animundi
animundi
"I had another feeling, that the earth is like a vibrant living thing. The vessels we've clearly seen on it looked like the blood and veins of human beings. I said to myself: this is the place we live, it's really magical. (Chinese Space Program Astronaut Yang Liu, as cited in Chen, 2012, p. 288) (The Overview Effect: Awe and Self-Transcendent Experience in Space Flight)
"Science considers anthropomorphism toward animals a grave mistake, even a sin. It is common in science to speak of "committing" anthropomorphism. The term originally was religious, referring to the assigning of human form or characteristics to God - the hieriarchal error of acting as though the merely human could be divine - hence the connotation of sin. [...] Just as humans could not be like God, now animals cannot be like humans (note who has taken God's place)." (Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, When Elephants Weep: the Emotional Lives of Animals, 1995)
"What a pitiful, what a sorry thing to have said that animals are machines bereft of understanding and feeling, which perform their operations always in the same way, which learn nothing, perfect nothing, etc.! [...] Is it because I speak to you, that you judge that I have feeling, memory, ideas? Well, I do not speak to you; you see me going home looking disconsolate, seeking a paper anxiously, opening the desk where I remember having shut it, finding it, reading it joyfully. You judge that I have experienced the feeling of distress and that of pleasure, that I have memory and understanding.
"Bring the same judgment to bear on this dog which has lost its master, which has sought him on every road with sorrowful cries, which enters the house agitated, uneasy, which goes down the stairs, up the stairs, from room to room, which at last finds in his study the master it loves, and which shows him its joy by its cries of delight, by its leaps, by its caresses.
"Barbarians seize this dog, which in friendship surpasses man so prodigiously; they nail it on a table, and they dissect it alive in order to show the mesenteric veins. You discover in it all the same organs of feeling that are in yourself. Answer me, machinist, has nature arranged all the means of feeling in this animal, so that it may not feel? has it nerves in order to be impassible? Do not suppose this impertinent contradiction in nature." (Voltaire)
"I believe that life can go on forever. It takes a million years to evolve a new species, ten million for a new genus, one hundred million for a class, a billion for a phylum - and that's usually as far as your imagination goes. In a billion years, it seems, intelligent life might be as different from humans as humans are from insects. But what would happen in another ten billion years? It's utterly impossible to conceive of ourselves changing as drastically as that, over and over again. All you can say is, on that kind of time scale the material form that life would take is completely open. To change from a human being to a cloud may seem a big order, but it's the kind of change you'd expect over billions of years." (Freeman Dyson)
"You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.
"And at one point you'd hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.
"And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.
"And you'll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they'll be comforted to know your energy's still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you're just less orderly. Amen." (Aaron Freeman)
"You cannot get an intelligent organism such as a human being out of an unintelligent universe. So in any lump of rock floating about in space, there is implicit human intelligence. Don't differentiate yourself and standoff against this and say 'I am a living organism in a world made of a lot of dead junk, rocks and stuff.' It all goes together, those rocks are just as much you as your finger nails." (Alan Watts)
"So is there any reason why the universe as a whole should not be considered conscious?
"Okay, I can hear you saying, "That's not proof that the universe is conscious. It's just evidence." But then, as I pointed out earlier, nobody has proof that anyone is conscious other than himself. Just evidence.
"I would say you're on stronger ground assuming that the whole universe is conscious than assuming that an individual is conscious. Ask yourself: Which makes more sense-that conscious human beings gradually emerge over time out of the dynamics of dumb matter; or that a great consciousness articulates itself within particular instances of much smaller consciousnesses, and eventually that of us puny human beings?
"And what makes more sense, a universe where everything just happens to follow the same rules, and no two particles dare be in the same state-even though they have no knowledge of what each other is doing, since they are just dumb particles-
"-or a universe where a single consciousness holds everything in place, as an enormously diverse, thoroughly integrated set of information?" (Tzvi Freeman, The Consciousness Problem from a Jewish Perspective)