Life Briefly Analyzed

Is life energy? It’s reasonable to think so. After all, all the motion that we see here on earth or up in the sky is produced by energy—either by suns of or by the original Big Bang that created the universe. Trouble is that energy as such lacks one of the important features of life, consciousness. If consciousness is viewed as more valuable or in a higher order than mere energy, then to say that life is energy is to assert that something (consciousness) can be derived from something that does not have the potential for it (energy). With a little effort, we can in virtually all instances trace energy to specific chemical or physical causes. Okay. The Big Bang is a little more difficult to prove.

Is life purposive? Of course. But by purposive I don’t merely mean such things as satisfying hunger or building a career. Nor do I mean the capacity for reproduction. Reproduction, after all, simply builds other individuals like myself; all of them, myself included, must die. So life’s purpose is to die? Absurd.

It does not surprise me, therefore, that humanity has ages ago postulated that life’s meaning must be found beyond bodily existence. Death is too poor a purpose to justify the complexity of life or the maintenance of the incredible chemical machines that we are just to let them return to “dust”.

Now materialists will claim that humanity’s projection of an afterlife is just another human desire to “hang on” to life. That charge seems reasonable until you become genuinely old. When you finally are, you become indifferent to such things. Fall asleep dreamlessly and never awaken? That’s perfectly OK for most of us.

Two Natures

In an op-ed in the New York Times this morning Alan Lightman speaks of Nature. The article is “Our Lonely Home in Nature,” and its thematic is that “nature doesn’t care one whit about us.” Lightman’s context is natural disasters of recent memory: mudslides, tornadoes, and the like. Lightman is a physicist who teaches humanities at MIT. He is also the author of The Accidental Universe. He belongs to a kind of coven of modern thinkers who are hard atheists because they can’t reconcile the observations of science with an interventionist God. By intervention here we can think about miracles, say. Our “Home in Nature” is a lonely place because, as Lightman says, “Nature, in fact, is mindless.” His atheism is coupled with an aesthetic view of the cosmos, something that recalls Carl Sagan, another member of that coven, and his exultations over galaxies.

Is Nature really mindless? Here we encounter that curious Now-You-See-It-Now-You-Don’t that always arises when materialistic scientists engage in philosophizing. The philosophizing itself is obviously the activity of a mind. Yet according to the materialistic doctrine, mind arises as a consequence of the “accidental collocation of atoms” (per Bertrand Russell). That’s when “Now-You-See-It” applies. But mind considered as a radical power outside the reach of matter, even when it manifests inside the cosmos, that sort of mind is denied; then we have the “Now-You-Don’t.”

The truth is that there are two Natures. There is as radical a divide between “living” and “non-living” as there is between “mindful” and “mindless.” Living Nature quite observably is a tour de force in an environment that itself “doesn’t care one whit”—and can’t: it’s mindless. When we speak of Mother Nature, we speak of life, not of rocks or galaxies. And when such life has achieved a certain status, it does care—and it cares a lot.

So long as we adhere to the belief that matter is all there is, we cannot explain life and, therefore, cannot explain mind. In that situation Lightman’s Lament is true. But it may be premature. Science has thus far only described the living, always sticking to life’s tooling, which is material, ignoring its essence, unable to explain it. Such explanations are beyond the methods of science, but our minds continue to demand some answers. These will come after we’ve passed on—and to all of us, no matter our beliefs. Then we’ll also know why life, in this inhospitable environment, must have its own material tooling.

Science has succeeded because, abandoning natural philosophy, it has limited its subject to the easy part—which is, itself, monstrously extensive. The hard part is still there, daily experienced, but science cannot handle it.

Now regarding humanism, it comes in a rather extensive color-scheme. I’ve outlined that on this blog here.

The Little Real Life

People live three lives these days: daily, media, and inner. One of these is unavoidable, another is neglected at our peril, and the third, frankly, is becoming quite absurd. Both daily and inner life are “real life,” this in contrast with what “real life” is supposed to be about if we watch today’s entertainments. Daily life in our now retired state still holds its daily chores. Sometimes they are unusual and produce their own muted little triumphs. Sure enough the string-pull light above this station, which turns on the fluorescent lamps above, once more went on the blink. There are seven such in this basement; six have been in place since, well, since 1989 when we bought this place. But the one above me has been replaced, this morning, for the fourth time. Hard, black wires, their copper teeth bared, must be attached to two screws set into a porcelain device. And then the device, with suitable openings, must be threaded, in a manner of speaking, around two longer screws until they “catch.” After that the screws are tightened and the job is done—in relative darkness because the basement lights are turned off at the fuse box. And—it worked! The muted triumph. Real life. That life also involved my visit to Ace hardware. We began in sunshine—using which I cleared off last year’s vast clump of dead Michigan bamboo stalks (read Japanese knotweed, link). Drops marked my windshield on going, rain fell hard as I returned, having swiped my card and signed my name on a little calculator-sized screen with a kind of stick anchored to this device by another black wire. As if those signatures mattered. The Little Real Life has its own profound mysteries too. Returning Brigitte told me that an upstairs walk-in closet has another overhead that fails to dispense its light. Another item for my to do list in the Little Real Life; they are sometimes challenging, as that closet, I fear, shall be. But so long as the problems are little, no problem; when they are bigger, the pains tend to be financial. But nothing compared with what flows over the media every day, every day. And turning them off only helps a little—because the chaos is in the air. Which then, of course, reminds us of the Inner Life. It holds out hope.

A Long Footnote to "Property"

One must always remember that to the mind of the Middle Ages a man’s lawful property was an extension of his personality—an exterior body, as it were, and, like that body, a sacred trust to be used and not abused, either by himself or by others.

Thus wrote Dorothy Sayers in her commentary to Dante’s Inferno, Canto XXIV, the first of two that deal with the fate of thieves in hell. To this she added, “This accounts for the severe view which Dante takes of offenses against property.” Sayers had introduced this point in her commentary on Canto XI already, saying at that point:

Property is regarded, in accordance with Roman law, as an extension of the personality. Consequently, to damage or destroy one’s or one’s neighbor’s good is a sin of the same type as the damage and destruction of one’s own or one’s neighbour’s body.

Indeed, this view of property really arises from Natural Law. Not surprisingly, therefore, we find it present in most legal codes, not least in African customary law and in Islamic law. The interesting aspect of this interpretation of property is that, much as in John Locke’s thought, which as simply an updating, in is own time, of natural law thinking, property is linked to the body because it is linked to life. It is an “extension of the person” because the person depends on property in order to make his/her livelihood. Land, cattle and tooling were, together, the foundation of agricultural survival; tools and materials were the extensions of the craftsman without which he could not practice his trade. I would also note that we also experience this extension psychologically—and law recognizes this feeling. The following excerpt from Harmful Thoughts: Essays on Law, Self, and Morality, by Meir Dan-Cohen (Princeton University Press, 2002, p. 217) will illustrate that:

Tort liability often extends beyond the unintended consequences of one’s bodily engagements. The famous tort cases involve escaping water and straying animals, but for our purposes a more mundane example will do. An unexpected wind blows a vase out of my living room, and the vase lands on a passerby’s head. Even if I had not myself placed the vase or been otherwise involved, I would be mortified more intensely than, say, my neighbor, as we both helplessly watch the vase traveling toward the passerby, and I would be expected and inclined to rush to the rescue with greater urgency than any Samaritan who happened on the scene.

Notice first how closely the phenomenology here resembles the win-spilling case [described earlier]: just as bodily involvement was the source of responsibility for the win-spilling, ownership of the vase links me inexorably to the passerby’s injury.

We have here, therefore, a logical basis for property-as-extension-of-body (meaning its economic support functions), a psychological identification because we own something, and a legal recognition of that fact.

Now to this I would add some observations. First, property as an extension of the body for its maintenance made a lot of sense in pre-modern times when property, for the vast majority, was the means of making a living—be it by agriculture or trades. In those days property had a functionally closer association with life than it has today. If we were to bring natural law up to date, to modernize it properly, as Locke was doing for his time, we would include as an intimate core, of the concept of property, that which provides us our actual, continuous source of income—much like a shop-materials-tools or land-cattle-and-implements functioned in medieval and in earlier times. And that functional equivalent would be — our job! But we don’t have a right to jobs. Not like medieval man had to property. If you apply the life-liberty-property slogan to the ordinary modern human, you would see that, in our age, we are actually deprived of one element in this trinity—despite all the endless talk about the sanctity of property.

Worth thinking about.

Life, Liberty, and Property

The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it,that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. [John Locke, Two Treatises of Government]

Locke [1632-1704] is the source of the slogan that heads this post. The words of the slogan are a modification of the quote shown above. In that same book Locke uses much the same phrase three times more. In one case he speaks of “life, liberty, or estate,” in another of “a power…to preserve his property, that is, his life, liberty and estate,” and finally he speaks of “life, liberty, or possessions” again, but this time leaving out health. From this we get Jefferson’s elegant edit in the Declaration of Independence: “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” The modified phrase also appears twice in the U.S. constitution, in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Both prohibit depriving persons of “life, liberty, or property”; in both cases the same qualifying phrase also appears: “without due process of law.”


In thinking about government and rights, Locke relied on natural law doctrines that find their rootings in antiquity. His own intention was to erect rational fences to defend the people against arbitrary government and offered justification for overthrowing rulers who violated natural law.

But natural law also deals with humanity in the collective, thus with communities and states, both of which, it turns out, are necessary features of individual liberty. Collectives also have rights, and these in turn limit individuals rights. Collectives may restrain some to protect others; they may defend themselves and, in the process, cause (at least indirectly) the death of their warriors; and they can require contributions necessary to maintain their activities. Life, liberty, and property, therefore, are not absolute rights but delimited in complex ways when the one and the many must both be accommodated in our thought.

Taxation is not theft. Extreme forms of right-wing thought maintain that it is, but what such advocates demonstrate is their own irrationality. We do have anarchists among us. But when such modes of thought begin to influence the masses, one begins to see the consequence of neglecting or outright banning ethics in school in favor of “social studies.”

See Spot Run

[This is a science-fiction fantasy. Or is it a science-science fantasy?]

Life is like the big red spot on Jupiter. No; I am not kidding. Back forty, fifty years ago, in the seventies and sixties, the scientific consensus was stolidly mechanical. Life was chemical in character. The organic chemicals were being synthesized in labs. It was held then that in due time science would combine them in a tube and life would come wiggling out. That ambition hasn’t been jettisoned exactly; biochemists haven’t simply thrown up their hands and decided that life is some kind of hologrammatical whatsit that cannot be explained; chemistry is still very much in the saddle; but the mood has changed. An excellent, widely-used textbook, its second edition published in 1972, Biology Today, begins with the question, “What is life?” David Kirk, the author, does not provide an answer in so many words. The whole text is the answer. Today’s science would say that life is a dissipative structure like—well, like the big red spot on Jupiter.