Book
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| IN A NUTSHELL On one side is unfathomable expanse |
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PREFACE What exactly is organic matter?
When I was about 4 years old, I asked my mother if worms went to heaven. I was told some version of "don't be ridiculous."
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BIOLOGICAL CREATION
The book is divided into Parts, Chapters and Sections.
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SUMMARY
The blur of pure change begins to reveal itself to human thinking as change and not-change, reflected and understood in the immediacy of self-other communication.
Change occurs in time. There is a before. What changes are specific things. Things change for a reason. Asking "why" things change reveals their cause. In order for them to be, they must have matter, form, another thing (efficient) and purpose. What is before a specific, discrete thing is an infinite series of discrete things. Something must cause the series at the beginning.
Quantitative measurement is added to Aristotle's qualitative observations. Even without purpose, discrete things still have an after. The same thing can move at varying rates over a distance. These things can be observed, anticipated and quantitatively measured to demonstrate the validity of the anticipation. What is anticipated about the observed is generalized as a quality of the thing.
The observing is simple, internal consciousness. The observed are complex, external things whose different changed positions in relation to one another can be measured geometrically.
Distinct things move in continuous time and space. Things have measurable relations within their parts and with other things. Relations between measurements are apart from the physical universe.
The fundamental condition rooted in the paradoxical split in infinity between the continuum and singular parts is applied to discrete positions and continual distance, discrete moments and continual time, and discrete movements and continual movement.
Motion and distance are replaced by velocity and position as the touchstones of measurement. The thing's velocity and position are both infinitesimal and can only be approximated. Differences in velocities is the rate of change which is acceleration. Knowing the acceleration, velocity and position can be calculated. The original shape of the object cannot be calculated. Formal cause is eliminated.
Things not only have but ARE positional mass (inertia) and momentum(mass x instantaneous yet changing velocity) which require a force to change. This force comes from another thing. Therefore, force and accelerating mass are determined by each other. This relation can be calculated and their future can be predicted in an absolute empty time and space.
The world consists of separate, external things. Observations of things and their relationship to other things enables predictions of where these things will be in the future. These relationships are known in a mathematically reduced model of the world.
Consciousness experiences the world through its own built-in organization. Parts and wholes that constitute this organization derive from the original paradox.
A world reduced to matter is understood as quantities that can be measured.
The quantitative relations of things in space and time, including the movement of things, now and in the future, are completely determined by the past. Time, therefore, can be seen as the same backwards or forwards.
Science understands the world by making models of it and testing those models by making predictions. The smaller the model, the more precise are the predictions.
In a fully determined, changeless universe, time has two directions. Life experiences one directional change.
The objects that we experience are approximations of a real world that is made of particles too small to be directly experienced and a space-time continuum too large to be directly experienced. Three forces at the small size and one at the big size are all determined by the relations of their respective objects.
Force is the external explanation of how one thing moves (or stops) another thing. But force needs time as well as space to cause an effect. Energy is the internal (within the object) factor that includes time.
A thing's mass does not change. Its energy and momentum are at different ratios depending on the position from which it is viewed. It is in that way that energy, mass and momentum are equivalent.
Cause and effect are separated by time and distance. Time and distance are relative to any point, but unified at the speed of light which is absolute at any point. Time and distance at any point at the speed of light are infinitesimal. Mass, which is changeless, is infinitely large at the speed of light. Light has no mass. Cause and effect are limited within the confines of the speed of light. Light, mass and energy are matter without form.
In a world in which time and distance are relative, the now, that is, the present moment, is an individual perspective. Objective or invariant reality occurs not to a individual perspective, but in a unified space-time.
Gravitational force at a distance is explained as a mutual dynamic relation between mass and a curved space-time continuum. It is equivalent to the acceleration of mass.
The smallest physical parts are mathematically described interactions between particles as close to the infinitesimal point that can be understood.
Discrete particles of mass/energy leap through the continuum by "trading places" with mass-less photons whose energy is equal to the distance leapt.
Depending on how it is observed, a particle is either a discrete particle or a continuous wave.
Zeno's paradoxes of position and motion, which reflect the ultimate paradox of discrete and continuum, manifest in the quantum realm as an inverse relationship between the certainty of an object's position and motion, that is, the more certain is an object's position, the less certain is its motion, and vice versa.
Wave properties correspond to particle properties. Large vertical amplitude (which has shorter wavelength) = more certain particle position and greater and therefore more uncertain velocity. Longer wavelength = more certain velocity, less certain position.
The shorter, more precise the time interval, the higher, and therefore, more uncertain, is the energy. The more precise, or certain, the energy, the more uncertain the time that the particle or short wavelength has that energy. Just like Position and Motion, Energy and Time are complimentary, co-existent properties, in other words, two sides of the same infinitely distinct point.
high frequency Low frequency short localized undefined wavelength Long defined wavelength
uncertain energy more certain energy more certain time uncertain time more certain position uncertain position uncertain velocity more certain velocity
The paradoxical point/continuum manifest at the smallest point, so far imaginable, as co-existent, not separate, properties.
In a particle-wave, momentum, mass, energy and time are all in a dynamic relationship of mutual uncertainty where force determines the probability of outcome rather than a macro space-time location.
Particle-waves or wave packets are formless probability clouds without definite location or velocity. Wavelengths are whole numbers determining quantum energy leaps.
The wave packet is a part-whole relationship in which the part is the whole and the whole is the part, both particle and wave are in "superposition." In some sense, the wave packet "belongs" to itself.
Wave packets connect via entanglement, in which the identities of each are mutually uncertain. They may "share" a particle, in which case the collective state is a precise whole. The parts lose their former identity.
Entangled particles can demonstrate nonlocality when the measurement of a particle quality will always be reflected in its entangled "partner" no mat-ter the distance. The whole determines the parts without regard to distance.
Electrons and protons have negative and positive charges respectively, and are measured relative to one another. Together they can form an electro-magnetic field which is its own force, ever expanding outward at the speed of light unless it is slowed or directed by macro-sized, phenomenal objects.
De-coherence of the wave function or wave collapse is the interface between the quantum and the phenomenal. The particle does not "appear" until the encounter.
The wave collapse is a discontinuous point in an otherwise space-time continuum. The human observer observes the measurement in space-time. Superposition of two particle/waves (before the measurement) is the logical solution to the paradox of discrete things moving through the continuum to the next discrete position.
Approximate measurement becomes more and more accurate until it reaches uncertainty. Finer and finer resolution is the sliding scale of awareness. Within immediacy lies uncertainty, along with an objectivity that is separate from the aware observer, yet is consistent with his measurements.
The quantum realm is known not as observable forms, but only by mathematical equations. Observable forms are mathematically nonlinear, that is, they change in time.
Space-time consists of points which have speed and distance only relative to other points viewing them (or that could view them). The points in themselves are beyond viewing.
Causation defined as one thing causing another is countered by randomness found in both quantum and phenomenal realms. Random motions of things in large enough quantities can be understood as statistical cause. (Aristotle, by the way, included collections in formal cause.)
Entanglement of wave packets and superposition of wave packet states somehow emerges or creates the phenomenal world. If the mass totaled in multiple entanglements is great enough, or if the wave that collapses is somehow large enough then phenomena might result.
Time reversible quantum mechanics and the "block universe" of space-time meet at the timeless point of quantum to phenomenon interaction. This timeless point is where the one-way phenomenal "arrow of time" begins.
The difference between the quantum realm and the phenomenal realm is form. What we are aware of, as opposed to what we calculate, is shaped material. From what comes form?
The discrete and the continuum manifest as fundamental, uncertain particle/waves and uncertain energy/time at the smallest scale and at the phenomenal scale as objects moving through a continuum separated by infinite edges, but experienced and measured as a one-way past-to-future flow, that in turn is bounded at the largest scale by a curved space-time continuum containing space-time points with locations determined only by other locations.
Quantum randomness measured as probability of discrete states is asymmetrically directional (toward the maximum probability). Time in the phenomenal world is asymmetrically directional in a three-dimensionally structured space. Macro-states are statistical totalities of micro-states. The maximum probability is toward the future.
Chemistry is the science of complex, unlimited molecular structures. Physics is the science of the underlying physical laws, in both cosmic vastness and simplest particle description.
At the phenomenal level, size or volume comes into being. Size has a form. Size and shape/form reflect a distinction between quantity and quality.
Scale is the same shape at different sizes. Fractal self-similarity combines infinite resolution of size with infinitely distinct shapes at all sizes. Fractals are the phenomenal representation between the largest continuum and the smallest part.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics represents the asymmetrical arrow of time as a flow of sized shapes (forms) from order to disorder. This flow can be looked at as ordered free energy or low entropy flowing toward total equilibrium or high entropy. Order can be thought of as "useful." Free energy is energy available to do work. Instead of a flow, energy can be understood as a state, defined as a quality that always increases and never decreases. The quality can be measured as a relation between possible configurations of atoms in a system, i.e., microstates, and a change in outside macro variables. Entropy can be looked at as a natural flow, or as a state that can be manipulated. Disorder then becomes statistical order.
A gradient is a measure of the speed and direction of the thermodynamic flow in a system constrained by distance and macro variables like temperature and volume.
For the gradient to affect constraints, work is required.
One theory is that the universe begins in a burst of free energy expanding out from a point and breaking the absolute equilibrium between the two low entropy (high order) gravitational and electromagnetic forces, leading in time to zero energy and infinitely dispersed particles, with complex structures forming in between.
Within macro objects, the relation of size and form is increasingly complex. With increasing complexity, individuality of wholes emerges out of constituent parts.
Chaos is the point at which flow spontaneously self-references into a form in time, but not measurable by a clock. These forms are fractals, with loops changing sizes while maintaining similar shape. The forms are patterns, separate from the underlying space-time matter.
In a thought experiment that takes the chaotic moment to its ideal abstraction, pure size, regardless of shape, links within entropic time the infinite continuum as individual form and the infinite discrete as multiple forms.
Simple patterns arising in chaos from random unstructured flow become complex structures with progressive individuality. Each whole is made of unique variations of parts.
Chaotic patterns are rhythmic space-time matter. Synchronization is rhythmic simultaneity of forms in time separated from matter.
Complex structures organize as networks. Parts and wholes become independent of one another. Patterns themselves become individualized.
Micro-states, the different organizations of parts, are known statistically, not directly. Entropy is the measure of disorder. Information is the measure of order. Entropy is unknown information. The thermodynamic arrow of time flowing from order to disorder can be thought of as information becoming more certain from the point of view of the present. The totality of information is information to be known. Knowledge flows from present to past.
The purest state of certainty is the state of correlation itself. Total certainty is total self-sufficient individuality. This is not knowledge. Pure knowledge is shared informational certainty between two less than certain entangled partners. Entanglement is the individualization of relation. Greatest certainty is a state of greatest entanglement just before the present moment of de-coherence - a dynamic interaction with the universe. Total certainty is lack of information. Life is lived in the state of present knowing, with certainty always, immediately behind.
The universe is coming towards us as we go out towards it. In a time at the chaotic center, life knows what it can. It has to. FORM
Life emerges out of chaos as self-sustaining patterns separate from the material. Information becomes self-aware. Complexity becomes self-similar.
Random quantum fluctuations and thermal direction interact in the living moment of free energy becoming entropy and information becoming certain.
Organisms differentiate and are differentiated by the interaction with the macro level environment, which includes both thermodynamic and informational constraints or limitations.
The thermodynamic flow of energy is interrupted by a living being, kept above equilibrium temporarily and selectively released in the nested buckets of its parts as required by the whole organism.
Mathematically, living beings are more like a computer program than a static equation. The relations are nonlinear with dynamic starting points in ever moving loops and sub-routines.
The energy gradient of the environment is captured, reversed and stored by a living being by selecting, i.e., choosing, needed sources ahead of itself, using more energy to stay ahead of the environment and thereby releasing more entropy. The reversal of the gradient frees form from the outside thermodynamic flow and its own entropy. Stored energy from its past, selectively released, creates its own time. Within that time, awareness of need and choice of sources arises.
Energy quantity is turned into energy quality by meaningful categories in work. Information and energy are exchanged, turning work into agency.
In life, form individualizes to where it is freed from matter. This does not mean separate from matter. It means form remains through a change in matter. As such, individual form flows through differentiated matter as differentiated matter flows through individual form. Freed form is a self-organizing process, maintaining itself as life within the flow.
Life is not matter, it is living matter. It lives inside the fundamental choice within the given that arises in form that is free from matter. The choice to survive necessitates making what is given meaningful. Matter is given meaning. Death is essential, for life is lived in its own time keeping one step ahead of everything else by looking forward at everything else. Living forever would be timeless.
The opening at the nexus of form and matter is pure time. Life is a loop of rolling time. Pure time is the result of directed change necessitated by the necessary but impossible choice which changes infinitely between the discrete and the continuum, small and large. Living time is directed change. External time is the measure by life of the matter that passes through form. External time is spatial with future determined by the past. Internal living time points in the direction of the future, creating its past.
The progressive individualization of formed matter reaches its apex in the freed form of life. As such, being free is what life is. The discrete-continuum contradiction frees form from matter as an individual self over against the non-self in its own time, looking forward from the in to the out.
In order for living form (living matter) to be separate from its non-self, the edge of itself must be part of itself. Beginning with the cell wall, the boundary contains self and other within it. A boundary is the dynamic limit of awareness.
With the opening of the future, life's necessity of freedom is also its purpose. Its reason to live is to live. Purpose is at one with its freedom.
Living parts are not matter. They are pure functions or tasks made up of passing matter ephemerally formed into structures serving the purpose of the organism.
The looping time of life is progressively complex as the looping tasks become patterns of loops, yet progressively simple, as the same patterns are repeated throughout levels of life. All patterns work for the sustenance of the individual pattern, the organism.
Awareness turns information into meaning by selectively reducing infoma-tion and storing it as meaning with a gain of time. Time gained enables the freedom to choose and energy for work to obtain the choice.
Meaning selected from past information and applied to its own future is reflected in the living structure of each individual organism. Material discreteness flows through continual form. Life selects to its own specifications of what is useful to continue the flow of its form.
For information to be meaningful, there must be communication between information source and receiver. Organisms are both.
Choosing among possible meanings requires cognition of importance and what is new.
Life is free in its flow through matter. Its future is its own creation, which in turn causes it to continue.
Feedback loops select for the purpose of forward timed resolution, culminating in the organism's survival.
By catalyzing themselves, living loops retain their form beyond the loop's matter. Self-similar processes outlast their material, but retain their form.
Form maintained in repeated instances of loops, is further internalized in the timed cycles of multiple loops.
Looping forms and timed cycles communicate in levels of complexity, with the receiver of knowledge and director of action at increasingly broader levels.
Network topology is what is universal and simplest about all living processes throughout any level of complexity. All processes are combinations of nodes and links called network motifs.
Autopoiesis extends the self-communicating organization to the whole organism-environment structure. Just like levels are the more complex users of the meaningful communication below them, the organism is the more complex user of the total communication with the environment.
A living being constantly maintains its ephemeral parts by repair and replication. Meaning grows in complexity until growth is unsustainable. The whole individual does not replicate. It reproduces. The individual makes a part which becomes a similar whole. The flow of matter both selected and transformed by a living being are bio-molecules whose lock and key shape drive and are driven forward by and into the loops that they form.
Beginning with energy from sunlight, the structure of non-living matter that life uses, is physically structured for the living direction.
The cell is the basic unit of life. Life does not exist at the molecular level. The totality of loops form a complex rhythm- each loop powered by its local future, the rate of energy release timed in accordance with other and greater loops, with the cell as a whole the furthest from equilibrium.
Information about the environment and past encounters with the environment are stored in the words and sentences of the genome within the DNA molecule. This information is translated into meaning within the words and sentences of proteins.
The information stored in the genetic language has a structure that can be translated into a protein language of three-dimensional meaningful, forward pointing shapes.
In the basic catalytic protein loop, shape changing is causative in the exchange from information to message. Proteins and genes work together in interconnecting circuits, all for the good of the whole cell.
DNA is a database of genetic information that can be read in different ways depending on context provided by protein circuits. RNA serves both as a temporary repository of the contextual meaning and a translating vehicle from genes to proteins. The RNA molecule could have been the progenitor of both DNA and proteins.
The membrane is the living boundary of the cell. Lipids are structured to separate the outer world from the inner. Environmental information is selected via the shapes of proteins embedded in the membrane.
Metabolism is the total cellular network, and is mirrored in the general input-output of any multi-cellular organism. The immense numbers of pathways, reactions and molecules and the timing required is almost unimaginatively complex. Life is a network of tasks. Selected energy sources made meaningful by the cell are broken down in the task of anabolism and put back together as the temporary cellular structures for cellular tasks in catabolism.
The metabolic rate is a measure of the organic process, which divorced from distance, is a maintenance of form independent of the total chemical reactions. Steady-state is dynamic non-equilibrium over and against an every-changing environment.
The complex rhythms of metabolism are anchored at one end by the random movement of discrete parts and at the other by large movement in the expanse. Circadian rhythm is the constraint of time.
Unlike a single atom of an element or a single molecule of a kind, a single organism, though belonging to a species, is an individual. With its own lifetime it is its own constraint. It is its own efficient cause by using formal cause, i.e., shapes, to affect its end-directed final cause, self-survival.
Individuality is enhanced, indeed achieved, in interaction with other selves of the same and different kinds. The whole-part-whole dynamic circularity in metabolism manifests as population-individual-population.
Other selves become specialized partial selves within a greater individual. Group communication becomes more intelligent with better survival skills, which include but are not limited to the greater communication speed of nerve cells.
With organs, groups of cells within the multi-celled organism are specialized functional structures, with the organs' form remaining through a change in the life and death of constituent cells. Organs are synchronized within themselves and with each other in a organism-wide fractal-like rhythm of complex timing.
The organism's rhythm includes inter-organ messaging by proteins called hormones. The messages are translated at the cell membrane and then the meaning is interpreted and enhanced within the cell. Like genes and proteins, the same hormone can be interpreted differently by and in different organs. As always, the information exists independently of the material structure.
Certain cells are specialized to recognize and destroy material that is non-self. Bacterial cells that belong to the organism are recognized as self, and they, in turn, recognize their host's cells. The selection process involved is universal to the whole organism including the brain.
Biochemistry explains life from the outside. Evolution explains life from before. Standard evolutionary theory individualizes at the level of the species. Random genetic change and deterministic selection combine for species to change. The progressive order of matter implies the organism. Order itself evolves.
The material world that preceded life is part of life's understanding of itself. Life compliments the structure of matter. The matter flowing through form is understood as and by shapes. Asymmetry in molecular structures is necessary for parts to fit together and thus pass information as shape qua shape.
The thermodynamic advance of individualized complexity in matter is logically necessary to establish a continuum to life, but not sufficient in establishing the individual self. Molecular chains self-assemble into loops. A loop captures energy until it divides into more of the same kind. To best continue, a closed molecular loop divides into retaining and procuring functions. Nucleotides and amino acids split yet remain connected by code. Amino acid and nucleotide chains continue to grow enclosed by lipid membranes permeable by proteins. Competition divides kind into kinds, first kinds of loops, then kinds of cells. But Life begins when molecules become codons inside a membrane, becoming a successful individual cell, looking out and forward at whatever came before, selecting what it needs to continue.
There is no one-to-one correlation between individual genes and the structures made by proteins called traits. In the circle of information between genes and proteins, mistakes can be made. The factors are many and random. Random changes in genes are sometimes inherited by offspring.
Random variation spreads out from the individual. Functions and their ephemeral structures built from flowing matter are constantly adjusting to a changing environment. Environmental selection reduces. Information becomes more certain with fitness. Functions themselves can then be maintained apart from any one species. Over evolutionary time, lasting functions can have different structures and lasting (that is, recurring) structures can have different functions.
The ecosystem co-evolves with life. Beyond the ecosystem, the world randomly changes regardless of life. Both due to interaction and without, change makes available niches for species to fill. Behavior variability and learning increase with environmental changes, and decrease as a species fits into a niche.
Phenomenal traits, or structures, do not map one-to-one with genes. Traits can develop independently in different lines of species descent. Basic traits like body plans and metabolism can remain entrenched in many lines of development. Genome information survives to match the environment in which it finds itself.
To adapt, the functionality of behavioral traits accompanying a given genome must be varying enough to cope with environmental changes. What traits are needed and how they will be used is not evident until they are used. They are used by individuals. Behavior variability is itself a trait.
Genetic information connects all life. But phenomenal meaning of that information is both temporary in detail and lasting in modular generality. Form limited by constraints, not matter parts, leads to distribution of modularity. Extinction or speciation occurs when information no longer fits. Diversity of species does not correlate with genetic diversity. Complex intelligence expands with the division of labor in groups. But intelligence is always passed though meaningful interpretation by an individual. Life flows through all species but is lived in the individual.
Species adapt but individuals learn. There are many factors in the cell network beyond the genome that are inherited. Functionality evolves. Functionality, not the genome, is what is internal to the individual. Cognitive ability increases when the genome cannot cope. Greater cognition arises from the ability to change.
The organism develops from the seed with increasing individualization mirroring the generality of living forms, progressing through to the species and at last the individual. Throughout the process the developing individual directs its own parts. The head comes first, developing from the embryonic skin, the original boundary of sensation and selection. The developmental process itself mirrors and is mirrored by evolution.
The whole of life flows through distinct species and whole species through distinct individuals. The whole individual develops through its parts in the order of life. The whole individual life flows through a distinct cell into another individual whole.
Awareness is the self-processing of information. It reduces and enhances information according to its own structure. This living awareness is the informing of matter. Information is being fed into the thermodynamic flow at every step. Life continually adds meaning. Infinitely directional change becomes one-directional two-way flow in living time. Unity and distinction, background to one another, in the flow of awareness, are movement and object as background to one another. Boundaries and constraints are necessary for self-organization. Infinity is limited by individuality.
Beginning with the anticipation of sameness and recognition of difference, the idealization of the past in a non-existent future pulls the living being forward. The present moment, facing forward into nothing, falls into the future. The future is the life force.
Qualities are selected out of meaningless matter into meaningful form. Quantity is a meaningful form. Sameness and distinction applied to position and motion is the fractal awareness of shapes repeating within themselves.
An organism chooses. Survival, the choice to live, is the fundamental choice. Choice determines meaning.
Matter itself has no meaning. Meaning is a relation with that which is not yet. The living being turns information into meaning by selecting similarity, but interpreting it as equivalent. Meaning making is felt in completing the similarity to fit anticipation. The individual feels itself in the absence that it fills.
Value arises out of successful choices. Choice is based on value to the organism. Value prioritizes choice. It is the purpose of a choice. Purpose drives the informing of matter and maintains meaning. Choice is caused by the idea of what is good in the future, its value.
In the temporal space between form and matter, awareness is about everything else. The moment is a viewpoint in a space-time whole. Every task is for something else.
The metabolic causal circle develops into the dynamic progression of learning. Categorization deepens as new content is added to the recognition of what is absent. With an open future, possibilities are larger than the actual. Openness to the future provides the necessity to learn.
INTERSUBJECTIVITY
Communication is the state of being "inter-subjectively open" to the next moment. The self in the other is already there.
Semiosis is the process of creating meaning through the use of signs by living organisms. Beginning with cellular tasks, the capacity to express, understand and replicate messages is universal to life. Evolution of the use of signs is an expansion of freedom.
Throughout the organism, molecules are symbols of activity beyond themselves. In separating the sign from the object that it belongs to, the future is anticipated.
Communication requires signals between sender and receiver. Because they are independent entities, signals can be combined in any way. The more complex the signals, the more meaningful the message. Symbols and the meaningless "noise" in between, form patterns to be meaningfully interpreted. Patterns of distinct symbols and continual noise are living communication's coherent reduction of the all pervasive point and continuum.
Language is signaling looped upon itself. Syntax is the formal system of symbols and the "rules of manipulation." Semantics is the meaningful content abstracted and conveyed. Language is potentially open to infinite generalities about any object it can name. Syntax is the limit.
Thinking manipulates every sign. Ideas are signs freed from any particular object. Thinking freely manipulates ideas.
Descriptions are meaning that living beings share through stories. Explanation adds its own facts to the described facts.
What is present in the intersecting flow of matter and form is neither the ultimate particular nor the most general category. What is known is what has been successfully categorized. Reasoning is a relation that connects what is known so far and what will or could be known.
Belief is reasoning that form is without matter.
Truth is not the object of faith in the unknown, but faith in what can be known. Truth is always a relation between form and matter, that is, an attribute of life.
In time, parts and wholes are ordered as categories and objects. The logic is procedural. Seen from the outside, the procedure is a regress. From the inside, it is recursive. There is a residue of meaning that drives or pulls the logic forward. In the living procedure, the procedure is input.
Quantitative matter is pure quantity in form. Pure quantity in form, applied to quantitative matter is approximate yet formally true.
Objective truths exist beyond the senses and are therefore available to all, independent of subjective opinion. The scientific method discovers objective truths. Originating in successful survival, understanding of reality is gleaned from making consistent predictions about the outcomes of events. Inductive reasoning goes from the specific to the general, in other words, bottom up. Deductive reasoning starts with the general hypothesis and examines observed outcomes that are consistent with the general. It is top down.
The scientific method is circular, albeit expanding. It starts and ends with observation. Observation is increasingly becoming measurement and statistics.
The world that the scientific method reveals is not logical, it is causative. Cause and effect imply time in matter. Relations between measured phenomena are assumed to be entailed by causality.
Laws themselves are not explained and therefore, not part of the world. They are purely formal. The First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics imply contradictory concepts of time.
It is in the now that the timeless law and the space-time event are unified.
In physics, observation is a measure. Objectively, the point of observation is the measuring instrument. The point of observation cannot be found in matter. The specific choices of the observing scientist are not measured.
Separate events connected by timeless theory leads only to further material reduction, where the qualitative universal arises out of mathematically equating quantifiable properties. The meaning of objectivity to the observing human lies in the explanation, that is, what the theoretical description is a description of. Qualitative universals only hint at quantitative relationships.
Models are an isolated subset of the universe within which it is assumed the most thorough and simple laws are universal.
Evolutionary theory explains life as being caused by its past. The causal entity is not a thing but a dynamic interaction called selection. All of evolution passes through the reproductive fitness of individual organisms. Subjective awareness, the "inner point of view," has evolved with and within life. The theory of evolution is a product of evolution.
Psychiatry now treats the brain as an object. But mental phenomena are not structured in a physical way. Subjectivity is a biological process, not an isolated object.
Biology is not a subset of physics. Physics is a subset of biology.
The limits of objective measure are made meaningful by the limiting process of subjectivity.
The brain is alive.
To know life is to know knowing. A theory of everything must include the awareness of that theory.
The standard modeling process is syntactical. Modeling life must include semantic meaning. Qualitative narrative imposes causality on randomness.
The physical models of the universe are mechanisms. Living beings are organisms. Because an organism is informational and not mechanical, the relations between parts are more fundamental than the parts.
Components are functional parts, i.e., tasks. Like all life, they communicate forward into and with the greater context.
In time, both measurement of matter and formal logic is recursive. Awareness is both the start point and selection of the end point of each measurement and logical progression.
The modeling process is an organic relation of the formal and material mechanistic models. A living being models a living being that is modeling.
A relational explanation explains the action of explanation while building organizational causation.
At the intersection of form and matter in the living moment, components run through material, efficient, formal and final cause in a forward direction bringing each other through the past. Subjective time pops out of its own circularity into another level or functional process or task. Living awareness circles through itself.
Life is a functional process, not a collection of past parts.
Conscious awareness and unconscious awareness are the widest tasks or functions of living awareness, each calling the other. Other tasks are for other tasks. Being for themselves constitutes the one self which is of the other, in other words, matter.
Since the living body is one whole relation of relations, consciousness is the whole relation with and of the body. Feeling is the undercurrent of awareness, the urge to survive, not conscious of survive. The value tied to survival embedded in the living, aware body becomes explicit in consciousness. Feeling is its own object. It is for and of itself.
Living awareness through internal time consists of the relative timing of forward directional relational components in the moment, causing themselves at the durational nexus of form and matter.
Regress, as opposed to the self-call of recursion, is an empty, repeated present. The infinite regress is halted by the limit at the timeless now. Recursive looping in conscious awareness is semantic infinity, that is, finite qualities can be infinitely combined, always and continually in the future.
All objective things are the ways in which life organizes the universe. The "hard" problem is the purely subjective- what is directly present to the organism. "Qualia" is the term for that which is immediately presented to consciousness
The unity of consciousness seeks and finds unity in the universe. Consciousness unifies conscious awareness with unconscious awareness. It unifies awareness against that which is not aware.
Experience is qualia plus temporal unity. It is continuous presence, alternating between interaction with the whole and immediacy at the point. Experience is alternating conscious awareness and unconscious awareness. Experience is the most general feeling. It is what life feels like.
The self is the feeling of the whole organism as one entity. From the body to consciousness there are four relational components of self. The self is not separate, it is a unique individual. The individual selfs outward to the predicted future of others. From ahead it looks at itself as a past object called a self. The self identifies with itself in the present.
Behavior represents awareness as an observable object. In behavior, subjectivity can be seen as having a causal effect on matter.
Intention is the self-causation of directed objectification.
The relational or functional organization of tasks always resolving ahead of themselves, culminate at the level of the whole organism in communication with another, where meaning is shared in the next moment, and progressively clarified in shared truth.
By choosing to live, life is freed from its past. We are in between the small and the large as far as we can manipulate the part/whole contradiction.
The life force is its own future.
The living being causes itself to act by being aware of its choices, and choosing.
Will is the effort of choosing to do or think anything.
The self is a choosing organism that belongs to its choosing
What is meant is the reason to continue.
Intelligence is the creative ability of living awareness to survive. Intelligence begins with will to reach a correct conscious binding. Beyond survival, it is the ability to playfully create.
The brain is a labyrinth of communication throughout the body. Living awareness operates throughout, culminating in full body individual awareness.
Qualitative sensation is the in-out boundary of momentary awareness. It is the patterning of changing parts and wholes.
Perception is the ongoing process of turning the patterns of sensation into meaningful identities.
The brain makes further meaning by combining and recombining percepts into objects and events in spatialized time. The greater temporal distance between sensation and perception allows for more complex awareness of the changing environment.
Each neuron is comparatively, a unique individual. They retain their structure through material change. Like consciousness, they are of something else. Digital pulses from each of many neurons alternate with analogue chemical receptors of a single neuron, which interpret and store the multi-pulsed patterns chemically, before each passes the patterns on again in singular temporal bursts. Part and whole alternate as patterns in one direction.
Groups of neurons, like molecules in cells, specialize. Functionality, like in the cell, is contextual. Information is separated and reconnected. The right and left brains reflect whole and parts respectively.
Combinations of pulses form patterns that move across the brain on top of but not consisting of, the physical structure.
Patterns are further structured with relative positioning and timing. Functions retain temporal structure through a change in matter instances, and patterns retain temporal structure passing across matter. The same network principle that we've covered in complex matter and living beings as a whole is evident in the brain.
Duration, or internal time, is manifested in the temporal distance between relatively faster and slower forward processes which are projected backwards as foreground and background respectively. Tasks coordinated in the complex timing of temporal positions, look to consciousness from the outside as structural, albeit ephemeral, patterns. Patterns are the rhythms of time itself.
Selection criteria is built into the changeable structure of the synapse. The selection criteria is already in place ahead of the next input. What is passed on has been previously selected. Patterns do not cause from the past. They are interpreted from the future. Form is ahead of matter in the direction of time.
Awareness shapes matter. The organization of the brain is what consciousness sees in its own objectification. Consciousness is the widest component. It is the most general criteria for binding form and matter. Consciousness expands in complexity toward the future. Thoughts and decisions seem to come from nowhere because they are actually coming from the not-yet future. The structure is a nested hierarchy of timings. Duration is the ground of consciousness and will. Binding is temporal simultaneity of category and object Memory provides the same/difference context for binding. Attention is the ground of binding in the present. Will is the urge to live, directed at the anticipated binding. Will is the ground of attention. It pulls the future in to extend the present. Effort is the feeling of will.
All animals are conscious of something.
All animals sense the world through the timings of their own bodily structure. The real world is what all living beings sense.
All animals recognize in the span of their own present moment what has been recalled from their history, recently, long-term or genetic.
Similar functions can be found in different brain structures. All nervous systems can be altered by experience. Variable behavior in correlation with, but independent of a varying environment, can be traced in the tiniest brains.
Language extends from sounds to gestures. Animal language inherently contains past and future.
In social organizations, members, like proteins in a cell, function as tasks. Like repeating structures, separate tasks are performed by different members. But individuals are recognized by individuals. An individual can perform different tasks, or roles, during its lifetime.
All animals have a binding moment of conscious attention in which they focus on a small object within a larger background.
Sensation and memory combine in ways that best fit the species and its environment. Behaviors similar to various aspects of human intelligence are observed throughout the animal kingdom. Intelligence is a variation within a single species. Intelligence begins with the will to make the correct choice. Animals use their awareness to various degrees of effectiveness.
Plant awareness as a whole is based on growing, not moving. Its own time becomes its boundary.
Plants sense meaning directly. Time change itself is sensed in changing light.
Plants remember and learn from experience.
A plant anticipates and plans its own growth.
An elaborate language of timed chemical responses enable the plant to recognize and communicate with family, friends and enemies. Mobility through growth integrates its sense of time with its body.
Metabolic flow and information flow are entwined in the developed inter-cellular structure. The key to life-long memory is ingrained planning in the cell division areas at the root and stems.
Cells throughout the developed plant areas have an input and output and connect like neurons. The root and modular apices direct growth through cell creation, and together form a distributed nervous system. The root, being the primary module, coordinates the activity of the whole plant.
Plants retain their life history in their bodies through modules. They grow into their own future by retaining their past.
Plant awareness is directed through their own retained past into their future growth, thereby extending their sense of the present to their lifetime. It looks at the future as if it were the past.
The entire organism is a network of identical cells living underground, except for the sexual organ, the mushroom.
Fungi travel by growth like a plant, but are not confined by root in one place. Like animals, they get carbon from organic molecules. They grow around their prey, digesting before ingesting.
Living awareness in mycelium is immediate, and one and the same with material survival. The structure of consciousness is without cell types. It operates purely by relative position. It looks at the past and the future as if they were the present. Life and awareness requires three elements: Memory, Procedure and a Boundary. Animals emphasize procedure, Plants memory and Fungi boundary.
Why is the term "artificial intelligence" and not artificial life, or artificial consciousness? The term artificial life is meaningless. Consciousness is alive.
Unlike a computer that cannot generalize beyond boundaries, human consciousness is open-ended manipulation of limits. A conscious computer would generalize without limit.
Simulating the human brain requires purposeful organization. An artificial neural network can generalize an image statistically from variations in patterns. But the object to be recognized is supplied by the programmer.
Part and wholes can be copied, but an individual cannot be.
Living awareness wonders why...
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