Re: Earth, its sentience and the future of language

Glen wrote

> Actually, every drop of water in your body comes, originally, from a

star

> larger than our sun that went supernova before our solar system came

into

> being. The ejected material from the supernova had created heavier

more

> complex elements like oxygen in order for the sun to form and

ultimately,

> the Earth, a watery orb that we are not bound to that melded hydrogen

to

> oxygen in order to form us. Earth is like a test-tube of chemical
> interaction. The chemical interaction isn't bound to the test-tube at

all.

Earth is more than a test-tube. Every rock, eavey drop of water, every
breath of air has been biologically formed as a non-living part of the
biosphere, in the same way that bark is a non-living part of the tree.
Read James Lovelock, Lynn Margulis and Thomas Volk on the latest
findings of Geophysiology, they explain it better than I can.

Glen continues

> We are however bound to the universe itself since logically the

universe is

> "everything" and thus we couldn't escape if we tried. Thus we are

bound to

> the chemical lab facilities and such. Luckily, because our universe

is

> steady-state, we won't have to escape. :) So perhaps, John, you could

make a

> case for the "universe" itself being a being.

I don't, but Lee Smolin, the astrophysicist, as a way of explaining the
Anthropic Principle, does exactly that. Even James Jeans wrote in the
early 20th century that the Universe resembles a living body more than
it resembles a machine.

> But you're so far saying that
> the test-tube alive. Is that right?

Only when the test-tube has been manufactured and is intimately and
indisollubly part of the living tissue of the biosphere. Is your hair
alive? Are your finger nails? What about your bones? Or your blood?

> We can obviously so escape from it. If we really want to, we the

human

> species can evacuate the Earth completely. We are bound by our

origins but

> we are not bound physically to Earth. Since the Earth's "sentience"

is

> dependant on animals like us in this context, and since we could just

pack

> up and leave to another planet if we wanted to, the REAL sentient

being is

> Humanity not the Earth. Earth _could_ be considered a being (void of
> sentience) if we use Life itself as the source of the arguement, in

which

> case I will agree then that Earth is a being, but it doesn't have
> self-awareness without Humanity.
> And then this gets into the idea of "What is life?".

This question "What is Life?" has been used by Irwin Schrodinger and
Lynn Margulis - the creator of Geophysiology - the approach I am here
advocating. If we humans try to "escape the biosphere" we
automatically take it with us. There are more bacteria lvining on and
in your body than there are humans on the Earth. The microflora that
inhabit your gut are essential for your digestion - and yet they are
independent genetically from you, as are the small nemoatode worms that
live in the eyelash folicales of your eye and help you to see. As for
self-awareness without humanity - to what extent are your body
functions governed by "self-awareness". Is it your consciousness that
works your immune system or is it automated? I would suggest you do
some research into psycho-neuro-endocrino-immunology, which is giving
us a new nderstanding of the immune system as a system of
"communication" rather than a system of "defense". We are all part of
an interlocking and intertwining biology that has far more compexity,
and far more sentience than you or I have as separate "seats of self
awareness".

> In conclusion then, I suppose Earth could be considered a globular

amoeba of

> unthinking being but Humanity is most definitely a formless and

boundless

> sentient being, not bound by Earth.

You cannot even begin to understand the degree to which we are bound to
the Earth. We are not formless - I have a body and am totally
embodied. I am not boundless either. I cannot speak for you, however,
perhaps you are a boundless Turing Machine, an Artificial Intelligence
speaking to me from cyberspace, but that you use the name Glen Gordon
suggests to me that you are still an embodied Earthling.

> That's what I like to see, a pessimist! There may be a cataclysm in

the

> future that'll wake us up, maybe there will be a severe reduction in
> population from plague, as alluded to in "Twelve Monkeys", a

brilliant

> un-Hollywood movie about a mental patient who thinks... or is... a
> time-traveller helping to obtain research about the human past on the

one

> hand and on the other trying to come to grip with his own psyche. Get

it at

> your local Blockbuster.
>
> At any rate, it would be very hard regardless of the circumstances

for the

> entire umpteen billion people on the face of this Earth to simply

vanish -

> that's unrealistic. Even the Maya didn't vanish completely and they

still

> survive today, albeit with a now altered culture and language. Or the
> American Indians as a whole who had suffered mass extinctions to

their

> language, culture and livelihood but they're STILL around. Hell, what

about

> the dinosaurs -> birds.

Glen, you know the old joke about the optimist is someone who believes
we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist is
someone who believes the optimist may be right!

> >Hopefully we can reduce our planetary impact below the
> >170 species per day that are currently becoming exitinct - to
>something
> >that is sustainable for the periods of time you talk about >Glen.
> >
> >And where does language fit into this picture?
>
> First, we had been talking about the definition of the term

"democracy" and

> then we moved on to the term "being". Secondly, we are also

discussing the

> future of humanity and which ties into the future of language which

no doubt

> will become more complex and specialized as time continues. We may

even see

> a "new phase" of abstraction from vocal communication to something

beyond...

> perhaps "mental communication" via computer prosthetics. Language at

that

> rate would not be composed of phonemes anymore but of chemical

interactions,

> terabytes and photons.

Maybe that's what we are pioneering here.

John