical change in their body; the change should be a noticeable physical change. Similarly, if a person were merely their body, death would merely be a change in behavior. I.e., the body is still there, therefore the person still exists! That is, the person has merely changed his or her behavior to, say, not responding to anyone and cultivating bacteria. Yet clearly, the essential part of what we call the person is, presumably, not there anymore after death (hence our saying, “they died”). 

So therefore, what we call the person is, by way of direct reference, not their body. And if “the person” is, by definition, something other than their body, then what evidence do we have that the person dies when the body dies? Obviously, the only evidence of death, in the broadest sense, that we have in the event of what we call “death” is no more and no less than that of the death of the body, thus leaving the life of the person completely in question.  (The fact that it happens that we can no longer attend and interact with them—by physical means, anyway—is already accounted for by the observation that one’s body is our primary instrumentality for attending and interaction with them antemortem.)