Latent Types In The Fabric Of Nature Comments

- a prose meditation on where we should look for the origin of life.

Some forward-looking scientists (such as James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis) have been laughed at for suggesting that earth and cosmos are somehow intelligent and alive. I totally sympathize with their point of view. Old-fashioned science says everything that happens in the cosmos comes from blind, random collisions of atoms. They try to grind physical matter under the boot-heel of their mechanistic philosophy. Bullshit! The natural laws that incubated us could not be stupider than we are. Physical matter is stardust. The natural laws underpinning matter are beautifully interwoven in a way that enables life to emerge. We need a new vein of science that recognizes immanent intelligence, present in the way laws fit together. It may not be the fleshly theater of consciousness that we're used to. It is solid-state, non-local intelligence that is manifested in the interrelated, life-fostering properties of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, etc.[1] Some scientists are groping toward this kind of breakthrough in understanding, for instance Michael Denton. In his books 1) THE DESTINY OF NATURE; 2) EVOLUTION, STILL A THEORY IN CRISIS; and 3) THE WONDER OF WATER, he speaks of the 'possibility-spaces' of carbon chemistry and the theory of 'TYPES' that are latent in the fabric of nature. When taken together synchronically, these TYPES foreshadow the diachronic growth of the tree of life. The TYPES correspond to major phyla, classes, orders and genera on the tree of life. As potential forms (existing in possibility space) , they are nestled together like Russian dolls; when they are serially instantiated as living beings, they emerge and unfold like branches on a tree.
...
Read full text