WHAT IS LIFE...

Is It Matter?

You might be suprised to find that many people don't think that Life has much to do with matter. Instead they see Life as being purely of the Mind, and often they say the whole World is just Mind. Is there something to this Idea? That's a hot issue because there's also a lot of people who say that Mind is just some strange side-effect of Matter, that Matter is the only 'thing' that matters.

You may have picked up on my unsubtle puns. In philosophy there are as many opinions on these issues as there are philosophers, but that's largely due to the fact that language can't transmit a person's direct experiences. Something is always missed in the translation from words to perceptions of the ideas the words convey. But we seem to get by, somehow inspite of this problem. So what is matter?

PLATO: the raw stuff of the natural world. Constantly in motion, but order must be imposed upon it by Mind. That order comes from Cosmic Ideas - geometric forms beyond our space-time that somehow shape the World into being.

ARISTOTLE: inert [i.e. naturally at rest] raw stuff of the world. Aristotle believed that matter, in itself, had no form, but the forms didn't come from outside of space-time. Objects don't participate in their Forms, as Plato believed. Instead the Forms are one with the matter that they shape.

Fundamentally, for both, matter was passive - it received Forms and was moved by Soul. And their views defined what matter was until modern science began to pull the world into bits and pieces. Descartes discovered that the World could be defined by measurement and geometry in ways Plato never dreamed. Newton discovered the Laws of gravity, of motion and mass. Others defined the other forces - electromagnetism, the weak force and the colour force - and they discovered a world of little bits, the quantum world.

The essential difference between the old views and the new is the new doesn't know quite what to make of forms. We know a lot about matter and energy, but complex systems built up out of it are quite beyond our maths to handle in absolute detail. Unlike simple things like forces. So everything we say about it is a bulk approximation using statistical arguments or descriptive arguments. No computer can calculate what, for example, gas in a sealed box will do from moment to moment in absolute detail, but that usually doesn't matter. Why? Well for simply organised systems, like gases, random behaviour is a good assumption and that [surprisingly] has known mathematical properties. Random means: No Preferred 'Direction'. For a gas in a cubic container it means that the number of gas bits [atoms or molecules, which are atoms joined together] hitting a wall at any instant is, on average, the same for all the walls. And we observe that to be so. We don't suddenly lose a wall of our house due to all the gas in it suddenly deciding to hit the same wall at the same time. Air just doesn't care where it's going until...

You suddenly apply some directed energy.Say you heat the floor of the box. By doing so you set up convection currents that order the gas in the box - hot air rises and cool air falls thanks to the direction imposed by gravity. For gases this isn't terribly obvious on a small scale, though on a large scale it can produce mighty thunderheads [exactly how is another tale, but convection is in it.] In liquids convection currents can be quite spectacular on the small scale, and they show just how simply Order can arise out of a seemingly random system - apply directed energy.

So how does Life fit in? And What is Mind?

WHAT IS EVOLUTION?

Who Is God?

Why Young Earth Creationism is wrong

Why Creationism is wrong

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