“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, January 23, 2014

Life Intrinsic to Things

Some forms of theism think of life as a highly contingent miracle.

Some forms of materialism (quite a lot) think exactly the same. What mostly exists is “dead matter” (Meillassoux's phrase, and of course Brassier et al.) such that life is a highly contingent affair.

But this theory says something very different.

In essence, life is an essential feature of a reality in which things are quantized. And thus subject to probabilistic rather than mechanical causality. A young physicist takes on Schrödinger's (“What Is Life?”) mantle.

Thanks Dirk!

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