First post for real. This is gong to be inordinately long, mostly because I need sort all of this stuff out before I can go on thinking about this topic. None of you have to read this.
So, at the first rehearsal I asked a series of questions about what we think the end of the world will be like and where we think we got these notions. But of course, there is a lot of vagueness in both the words "end" and "world". Nao broght up, and I think rightfully so, that it's not obvious that anything ever "ends", rather that things just change form. Of course, Einstein's (I think it was him) conservation of matter/energy would seem to support this- there is the same total mass and energy charge in the universe there was the split-second after the Big Bang- it's just organized differently- and one of those organizations happens to be carbon-based life, which might not be here in 2,000 or 2 million years.
There are two things I want to tease out before I let that picture (which might not be exactly what Nao meant, so come slap me if I'm wrong) stand. We obviously don't get our definition, or even our notion, of life from physics. Where our notions come from is going to quickly diverge into many pathways (an issue we have to address as a group soon- just how many different knowledges are we dealing with inside our group and in our potential audiences?). For myself, I can probably say my notion of what life is comes from the Aristotle and then gets kind of adopted by modern biology- and I think that's the case with most folks who are educated (and who buy into) American or Western European schools. Now, included in that notion of life is the necessary finiteness of life- all lives end. As long as the discussion doesn't get metaphysical, on this picture, every being is born, moves around, does some stuff; and dies, and death, on this picture, is the termination of life. It's also perfectly consistent with this picture to think that all life could cease to exist- in just the case where all living things die. This is one possible meaning of the end of "the world".
Immediately, we might want to ask, well, what do we mean by "death"? If I give you some medical definition (lack of electric activity in the brain, lack of circulating blood, etc.), it is still open to ask- but does that really constitute an end? If I understood Nao right, something like that question motivates his skepticism about "the end of the world". Obviously, this question gets metaphysical very quickly and I actually can't think of any way to evaluate it (I guess I'm still an empiricist philosopher), but all of a sudden I want to point out that I doubt we're going to assuage our anxieties about catastrophic changes in life as we know it with metaphysics. Even Christians committed to the notion of the Rapture seem to be committed to it because of, and not in opposition to, extreme trepidation about the end of life. I don't know what to make of this, but I thought I'd throw it out there. I guess the thing to investigate is, what kind of attitudes are out there that are ok about mass extinction. If you were Hindu, for instance, and believed in endless cycles of death and rebirth, would the next mass extinction, one that includes human beings, be less troubling to you? I honestly don't know (and don't really know any practicing Hindus either).
All right, part two of the diptych: the "world". One thing I firmly believe is that 'worlds' are observer dependent phenomena. This is following on Cassirer, Nelson Goodman, and even quantum physics- you just don't get something as robust, and concept-laden and variable as what we all try to mean when we say "the world" without human beings. For instance, how many of us mean to include dark matter when we talk about the world? Probably none of us, as it has no positive existence. However, if the theoretical models are right, i.e. if the world of cutting-edge physics is right, it makes up the vast majority of "the world". Of course, you can probably see where I'm going with this, a variant on the tree falling in the woods koan: is there any world there if no one(human) is there to perceive/construct it? The only answer I can think of is that any answer to this question is going to be someone costructing another world, i.e. one without humans in it. If you try to ask someone to imagine no world, they are completely stuck- our brains don't work like that, because we can't think thoughts without content. Thus, I want to say we can only mean by "the end of the world", something like "the end of humanity", or "the end of sentient life"- not the lack of any world at all. If there is a person out there whose afraid of absolute nihilism, it's probably because he hasn't seen the Big Lebowski.
In the end, then, I agree, after a fashion, that the world does not end- or at least that "worlds do not end", and the only question left is how to evaluate a world sans "life" in the biological sense.
So, at the first rehearsal I asked a series of questions about what we think the end of the world will be like and where we think we got these notions. But of course, there is a lot of vagueness in both the words "end" and "world". Nao broght up, and I think rightfully so, that it's not obvious that anything ever "ends", rather that things just change form. Of course, Einstein's (I think it was him) conservation of matter/energy would seem to support this- there is the same total mass and energy charge in the universe there was the split-second after the Big Bang- it's just organized differently- and one of those organizations happens to be carbon-based life, which might not be here in 2,000 or 2 million years.
There are two things I want to tease out before I let that picture (which might not be exactly what Nao meant, so come slap me if I'm wrong) stand. We obviously don't get our definition, or even our notion, of life from physics. Where our notions come from is going to quickly diverge into many pathways (an issue we have to address as a group soon- just how many different knowledges are we dealing with inside our group and in our potential audiences?). For myself, I can probably say my notion of what life is comes from the Aristotle and then gets kind of adopted by modern biology- and I think that's the case with most folks who are educated (and who buy into) American or Western European schools. Now, included in that notion of life is the necessary finiteness of life- all lives end. As long as the discussion doesn't get metaphysical, on this picture, every being is born, moves around, does some stuff; and dies, and death, on this picture, is the termination of life. It's also perfectly consistent with this picture to think that all life could cease to exist- in just the case where all living things die. This is one possible meaning of the end of "the world".
Immediately, we might want to ask, well, what do we mean by "death"? If I give you some medical definition (lack of electric activity in the brain, lack of circulating blood, etc.), it is still open to ask- but does that really constitute an end? If I understood Nao right, something like that question motivates his skepticism about "the end of the world". Obviously, this question gets metaphysical very quickly and I actually can't think of any way to evaluate it (I guess I'm still an empiricist philosopher), but all of a sudden I want to point out that I doubt we're going to assuage our anxieties about catastrophic changes in life as we know it with metaphysics. Even Christians committed to the notion of the Rapture seem to be committed to it because of, and not in opposition to, extreme trepidation about the end of life. I don't know what to make of this, but I thought I'd throw it out there. I guess the thing to investigate is, what kind of attitudes are out there that are ok about mass extinction. If you were Hindu, for instance, and believed in endless cycles of death and rebirth, would the next mass extinction, one that includes human beings, be less troubling to you? I honestly don't know (and don't really know any practicing Hindus either).
All right, part two of the diptych: the "world". One thing I firmly believe is that 'worlds' are observer dependent phenomena. This is following on Cassirer, Nelson Goodman, and even quantum physics- you just don't get something as robust, and concept-laden and variable as what we all try to mean when we say "the world" without human beings. For instance, how many of us mean to include dark matter when we talk about the world? Probably none of us, as it has no positive existence. However, if the theoretical models are right, i.e. if the world of cutting-edge physics is right, it makes up the vast majority of "the world". Of course, you can probably see where I'm going with this, a variant on the tree falling in the woods koan: is there any world there if no one(human) is there to perceive/construct it? The only answer I can think of is that any answer to this question is going to be someone costructing another world, i.e. one without humans in it. If you try to ask someone to imagine no world, they are completely stuck- our brains don't work like that, because we can't think thoughts without content. Thus, I want to say we can only mean by "the end of the world", something like "the end of humanity", or "the end of sentient life"- not the lack of any world at all. If there is a person out there whose afraid of absolute nihilism, it's probably because he hasn't seen the Big Lebowski.
In the end, then, I agree, after a fashion, that the world does not end- or at least that "worlds do not end", and the only question left is how to evaluate a world sans "life" in the biological sense.
posted by Dillon Westbrook at 8:34 PM
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