Stayin' Alive

If science is about the measurement and quantification of physical things, then what exactly is a species? A dog is a physical thing, but what about dog? What about mammal, or reptile, or tree, or star, or planet? Yes, we can see and measure individual dogs, snakes, elms, stars, trees, and we can see that these individual entities share certain features that distinguish them from other types of entities. Although individual dogs vary enormously in size, colour, shape, and many other characteristics, they all have other very definite things in common. Likewise any other class of things we can think of. And while it is certainly possible to reduce any given dog to its constituent components, whether to bones, fur, DNA, or atoms, it is clear that the generality 'dog' has no physical being whatsoever and is neither measurable nor perceptible to the senses. It is a concept, but a concept that manifests itself in physical things, as if some sort of invisible template lurks in the empyrean, a higher plane of existence than ours from which all individual things on earth are created.
Most of Plato's dialogs take place between Socrates and his friends, and for the most part his friends are pretty dumb. But in the Parmenides dialog Socrates defers to the older man. It's not an easy dialog to read, all about the logical problems associated with proving the existence of The One versus the Many. I take these terms to mean God and matter, and the discussion is interesting to me because the argument is based on logical reasoning, not as with modern scientific atheists on the evidence of the senses. The most stunning statement Parmenides makes is that The One is completely unaware of the created world.
The article on Parmenides in The Big View website states his view that, "...the senses deceive us and hence, our perception of the world does not reflect the world as it really is. Instead, the real world is something above our apprehension and can only be apprehended through logic." Phenomenologists have a similar analysis.
Not much of Parmenides' own writings survive. In them he seems preoccupied with proving the universe to be fundamentally one single thing. The reasoning is hard to follow and it's hard to be sure what he really meant, but Socrates/Plato was inspired by the problems presented by Parmenides' theory to make a dialog out of it where Socrates was left speechless. When he thought about these problems he wanted to "...run away, because I am afraid I might fall into a bottomless pit of nonsense, and perish..." I can sympathize.
When studying the physical world- plate tectonics, brownian motion, harmonics, levers or whatever, it's difficult enough. What does it all mean? Beyond a certain complexity calculations quickly become insoluble. Climatologists still can't predict the next day's weather. Newton's laws accurately describe the orbit of Mars around the sun, but the swarm of asteroids between Jupiter and Mars is a different thing, and the vast quantity of bodies outside the orbits of the planets are even more inscrutable. To tell the truth, as marvelous as the discoveries in physics have been, they only illuminate the simplest of phenomena. Nevertheless, the processes are pretty well understood. There may be a multitude of things to study, but one salient feature stands out: there is order in the universe. Things work the same on earth as in the stars. As far out as we can extend our perceptions, the same laws are observed.
And isn't it astounding that no matter how great the distance there is always something more. No matter what the scale there is always something larger, and there is always structure, order, form. The same is true when we look inward to the small. Only a few centuries ago scientists turned the lens from looking into the distance to looking at the tiny things found in a drop of pond water. And now we are able to show images on the molecular scale. Again, no matter how closely we look we find order, structure and form.
Since the onset of the scientific age we have accumulated more information than any one person can possibly absorb. Arcane theories of relativity and quantum mechanics unintelligible to the average person nevertheless make possible many of the technological marvels we have come to take for granted. But have we advanced in our understanding of the meaning behind these complex theories and what does all this information tell us about ourselves? How do we dig ourselves out from under this avalanche?
Maybe we could start by thinking about how living things differ from the inanimate things that are more amenable to scientific reasoning, more predictable in response to stimuli. Darwinists and geneticists have been determined to fit their theories ov evolution and inheritance into the same theoretical frameworks that have been so successful in the physical sciences. But the facts don't fit the theory.
This is the one fact I aam speaking of: living things behave in fundamentally different ways than inanimate things. Living things have volition. No matter how small or simple the organism, it has preferences. Unlike you or I, a rock would be indifferent to being unable to move at the bottom of a ditch filling with water.
Being alive is actually a great deal of trouble, with far more opportunities to experience pain than joy, and staying alive is an unrelenting struggle. Why do we put up with it? Albert Camus thought it was the only question that mattered.

Love and sex

"Every sensation, he says, is devoid of reason and incapable of memory; for neither is it self-caused nor, regarded as having an external cause, can it add anything thereto or take anything therefrom," is how Epicurus states his case. At first glance it seems to be true. "Hence it is from plain facts that we must draw inferences from the unknown...All our notions are derived from perceptions with some slight help from reasoning." These perceptions produce movements in the mind, or as logical positivists would have it, mind is a property of matter. Frankly, I think this formulation is a rather astounding claim for matter, but never mind. Since sensations are primary, it only follows that they are 'good,' and thus pleasure is logically the goal of living. Because it also follows from his logic that the objects of our perceptions (including our bodies) are the only realities, therefore at death our bodies revert to those minuscule, indestructible atoms, and the you that was vanishes like a puff of smoke.
Plato wasn't so sure that pleasure and sensation could be equated with good. "He who is the victim of his passions and the slave of pleasure will of course desire to make his beloved as agreeable to himself as possible," he expounded in the Phaedrus dialog. In other words when pleasure is equated with love, the lover will seek to dominate the beloved for the sake of the pleasure he derives from the beloved. Neither did he think that reality was reducible to matter: "The soul through all her being is immortal..." "...Only the self-moving, never leaving self, never ceases to move and is the fountain and beginning of motion to all that moves besides." For Epicurus the key to understanding the universe was matter, and for Plato it was energy...which he called the Psyche.
Noun and verb, as if you could have one without the other. Yet, in both philosophy and common belief, these are the two warring factions. Entire eras of our history can be defined in terms of these contrasting views. For many centuries Platonism ruled. It was made to order for the Christian era, without which that immense thought-structure could have had no logical justification. But in the last few centuries the ghost of Epicurus has seemingly vanquished Plato to the attic, along with old clocks, broken toys, 386 computers and all other outmoded items.
The dialectic even filters down to how Valentine's day is commemorated. In the bookstore last week two tables devoted to the occasion were set up so that you almost stumbled over them as you went through the entry. This is called marketing, but what was being marketed? Sex. Pleasure. The senses. One title I remember was "The Loin King." Ha ha. A book of sex coupons flanked it, illustrated editions of the Kama Sutra a little further down, etc. Nothing at all about love, unless you think that love is just a wishy washy synonym for sex. Curiously, the rear of the table is taken up with tomes of advice for losing weight. Because obviously if you are fat you're not going to do very well at the local pick up bar. So what happened to Valentines that used to promise love eternal, and yours alone? Why, these sentiments depend on an awareness of something nobler and higher than mere sex, something unexplainable in terms of the here and now, something that only makes sense if you believe in a transcendental constituent in the human make up: an immortal soul; something like what Plato tried to envision.
I'm not trying to make this into a diatribe on the morality of promiscuous sex. I would like instead to learn if there can be such a thing as morality, or honour, or love, or if these ideas really exist apart from the physicality of being. These are really tough questions, and they aren't just of academic interest as the Valentine's Day display showed. What we believe has a profound affect on how we organize our communities and how we live our individual private lives. For the most part, the general consensus since the 19 century has been that truth is only to be found in physical causes so that when a science of psychology was pioneered, the mind was entirely ignored. A generation of behavioral psychologists pretended it didn't exist, a philosophy that was made to order for the nazis and the bolsheviks. Observation of behavior was expected to reveal all. As the study of genetics advanced behaviorism of the whole creature was superseded by the study of the behaviors of certain complex carbon-based molecules. There is no doubt at all among geneticists that all behaviors of living things can be explained through DNA.
I don't mean in any way to disparage the work of geneticists, with one major caveat. They want to believe life can be treated like any other scientific concept. That's why an embryo is nothing more to them than a mass of inert tissue to be poked and prodded, experimented on, and disposed of just like any other chemical broth. In molecular biology scientists have found their own atomism and have joined the ranks of nuclear physicists as hard scientists. The knowledge they have added to our civilizational bank is immense. But I think that in contemplating the mystery of life and consciousness that we are led to an entirely different conclusion. Living things are not mere assemblages of chemical constituents. Life is different. And maybe by contemplating these mysteries of life and consciousness we might end up discovering entirely new worlds of thought and understanding, maybe even new science. And it amazes me that Plato and Parmenides discerned the implications of these questions over 2000 years ago. I think the careful observations of generations of students since then has only added to the mystery because they do not point to a materialistic origin of being.