One Soul

"Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things that exist; observe, too, the continuous spinning of the thread and the contexture of the web."

- Marcus Aurelius (121 - 180)
Meditations

"But can anyone doubt today that all the millions of individuals and all the innumerable types and characters constitute an entity, a unit? Though free to think and act, we are are held together, like the stars in the firmament, with ties inseparable."

- Nikola Tesla (1856 - 1943)

"We cannot fathom the marvelous complexity of an organic being; but on the hypothesis here advanced (pangenesis) this complexity is much increased. Each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm - formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute, and as numerous as the stars of heaven."

- Charles Darwin (1809 - 1882)

An Unknowable Unfolding

"How did the universe get from matter to mattering?

...

Life comes from life," declared Pasteur.
But, if so, whence life in the first place?

...

The biosphere explodes in diversity,
creating more and more cracks in the
floor of Darwin’s nature until the cracks,
ever expanding, become the
very floor of nature,
and nature herself.

...

The ultimate, an unknowable unfolding, slips
its foundational moorings and floats free.

...

Agency introduces meaning into the world!"

- Stuart A. Kauffman (1939 - )
A World Beyond Physics

Little Universe

 

“We cannot fathom the marvelous complexity of an organic being; but on the hypothesis here advanced this complexity is much increased. Each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm - a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.”

- Charles Darwin (1809 - 1882)

"The Universe is nothing but an infinite and complex mechanism. Its complexity is so great that it borders on willfulness, suddenness, and randomness; it gives the illusion of free will possessed by conscious beings."

-  Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky (1857 - 1935)

“The teeming hordes of living things on Earth, not only in space but in time, are actually all one massive, single organism just as certainly as each one of us (in our own minds) seems to be a distinct human being throughout our limited lifetime… Each of us is, equally, an independent living human and also just one utterly minute, utterly brief unit of a single vast body that is life on Earth. From this point of view, the passing of human generations, in peace or turmoil, is nothing more than the shedding of cells from one’s skin.”

- Neil Theise
Notes on Complexity

Constructs of Imagination

 

"Perception is not a
window on objective reality.
It is an interface that hides objective
reality behind a veil of helpful icons.
...

Conscious realism makes a bold claim: consciousness, not spacetime and its objects, is fundamental reality and is properly described as a network of conscious agents. To earn its keep, conscious realism must do serious work ahead. It must ground a theory of quantum gravity, explain the emergence of our spacetime interface and its objects, explain the appearance of Darwinian evolution within that interface, and explain the evolutionary emergence of human psychology.

...

...
What we call ‘reality,’ consists of
an elaborate papier-mâché construction of
imagination and theory filled in between
a few iron posts of observation."

- Donald Hoffman (1955 - )

The Case Against Reality