Category Archives: Life (phenomenon)

relating to the phenomenon of Life: what it is, what makes it special, as well as what makes it ordinary

Chickadee Explosion

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Chestnut backed chickadee adult tending to a brood in one of my “rustic” nest boxes.

As I’ve brought up before, when contemplating the pros and cons of low infant mortality for humans, chickadees invariably come to mind. Part of the reason for this is that I have made and installed a number of nest boxes tailored for tiny birds. The most frequent tenants during breeding season are chestnut-backed chickadees, but I also get violet-green swallows, red-breasted nuthatches, and less often black-capped chickadees and Bewick’s wrens.

In fact, a recent article in the New York Times—in questioning the overall value of feeding birds in the UK—cites the apparent chick-rearing “success” of one of their chickadee equivalents (blue tit), boosted by bird-feeding practices. The article indicates that the tit’s “success” is upsetting biodiversity by displacing other woodland cavity-nesters, thereby leading to decline and threatening the survival of other species. I had already planned to write a post on a hypothetical chickadee explosion, and this article reinforced that impulse as a real-live case-in-point.

In this post, we’ll explore the absurd consequences that would obtain if medical intervention somehow eliminated fledgling mortality among chickadees, so that all the birds in a brood reached reproductive age. The results become disastrous in a shockingly-short time. Go ahead and make a guess as to how long before chickadees overwhelm the entire Community of Life. I may have biased you already by saying it’s shockingly short. But given that I call the 10,000 year period since agriculture began “a flash” on ecological scales, who knows what I even mean by “short.” Ignoring my characterization, then, what does your intuition say?

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Is Cognition Inherently Dangerous?

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By Andrzej Barabasz (Wikimedia Commons)

Has anyone noticed the blasphemous tendency in my posts to belittle cognition? The position is that brains are imperfect and tiny subsets of the universe that are not remotely up to the task of supplanting time-tested ecologies with cognitive constructs involving agriculture, writing, money, and legal systems. Paraphrasing Frank Egler, it’s not that nature is more complex than we think, but more complex than we are capable of thinking. Brains can’t be expected to fool Mother Nature, in the end.

Does that mean cognition as a whole is ecologically worthless and inherently destructive? Of course not! Lots of creatures—even crickets—rub neurons together to make thought. Moreover, non-neural forms of cognition take place among plants, fungi and microbes to help figure out how to cope with varied situations. These neuron-free beings even learn (see examples of amoebas and plants). Clearly cognition itself is not ecologically disastrous—demonstrating compatible utility over eons. Humans used top-shelf brains for millions of years without precipitating ecological disaster. Yet human brains are also key players in staging the current disastrous path.

How can we tell what sorts of human cognition are safe, then? I propose a metaphorical framing that helps identify when cognition “goes rogue” that I hope will also be useful for others.

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Views: 1306

Dumb Geniuses

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From Archives New Zealand (Wikimedia Commons).

A new video from Ze Frank is out, this time about Geckos. True to form, Frank masterfully illustrates ze genius of other life forms. One amazingly-intricate evolutionary adaptation after another leaves us grasping to make sense of the various superpowers manifesting in the living world. If Ze Frank’s videos don’t leave your mouth agape, there might be something wrong with your jawe (the anatomical feature best suited for expressing awe). I admire his skilled and unabashed use of anthropomorphism to imbue these characters with personality and desire. He’s not wrong, and our culture could use a great deal more appreciation for the shared engagement of all Life.

Now, it does pain me to see the torture that animals are subjected to in laboratory environments just so that we might attempt a deeper understanding. Admittedly, part of my sense of amazement is enhanced by partial scientific understanding of the phenomena. Yet, it would still be possible to put superpowers on display without the clinical Nazi part. As is true for so many things in modernity, the act of scraping some veneer of “good stuff” leaves devastation in its wake. It’s seldom worth it, in the full analysis.

But the main point of this post is to reconcile the genius of microbes, fungi, plants and animals (of which we are part) with their obvious “dumb” qualities as well. To wit: a spider can weave an elaborate web I’d have no hope of replicating, yet when stuck in a sink will repeatedly try—and fail—to climb the steepest wall. Clinging to spider webs for a moment (they’re like that), birds also weave nests using spider webs and other bits of fluff, moss, twigs, spit, and many other seemingly random elements. I know I couldn’t pull it off, even allowed unlimited spit. But a bird in a garage with the door wide-open can exhaust himself trying to fly into the ceiling, never realizing he can fly right out the enormous opening. A honeybee has many jobs in her lifetime: rearing; feeding; storing food; cleaning and maintaining the hive; patrolling and defending; foraging and finding new nest sites—communicating by both dances and chemicals. Yet trying to escape a house, she will bump into a window until she dies—never “getting” the whole glass concept. In the opposite direction, ants innovate in their foraging strategies so that they find ways into (and back out of) a house that would never occur to us—often repeatedly outwitting us as we try to block one route or anther. But their brains are tiny, and they’re not even on social media.

I could go on, of course, but the idea should be clear enough. What I want to briefly explore is this contrast between genius and dumb-as-a-brick (a recent post explored human dumbness). How are both true at once, and how might we, as humans, be both different and basically the same?

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Views: 2450

The Magic of Feedback

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This young macaque learns to employ negative feedback to keep it safe (Image by Anne-Ed C. from Pixabay).

What we don’t or can’t comprehend might be called magic. By this measure, most of the universe is—and always will be—magic. That’s okay. The faith of a materialist monist is that the universe “knows” what it’s doing, and expresses itself in astoundingly diverse ways using an elegantly small number of particle and interaction types: more than compensating via breathtaking emergent complexity. We needn’t grok it all for everything to still work splendidly.

Often, the universe—or an element within it—appears to our naïve eyes to express intent. Organisms seem purposeful. Some aspects of our existence appear to be tuned just-so; self-referential; tautological; teleological. A star perches right on the edge of fusion, sipping its fuel as slowly as it effectively can. Earth finds thermal balance because a 1% departure from normal (absolute) temperature results in a 4% change in the rate of heat loss in the opposite direction (hotter amps up cooling; cooler curtails it substantially). The cell membrane of an egg yolk—or an egg shell, for that matter—is as thick as it needs to be to maintain integrity, but no thicker. Bones are as big as they need to be, and no bigger. Plants and animals tend to exercise sound judgment on the when, where, and how of the actions they take. It’s a world full of Goldilocks scenarios.

The result really is amazing and can easily seem magical. In such cases, ask whether the circular just-so nature might be attributable to feedback, which is also loop-like, and holds more power than is apparent. This post attempts to teach a bit of electronics before returning to how feedback performs effective magic in the real world. While it might seem a diversion, a grasp of feedback in the (much simpler/tidier) electronic domain can bolster appreciation of its power (magic) in the wider world.

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Ditching Dualism #10: Determinism

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This driver is free to do anything with the steering wheel and gas pedal, at any time…or is he, really? (Photo by Szymon Kochański.)

One major hangup in subscribing to a physics-based universe of material monism is that it appears to remove human agency as typically conceived in our culture. If atoms and their interactions are making everything happen, abiding by rules they (or we) cannot violate, is there any room left for human intervention or free will? As obvious as it is to us that we can weigh decisions and do things when/as we want, this disconnect alone is often enough to cause categorical rejection of materialism—retreating instead to the more comforting and self-promoting metaphysics of dualism. This is quite understandable: the notion that physics, not “soul” is the master of all “our” actions is an exceedingly challenging prospect for meat-brains to square—especially when modern language is constructed around first-person ownership of “ourselves” as subjects. Even if able to make intellectual sense of the matter, it’s still a tough pill for anyone to swallow. It sure doesn’t feel right, for what very little that’s actually worth.

Determinism also rubs people wrong in the context of history: suggesting that only one path was available to the present, precluding any potential counterfactual fantasies that are all-too-easy and entertaining to imagine (by leaving out almost the entire, actual universe in meat-brain models). It also might imply to some (erroneously) that humans played no role in shaping events, if there’s only one way said events could have played out.

Many react to determinism with a “then what’s the point, if everything is pre-determined” sort of response (another fallacious framing). Determinism seems to lay out railroad tracks to the future, leaving nothing for us to do. Why even get out of bed, then?

I’ll try to address these issues here. Perhaps I’ve said it all scattered across other posts and comments, but here it is all in one place, with a few new twists and perspectives. Bear in mind that I am presenting (advocating) the case against dualism and for materialist monism. Please forgive the fact that I do not couch every statement with “In the materialist monist view…,” the repeated absence of which may come across as laying claim to ultimate truth, which of course I cannot do.

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Views: 3479

Ditching Dualism #8: Sentience

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These animated little guys know what they’re about: sensing and responding (sentient). Adapted from Wikimedia Commons.

Now we turn to one of the more perplexing aspects of materialism: one that prevents many from abandoning dualist beliefs. How can sentient living beings possibly arise from matter alone? Dualism asserts a sharp ontological divide between animate and inanimate (mind and matter as a parallel aspect), categorically prohibiting animate beings from being wholly composed of inanimate matter. The last post addressed the flaw in characterizing matter as being “inert” in the first place.

But even once past this barrier, our inability to connect all the dots from atoms to conscious experience (which no one has managed to do, and likely never will), strongly tempts us to declare—assuming phantasmic authority—that no such route even could exist, or that failure to map it means it may as well be declared non-existent (a reaction worthy of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast). Where’s the adventure in that?

As an aside, allusion to “phantasmic authority” above may elicit the reflexive charge that advocating materialist monism is an equivalent assertion devoid of authority. Not so fast. Materialist monism amounts to being satisfied that matter/interactions can plausibly form the entire basis of reality even if we don’t understand how. It is in claiming materialism to be insufficient—without evidence—that meat-brains seize more authority than they are due. Materialist monism cedes authority to the universe as we find it, rather than presuming to fabricate comforting alternatives.

Anyway, lacking a complete map, how does materialism deal with our experience as sentient beings, or other sentient life? We find a significant clue in the etymology of sentient. The root word is “sense.”

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Views: 7710

Ditching Dualism #1: Exaltation

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Image by Amore Seymour from Pixabay

By elevating human experience above the remainder of the universe, dualist beliefs can impede efforts to move past modernity—which I believe must end whether we wish it or not. Therefore, it seems important enough to devote some time to the matter. The first question one might ask is: “Am I a dualist?” A crude test involves answering the following questions:

  1. Is matter real (not a creation of mind), obeying physics independent of consciousness?
  2. Is mind/consciousness its own phenomenon, not a product of known matter and physics?

Here’s how I would label the results: Y/N is materialist (like me: mind is matter); N/Y is idealist (mind is everything); Y/Y is dualist (mind and matter separately real), and N/N is too bizarre for me to confront. “Maybe” answers are okay, too, but perhaps this series will result in greater clarity.

The topic of dualism is too important and too stealthily integrated into modern worldviews to be handled in a post of ordinary length. Maybe a book would be better, but I’m going to be lazy and parcel it out as a series of posts. I recognize that what I am attempting is very tricky, and probably insufficient to persuade anybody—we do get set in our beliefs (although I was once a default dualist, and still squirm at some of the implications of abandoning this comfortable, safe, and culturally reinforced position). All the same, I will try to anticipate failure modes and navigate around them before they seize the reader.

The larger effort here benefits from first establishing a starting position before even getting to the main topic of dualism. I hope it helps build a coherent framework, perhaps establishing deep resonance, connection, and trust before trying to extract the toxins. Of course, I may lose some people even in trying to establish a foundation, but I find I’m most interested in building something among those who start off with admiration for the universe we are lucky enough to inhabit. The others may be beyond reach.

The motivation for starting with an exaltation to the living world is mainly that I will ultimately be making the case that we find ourselves in a material universe, and that the only non-dualistic way to take this seriously is to have microbes, fungi, plants, and animals (including humans, of course) be entirely material beings. For many, this elicits distaste over the notion that humans and animals are “just machines,” and thus don’t deserve any more regard than a calculator. This hasty conclusion misses something enormous, and I thought it important to begin by expressing complete admiration for Life (which I even tend to capitalize, mimicking the convention for God). If being “only” material would seem to make a living being worthless, I hope by the end of the series the reader will understand this to be a failure of scope and not at all a necessary conclusion.

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Views: 5912

The Genius of Survival

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Photo by Meldy Tameng (Wikimedia Commons).

By accident, my wife and I stumbled onto the convention of calling essentially every living being a genius. It started as a joke about our cat, because obviously—in our human-supremacist culture—superlative traits like genius can only be applied to humans! Soon enough, this practice migrated to squirrels, newts, baby birds, ants—and even plants, fungi, and microbes. I no longer think of it as a joke.

I’ve utilized this framing in other posts by noting that every one of these beings knows how to do things we haven’t the foggiest clue how to do ourselves—or how, in detail, they manage it. I’ll get to the nuanced nature of the word “know” in a bit. But for now we can at least admit that the world is overflowing with phenomena we haven’t even registered, let alone understood. Typically, we just scratch the surface at best.

What I’ll do here is explore the relative genius of Life as compared to the normal use of the term, in the way of cognitive prowess. Let the games begin!

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Views: 4000

Death as a Nothing-Burger

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Image by LEONSTORETR from Pixabay.

I’ve had two posts in a row about the phenomenon of Life, so it is perhaps fitting to round things out with a post on death. Despite the fact that one cannot enjoy life without the accompaniment of death in its many forms, death is not a suitable subject for polite company in our culture.

Before discontinuing after a few episodes (due to excessive violence), my wife and I started watching the American Primeval show on Netflix. One scene contrasted most members of modernity who—when threatened by Native Americans—blubber and shriek at the prospect of death against one rare individual who showed no fear. While not explicit on this point, I could believe the Native Americans would perceive most members of modernity as being infantilized, pampered, useless, “full-grown children” who had not learned to accept the reality of life—including its requisite, ubiquitous mortality. Or, is that just me, projecting?

Fear of death pervades our culture: many among us cringe at its mention, and indeed structure whole lives around elaborate stories of denial: we can’t really ever be dead, surely!

It’s understandable: having never experienced death ourselves, our brains have no point of contact and cannot conceive what it is like. The vacuum begs to be filled by any fanciful notion that displaces fear of the great unknown.

But, I’ll make a point that many of us actually have experienced something close enough to death to be surprisingly informative. In another sense, all of us have “experienced” our own death state. I’ll explore these “experiences” and why I believe they tell us almost everything we need to know about the state of death. Indeed: if we’re open to observation, we actually already possess a highly probable sense of what happens after we die! As far as I can tell, it turns out to be a nothing-burger—which can be either disappointing or relieving (or just “whatever”) depending on perspective.

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Views: 5575

What is Life?

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By Conselleria de Medi Ambient, from Wikimedia Commons.

No doubt about it: Life is truly amazing. I mean, the things it gets up to far exceed our imaginations! (Just watch a few dozen Ze Frank “True Facts” videos to scratch the surface.) It hardly seems necessary to invest in a post to elucidate what constitutes Life, when a small child will correctly identify instances almost every time. Living beings demonstrate awareness about their surroundings, taking actions broadly in service of goals to thrive and reproduce. An amoeba marks itself as alive because we witness its purposeful mobility to secure food and evade danger.

Yet, living beings are undeniably made of atoms—atoms that do not appear in any close investigation to operate outside the usual rules of physics. Our sensation of awareness, experience of color perception, etc. seems so far removed from physics that the intractable connection is obvious to neither child nor adult. How could this awareness (what we label “consciousness”) possibly arise out of inanimate particles obeying physics without some “special sauce” unavailable to mere “machines” like computers or robots? It seems prima facie absurd, so it requires an unusual suspension of disbelief to submit to the baffling prospect.

How is it even possible, though, that inanimate matter can constitute Life? In a word: feedback. Life is feedback. The sun is of huge importance to Life, but we would not say that it is alive itself even though it actively engages with the universe and is a critical contributor to living beings on Earth. It’s continuance as a star is not contingent on these interactions. No feedback loop makes fusion in the core care what happens in Las Vegas. As an aside, I resist dividing lines and include the Sun (and everything else) in a living whole: just try doing without it!

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