Skip to main content

Friendly or Hostile Cosmos?

Image result for singularity

In a philosophy group to which I belong, a fellow calling himself Barleycorn posted the following thought:

People like to think of the universe as some magical godly force of creation but really it's just the earth that houses life. The universe for the most part is death. Put anything living up in space and the universe instantly kills it. The universe is not your loving friend. This little bubble on earth called an atmosphere is the only thing stopping the universe from instantly murdering you. So why all the memes about the magical mystical universe and all this spirit science crap? And why do so many people feel like the universe will absorb or save your soul at death. No it won't. That's a very romantic idealistic view of the universe. Life struggles AGAINST the universe.

My reply was, and is, as follows:

First, the "little bubble" of life on earth is only possible because of a continuous stream of energy from the nearest star, and because we are held safely within the gravitic embrace of that star, neither too close nor too far. Second, we don't know that this little bubble is the only such bubble, and in fact that seems improbable, since other solar systems analogous to our own are known to exist, and since there is evidence that the life within this bubble didn't start here. Third, cosmologists hypothesize that one universe's black hole is another universe's big bang, that the "singularity" at the heart of each is one and the same, seen from different perspectives. This makes the universe itself seem akin to an organism, and makes a black hole into a womb. There is much to be said for that "romantic idealistic view," within and through the language and achievements of science as it has arisen within this little bubble.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...