We face a world which is threatened not only with disorganization of many kinds, but also with the destruction of its environment, and we, today, are still unable to think clearly about the relations between an organism and its environment. What sort of a thing is this, which we call ‘organism plus environment?' -- Gregory Bateson
Since the question was asked in the 1960s, evidence has continued to accrue that organisms are dissipative structures ("me") made up of dissipative structures (organs, tissues, cells, biosyntheses, gut bacteria) and also constitutive of dissipative structures (families, tribes, cities, nation-states, ecosystems, biospheres).
All these accumulate matter and energy for reproduction at their constrained scales (negentropy), and all continually drop crumbs down their shirt fronts (entropy).
You can "rewind" a video or movie but you can't rewind life; there are no prior frames except in the form of constructs in your brain, running on the electrical potential between synapses.
Likewise, you can't fast-forward. There's no "there" to jump to.
Everyone you meet is already, in a sense, dying; you encounter them in the now on an arc of motion: the energy they accumulate, perhaps while having lunch with you, also dissipates; and it's eventually going to dissipate at a greater rate than their capacity to maintain stasis.
And then there's a corpse, and it too begins immediately to disincorporate.
We have, to a greater or lesser degree, an impulse to live forever; but DNA's brief does not support that.
It jumps to new substrate, beginning from a single conjoined cell in each instance, and leaves prior generations like so many bugs on a windshield.
Looking at it this way, we might conclude that DNA, not us as organisms, is what's alive.
Carl Sagan was inclined to suspect so, though in summarizing the available evidence he left the question open in a way that suggests it can be tested:
It is not known whether open-system thermodynamic processes in the absence of replication are capable of leading to the sorts of complexity that characterize biological systems.
That said, here we are, replicating, accumulating, dissipating, and, while doing these things, possibly mostly hallucinating.
The hallucinating appears to be built in, one of DNA's strategies for protecting itself by giving us consciousness, an interplay of hormones and synaptical storage that statistically safeguards our reproduction rate.
If we find all this disheartening, well, it's where we are in the game, so to speak. Religions in general tend to deny all of the above, by doubling down on the hallucinating: play the game this way (insert doctrines and commandments) and thermodynamics will no longer apply to you (insert version of Heaven).
Or don't, and we'll ply your ghost with clubs and matches (Hell).
Sagan's job was to prepare us to defend scientific method, the ground of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, against profiteers who, while themselves beneficiaries of the "modern miracles" of flight and laser surgery, nevertheless would, in search of bigger profit margins, upend the ballot boxes in favor of a return to medieval hierarchy -- God, angels, masculine rich men, and the rest of us, who can look forward to bullying maybe the family dog at best -- a hierarchy threatened by the discovery, which science could hardly eventually shirk, that everything is exactly equal in "intrinsic" value and utility to everything else in an interpenetrating and cyclical universe.
And Sagan was among those who had noted that neo-Darwinism, propped up as the justification of sociopathic rich men in their hyper-accumulative and hyper-dissipative activities, was flawed.
Lynn Margulis, who was married to him at one time, had found evidence of symbiosis as the origin of eukaryotic cells, work that was resisted for decades within the scientific community, much of which had fallen under the spell of the rugged individualism of neo-Darwinists and their boosters among the profit-minded.
If every living thing is made up of tiny cooperatives, what implications might that have for the model we are now living under, of maximized exploitation within a finite ecosystem?
Even the not-very-rich, embedded in economic structures created by and for the very rich, defend the structures vociferously when nature's networks are shown to be at least as cooperative as competitive. When Suzanne Simard merely found that birch and Douglas firs were sending carbon back and forth, it was enough to end her career with the governmental agency that employed her at the time.
It is easy at this point for us, contemplating the effects of the activities of the very rich, to become angry at the state of the world and angry with those we have identified as the principal actors. Motivated by such anger, many become active in seeking out and applying strategems for opposing the rich, from boycotts to revolutions.
We can see from the history of applied Marxism in the twentieth century that the cure can be equivalent to or worse than the disease, taking into consideration the usual measures of human misery and environmental degradation. One might cogently observe that these revolutions and their subsequent political evolutions show evidence of a reversion to authoritarianism linked to the protected well-being of the authoritarians and their families and friends, much the same as the conditions that had engendered the revolutions.
Greed, anger and delusion are not the peculiar province of the rich. They are endemic to all, and come to a boil when we too, impelled by impulses instinctive to us, subsequently become the rich, or at least those ensnared by the leavings of the rich..
I have some sympathy for us all. We're born dupes -- The process of replication that we call life has, in all living beings, its own project, and requires of us that we cooperate by being deluded as to our individual aims in life, reaching greedily for resources to further those aims, and angrily defending those resources from others who appear to be reaching for them. We're mightily stressed by all this. Is there a way out of what we may reasonably describe as our plight?
This is where Buddha comes in. Having seen the old, the sick and the dying, he gives up his possessions, his relationships and his United Health Insurance policy and heads for the hills, making his clothing from rags pilfered from a dump in a cemetery. Correctly surmising that the fourth sight -- a self-denying sadhu -- harbors a clue to a cogent reaction to his distress, he nearly starves himself to death, and then realizes one cogent reaction need not be the only cogent reaction. There's no need to stop eating. There's only a need to stop eating greedily. There's no need to snub society. There's only a need not to react to the foibles of others angrily. There's no need to tilt at the windmills of delusion. There's only a need to refrain from behaving in a deluded manner.
"The Way is actually very easy," declares the author of the Xinxin Ming. "Just fail to have any preferences."
Ha-ha-ha, we reply and skip down to the, mostly, to us, incomprehensible verses that follow, looking for an out.
-- shonin
(To be continued)