fresco wrote:The concept of "purpose" is an aberration of "cognition" which functionally seeks to "predict" and "control". It is similar to the aberration of looking for "causes" and evoking "god" as a prime mover.
Whatever "life" is to us, a hypothetical observer outside the box would presumably construct an explanatory model involving "life" and "non life" or negative and positive entropy as complementary processes within the box. Such a transcendent model is as unlikely to make sense to us as say the concept of "the body" would to those lower level entities we call "blood cells", assuming we could "communicate" with them.
That's a brilliant insight fresco. At a younger age, I often wondered if blood cells themselves had an understanding of self. If macrophages were conciously aware of thier purpose, to kill off cancerous cells, to fight back foreign invaders at all costs.
In many ways, though I doubt they have a concious understanding of self, our body is in itself a society, each cell with highly specalized roles so that the society itself can survive and flourish even though they can't possibly understand the purpose for their roles, to an outside observer with an understanding of what the body is, what it does, and how it works, their role seems quite apparent. Perhaps we are the same way.
Perhaps the universe itself is a living organism and that earth is a mere electron or quark, an integral part of a complex enzyme perhaps. It has no understanding of why it exists, but it still makes up a tiny part of the galaxy which itself serves a purpose as enzymes do that it can't even begin to comprehend.
It may seem rather obscure to compare nonliving objects such as the earth of the galaxy to living organisms.
But if you
read my explanationo on the bottom of the thread here. You'll see why I believe that there is no inherent difference between living organisms and nonliving objects.
