Thought you all might get something out of this: I’m not so familiar with some of these concepts, so this is more of me trying to understand them for the first time than an attempt to relate something that I think I’ve already made sense of, so please excuse any gross misunderstandings.
Reproduction can be thought of as a strategy for cheating entropy. It’s a way of accumulating invariance over time through variation and accumulating variation through invariance across space. Something ‘improbable’ like a species of cat can have it’s definition of catness extended (or feline phenomes) through variations on it’s theme. Something like a rock is relatively probable so it’s ubiquity literally compensates for it’s lack of evolution. Reproduction is a way for improbable structures to sustain their essential qualities as a bulwark (or bastion) against the waveform cancellation of entropy. This is the engine of significance itself. Going back to my etymological riffs on wag and wegh, there is a notion of motion which cancels itself out (by waving, weaving, wagging, or rocking back and forth) verses energy that nets some sort of forward progress. Wegh - to move along a path or road, to weigh as in carry something down a path, also to wake or watch, to attend, which relates to tend and tendon, nerve and fiber. There is an amazing thread (also a fiber) in here which unites the literal mechanics of electromagnetic frequency and power with figurative experiential dynamics - relaxing to sleep (rocking the cradle) versus a sort of pulling oneself together to become aware (waking up). There is a relation here of one to many (relaxation into sensory ambiguity and self annihilation) and many to one (contracting the oneself into a coherent and telegraphically self propelled motive. You figure out what you need to do and in what order. You attend to things. You watch and worry. You carry this burden of significance, the investment of a lifetime into action in the now. If you have a quantum wave function by itself, half of it’s possible states cancel out the other half (is that sort of right?). When you have multiple quantum wave functions, you have possibilities of unequal probabilities, as each waveform interacts with the others such that they share overlapping commonalities and do not share other underlapping possibilites. The intersection of possible states constrains a probability set to a finite value within that set, the so called waveform collapse, which makes the difference between unrealized probability (or superposition) and realization. Maybe the process of narrowing a range of possibility to a range of probability is the figurative extension or ‘potential energy’ of the literal realization, which would be what we call kinetic energy or ‘a change event perceived as ‘happening’ now’. Somehow this all has to do with differential vs integral calculus and the one to many vs many to one. Sensory input pulls wholes from the holes - that is, it qualitatively extracts one (rich, deep, complex) gestalt experience at a time from many quantitatively separate experiences, thus compressing events and leapfrogging the spatiotemporal separations between them. It pulls together our world. Motive output pushes holes through the whole. It exploits possibilities and chooses how and when to project energy in the form of effort or work; power. It compresses the sense of the self and it’s relation to it’s niche to yield a productive force for the interests of the self, or that which qualifies as significant to the self. What is left uncancelled after quantum waveforms collide again and again represents a sequence of invariance - a souvenir or record of the string of events which survived the whips and scorns of time; the life that has cheated death. Rocks don’t play the death game, so they never accumulate the same kind of significance that living organisms do. Biology accumulates significance more effectively because it submits itself again and again to extinction. Extinction of the individual self and the species. It takes a risk and the survivors get the reward (or suffer the consequences of having their significance devalued by the competitors) Evolution then is how significance compensates for an improbable event to even out the playing field against the entropic negation of the probable. Evolution is the method of significance and significance is the purpose of evolution - but they are not the same thing. Evolution is a passive teleonomy of circumstance. Chance and mutation. Meaningless clots in the stream of entropy. Significance is the victorious feeling of life over death, signal over noise, good over evil, quality over quantity, rebels over empire, and on and on. It is the growth of subjective, sensorimotive perception over ‘time’. This defines what life or consciousness is as much as any objective measure of reproduction or energy seeking, although reproduction is of course the primary strategy of achieving significance, but it does so by flooding the market with insignificance as well. Extinction can come through collapse of an ecological niche driven by reproductive success too, so it’s a double edged sword. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
