Tag: physical

“Love Exists at All Levels, at the Physical Level it is Gravity.”

December 26, 2024

“Zeus had changed into Eros when about to create,” writes the early Greek thinker Pherecydes, and, “having composed the world from the opposites, he led it into agreement and peace and sowed sameness in all things, and unity that interpenetrates the universe.”

“It is an arresting image, Lord, Zeus changing into Eros in order to bring opposites into a unity.  Was Pherecydes inspired?”

No, he was not inspired.  The particular passage is insightful, however.  It reflects the dynamic in the universe, in being, the dialectic of otherness and sameness.  There is sameness in all things and I put it there.  It is equivalent to order.  Otherwise things would fall apart.  A similar image is centripetal and centrifugal—there need to be forces of attraction and forces of repulsion.

“I understand that, if the gravitational pull were just slightly stronger, all the galaxies would collapse into a single lump.  And, if it were the slightest bit weaker, nothing would hold together.  Lord, could gravity, if this makes sense, be a kind of love or an expression of love?”

Yes, love exists at all levels, just as spirit or soul exists at all levels.  At the physical level, it is things like gravity.  At the level of human personality, it is integrity; it is the “transcendental unity of apperception” for consciousness (personality).  It is institutions and mores for society, balance and harmony for art, and so forth.

molecules

“The First Glimmer is Found in the Lowest Molecules.”

December 12, 2024

Consciousness developed very slowly.  The first glimmer is found in the lowest molecules, in their ability to interact with, to respond to, their environment.  Whitehead and Teilhard are on the right track in this regard.  (Leibniz is not.)

I had to look again at these thinkers to see what God was getting at.  Rejecting the mind-nature dualism, the twentieth-century philosopher-mathematician Alfred North Whitehead held that, even at the micro level, every event is a pulse of existence, feeling and responding to its environment.  These “prehensions” are not so much states as vectors, arrows pointing to connections with the surrounding world.  The Jesuit scientist-philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin spoke of the “within” of things, their interiority, which “appears at the heart of beings”:  “Co-extensive with their Without, there is a Within to things.”  In every part of the universe, “the exterior world must inevitably be lined at every point with an interior one.”  By contrast, the seventeenth century philosopher-mathematician G.W. Leibniz believed that everything in the universe was made of elementary particles that were not matter or energy, but minds, centers of consciousness, each of which internally mirrors all the others.  In short, Whitehead and Teilhard believed that physical (or psycho-physical) nature has levels of awareness—and they were on the right track—whereas Leibniz held that there is no physical nature other than points of consciousness.

As God went on, He sounded a lot like Teilhard.

What happens is that reactions have an internal dimension—responding to the environment, the molecule begins rearranging its internal parts and configurations and processes.  This is the beginning of interiority.  Ultimately, interiority involves the second-order process of monitoring and directing inner processes.  But, even at the beginning, prior to the emergence of second-order processes, there is an emerging consciousness.  To be conscious is not the same as and does not require self-consciousness.  It can be very dim and limited and still be consciousness, because something new and remarkable has arisen—the pre-sentient and then sentient awareness of the environment.  Don’t worry at this point about what is meant by “pre-sentient” awareness.  Your understanding is necessarily anthropocentric, using human consciousness as the standard by which to understand all forms of consciousness.