Thomas_More
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As bears enter their dens for hibernation this winter,they have no idea it could be their last.When spring comes, blooming flowers could be splattered by the blood of mama bears being gunned down while looking for food to provide for their babies — leaving cubs orphaned and alone.
Trophy hunters are tracking down and targeting bears across the U.S., putting them more at risk each day. Mama bears are being torn apart by bullets, leaving their babies to starve, freeze, or fall prey to other species. But private interests are working to remove grizzly bear protections so they can kill more bears and take over the lands they call home — all to turn a profit.
(Friends of the Earth).
And nothing does not exist.
You see nothing when closing your hand in the air. In fact you have just grasped trillions of particles. You walk through clouds of atoms and subatomic particles, which others have breathed in and out, which have formed countless existences and are continuing to do so … mammalian, reptilian, arthropodic, dinosaurine, botanic, your ancestors, of countless species.
You call what is invisible to you a void; I call it a soup.An infinite “void” is ok with me. I would be frightened if other worlds were to threaten our imminent destruction – a wandering gas giant for instance, about to swallow the Earth, but it isn’t likely in our lifetime.
A nuclear war, on the other hand, could be very likely in our lifetime.For you space is an infinite void. For me, I think galaxies, distant exploding suns, stellar clouds etc. are incredibly beautiful and wondrous.
I see space as a rich cosmic soup, bursting with energy and movement. Planets so varied and colourful. To know my atoms and those I have loved will be hurtling through space and forming trillions, zillions, of forms, including life forms, billions of years from now, is exhilarating. What types of conscious life they may even build one day … it’s beyond our perception.
I agree with you about size.
But you are assuming that consciousness is only our kind of consciousness.
We know, from our own brains and nerves, that matter thinks and feels. So it has consciousness. Our type of consciousness, or intelligence, results from the specific formation of our material being, the material formation of animals on this planet. What of other formations of matter?
When we say we think and feel, we can only comprehend those words as members of an Earthling animal species.
We are an example, one terrestrial example, of matter being conscious. There are doubtless trillions of examples who could equally think it their “role” to “introduce” self-knowledge to the cosmos, which you appear to be claiming as our “role”, as though we have an importance beyond ourselves.
Even if we establish socialism in our society, it does not guarantee that we will still exist for long in evolutionary terms. As Great Apes, Gould says, we are a branch that evolution has not much more to do with, having exhausted adaptation. This makes us ripe for extinction. Even if we have tens of thousands of years left, we are likely to become extinct without discovering life beyond this planet.
To say it is our role to bring self-consciousness to the universe is, therefore, arrogant and ludicrous.
As for humility, who can behold the cosmos without feeling awe, vulnerability and humility? Even if we have millions of years left as a species, we will only ever comprehend the equivalent of a speck of dust. We are still ignorant of more than 99.9% of fellow beings on our own planet!
I put the phrase badly. It just means the consciousness of being star stuff, with everything else, and not a separate “self” for whom the universe is “outside” of one’s “self.” (Which is the standard, illusory, feeling).
Socialism is a human social movement. It can’t pretend to anything else.
Yes, humans should be able to reverse some of the ecological damage they have caused, and some might argue that our disappearance might achieve the same result.
But drawing up a blueprint is not the same as gloating over a chimp’s inability to do so.
And you too may prove as vulnerable as he, in the passage of time.
” If you were of a philosophical (or metaphysical) bent you might even describe the evolution of humans are the biosphere becoming conscious.”
Again, arrogance. And especially ludicrous on the part of some little ants at the tail end of one little galaxy, who don’t even see the other life forms under their noses as worthy of consideration.
This is what I mean by most people not being ready for the realisation of cosmic reality. I would suggest some humility, and awe, before such self-aggrandisement. Otherwise you are behaving no differently from the religious, who believe in the specialness of “Man.”
“…the universe becoming conscious of itself through our agency.”
What human supremacist arrogance!
We are a tiny microscopic blip in one planet’s evolution.Gautama, btw, wouldn’t have heard of a prayer wheel.
ALB, you are continuing to confound philosophy with religious practices.I think the Eastern religions would say I don’t understand them. I don’t care. I think Hearn would understand me.
I’m not speaking for Eastern religions. I think language has changed meaning, and Buddhism was so absorbant of the beliefs and superstitions of those it encountered, that its original thought was submerged.In reading Buddhist texts, I retain only what speaks to me, and I speculate with regard to Sanskrit terms to which other translators give a different meaning.
Suffice it to say that materialism long preceded the famous (to us) European materialists, and, together with the other ancient Indian materialists, there was Gautama, and later Nagarjuna. Later, for all his faults, there was Lafcadio Hearn, who did not call himself a Buddhist but who, I believe, understood the original better than most avowed Buddhists do.
