Everything Is Alive
(Rudy Rucker is a guestblogger. His latest novel, Hylozoic, describes a postsingular world in which everything is alive.)
Over the years, I've come to think that everything is alive, even a rock. In academic philosophy, this doctrine is known as "hylozoism"---the word even appears in Wikipedia.
As Stephen Wolfram and I have both pointed out, any gnarly, chaotic natural process embodies a classical universal computation. And at the quantum level, even dull-looking objects are seething with universal quantum computations. When I look at a stone, I think of ten octillion balls connected by springs. There’s a lot going on in a rock, enough to support universal computation, enough to run a mind.
How do I know a rock is alive? If I let go of it, it's smart enough to drop?
Or maybe, in the right frame of mind, I can feel an affinity to the rock---in a way, there's no telling where one thing starts and the other thing stops.
* The text and a video of my "Psipunk" talk about the notion that everything is alive.
* A slightly more academic paper by me, called "Everything is Alive."
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If I kick a rock, only one of us is going to say "ouch". If a living thing is unable to communicate in any way, how could we ever tell that it's alive? Maybe it's the ability to communicate that separates the living from the non-living.
Holy good goddamn, that is a barnstormingly poor piece of philosophy. The "slightly more academic paper" wears academic terminology like a circus bear wears a party hat.
EVERYTHING?
I have a lot of socks and tissues to apologize to.
The topic of living rocks reminded me of this animated short film about some creatures watching the evolution of humanity from the perspective of geological time. It's a great (and funny) watch if you have 8 minutes or so.
Well everything is in MOTION.
if you want to say everything is alive you can. if you're working under a different version of alive.
everything is also custard. depending on how you define custard.
Harysammoth (#2), I think it's a barnstormingly fine piece of philosophy, myself. Thanks for the adverb "barnstormingly," by the way.
Everything is Alive.
I'd be more inclined to say "everything is nature" and then realign what I considered nature to be. And I anthropomorphise inanimate objects all the time, but I don't think they are alive.
Alive is a specific thing, and by making its edges so fluid as to include rocks, you just devalue the specificity of its definition. There are of course things like viruses or cancers that stretch the boundaries of how we define the word, but that's because they challenge the definition in a meaningful way (more meaningfully that atomic interaction), and are within an order of similarity.
Nature is more universal than we give it credit for, most of the time. Nature is life and the rock. It's physics and time. It's all the processes that interact in the meaningful and unmeaningful to create all that we see and experience.
Maybe cars and teapots aren't nature, but iron and clay are.
Everything is Nature.
You know there are actual specifics as to what constitutes a living thing. I learned it back in 10th grade biology class.
I am pretty sure that a rock didn't make the cut.
I know Everything is Alive because when I trip, I can see it moving.
Everything is God. But God is dead. God died in the Big Bang.
Huh. So anything that can be modeled computationally is a computation?
I think you've picked a fine cliff to follow Wolfram off.
Also: how could any finite structure be a universal computation?
Yri: You're welcome! It's also equally at home in conversations about religion and sport. You might similarly enjoy tintinabulant and discombobulous.
Oh, and you're quite right about Voudun, by the way.
I think Godley and Creme said it best:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyQoTn1Eo-Q
Sculptures that appear to be moving but aren't
I feel sorry for them all
What are they thinking
When they arrive at a place
Do they sigh with disappointment
And when they leave
Do they have regrets?
Is a sofa as happy in one corner
As it is in another
And how does the room feel about it?
I pity inanimate objects
I pity them all
Physics isn't fair
Is a tree as a rocking horse
An ambition fulfilled
And is the sawdust jealous?
I worry about these things
I'd have to second Arkizzle.
Seeing the all beauty and intrinsic value in nature (physics in this case) is definitely a perception I subscribe to, but the idea of "alive" requires a quantum leap that I don't think that most people are willing to make when pondering objects like a rock.
I can understand where Rudy is coming from though, the thought does trigger those dreamy "we're all made of starstuff" type sentiments.
My Aeron chair is really upset with me right now.
You know there are actual specifics as to what constitutes a living thing. I learned it back in 10th grade biology class.
Setting aside the fact that my ninth grade science class only recognized two kingdoms and couldn't make a coherent argument for whether or not viruses are alive - it's a philosophical argument. Previously held opinions of what defines life are just previously held opinions. I would argue that 'science' mostly consists of paradigmatic consistency. There's nothing in science that says that we can't redefine the (often unconsciously chosen) paradigm.
Thought Experiment:
A rock is the same as a computer but with smaller, less clunky moving parts. The fact that you are unable to interface with it is your failing. Not the rocks.
Not by any sense of the word 'alive' that has any value at all.
In potentia, maybe. In the sense that living creatures are made of similar atoms. However, it's the organization of those atoms that discriminates life.
"Animism," my philosophy of science prof replied.
"There's nothing in science that says that we can't redefine"
well sure. So you expand the definition to alive to include everything. And then you have to coin or reassign another term to fill the original position of what is generally accepted to mean alive.
someone said it earlier, there are definitely things on the fringe of being alive. rocks are not among them. If you want to change the way we look at rocks i can see value in that and think that it can be done in conventional terms without redefinition.
As a geologist I'd have to say, "Guh? ... Fuh?"
@#3 Stefan: lolz^2
I assumed the "everything is alive" bit was metaphor.
I don't know what this can even mean. A rock is not alive. There are places where the boundary is blurry, but come on, rocks?
One problem which remains to be solved is whether we can
learn to converse with the conscious objects surrounding us.
Possibly we will develop some quantum computational
technique so that one can sufficiently entangle oneself with an
object so as to able to talk with it.
On what scale is the matter alive? Is a stone a specific "entity"? If you could "talk" to a rock... what happens when you cut it in half? Does it die? Split and inhabit both structures? Become half as intelligent? With a complete lack of organizational structure, how can a "rock" be any sort of cohesive "alive" entity?
The only other conceivable demarcation is universal or atomic. Are the individual atoms alive?
This is all exceedingly silly.
No mention of Stephen Wolfram would be complete without linking this academic review of his magnum opus. "A rare blend..."
Obviously none of you are aware of the fragile corpus of us earthlings,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8M7Hp3CFeok
It's a semantic continuum. it gets even nastier when you get to sentient and sapient.
Plus the Canadian band,is really great!
#21: Are the individual atoms alive?
Yes. Oh god yes. You should hear them scream as the Large Hadron Collider smashes them to pieces. It's appalling.
NATURE OF MICRO-LEVEL CONSCIOUSNESS
If John Conway is correct, and both "free will" and Consciousness are part of the micro level of physics ...then rocks are minds and have free will. They're large conscious objects constructed from smaller conscious objects, atoms instead of neurons. It's just that they lack sense organs and muscles. But without telepathy, we'd never know it.
I was in a program once where we were trained to give a presentation to inanimate objects (eg. a wall or a rock) in a way so the object received the communication. This doesn't make a rock human or otherwise animate like some creature. The rock doesn't open a rock mouth and say "Yup, I see your point". No, it's a rock! But it does bring awareness that a rock is indeed alive, as a rock. And yes, so is everything.
And yea, in a "normal", non-philosophical conversation I don't talk in terms of rocks being alive, just as I talk in terms of "man-made" items and "natural" items, even though everything is natural. These are useful distinctions even if the language isn't precise.
this reminded me of a part of an animation by david firth, the animation is a bit disturbing to some, but its interesting.. just random animation in the middle about a scientist that has made it possible to make inanimate objects conscious:
http://www.fat-pie.com/socklops.htm
My older sister had a pet rock.
I think a good summary of this is Wolfram Hegel gnarly something something universal computation, therefore everything is alive. And conscious.
Sorry! But you did say you are just 'trying on' this philosophy, like a new coat. I agree it is rather interesting to think about. Here are some good references on this topic:
Putnam, H. 1988. Representation and Reality. MIT Press.
David Chalmers: Does a rock implement every finite-state automaton? (Chalmers attempting to refute Putnam above)
The problem with saying "Everything is alive" is, like most "Everything is x" propositions, reductive of the "x". If everything is alive, then the concept of alive no longer has any meaning. All we'll wind up doing is coming up with some other term for what we once thought "alive" was. I understand the reason to make the change - pantheism has a certain attraction - but the whole reason we privilege the term "alive" is because it is better than "not-alive."
LIFE VS. CONSCIOUSNESS
Hmm. Maybe the usual definition of "life" is being confused with the usual definition of "conscious?"
Perhaps rocks are conscious entities.
But if a computer could become self-aware, would we then start saying that it was "alive?"
The concept "Life" is defined by individuality (by self vs. non-self,) and by the ability to metabolize food, to grow, and to read out stored information to produce copies of the original self, so rocks aren't alive.
As a side note:
I am not fond of the term man-made...
Technically 99.9% of everything is "natural", as in from the earth. Fine we process it or concentrate it, but it came from the ground/air/water/plants...
This is mostly an annoyance with packages/products that say all natural, man-made, ect...
There is also a new Vitalism movement in certain philosophical circles these days. Everything old is new again.
Anyway, I love the smell of ideologies imploding in the morning, it smells like... victory. Good job Rudy.
Items of possible interest:
Larval Subjects
Deleuze and Vitalism
Hauntology
Biosemiotics By Marcello Barbieri
"I don't know what this can even mean. A rock is not alive. There are places where the boundary is blurry, but come on, rocks?"
Everything we perceive as "the world" is based on ways of structuring the information coming in through our senses. We know nothing of the world of objects. All we know are our ideas about them. Challenge those ideas, one's ideology, and you challenge the world. This can be very distressing as one can see above.
As it was explained to me, rocks possess consciousness, though they are not conscious. You move through the various levels of consciousness and its somehow a metaphor for evolution. I think.
Hiya, Gaia!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kami
I've always been fascinated by the secret lives of rocks.
I have an easier time anthropomorphizing things if I stick eyeballs on them.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/graphicsman/3549552083/
Gaia is "not an organism", but "an emergent property of interaction among organisms".
~ paraphrased Margulis, from wikipedia.
But it was a nice rhyme, Teller :)
Well, Rudy, as other mutants here have allready pointed out, off course you can claim that "everything" is "alive" if you strech the definition of "alive" far enough.
But then the term "alive" becomes utterly usless, since we mostly use definitions to differate certain things from other things.
or, to put it more bluntly:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk
"Alive" is merely a word, and like any other symbol you may assign whatever value you like to it.
It is possible, however, to so expand a definition as to make the word essentially meaningless...if rocks are alive, how then do we differentiate between those biological systems that traditionally have been defined as "alive" and objects, like rocks, that are clearly different than biological systems in almost every way?
How does diluting the definition of a word aid us in more accurately describing the universe when we are forced to use new words to describe an obvious difference in the makeup and behavior between things in our world previously contained in that words definition. It seems to me that such cerebration fogs our view more than it clears it.
So would a pet rock know it's a pet rock?
People will entertain the idea that rocks are alive, because they're so alien, we don't know where to the "living" attributes should be. If the example was a corpse, though, I think there'd be more agreement that it's not useful to define life as applying to it.
FNC 39:
Full text (by Geoff Bartley) here.Arkizzle 41: One could make the same argument about humans. I personally prefer to just sing:
Sing that 200 times with 50 of your closest friends while dancing and drumming, and you will be transformed. The change will begin in your ears and voice and rise up through your throat and spinal column to fill your brain and burst out through your head (piercing but not breaking), and make you a subtly different person thereafter.But I'm a goofy treehugging Pagan, and considered a bit on the mystical side even in that community.
People collecting versions of / arguments for / expositions of related ideas may appreciate the architect Christopher Alexander's most recent set of four books, The Nature of Order (which are lovely things whatever you think about the "everything is alive" idea).
He stops short of arguing for consciousness in all things, and because of his field he of course takes a less um, computational view of what that word might mean. His topic is "the quality of life" which seems to pervade all things, and he suggests it may be a property of all matter. So it's really a very different idea, but an example of someone starting from a very different place than Rudy, and eventually arriving in at least the same county.
And that's how you drastically oversimplify someone's life work.
http://www.natureoforder.com/
While it is logically and scientifically false to say that everything is alive, it is spiritually and metaphysically satisfying to do so.
In order to have the statement make sense scientifically, we have to redefine life, which leads to absurd conclusions (as has been pointed out).
None the less, the scientific definition of life is all about the human need to produce a rational, categorical, hierarchical, ordered world view from an apparently chaotic reality. This process serves an essential function in human knowledge and understanding.
But equally, if we break down that hierarchy and understand that we and all that we perceive around us are of the same substance, but in myriad states of complexity and expression, it provides a deep insight into our nature and place in time and space, life, death and existence.
That'll teach guest bloggers to ruminate whimsically.
Congratulations, you put syllables in sentences. Doesn't mean you've said anything important.
the entire universe is alive! and no, i don't have links to sources.
At the risk of sounding Jeddish, t'would be easier to say that Life is in Everything. Is there a universal Force? I think we're on the verge of agreement these days- the squints and the kneelers. The hot issue is whether said Force has some kind of central or collective consciousness or not.
I'm kneeling and squinting, and yeah- the carpeting is moving! It IS alive!
No wait- the ants are back. But that doesn't mean the carpeting doesn't have Life in it.
Let me ask my 4 year old.....
.... she says no, it's not alive.
If rocks are dead then you are dead. If you are an honest scientific materialist then you believe that your consciousness, your experience of being alive, is the result of computation. You are a Turing machine every component of which is dead. Therefore you are dead.
I enjoyed Rudy's post about a hike and the Genii Loci or spirits within things.
http://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/2007/01/25/ps2-note-5-hostile-silps-scary-wilderness-hike-big-basin/
"If I kick a rock, only one of us is going to say "ouch". If a living thing is unable to communicate in any way, how could we ever tell that it's alive? Maybe it's the ability to communicate that separates the living from the non-living."
NANUQ, I think you're forgetting about plants :] They don't say ouch either.
#40: LOL
I was skeptical of the whole premise at first, but the googly eyes really sell it.
Interesting that some people feel that it's valid to dismiss several thousand years of philosophical discussion with a dictionary definition or a reference to some basic science class they took.
Very provocative, and nicely played. It's not really a stretch to see all matter in the universe as interconnected, yet the very human concept of 'alive' seems to have struck a nerve with many. To that, i'd say, if rocks are alive, then to what extent are humans not alive?
While we humans have the 'gift' of (human) consciousness, it is also something of a curse. The rock doesn't spend any time worrying about anything it is not, it just 'is.' The rock knows what humans have yet to know.
"Everything Is Alive"
Oh, I hope not.
Putting aside the debate for a second, y'all should read Rudy Rucker's very funny and quite poignant short story "Panpsychism Proved" for a fictional application of this principle.
I love how directly the things Rudy is thinking about translate into his fiction.
"at the quantum level, even dull-looking objects are seething with universal quantum computations. When I look at a stone, I think of ten octillion balls connected by springs."
yah...me too.
My favorite game I ever played with my crazed classes was called, "Rock." The object was for them to become like rocks, completely still, completely silent. Their bodies and minds were to be as rock-like as possible. Then I'd lightly tap their shoulder when it was clear they had achieved the feat. A rock is a good metaphor for the meditating mind...
How to practice bad philosophy:
1) Simplify or redefine a term "as a thought experiment" or "for argument".
2) Manipulate that meaning until you forget that you aren't working with the actual meaning.
3) Draw conclusions. Publish. Be unpleasantly surprised and defensive when people point out the obvious objections.
Cloud-castles are fine things. They may even suggest new areas to investigate. But if they can't be tested, you probably shouldn't move into them.
I would be willing to accept that everything is alive, were it not for sentience. A rock may indeed embody certain properties at a microprotonian level that demonstrate a similarity between it and living things, but to believe that a rock is a living thing is to profess a belief in something very closely resembling immortality.
#9 - Exactly, it's the First Acid Trip philosophy...
to see...or not to see.
The universe dances toward life. Life is a remarkably common commodity. Anything sufficiently complicated seems to get cut in for some, in the same way that anything massive enough gets a generous helping of gravity. The universe has a definite tendency toward awareness. This suggests a certain subtle cruelty woven into the very fabric of space-time.
Pratchett, Soul Music
Sesame Street to the rescue:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cze1_cWdF5s
I think its all about Epistemology.
@#64
I'm not sure, but I think your suggestions are how to practice bad materialist science, not bad spiritualist philosophy. I don't think this post is about materialist science, though a lot of people seem to want to critcize it from that (irrelevant) perspective.
Correction--I meant materialist science vs idealist philosophy.
"Or maybe, in the right frame of mind, I can feel an affinity to the rock---in a way, there's no telling where one thing starts and the other thing stops."
Common symptom of schizophrenia.
Just sayin'.
You should check out Umberto Eco's book The Island of the Day Before. There's an interesting and rather whimsical chapter that ponders this very topic. I think it's called Paradoxical Thoughts on the Intelligence of Stones or something like that. Fun novel.
This is probably the most interesting thing of Rucker's that I've read, and restores some respect lost with the pointless anti-bald-guy post.
Reading that Wikipedia article answers my question about how hylozoism is different from animism. Of the two, I think I prefer animism.
I wish more people had an appreciation for, for lack of a better term, non-rational philosophies as a companion to a rational, functional world view. I'm not talking about believing that dinosaurs were put there by Satan to fool people into believing in evolution, either... I wish I were more eloquent and had more time to express what I'm thinking here :P
#73: Overstated, but valid point. Humans are marvelously good at imagining things that aren't, and at feeling "affinities" for everything from cars to rocks to sunlight to abstractions. "If I were philosophy, I would..." is not a completely nonsensical English sentence, as long as we remember that, in fact, we aren't philosophy and it ain't us. As I said, it can even be a useful brainstorming exercise -- IF you remember that you're proceeding from a known-false premise, and that the ultimate question is whether any patterns you derive can be brought back into interaction with known-true facts.
#72: Philosophy that doesn't eventually reconnect to the real world is -- excuse my french -- mental masturbation. Nothing to be ashamed of; it's fun and it doesn't harm anyone. But it's nothing to be particularly proud of either; everyone does it as soon as they have the equipment to do it with, unless they've been unreasonably suppressed.
Fantasy novels about worlds where "everything is alive" can be perfectly reasonable things. But it's a lot easier to pose a what-if premise then to pose one that's plausible... and in my opinion most of the "post-singularity/computronium" stuff published (with the notable exception of Vinge) has been science fantasy rather than science fiction.
I subscribe to the philosophy that everything is dead. It's called Pourinafortyzoic.
If everything is alive, then our ethics are in need of some serious retooling.
There is a group trying to do just that.
PEOPLE FOR THE ETHICAL TREATMENT OF EVERYTHING
#22 - Thank you for that review. So on target...
@#59:
Keep on walkin' the earth, Kwai Chang Caine!
So basically, "everything is alive if you change what 'alive' means?"
Hey guys, I'm going to write a book about how everything is made of delicious chocolate! :D
@73,
Yes indeed, animism is commonly linked to schizophrenia:
"When the patient "cannot change the unbearable situation of himself any longer, he has to change reality"...The paranoid schizophrenic, Arieti explains, resorts to "teleologic causality" or animism to understand the world. He writes that whatever occurs to the patient is interpreted as willed by the parental alters of the patient. In deterministic or teleologic causality, if Nature's happenings were not willed they simply would not occur. In paranoid projection the schizophrenic takes out from him/herself a disagreeable part of the self onto the world."
This link was even tested by Piaget, but with a null result.
I subscribe to the idea that consciousness permeates everything. I'm completely comfortable with that.
With my eyes, I become aware of light. With my tongue, tastes. With my skin, heat and cold and so forth; consciousness is just there -- *awareness* is something else altogether, though.
Philip K Dick was a big proponent of hylozoism.
Entry 33 in Fat's Journal (i.e. his exegesis):
This loneliness, this anguish of the bereaved Mind, is felt by every constituent of the universe. All its constituents are alive. Thus the ancient Greek thinkers were hylozoists.
A "hylozoist" believes that the universe is alive; it's about the same idea as pan-psychism, that everything is animated. Pan-psychism or hylozoism falls into two belief-classes:
1) Each object is independently alive.
2) Everything is one unitary entity; the
universe is one thing, alive, with one mind.
Fat had found a kind of middle ground. The universe consists of one vast irrational entity into which has broken a high-order life form which camouflages itself by a sophisticated mimicry; thereby as long as it cares to it remains--by us--undetected. It mimics objects and casual processes (this is what Fat claims); not just objects but what the objects do.
--Philip K. Dick, Valis
I think #30 has won this thread.
@#3 Stefan,
Those socks and tissues were asking for it.
@54,
I believe I'm an honest scientific materialist, but I do not believe that I am a Turing machine. I don't believe that all material processes can be accurately described as finite state machines. I don't believe that reality neatly fits into discrete states.
It is frequently useful to be able to distingush between classes of objects, even if there are intermediates that share qualities of both classes. It's useful to distinguish between humans, trees, and fungi on the one hand, and rocks and water on the other, even if there are some things, like viruses, that could be argued to be on either side of the line.
Every paradigm shift will be met with vigorous opposition.
While folks here are jumping up and down with cries of philosophical improprieties, and complaints about diluting the "Meaning of Life", one point sticks out rather glaringly:
As #21 alludes to, the definition which Rudy is playing fast and loose with, more than the definition of "life" or "living", is the meaning of "thing".
That is an even slightly more radical and fundamental definitional transgression if you ask me. And one which could stand some major rearranging if our species is ever going resolve many of it's major current confusions.
so it will emerge that our diagnoses of schizophrenia merely identify those who learned to see the real, physical world and haven't the language or mind to understand and convey it.
Johnny Hart's "B.C." cartoon once had a strip that had two cavemen leaning on a rock. One asks the other if he thinks that there's other intelligent life in the universe and, on getting an affirmative response, asks where it is. The other replies "You're leaning on it."
That struck my 14-year old self as modestly amusing, but having mulled over the implications for about five minutes, I came to the conclusion that (what I now know to be called) hylozoism was not a useful philosophy.
What you might call the Hylozoic Fallacy does point in some interesting directions, however. Possessing sufficient complexity to support life/thought does not by any means guarantee that something will support life or thought (neural net enthusiasts take note). And maybe a kind of Turing Test is in order: if an animate object (Dr Rucker's rock) is functionally indistinguishable in every practical respect from an inanimate object (or an object that would be inanimate if all things weren't alive), is there any point in considering it animate?
@75: Democritus came up with that whole Atomism philosophy thing-a-ma-bob about 2500 years before we were able to definitively prove there was something to it. "Masturbation", or "The only way forward"?
@79: Y'know, like the old joke goes, Just because your crazy doesn't mean you're a total half-wit. I wonder: If we were to sit down and brainstorm for a stretch, how many absurd-seeming beliefs could we link to loco and sane people alike?.
This explains Herbie the Love Bug.
It's not that this is philosophy being dismissed as bad science.
It's religion being misrepresented as philosophy.
The jump from 'you could construct a universal computing device using the atoms of a rock, in place without disturbing the rock' to 'the rock is alive' is a religious experience not philosophy.
Well Rudy, You just sold me on your fiction. This last post really did it. You sparked my interest from the very first post about the gnarl, and you just pushed me over the edge. You've sparked my imagination and I'm going to buy one of your books. Thank you.
Mr Rucker, my question to you -- assuming you're reading these comments -- is this (this is a personal question, so I apologize if you find it indelicate): Have you done a lot of psychedelics?
Seriously, I don't mean this in any snarky way. But I notice that hylozoism/animism/pantheism/panentheism (or some combination) is a direction in which many people drift when they do a lot of deep exploration aided by entheogens.
article reminded me of this from carl jung:
"...He felt that she [jung's mother] was rooted in a deep invisible spiritual ground that had nothing to do with the Christian faith. That ground seemed more connected to the things of nature such as animals, trees, meadows and running waters. He felt a close affinity for all of this in his own life. Later Jung admitted that he never realized how pagan this foundation was. He would spend many hours sitting on a large rock behind his house, and at times would have trouble distinguishing if he was the boy sitting on the rock or the rock being sat upon by the boy. In short, he felt an unusual oneness with nature. "
Rudy! Welcome to the club! You're in good company: Bal Shem Tov, Huxley, Blake, Ramakrishna, Tilopa, Leary, St. Francis and many others agree with you that physical matter absolutely vibrates with consciousness. But the scientists won't like you anymore, because they can't measure your discovery with their yardsticks.
There's a lot going on in an apparently simple rock! It seems at the quantum level things are not what they seem. Literally and figuratively.
It seems like the problem here is the term "rock," not "alive".
It's probably possible to zoom in on the rock's quantum components and think about their interactions as computation and such, but at that level it becomes hard to define where the rock begins and ends, no?
Or in other words, zoom in far enough and it's all just a big pot of stew.
Conscious stew. Ick!
Rudy is also in some good philosophical company, although much of it comes at this kind of view from a very different argumentative perspective (certainly not from the computational viewpoint, which I'm a bit dubious of). Bergson, Whitehead and Deleuze are a few figures I would name.
If one is to argue for a sensible hylozoism/vitalism, one must delineate the claim properly. It shouldn't be understood as an argument that everything is living in precisely the sense that biological entities as they are commonly understood are living. Rather, the point is that there is an aspect of the way in which we have traditionally understood these entities that can be universalised. Specifically, this would be the idea that things are not fully individuated products with fixed essences, but are rather continuous and dynamic processes of individuation.
Similarly, a sensible panpsychism (the doctrine that everything thinks) does not claim that everything thinks in precisely the sense that we take ourselves to think. Rather, there is a universalisable aspect to our conception of our own thought. In this case, one can argue that everything is in the position of solving problems, be they animals, animal populations, geological processes, galaxies, or even rocks.
I just wanna say--wow, when BB's hive mind works, it really works. Taken together, you've got all the material of an outstanding essay on hylozoism here.
Better than that, it's an essay that leaves interpretation to the reader. Consensus has gathered around one or two lines of argument (let's say the Wittgenstein-esque language camp, the literary camp, and the hard science camp), but spurs pop up here and there. Congrats to Rucker for starting the best BB thread I've seen.
It's gnarly rhetoric.
I'm glad there's so much interest in these topics.
Tomorrow morning, Friday, May 22, 2009, I'll have another post going up on "Panpsychism and Hylozoism," with links to some of the source material that I've studied while thinking about these issues.
And next week, I'll have a few remarks about how one might, at least science-fictionally, imagine IMPLMENTING Hylozoism.
Technogeek said "Philosophy that doesn't eventually reconnect to the real world is -- excuse my french -- mental masturbation"
Wow, you must be a completely rational being, one who's thoughts, motivations and actions are all controlled by conscious rational processes, easily revealed and described.
Would love to meet you, I've never met such a one before.
You have introduced a fun subject to ponder, at least with a rock. But let's substitute a pack of cigarettes for that rock. Wherein does the consciousness lie? Does each individual cigarette have it's own conscious experience? Do they feel oppressed or comforted by the Pack that is their Universe? Perhaps filters and their attached tubes of tobacco live out a tense, symbiotic relationship we will never fathom.
You can argue that there is no gnarl there, that each identical pack is somehow less alive that your rock. But that's an accident of scale. If you removed the tobacco tube and magnified it you would find plenty of gnarl. Same goes for the filter. Look at that smooth, white paper under a really good stereomicroscope - gnarl.
Is there is a sense in which you can say Everything is Alive, and still avoid my reductio ad absurdum?
"Conscious stew. Ick!", said the conscious stew.
Eustace's Cigarette is largely bio matter, cellular. Former living vegetation. At what point is a cell dead? How about the paper? It's largely bio matter, but has been ground practically to powder, cells destroyed. But dead? A couple squints here tell me that energy cannot be destroyed. Life is certainly energy. It didn't go into the chopper, so it must still be in the matter that bore it.
Eustace, I think your cigarette must be alive- until you initiate a chemical reaction that re-arranges the molecules. Then I think the energy leaves and it dies.
I'm just guessin' here. You know what we could do tho? We could conjur up the Lizard Man! I'll bet he can help us!
Lizard Man!
Lizard Man!
Come and help us if you can!
Dummies stumbling in the dark
Seek the wisdom you impart.
Eustace has a cigarette he wants to smoke
But will he wreak death with every toke?
Or is it dead and just as well
To burn it up? Please tell. Please tell.
[That usually works]
No one's gonna mention Tom Robbins and spoons and cans of beans , socks , painted sticks, etc. ?
I thought that would be first post. Well, someone's gotta mention it.
If hylozoism is an anti-thesis to dualism I'm all for it.
First off, thanks, Rudy! This post and the links are a lot of fun and totally make my inner-Happy Mutant jig.
Many responders seem to assert that the definition of 'life' or the parameters for what is 'alive' are simple and knowable (as evidenced by a definition in a high school textbook, a la #8 Anonymous). Lacking evidential proof, I would just like to post the reminder of a few snippets of Douglas Adams' speech (or self-debate), "Is There An Artificial God" given at Digital Biota 2, held at Magdelene College Cambridge, September 1998. He remarks that whereas in handwriting recognition, the researcher can't say, "Well, it's sort of A-ish but there's a bit of B in there… because you can't spell the word 'apple' with an A-ish B," the determination of what is alive and what is not is somewhat more difficult. The handwriting researcher must determine which letter it is to make any sense of what is written. On the other hand, in the absence of an intentional creator, taking the consideration of whether something is alive or not, the live status of the thing doesn't change depending on the decision of a researcher -- unless the researcher kills it (excluding all Schrödingeresque talk of the effect of observation on a subject).
To loosely transcribe Adams, 'It turns out to be tremendously hard to define [life]… I remember some time ago needing a definition of life and being surprised at how… detailed any definition needed to be in order to include this and include that and not include [the other]… But if you think about it, I mean, anything that includes a fruit fly and Richard Dawkins and the Great Barrier Reef, I mean, is an awkward set of objects to try [and categorize!] So when we try to determine whether something is alive or not we try to find one rule that is self-evidentiary true, and it turns out to be very, very hard.”
I think the more constructive addresses to Rudy’s assertion of panpsychicism and hylozoistism (sp?) would be to question Rudy’s Point #5, as to whether ‘any complex system can be regarded as having self-reflection.’ That seems to me to be the hinge-point of both assertions, and personally, my confusion lies with the idea that any sufficiently computational entity engages in “watching its own reactions.” I think I grok it, but I suspect I need a more complete explication of what “watching,” and ‘its own” are in this context. Is any reaction by a processing system considered 'watching?' Is that watching perception? Is perception nothing more than reactionary? Interesting questions, to me.
As a child whenever I interacted with any inanimate object, e.g. kicked a rock, tossed a sock, chewed on a pencil, etc., in my head I would hear the object's "voice", either a happy voice (if I was doing something pleasant to the object, like cleaning it), but more often than not, an unhappy voice: "NOOOOO don't put me in that dark drawer!" or "Goodbye, my friends! I leave you against my will, having been kidnapped by this human!" or simply "Ow! Why'd this stupid person kick me?"
I had to force myself to stop thinking of inanimate objects as being alive, as it was perilously close to stopping me from functioning. When trying to choose a shirt to wear, I was almost crippled by the thought of hurting the non-picked shirt's feelings, or by imagining the picked shirt gloating to the other shirts: "nyah nyah nyah!! I'm the favorite!"
This post has reminded me of those fanciful (read: insane) days ... now I have to remember to forget how to hear the inner voices of things.
The keyboard doesn't hate me, the keyboard doesn't hate me ...
#97: I will speak for Rudy, to wit: "well, duh!"
#112: I agree that the definition of life is fuzzy -- prions being a good example thereof, even moreso than viruses -- but I don't think giving up and opening the term up so far that it loses all useful meaning is the proper response.
It's a human-drawn categorization. Like any such, it's going to have fractal edges, and it's subject to refinement as new examples which dance on that line are found and require that the fractal be further elaborated to include it appropriately... or that we recognize that for this particular example, the answer really does have to be more qualified than yes or no.
It's also a matter of posing a reasoanble question. In a recently dead cat, many individual cells may still be alive, never mind the microorganisms now starting to feast on it, never mind any fleas which may not yet have gone looking for a new host. Is that living matter or dead matter? Depends on the scale you're looking at.
As I say: I don't mind the thought experiment. I'm just extremely skeptical about claims that it has established anything other than the fact that, if you negate this one point, you can still build a self-consistent logical structure on top of it. Which I think we already knew.
Mathematics is philosophy until it gets applied to the real world. So is semantic juggling. Fine way to raise a question, but it doesn't provide a reliable answer until you bring it back to check that you haven't performed the moral equivalent of dividing by zero.
#105: I don't claim to be fully rational. I do, however, try to recognize my irrationalities and allow for them... and I don't claim they're anything but irrationalities.
Gotta point out Tom Robbins' "Skinny Legs and All," about the adventures of a Can o' Beans, Spoon, Dirty Sock, Painted Stick, and Conch Shell on a journey to the Mid-east. I wanted to use the idea of inanimate objects being alive in a novel of my own and asked Tom for permission to steal his idea. He said that since he actually believed inanimate objects were alive, the idea wasn't his to steal in the first place, so go right ahead.
I love this bit of Lovecraft:
"He had read much of things as they are, and talked with too many people. Well-meaning philosophers had taught him to look into the logical relations of things, and analyse the processes which shaped his thoughts and fancies. Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value one above the other. Custom had dinned into his ears a superstitious reverence for that which tangibly and physically exists, and had made him secretly ashamed to dwell in visions. Wise men told him his simple fancies were inane and childish, and even more absurd because their actors persist in fancying them full of meaning and purpose as the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness."
The problem I have with these discussions is the assumption that so called scientifically minded people have with first defining their terms. The question here seems to me to be whether all things are conscious on either an individual level or in a fractal sense. Until there's a decent definition of what consciousness is, I don't see how you can make an accurate argument either way. A sensible way to start, to me, seems to be to define what it is not. We know we are conscious in the sense that the term relates to our quality of being. This is not our memories, our sense perceptions, our feelings or our thoughts all of which interact with our consciousness but are not it. It is not even our awareness as we usually define that in relation to those qualities mentioned. I have no problem with the idea of consciousness being a fundamental aspect of existence but I can't think of way that it is provable in a laboratory. If it's nature is as the fundamental building block of existence as millenia of meditators and some philosophers have argued, it would make it impossible to isolate for study. In that sense it inhabits the realm of the scientifically unprovable and is therefore either a matter of philosophical taste or "revealled truth". Cheers Rudy, always a joy!
Help, Troof! I'm being chased by living cigarettes; they're trying to burn me to the ground!
To take your article litterally, indeed, everything has a living and conscios energy, everything that exists around us, and I mean litterally. Elementals comprise a dizzying array of intelligent beings that are normally invisible, but can be seen by the trained observer, they do in fact inhabit all living and non living materials.
"The Djinn Concept
If real unseen beings exist on Earth, it seems likely that inhabitants of other planets may be as hidden to our 5 senses as the Djinn are. The Djinn Concept challenges us to realize how limited our perceptions are. Things really don't work quite the way we think they do.
Consciousness is not limited to the human brain, but pervades all manifestations of life. So much life is crammed into a single cubic inch of backyard soil that it is unlikely that the potential inherent in a whole planet is just wasted. Life is an ever deepening mystery! Most of us aren’t comfortable with making that a part of our working hypothesis, but our explorations will be enriched and strengthened if we do."
Unknown Author
Millions of universes in a single rock...
if you kick the rock, you'll say ouch. but the rock will say 'thud'. its a rudimentary consciousness. this is also something commented heavily upon by the philosopher alan watts in the "The Book: on the taboo of knowing who you are"