I’ve always wanted to know. On a sub-cellular level. Does all the shit you’re made of have a mind of it’s own?
Do your mitochondria intelligently say “I better synthesize some ATP for my cell to function!”?
Do your ribosomes think to themselves, “I better read this RNA and make some fuckin’ acid chains!”?
Or is it all just profound, extremely complicated chemical reactions? What is the driving force?
I don’t get it ;_;
No. On that level it’s just a lot of chemical reactions running nearly automatically. The enzimes help making it more organized (though at the expense of energy), but there is no intelligent design running them.
If that’s the case, then I can only assume that the soul DOES exist. The more I learn about science, the more and more faith I have in religion. It’s hillarious to think that most people presume them to be opposing forces.
Yeah, as far I can tell, there’s no reason for us to be “Alive” as opposed to a rock which isn’t beyond a soul. Although I suppose a rock could technically have a conciousness which is just too slow for us to comprehend.
Each cell is programed for what it is supposed to do!
Rocks do have minds. Take Hades for an example.
Hades just got SERVED. But seriously, if there is “Program cell death” why can’t there “Program cell function” or something.
Why can’t there, or why can’t there be?
MAKE SENSE.
I was just talking to someone about this, how there has to be some sort of spark that separates “life” from mere matter.
The complex nature of cells themselves just doesn’t cut it for me. That alone isn’t life, it’s just chemicals.
Perhaps the world is a creature, and we’re all cells on it? Why do people care so much for the environment so?
Pretty much. Cells perform the actions they are meant for because of the chemical reactions.
As for rocks, go read Life’s Rocky Start, an article in Scientific American. Search in their site, it was published a few years ago. Although rocks are not alive, crystals may have catalysed some of the chemical reactions that gave origin to us.
As for the science-religion paradox, it’s understandable. Most of the greatest scientists feel or felt the same. Einstein and Newton were very religious. Stephen Hawkings, I believe he is agnostic; he once said that maybe we will have to accept the universe as created by God someday. Not as creationism preaches, as for Hawkings, God or whatever the powers-that-be are would only have made the Big Bang (or pre-big bang), with things going automatic from then on. That is because answering where the universe came from is tricky. Even if we find a starting point, there is always the question “and what came before this starting point we found?”. Something must have created our universe, and then this something must have been created by something else, and so on infinitely. But this goes against scientific logic.
Actuallly, over the summer me and some people I met in a writers were discussing this. I came to the conclusion that their must be a soul because we are otherwise just made of non-living, non-concious particles. As far as I know, the serious meaning of life, is life.
And as for the God/Creator thing, it doesn’t necassarily have to have something preceding. It created the universe and therefore the rules which govern it, therefore it does not have to abide by them.
No, it’s 42.
Actually, you could see a human mind as a fantastically developed A.I. running on organical hardware if you wish to go skeptical. This does not exclude the existence of soul. Take mysticism out of it, and the soul is an abstraction of this A.I.
Since the universe is made of information when you go down to the smallest levels of matter, it is pretty possible that we live in a hologram universe. This is an hypothesis produced by Hawkings too. Our shapes are just illusions, the real us have no shape. One could interpret that real, shapeless self as soul.
Then why do we see ourselves as humans, if we have no shape? Wouldn’t we know we have no shape, instead of knowing we’re human.
Sounds like the Matirx digital-image thing. Meh, could be. We don’t know, we can’t know, we can only make our own choices. That’s what I believe.
I take the blue pill.
Isn’t this Platon’s Metaphysics theory? The existence of a spiritual (superior) “model” of a being that allows said being to manifest on the material (inferior) plane?
Setz: to make it simple, think of a videogame. You see the characters as they are drawn, but the reality is that each character is only a group of 0’s and 1’s being processed by a computer. With reality it is something analogue to that.
SE: bull’s eye.
Very complex chemical reactions as “life” does cut it for me. It seems egotistic to assume something vague, undefined, “divine” as the driving force behind us.