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According to modern physics,there are 4 fundermental forces in nature that interacting with each other and thus formed universe.
But what about life existing on earth?Were life be formed by the interacting of the 4 fundermental forces?
If not,I think there must be a force other than the 4 fundermental forces that created life and still actively acting on life.
At the least,our lives are acted upon by the force of life.This is why we are living and couldn't cease our life whithout using external force.
The essence of life isn't a physically quantifiable so it would need purpose to have force, right? Why would a universe that's indifferent to everything care about life?
The essence of life isn't a physically quantifiable so it would need purpose to have force, right? Why would a universe that's indifferent to everything care about life?
But all lives are formed by physically quantifiable substances.If the 4 fundamental forces play no part in the formation of life,did these substances form lives all by themselves?.
Life is a certain configuration of materials and forces; there is no reason to assume it is a thing-in-itself. The same applies to many things: consciousness, love, etc. Our human tendency to confirmation bias wants us to think there is something ineffable and special about these things and therefore about us, and it's hard to let go of this notion.
The essence of life isn't a physically quantifiable so it would need purpose to have force, right? Why would a universe that's indifferent to everything care about life?
Which begs the question "WHY does life exist at all?" It serves no purpose and doesn't seem to arise from some fundamental law of nature. So why are we all here?
The known forces of physics, along with the principles of non-linear dynamics, seem to be sufficient to explain the origins and basic behaviors of life. The principles of non-linear dynamics are essential for explaining how matter is able to self-organize into complex systems. I have argued in other threads, however, that some aspects of consciousness seem to imply the need for some "explanatory tool" that is missing from current physics. What's missing might be a type of fundamental force, or it could be just some deeper understanding of the principles linking complex dynamics to the subjective/qualitative aspects of experience. My basic idea is that a deeper understanding of the qualitative aspects of matter might help us understand causation in physical systems. Within physics there is currently no real understanding of causation. Current physics only deals with structural properties - the types of properties that can be mathematically modeled purely in terms of objective/quantitative relations between hypothetical fundamental elements.
One way to roughly think of it: Structural properties only describe the "outer shell" - the publicly observable exterior aspects - of the elements that compose the physical world. But the existence of an "outer structure" implies the existence of some "inner essence" that exhibits the structure. The "inner essence" of a thing is, on current theories, always a sort of "black box." We might suspect that "stuff happens" below the publicly visible surface, and it makes sense to assume that this unobserved "inner stuff" somehow accounts for the publicly visible dynamics of the "outer surface" features, but we currently don't seem to have the conceptual tools for relating the "inner stuff" to the "outer behavior."
Take an electron, for example. Physical theory describes its behaviors and tendencies to behave. No attempt is made to conceptualize that which is doing the behaving - other than to give it a name. We find a particle that behaves in a certain way, and we call it an 'electron'. But what is an electron? It is a thing that behaves in this way. And that's it. The thing that does the behaving is a black box. The question then becomes: Is it even logically coherent to try to conceptualize what's going on below the surface of the black box? Physics doesn't even try. Should it try? Or would this be a complete waste of time?
My proposal is that future physics will find ways to mathematically model the "inner" essences of things using qualitative - not just quantitative - principles because what it going on "inside the black box" is fundamentally qualitative. If I'm right about this - if the black boxes fundamentally are qualitative entities - then the current quantitative terms of physics will not be sufficient to explain their behaviors. Depending on how you look at it, we might end up thinking of these fundamentally qualitative aspects as new forces in some sense, or - I'd say more likely - our conceptions of the forces of physics could change in such basic ways that we don't think in terms of new "forces" at all. We might look at causality in a whole new way. In any case, I think the first step to making this transition is to understand that the qualitative/subjective aspects of conscious experience are not fully reducible to the purely quantitative/objective concepts of current fundamental physics. Qualitative or proto-qualitative concepts will need to be built in on the ground level of our future scientific explanations.
Which begs the question "WHY does life exist at all?" It serves no purpose and doesn't seem to arise from some fundamental law of nature. So why are we all here?
As I suggested in my previous post, I don't think that life, as such, is the central question. If you were to replace 'life' with 'consciousness' in your statement, then you and I would be closer to the same page: My version of your statement would thus be:
"WHY does consciousness exist at all?" It seemingly serves no purpose and doesn't seem to arise from some fundamental law of nature.
The ultimate "why" question is almost certainly unanswerable. For every rational explanation, you can always ask one more "why" question: "Why is it this way rather than some other way?" Logical explanations require certain unexplained givens - some brute facts to get the explanation off the ground. But I think we can address the question about why consciousness exists by going at least few layers deeper than we do now. The key to consciousness is it's qualitative aspect, and my proposal is that this qualitative aspect is at the roots of causation. A causal process is always necessarily a qualitative process because it is the qualitative aspect of the process that constitutes the dynamics of the process. Without the qualitative aspects, there would be no dynamics - no "energy" - and without energy there is no change, and thus no "process" at all.
So it turns out that consciousness does serve a purpose - or, to be more precise, the qualitative aspects of reality out of which life and consciousness emerge serve a crucial purpose - they constitute the essence of energy/causation.
Now it might occur to you that consciousness does not exist without life. There was primitive life on earth before conscious creatures evolved. So it seems that consciousness cannot be the cause of life. But what I'm suggesting is that life and consciousness both emerge from some fundamentally qualitative aspects of reality. Primordial energy is fundamentally qualitative, and because of this, life and consciousness can emerge.
Last edited by Gaylenwoof; 01-25-2015 at 04:58 PM..
Life is a certain configuration of materials and forces; there is no reason to assume it is a thing-in-itself. The same applies to many things: consciousness, love, etc. Our human tendency to confirmation bias wants us to think there is something ineffable and special about these things and therefore about us, and it's hard to let go of this notion.
By life i mean anything that is alive which is different from objects,substances and things that are dead.Consciousness, love, etc are developed from life and may be parts of it.It is more a thing-in-itself than anything that is dead.
As I suggested in my previous post, I don't think that life, as such, is the central question. If you were to replace 'life' with 'consciousness' in your statement, then you and I would be closer to the same page: My version of your statement would thus be:
"WHY does consciousness exist at all?" It seemingly serves no purpose and doesn't seem to arise from some fundamental law of nature.
The ultimate "why" question is almost certainly unanswerable. For every rational explanation, you can always ask one more "why" question: "Why is it this way rather than some other way?" Logical explanations require certain unexplained givens - some brute facts to get the explanation off the ground. But I think we can address the question about why consciousness exists by going at least few layers deeper than we do now. The key to consciousness is it's qualitative aspect, and my proposal is that this qualitative aspect is at the roots of causation. A causal process is always necessarily a qualitative process because it is the qualitative aspect of the process that constitutes the dynamics of the process. Without the qualitative aspects, there would be no dynamics - no "energy" - and without energy there is no change, and thus no "process" at all.
So it turns out that consciousness does serve a purpose - or, to be more precise, the qualitative aspects of reality out of which life and consciousness emerge serve a crucial purpose - they constitute the essence of energy/causation.
Now it might occur to you that consciousness does not exist without life. There was primitive life on earth before conscious creatures evolved. So it seems that consciousness cannot be the cause of life. But what I'm suggesting is that life and consciousness both emerge from some fundamentally qualitative aspects of reality. Primordial energy is fundamentally qualitative, and because of this, life and consciousness can emerge.
Consciousness is just a function of a brain which is a servant of human life just like hands and stomach and kidneys,etc.Like hands and stomach,consciousness as the function of a brain serves purposes of our lives.
Brain, hands, stomach, etc.are developments that life made through billions of years.
As for primordial energy,may I replace 'energy' with 'force'?or power or anything of that kind,which made life to emerge and to develop and are still acting upon life,including our own lives so that one couldn't cease his own life without using external forces.I mean all lives are still in controll of the force or energy or power or anything of that kind.If a human is in controll of his own life,he should be able to cease his own life by his own will wihtout using external forces.Obviously no one is able to do this,so our life is in controll of a force or something like that.
This is a tough question. At the smallest level, everything is made of the same stuff, so what's the difference between living and dead? The most straightforward answer is that living things are made of cells, which regulate themselves and perform certain functions. But material that makes up a cell isn't really alive, and all those functions are just the result of chemical reactions. I really don't have any answers and don't know enough about biology to get too in-depth, but it's interesting to think about.
As for why, I don't think there is a why... Life is just something that happened to develop over billions of years under the right circumstances. I just choose to not worry too much about why we're here and just focus on living the best life possible.
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It serves no purpose and doesn't seem to arise from some fundamental law of nature. So why are we all here?
