Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

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Do you ever get the impression that the people trying to get our money all the time are the same people feeding us news stories?

No matter how much we understand about the universe, no one could have ever predicted the rise of life from among randomly mixing chemicals, or the emergence of written language among ancient Mesopotamian miners, or the invention of the computer from thousands of interacting vacuum tubes. What lies ahead of us then just over the horizon that we cannot even imagine? What revolutionary new idea will spark forth and take over our world again, totally transforming it forever? Some say it is AI. But what if it's something else? Something we never suspected at all?

Of all the colors red is the boldest and most bodacious of all of them. It always knows how to make an entrance, shocking us with its vivid presence. From blood to burning coals to vivid sunsets, if red were a sound it would be the sudden guffaw of a strong young man. Everyone respectfully pulls over for the flashing siren. Everyone stops for the bold-fonted stop sign. Red is an attention grabber, beautifying the lips of the seductive starlet. Highlighting the plumage of the seldom-seen cardinal. Seducing us with its glare amongst the leafy fruit trees. Red is brave and passionate and strong. Embrace its every rare appearance.

Addendum:

Some point out that yellow may have replaced red over the years. It is not so. Yellow is red's kind and cheery though sometimes manic sister. She steals attention too, but won't if red is around showing off. There are rumors she and red had an incestuous baby together some time ago named orange that hardly anybody likes. But he DOES seem to attract fast food customers and traffic construction workers and certain seasonal gourd farmers..

There is nothing really magical or supernatural about being invisible. Gravity is invisible, and yet is as there as anything else. Our minds are invisible. The person I am and am always referring to is invisible. A ghost is no less "there" for being invisible. It is only camoflauged as any thing that is transparent in a transparent medium would be. We cannot see the ghost for all the other things we are not seeing. Regardless of its particular manner of unseeability, the ghost just naturally blends in with the unseeability of space itself.

I love trees. Maple, douglas fir, pine, birch, cherry, and oak. Here in Oregon I'm surrounded by them. Of all living species on earth they are one of the most successful at surviving and reproducing, numbering by recent counts at 3.04 trillion. And they do this entirely without brains, without sentience, and without even moving around. This somehow gives me hope for our own planet. Life in the end really doesn't depend on us at all, and will go on morphing and evolving long after we've gone extinct. We were just along for the ride.

(Nov 3, 2025 10:21 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ]I love trees. Maple, douglas fir, pine, birch, cherry, and oak. Here in Oregon I'm surrounded by them. Of all living species on earth they are one of the most successful at surviving and reproducing, numbering by recent counts at 3.04 trillion. And they do this entirely without brains, without sentience, and without even moving around. This somehow gives me hope for our own planet. Life in the end really doesn't depend on us at all, and will go on morphing and evolving long after we've gone extinct. We were just along for the ride.

Maybe an applicable metaphor for the material universe in general. The latter has no representations and manifestations of itself as anything (mindless like the tree), but still organizes in the dark. Mechanistic detections (repulsions and attractions) and quasi-systematic response to those interactions replace experiential consciousness and concepts. OTOH, the tree has guiding genetic instructions (precursor of memory) and higher level "preferences" that eventually result (like striving to collect sunlight). So it's closer to "intellect" than the cosmos at large. The backbone of biological intelligence is information storage (for identifying and understanding) and non-neutrality (preferences, favoritism, discrimination).

The ancient legacy of the trees is inscribed in our own bodies, a reminder of when we lived and flourished in their leafy heights. The branch-grasping prehensile hands. The chromatic sensitivity of our eyes to bright colors. Bipedalism to enable reaching for fruit on far branches. Binocular vision to discern distances between branches. The inborn fear of falling. The stored energy of glucose obtained from the tree's fruits and nuts. The respiration of its life-giving oxygen. Even when we descended from the trees we still used them to build shelters and boats and ships and furniture and fences and eventually mansions in the treeless suburbs. It is no wonder that ancient mythologies seem to often involve trees, like the tree of knowledge of good and evil in Genesis, Yggdrasil or the world tree of Nordic myth, the Garden of Hesperides in Greek mythology, and the sheltering bodhi tree over the enlightened Buddha. As Nietzsche says: "Man is a hybrid of plant and ghost."

Quote:Maybe an applicable metaphor for the material universe in general. The latter has no representations and manifestations of itself as anything (mindless like the tree), but still organizes in the dark. Mechanistic detections (repulsions and attractions) and quasi-systematic response to those interactions replace experiential consciousness and concepts. OTOH, the tree has guiding genetic instructions (precursor of memory) and higher level "preferences" that eventually result (like striving to collect sunlight). So it's closer to "intellect" than the cosmos at large. The backbone of biological intelligence is information storage (for identifying and understanding) and non-neutrality (preferences, favoritism, discrimination).

I have come around to the belief that there is a level of subjectivity in everything, including trees. The mere fact that we posit a tree as something that events happen to and that responds to these events to me entails an experiential state of being. We call it time and quickly dismiss it as the abstract passage of empty moments. But I believe this flow of everything is a fundamental METAphysical substrate of everything. It is the constant coming to be and fading away of becoming itself, manifested in the billions of forms of life and even non-life things like crystals and water and energy. If it were all darkness inside the tree, there would be no sense in understanding it as a passive subject of this flow of becoming. Of something other than mere nothingness going on that actively instantiates it as real and in itself. And while this subjectivity may not represent itself to itself in a state of consciousness, it nevertheless actively participates in its own becoming thru the processes that make it what it is. We ourselves share in this unconscious yet experiential level of becoming in our own unconscious psyche, accessing and processing the wealth of information embedded in our very cells and DNA. There is in the end no possibility of information transfer apart from some level of mind able to receive and process that information. Intelligence is hardwired into Being itself.

Never underestimate what can come out of just playing around with words, either thru writing or thru conversation. There is unbounded potential for creativity and enlightenment from this game of rearranging words and ideas just for the fun of it. Look what happened when Shakespeare played around with words all day, or Isaac Newton, or Immanuel Kant. Wholly new and exciting worlds lie dormant in exploring whatever can be sensibly said and thought out. If anything can be said or imagined, it can also be true, perhaps for the very first time!

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Some ideas are so powerful that their mere possibility of being true is enough reason to believe in them and hold them dear to our hearts. Democracy was and is one such idea. Life after death is another..