Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Stoppelmann]

Both the animate and inanimate can undergo quieter or more tumultuous times, just that only the sapient are aware of it and is capable of resisting entropy in more ways than just mindlessly holding tight. Still, there's nothing much more at peace in this reality than inanimate objects.

There's an old mediation idea that you breathe in peace and breathe out love. As part of the Earth we require a constant connection to stay alive through respiration. We draw in healthful, peacefully non-sentient molecules and breathe out our gratitude and appreciation for that peace, with love being basically the sapient equivalent to non-sentient peace.

I get weekly email digest of The Marginalian by Maria Popova (https://www.themarginalian.org) and this week she wrote:

Hermann Hesse believed that trees are our greatest spiritual teachers. Walt Whitman cherished them as paragons of authenticity amid a world of mere appearances. Remembering his most beloved friend, he wrote that she was “true, honest; beautiful as a tree is tall, leafy, rich, full, free — is a tree.” I too consider the people I most love my human trees — people firmly rooted in a foundation of moral beauty, relentlessly reaching for the light, bent into their particular beloved shape by the demands and traumas of their particular lives.

A century after Whitman, Ram Dass (April 6, 1931–December 22, 2019) drew on the human-tree analogy in a soulful invitation to treat ourselves — and each other — with the same nonjudgmental spaciousness with which we regard trees. Answering a question about how we can judge ourselves less harshly, he writes:

“Part of it is observing oneself more impersonally… When you go out into the woods and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree."

The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying, “You’re too this, or I’m too this.” That judging mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.”

So, you can see I am very much someone who appreciates the poetic perception of life, which has its perspective on truth, but I like the way Maria Popova collects varying sources together and offers them for free, although you can contribute, and she is a constant source of fascination.

She also quotes the great English neurophysiologist Charles Scott Sherrington for example, who termed his orientation “Natural Religion”, which he published as Man on His Nature, which is in the public domain: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dl ... a151fba58f.

But this has nothing to do with Gaia.

Some academics scoff at Watts, but had some beautiful insights and he never fell into the holier-than-thou trap.

Our attempts at terraforming suffer from inexperience. The planet's been developing systems over billions of years, and the complexity builds over time. You'd need a helluva supercomputer to catch up, although I suspect that what AI achieves will always be, to some extent, a sketchy imitation of nature - just as imitations of pretty well anything will tend to fall short of the real thing.

Specialisation is a double-edged sword. It allows researchers to probe ever more deeply, and in greater detail, either confirming or disproving previously contestable hypotheses. Yet there is always the risk of siloing, of not being able to see "the wood from the trees". To that end, there has been a lot more cross-disciplinary work done this century. However, as I mentioned earlier, overviews tend not to be "scientific". If an idea does not generate potential experiments or observations to prove or disprove, then it falls into that most reviled of intellectual weastepaper baskets - philosophy Ideas without practicality or consequence.

Yet grand overviews can give us a sense of meaning and purpose. They can make us happier, more content. This is why people claim that science is not spiritual, or even anti-spiritual. Ironically, many scientists have strong spiritual feelings about the nature they study, but they only speak of it in informal settings, never when they are educating.

Yes, Sherrington mentioned above is quite possibly an example of that. For me Maria Popva seems to have it, “Wonder, Sherrington argues, is the appropriate mood with which to approach the workings of our improbable planet and their echo in the workings of the exquisite cathedral of chemistry and chance that is a human being. That is where traditional religions have both thrived and fallen short, emotionally compelling in their humanistic self-reference, yet limiting of wonder, which has to do with what lies beyond ourselves.”

We are too concerned with ourselves to look beyond, which is why we tend to anthropomorphise everything, and fail to take the whole dimension of life on our “improbable planet” into account. Terraforming Mars was of course the initial reason that Lovelock looked at the Earth so closely, and when you look into the complexity of climate science alone, you get the feeling that people are imagining terraforming to only take a manageable period of time, but our planet takes thousands of years.

George Carlin reckoned it was silly to think we could save the Earth. He figured the Earth will keep on doing fine, but we will be going away.

The idea of "primitives" is fun to think of in terms of stone axes in the Stone Age. The first stone axes were basically sharp shards of rock that the people found. Fast forward a few thousand years, and those stone axes are beautiful little works of art, meticulously flaked away to precise shapes, with a ridge at the bottom to allow them to be attached to spears. The latter would undoubteedly see the former as "primitive".

Looking at the extent of change made by humans over a relatively short time geologically, I think it's fair to say we are actually different. Our empowerment means we are change agents, as described above. I consider this as neither hypothesis nor theory, just bald observation.

George Carlin was right, but my used of the term primitive was more as a comparison, without denying the ancients proficiency in survival and even aesthetic appreciation. The problem with us being change agents is, as you probably agree, that we often do not know what we are doing with regard to interacting on a larger scale. Otherwise, we would have moved forward at a slower pace, and avoided much of the pollution we have caused. But then again, when you look how we ignored indigenous culture and their knowledge of their surroundings, it was typical for humankind to be arrogant about his “civilisation”.

You have the poetic side covered well here, so I'll add a view through a more prosaic lens. Everything is in a state of disequilibrium. This is good, otherwise nothing would happen and the universe would truly be "dead". The Earth, like another entity, is basically a mess of little imbalances all over the place. The Earth is constantly balancing and rebalancing under a constant spray of solar radiation. This causes the hydrated surface of the planet to bubble, and life is basically a complexified collection of such "bubbles".

I think that the poetic covers that it its mythology, which you can interpret as saying that the disequilibrium you mention is a part of life. Our path is a line between the extremes, and the dichotomy has to be balanced, but will pull one way and then the other. Yin and Yang have their demands on us, and it is recognition of that which helps us retaining stability in the storms that pull at us from all directions.

Yes, there were warnings. That's what people have always done via stories and myths handed down (and embellished) over generations, and it's what we are still doing. There's warnings everywhere. Climate change. Natural disasters. War. Economic downturns. Extinctions. Unemployment. Ecosystem breakdown. Crime. Inequality. Social division ... we humans are a pretty diligent bunch - or rather, we humans are diligent parts of the Earth, amongst other things

For the most part, it seems we are in furious agreement on this. Thanks for the topic, its one that is dear to me.

I think the problem, especially with the new storms on the horizon, is that we do need heed the lessons of the past, that balance is precarious and requires of us that we continually compensate, even out, and counterpoise, which the economic machine we have created is increasingly unable to do. The variability of cultures to do this has been reduced and monocultures compete with the same products, causing the multiplicity of sources to reduce. A new ice age or a significant warming of the northern hemisphere would sensitively reduce the availability of food resources, and the expertise in other parts of the world has been decimated. This possibility is hardly covered by experts, and yet they talk about terraforming … deluded.

Yes, I can tell that the topic is dear to you, it is nice to have such an exchange.

[Sy Borg]

Some academics scoff at Watts, but had some beautiful insights and he never fell into the holier-than-thou trap.

Our attempts at terraforming suffer from inexperience. The planet's been developing systems over billions of years, and the complexity builds over time. You'd need a helluva supercomputer to catch up, although I suspect that what AI achieves will always be, to some extent, a sketchy imitation of nature - just as imitations of pretty well anything will tend to fall short of the real thing.

Specialisation is a double-edged sword. It allows researchers to probe ever more deeply, and in greater detail, either confirming or disproving previously contestable hypotheses. Yet there is always the risk of siloing, of not being able to see "the wood from the trees". To that end, there has been a lot more cross-disciplinary work done this century. However, as I mentioned earlier, overviews tend not to be "scientific". If an idea does not generate potential experiments or observations to prove or disprove, then it falls into that most reviled of intellectual wastepaper baskets - philosophy :) Ideas without practicality or consequence.

Yet grand overviews can give us a sense of meaning and purpose. They can make us happier, more content. This is why people claim that science is not spiritual, or even anti-spiritual. Ironically, many scientists have strong spiritual feelings about the nature they study, but they only speak of it in informal settings, never when they are educating.

Yes, Sherrington mentioned above is quite possibly an example of that. For me Maria Popva seems to have it, “Wonder, Sherrington argues, is the appropriate mood with which to approach the workings of our improbable planet and their echo in the workings of the exquisite cathedral of chemistry and chance that is a human being. That is where traditional religions have both thrived and fallen short, emotionally compelling in their humanistic self-reference, yet limiting of wonder, which has to do with what lies beyond ourselves.”

We are too concerned with ourselves to look beyond, which is why we tend to anthropomorphise everything, and fail to take the whole dimension of life on our “improbable planet” into account. Terraforming Mars was of course the initial reason that Lovelock looked at the Earth so closely, and when you look into the complexity of climate science alone, you get the feeling that people are imagining terraforming to only take a manageable period of time, but our planet takes thousands of years.

Agree with Maria P. You need to have a busy, preoccupied mind to not appreciate the weirdness of reality. And it's not getting any less odd!

George Carlin reckoned it was silly to think we could save the Earth. He figured the Earth will keep on doing fine, but we will be going away.

The idea of "primitives" is fun to think of in terms of stone axes in the Stone Age. The first stone axes were basically sharp shards of rock that the people found. Fast forward a few thousand years, and those stone axes are beautiful little works of art, meticulously flaked away to precise shapes, with a ridge at the bottom to allow them to be attached to spears. The latter would undoubteedly see the former as "primitive".

Looking at the extent of change made by humans over a relatively short time geologically, I think it's fair to say we are actually different. Our empowerment means we are change agents, as described above. I consider this as neither hypothesis nor theory, just bald observation.

George Carlin was right, but my used of the term primitive was more as a comparison, without denying the ancients proficiency in survival and even aesthetic appreciation. The problem with us being change agents is, as you probably agree, that we often do not know what we are doing with regard to interacting on a larger scale. Otherwise, we would have moved forward at a slower pace, and avoided much of the pollution we have caused. But then again, when you look how we ignored indigenous culture and their knowledge of their surroundings, it was typical for humankind to be arrogant about his “civilisation”.

I worry about this on a practical level but not an existential one. No one - human nor animal - has ever had much clue about what's going on beyond practicalities. Billions of people lived and died believing that the Earth was surrounded by a dome of stars and that diseases were caused by evil spirits. Despite being pretty clueless, the Earth's life forms have come a long way in the last three billion years.

Yes, there were warnings. That's what people have always done via stories and myths handed down (and embellished) over generations, and it's what we are still doing. There's warnings everywhere. Climate change. Natural disasters. War. Economic downturns. Extinctions. Unemployment. Ecosystem breakdown. Crime. Inequality. Social division ... we humans are a pretty diligent bunch - or rather, we humans are diligent parts of the Earth, amongst other things :)

For the most part, it seems we are in furious agreement on this. Thanks for the topic, its one that is dear to me.

I think the problem, especially with the new storms on the horizon, is that we do need heed the lessons of the past, that balance is precarious and requires of us that we continually compensate, even out, and counterpoise, which the economic machine we have created is increasingly unable to do. The variability of cultures to do this has been reduced and monocultures compete with the same products, causing the multiplicity of sources to reduce. A new ice age or a significant warming of the northern hemisphere would sensitively reduce the availability of food resources, and the expertise in other parts of the world has been decimated. This possibility is hardly covered by experts, and yet they talk about terraforming … deluded.

Yes, I can tell that the topic is dear to you, it is nice to have such an exchange.

Yes, our economic system resembles a house coming ever closer to falling down, with people desperately adding extra patches and struts to hold it up. In time, it will fail.

[Pattern-chaser]

I get weekly email digest of The Marginalian by Maria Popova (https://www.themarginalian.org)

Thanks for that link. I used to follow Brain Pickings, but lost the feed when it changed (I think). Now I'm following again, via RSS.

[Stoppelmann]

I get weekly email digest of The Marginalian by Maria Popova (https://www.themarginalian.org)

Thanks for that link. I used to follow Brain Pickings, but lost the feed when it changed (I think). Now I'm following again, via RSS.

You are very welcome ...