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David Macy wrote: if I were
going to attempt to manifest an organism from 'scratch', --then I
would/could probably do it first via the manifestation of
community/ecology.
OK. How? If you can't use the soma of a living organism for the basis of
your manifestation, then how would/could you go about it?
See, science has been actively trying to achieve this for
ages, and in the past 5 decades or so has had some formidable technology at
its disposal to throw at the problem. Genetic engineering doesn't count as
creation of life, in my view. Instead, I would characterize it as
manipulation of life. The primordial soup kitchens are working more at
the ontological, pre-life level, but they don't know what they're doing in
terms of "creation" other than trying to arrive at the same happy
accident, by putting what they suspect are the same ingredients together in
the same proximity under the same conditions, and waiting... and watching. When
it doesn't happen, they tweak the soup recipe, but all that the failed
attempts to date have taught us is what doesn't work. Humanity is
groping at this problem, piecemeal, without any kind of underlying vision of
what would entail success. They hope that if they can provoke or
trigger the same "accident" (self-organization of a living organism), then
by watching it happen, they'll be in a better position to assess what "it"
is. But RR suggested that this kind of self-organization isn't accidental,
it's entailed. By learning about the entailment patterns in complex systems, we
will ultimately learn why and how different patterns of organization entail
corresponding characteristic behavior patterns.
It seems to me that if life in the organismal sense were due
purely to environmental factors, the primordial soup experiments would have
succeeded. Not only that, but living systems would be abundant in this solar
system, just as they would be all over the universe. It would be every bit as
crowded as it seems in Star Trek: Bipeds everywhere, which can interbreed and
everything! So, why is it not like that? Complexity is rampant in the universe
and in our solar system; that much we can all probably agree on. But life as it
exists in Earth organisms appears to be rare, as far as we can tell--
at least in our planet's neighborhood. In other words, while there are
environments aplenty on all the planets orbiting our sun, there are only
ecosystems on Earth. Why?
How can there be a community of life if there are no organisms? To
me, that's like saying we can have a forest before we have trees.
Judith
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