Additionally, if all matter has some level of awareness, then there is no such thing as dead matter.
Sorry if I'm not using this quote/response thing correctly. I'm hoping this views as a reply to A Jay because that was the most articulate and insightful presentation of the subject I've ever seen. I don't agree with it, but it was beautiful!
You see there is such a thing as dead matter, at least with regard to our common living experience, and this provides an elegant intro to a difficult subject. I believe, perhaps because I was taught, that we ought to be able to expand our fundamental beliefs to the greatest possible application - the maxim - and the more widely applicable a belief was the more likely it was to be 'true'. It's also a slippery slope because we tend to fall victim to things like generalization, cognitive bias, heuristics, etc., to the extent where we might apply characteristics to the environment which aren't actually 'true'.
Anyway the magic wand falls into this dead category. It was formerly living. It wouldn't exist without it's prior
fluid form, yet now that the water supply is disconnected it remains forever static, yet it's not just another 'thing' created by the hands of man (like a statue)- it's naturally-occurring. Not like a stone, which always was and always will be a stone as far as our own perceptual experience is concerned, but something else. Some other category of life, each one an imaginary box to contain our thoughts, created by a magic
spell, for words and their
spelling influence our thoughts very much.
During the course of my Reasoning, I found many examples of how mere beliefs that we hold in our minds (often in the form of even lesser theories) could influence each other. The greatest example of this resides among the mini-moons of Mars and the minds of Charles Darwin and Edwin D. Babbit - two great thinkers of the late 19th century - when Mars' so-called moons were discovered.
They were given the Latin names
Fear and
Dread, despite the fact that neither of them is bigger than Nantucket (15 miles). The classification of these orbiting asteroids as 'moons' (Earth's is 2,000 miles) is akin to lacking a linguistic distinction between kayaks and battleships, but neither Darwin nor Babbit were able to put them into context, relying instead upon the word of those who specialized in the subject. Which specialist? Or witch specialist?
You see by the mere act of naming (
spelling) something we
cast an impression upon everyone else. Remember the beginning of the John Carter movie? The narrator says something like "Mars...you think you know something just because you've named it...". I'm certain Burroughs was really talking about moons, because Carter's exploration company was called
Two Moons, and they played a part in the story itself.
Where Burroughs was able to see them for what they are and quite literally keep them in perspective, both Darwin and Babbit allowed the belief that 'Mars has moon(s), too' to influence their understanding of Earth. They concluded that moon(s) must be a natural occurrence. Wherever there is a living planet, there must be a moon(s). Mars must have been alive at some point in the past. All of these would be perfectly Reasonable conclusions if Mars had anything that even closely resembled 'the moon', but it doesn't. Not even close. Such is the power of words.
If we examine the entire solar system we find that everything flies around the sun in the same direction and on the same plane, which is called the ecliptic. The planets also spin around their own center, again all in the same direction. Now, the orientation of each planet's equator to the ecliptic is very telling because Earth, the only wet, living planet that we know of, is tilted very much.
The Obliquity of the Ecliptic made a brief appearance in an episode of Sherlock - the one which sympathized with menopause-aged women murdering their scientist husbands, if I'm not mistaken - The Abominable Bride.
I believe we need to draw the line somewhere in order to truly understand living experience, and I believe that line ought to be as close to perceptual reality as possible. We can't reasonably say that all the planets are alive to some degree, just because all of them have a slightly skewed ecliptic alignment, because we aren't finding different degrees of life or different amounts of life, we're finding no life, which is exactly the case with the moon, yet even though it carries no life, it seems to exhibit celestial behavior. A benign rock simply floating in space would eventually rotate around on some direction or other, but it never does. None of them do, which I believe demonstrates a relationship very much like parasites feeding off a 'host planet' (the term scientists actually use).
My own theory is more heliocentric - It seems to me the moon is actually consuming the sun (Sol) some crazy how by accelerating process of incarnation of (either new or smaller) souls here on Earth, with the expectation that not all of us will be able to actually incarnate, and so many of us will end up getting caught in the trap/weir/well/hell. If Hollywood is any place to look for clues, the sound of their screams (or other emotional emissions) would be its equivalent of nourishment. Yes, dear friends, if you Google the word 'lunatic' you'll find my picture. That doesn't mean I'm wrong.
I really appreciate your comment, A Jay. There's a form of photonic light which resides within us (Fritz Albert-Popp), and it likely resides within other animals and plants, too. I believe the sun is the ultimate source of this Light - that we are one-and-the-same. Perhaps light or fire/metabolism could be our litmus-paper for life.
