Natural History: Some More Random Rambling

Sometimes you have a new thought, an idea, or eureka moment, but it’s not gutsy enough to expand into a reasonable length article or essay. So, here’s a further potpourri of thoughts on or about natural history that are too good not to record, but with not enough meat available to flesh out. 

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* There are probably as many different definitions of “what is life?” as there have been and are biologists, life scientists, naturalists and philosophers, etc. Most centre on or around concepts like growth, reproduction, response to stimuli, metabolism, violations of the second law of thermodynamics (entropy), and related similar ilk. None have been entirely satisfactory otherwise we would have THE textbook definition. My take on “what is life?” is somewhat different. Life is some sort of complex organic structure that has a behaviour that is not absolutely predictable via classical (or even quantum) physics. Or, in other words, under the most tightly controlled and uniform set of laboratory conditions, the ‘structure’ will do as it damn well pleases!

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* Speaking of life, there is no such thing as ‘living matter’ vs. ‘dead matter’. All matter is ‘dead matter’ since all matter, from the ground up, is composed of electrons, protons (quarks and gluons), neutrons (more quarks and gluons), photons, neutrinos, etc. Few if any would ague that an electron, proton, neutron, etc. is ‘living matter’. And the atoms, hence molecules, even complex molecules they make up are not alive. No matter is alive or is ‘living matter’. What is ‘alive’ is the organisation, the overall structure of various bits and pieces of matter, in highly specific arrangements, such that – and this is the key point – entropy, at least temporarily, is thwarted. Entropy finally wins when the organisational structure breaks down, that is, life dies.   

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* Does free will require you to have an infinite or unlimited number of choices, or a finite number? If the latter, you’re still confined in a box, just a slightly larger box than if your box confined you to one and only one choice.

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* The ultimate lack of free will associated with you is that you had absolutely no say in being conceived and being popped headlong into this world. You had no choice in your ancestry or in your genetics or your sex or even what historical era you were to make your way in. Now if you have absolutely no free will in these rather important, in fact absolutely fundamental, parts of your life being kick-started, why should you expect any free will from there on in?

Of course in some societies you’d have no choice in schooling or religion or upbringing or even to the person you got hitched to, etc. But all of that really falls under a separate category of sociology and culture and has nothing to do with the metaphysical or usual notion of what it means to have free will.

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* It struck home to me recently how often we shift our worldviews. We have no worldview at birth. Our worldview at five is one that’s full of self, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, imaginary friends, and parties with lots of cakes, cookies, soda pop and presents. All of that certainly changes, and drastically so, when you hit the teens when your worldview shifts to the opposite sex and sex and rebellion against all things adult. Maybe somewhere there’s an easing in period, a first stirrings, where you start to acquire a worldview of a God and heaven and angels and all things bright and beautiful (that’s probably imposed on you by parents and social mores. Then you get trust out (usually by choice) into the adult world that’s full of bills and responsibilities and employment and/or family life raising your own brats. During all of this you probably never really think of the ‘natural’ cosmic context you find yourself in. But that tends to come as you pass the half-way mark and start heading downhill. The Big Questions come more to the fore and you start to adopt a worldview that makes comforting sense away from the normal routine worldview of taxes and nasty bosses and your kids in trouble with the police again. Again, for most, that tends to revolve around God and heaven and angels, etc. But some people start thinking more outside the comforting religious box and more about space and time, and before and after, and finite vs. infinity and what non-religious Big Picture makes the most philosophical and logical common sense. And whatever specific you come up with can also shift as you reflect on your earlier reflections without end as new concepts and connections come into being or focus which you’ve got to ponder and fit into the master worldview jigsaw puzzle you’ve established.

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* Death is not something to be afraid of. You experience dying, but not death since once dead, you have no existence and you need to have an existence, you have to be alive, in order to experience something, anything, even death. So you never experience death, only that up to but not including death.

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* There’s one absolute reason I’m convinced telepathy doesn’t exist. As I go about my daily walkabout routine and associated observations, I’m forever passing out mental thoughts and images of what I think of many of the deadbeat drivers and other lesser forms of humanity I spy with my little eyes. My thoughts tend not to be very complementary to say the least. But since the lowlifes and rift-rafts haven’t ever proceeded to immediately stop their lowlife activities and drop what ever rift-raft things they were up to, to instead change direction towards me and beat me about the heat and body unto a bloody pulp for my unflattering thoughts, I conclude telepathy doesn’t exist. If it did, I doubt I’d be typing these thoughts now.  

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* Humans call them weeds. Mother Nature calls them plants. So-called ‘weeds’ too have their place in the natural scheme of things. Stupid humans!



Natural History: Some Random Rambling

Theory of Consciousness: Actually I don’t think it’s all that mysterious; well it may be mysterious but it’s biologically universal. Every living thing from humble microbes to plants, jellyfish to frogs, birds to cats to primates have consciousness because all respond to external stimuli in ways that are not predictable by classical physics (unlike a rock expanding and contracting as the temperature rises and falls). From conception to brain death you feel and respond to stimuli 60/60/24/7/52, like gravity and temperature, etc.  If you respond, in un-rock like ways, you are self-aware or have consciousness. If you should have some different definition in mind, then perhaps look for a dividing line between that which is clearly not exhibiting consciousness by that definition and what is. What is the difference in biochemistry between that which is and that which is not? Explore that and you’re on the way to an answer!

Consciousness can be expressed as a series of Russian dolls, which probably doesn’t actually explain what it is, but it’s interesting. We start with: “I’m self aware”. Then, “I’m self aware that I’m self aware”. Then that string is followed by “I’m self aware that I’m self aware that I’m self aware” and so on down the line unto infinity.

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Dreaming: From the moment we wake up, until the time we go to sleep, our brain gets bombarded with sensory inputs – sight, sound, taste, smell and touch. When we go to sleep however, we’re in sensory isolation. Unless it’s a really loud bang, or super strong odour, or the pet dog jumps on top of you, you sleep soundly through it all. It’s not good to be in a sensory isolation tank for eight hours straight, which is what sleep is. So, how does the brain manufacture sensory input? Dreams! Apart from the automatic functions of the brain/nervous system, like breathing, your brain keeps active via dreaming. It’s generating images and receiving back those images – busy work if you will.  

The reason therefore that it’s hard to recall your dreams, well it’s akin to short-term memory. Once awake, once the brain is in forward gear, in high-drive, what was dreamt about is now as irrelevant as what you had for dinner 101 nights ago.

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Reality: Any alternative reality (i.e. – higher realms of existence; spirit worlds; non-corporeal beings; astral planes; etc.) expounded by those who have experienced that so-called ‘reality’ by deliberately altering their brain chemistry via ingesting, injecting or inhaling various brain chemistry altering substances (alcohol, LSD, marijuana, petrol/glue sniffing, pain killers, or just any old generic ‘magic mushroom’), or undergoing sensory isolation is totally suspect, has no credibility and is not to be believed. That equally applies to involuntary brain chemistry alterations (i.e. – exposure to bring flashing lights, lack of sleep, oxygen deprivation at high altitude, long-term fasting, or eating foods that inadvertently contain brain chemistry altering chemicals).

You certainly don’t accept your mind-generated alternative realities you experience in dreamland when your brain is in sensory isolation mode, so why accept the ‘magic mushroom’ variety?

It’s hard enough coming to terms with everyday reality when you are wide awake and stone cold sober, so who needs to unnecessary complicate things with alternative ‘realities’? In fact, even when you are wide awake and stone cold sober you cannot always trust your mind to reveal to you really real reality – optical illusions anyone?

This alone blows out of the water most of what lumps together as New Age claptrap, like altered states of consciousness. You may alter your consciousness, but that doesn’t expose you to really real reality.

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Telepathy Revisited: There just might be a (slight) case to answer after all. That telepathy isn’t, isn’t silent one or two way crystal clear communication over vast distances between two separate brains or minds. What telepathy might be is that vague sense that there’s another mind out there, close by though, that has some resonance with your own. The classic case is that sense that you just know that someone else is watching or staring at you even though you can’t see who it is.

There has to be a medium by which this transfer can well, transfer from them to you. That medium apparently is Earth’s electromagnetic (EM) field. Brain thoughts or activity is electromagnetic in nature. It perhaps might be barely possible for those brain EM waves to be carried via Earth’s EM field to another person’s brain. That other person would at best just have a quasi-vague sensation that they were sensing, well, something, without being able to put a definitive finger on the specifics to many decimal places.

The non-human evidence is how large flocks of birds or schools of fish can in near unison turn on a dime. Since the “turn” command isn’t vocal, and visual observations would make for unacceptable lag times, the idea is that the communication is EM in nature from brain to brain at light speed via Earth’s EM field as the in-between medium.

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The Wheel: When you think of the most important and fundamental inventions that humans are credited with only a select few really stand out. Taming fire is one. Cutting tools like stone flakes are another. Writing is a third. Coming up with the concept of nothing or the zero was a real breakthrough. And of course there is the wheel. However, there are a few anomalies when it comes to the wheel. In the ancient Americas for example, the wheel was both known, but unused. Translated, you find in the archaeological record children’s toys that have wheels. What you don’t find is that concept extrapolated into the adult world. Adults, be they Incas, Aztecs, Amerindians, etc. did tot make use of the wheel even though wheeled toys abound. Now the basic reason for that given is that they had no beasts of burden like oxen or horses to pull chariots, etc. so therefore no wheeled chariots. However, that doesn’t explain the lack of other practical adult applications like the wheelbarrow, or small wheeled wagons/carts/platforms or ‘shopping’ trolleys or even a primitive rickshaw that could be pulled by one person. Not everything wheeled has to be the size of a chariot, a covered wagon, a stagecoach. There’s not even a potter’s wheel and so on. The concept of round or rolling (as in logs) is obvious to the most basic of cultures, yet for the first half of their very lengthy empire, that super-civilization, at least for those times, the ancient Egyptians, didn’t make use of the wheel. The Australian Aborigines didn’t seem to have a wheel-eureka moment either.

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Orion’s Belt: It consists of the three bright stars Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintake The stars are more or less evenly spaced in a straight line, and so can be visualized as a belt. For some mysterious reason, several archaeological sites exhibit or mirror the positions of the trilogy of stars that make up the Belt of Orion. The most famous is the trilogy of those massive ancient Egyptian pyramids on the Giza plateau. The second is seen at Teotihuacán’s central pyramid complex in Mexico. The third is a trilogy of Hopi Mesas in Arizona. Okay, Orion’s Belt, that trilogy of stars, is fairly prominent in the night sky, but then too so is a lot of other star patterns. What makes these special to our ancient ancestors? A big deal of this is made by ‘ancient astronaut’ theorists. Somehow that trilogy of stars must be special, like perhaps home turf to ET. Alas, that doesn’t seem all that plausible. Alnitak (Zeta Orionis), Alnilam (Epsilon Orionis) and Mintake (Delta Orionis) are very bright stars (to the naked eye), but they are also very, very far away. That alone suggests that they are very un-Sun like. Alnitak is 736 light-years away and 100,000 times our Sun’s luminosity; Alnilam is 1340 light-years distant and 375,000 times as luminous as our Sun; and Mintake is 915 light-years away as the crow flies and is a whopping 900,000 times the Sun’s luminosity. Mintaka is also a double star system. Translated, the trio of stars that make up Orion’s Belt don’t seem to be likely candidates for extraterrestrials that would come a-calling as ‘ancient astronauts’. I very much doubt SETI scientists would target these stars as likely candidates to point their radio telescopes at.

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Human Language: Modern humans are one species, many breeds, but one species. Our single species has however thousands of languages, both in use and extinct. That’s an anomaly. Other animals, each a single species, whether of not they come in breeds like cats, dogs and horses, have one vocal language (supplemented, as in the case of humans too, by body/facial ‘language’). A Chinese cat can converse, that is making its intentions understood, with a French cat, or with an Egyptian cat or with an Australian cat. Why humans alone needed to or have developed a massive multitude of spoken languages is a bit of a mystery. Body/facial ‘language’ on the other hand is pretty universal, therefore singular.