yet another analogy of consciousness

Consciousness is a ray of light and truth beyond space and time refracted through the circuitous configurations of atoms at the dimension of the picometer and projected into the meso scale of meter-length sizes from a rather ticklish medium, the photon, and creating in its wake the stabilizing form of a timeframe-redraw transcendent subject, persistent through time, and using that very medium--time---to fold in on itself modes of self-reflection, the capacity for thought, and ultimately knowledge of self-and universe. 

"More bullshit after these messages."

The transcendent moment

What if the next stage of evolution was the slow rise of an understandable human voice among all life on the planet, speaking directly to you sometimes out of the blue. 

Aesthetic genetics

Beauty tends to beauty and thus it accumulates. 

Now I'm the dupe

Two points: we have no community. In the past many ran with groups of familiars in their generational cohort and through them met with similar groups and that was the medium through which strangers were made familiar enough to connect. It was much more organic. As a result, we've become atomized and in seeking to reconstruct that world, we've fit it into our screens. This results in reducing everything in our life to an interactive square within our glowing rectangle, our food lever within our Skinner box. Now, we're all a captured audience not unlike those dupes at the video poker in the gas stations in the muddy Midwest of my youth. Sad really, I've found myself more than once become that sun-leathered dupe, cigarette smoldering between lips, staring blankly at card choices, smacking away at the select/discard buttons like a monkey in an experiment.

Explaining life in terms of the statistical theory of entropy

"How would we express in terms of the statistical theory the marvellous faculty of a living organism, by which it delays the decay into thermodynamical equilibrium (death)? We said before: 'It feeds upon negative entropy', attracting, as it were, a stream of negative entropy upon itself, to compensate the entropy increase it produces by living and thus to maintain itself on a stationary and fairly low entropy level.

"If D is a measure of disorder, its reciprocal 1/D, can be regarded as a direct measure of order. Since the logarithm of 1/D is just minus the logarithm of D, we can write Boltzmann's equation thus:

- (entropy) = k log (1/D)

Hence the awkward expression 'negative entropy' can be replaced by a better one: entropy, taken with the negative sign, is itself a measure of order. Thus the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness ( = fairly low level of entropy) really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment. This conclusion is less paradoxical than it appears at first sight. Rather could it be blamed for triviality. Indeed, in the case of higher animals we know the kind of orderliness they feed upon well enough, viz. the extremely well-ordered state of matter in more or less complicated organic compounds, which serve them as food stuffs. After utilizing it they return it in a very much degraded form — not entirely degraded, however, for plants can still make use of it. (These, of course, have their most powerful supply of 'negative entropy' in the sunlight.)" (pp. 73-73)

from Erwin Schrodinger's "What is life?"

Entropy defined

"What is entropy? Let me first emphasize that it is not a hazy concept or idea, by a measurable physical quantity just like the length of a rod, the temperature at any given point of a body, the heat of fusion of a given crystal or the specific heat of any given substance. At the absolute zero point of temperature (roughly - 273°C) the entropy of any substance is zero. When you bring the substance into any other state by slow, reversible little steps (even if thereby the substance changes its physical or chemical nature or splits into two or more parts of different physical or chemical nature) the entropy increases by an amount which is computed by dividing every little portion of heat you had to supply in the procedure by the absolute temperature at which it was applied — and by summing up all the small contributions" (p. 71). 

"Much more important for us here is the bearing on the statistical concept of order and disorder, a connection that was revealed by the investigations of Boltzmann and Gibbs in statistical physics. This too is an exact quantitative connection, and is expressed by 

entropy = k log D,

where k is the so-called Boltzmann constant ( =  3.2983×10⁻²⁴ cal./°C) and D a quantitative measure of the atomistic disorder of the body in question. To give an exact explanation of this quantity D in brief non-technical terms is well-nigh impossible. The disorder it indicates is partly that of heat motion, party that which consists in different kinds of atoms or molecules being mixed at random, instead of being neatly separated ..." (p. 72). 

as quoted in Erwin Schrodinger's "What is life?"

Life's characteristic feature: staving off max entropy

"What is the characteristic feature of life? When is a piece of matter said to be alive? When it goes on 'doing something', moving, exchanging material with its environment, and so forth, and that for a much longer period than we would expect an inanimate piece of matter to 'keep going' under similar circumstances. When a system that is not alive is isolated or placed in a uniform environment, all motion usually comes to a standstill very soon as a result of various kinds of friction; differences of electric or chemical potential are equalized, substances which tend to form a chemical compound do so,  temperature becomes uniform by heat conduction. After that the whole system fades away into a dead, inert lump of matter. A permanent state is reached, in which no observable events occur. The physicist calls this the state of thermodynamical equilibrium, or of 'maximum entropy'" (p. 69).

from Erwin Schrodinger's "What Is Life?"

This conceptualization of life as an organization of matter into a set of persisting interactions with its environment that lend some kind of creedence to the possibility of seeing the originating conditions of life as a sort of gravitational effect to the substances that adhere for a duration to the scaffolding of an organism as it is in the process of self-organizing. But is there a crucial component in the whole ensemble or is there just some 'emergent effect' of the whole together? This is hard to figure out. I used to look at intelligence as a feature of the selective membrane, the basic datum of in/out as a configuration of space and time, and perhaps that is the essential character of the thing. Or is there something underneath this? Some life/intelligence Brownian motion that stirs a thing into an organism with orchestrated actions?

There's a concept concerning tensors that attempts to describe the actions of things like electromagnetism, that is, it's thingness in the fact that two objects can attract or repel each other at some critical distance, which gives the intervening medium some character that needs to be described. How this 'force' operates at a distance is the thing in the question: 'how is electromagnetism a thing?'

Some of the hokier, new-agey visions of the earth as this resonant structure that gives all the things around it a similar harmonic is both dream-catchery and in and of itself true. Perhaps, this 'crystalline' feature of DNA is a feature of the earth's iron core emanating a harmonic field that establishes an affordable 'low energy state' to the possible configuration of proteins in the lattice work of DNA that we know. That, at the foundation of the DNA is a recording medium enabled by the harmonics of a rotating ferrous 'plasma' core that is perturbed continuously by the day-to-day features of existing bathed in the electromagnetic radiation of a sun to produce the all the little 'evolving' chemistry experiments in the vast biomass of single-celled life in this world. Everything above that level is simply an afforded compilation of possible collaborations between various discreet versions of these single-celled life forms and the various lab bench chemical transformations they allow within the confines of their selective membranes.