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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bentway who wrote (222379)	4/21/2013 7:36:17 PM
From: cosmicforce	Respond to of 545116

< [what], my viruses can know about me> My speculative hypothesis is that the right viruses "know" (in a quantitative and qualitative way) that you are a suitable place to live. I find the world a pretty suitable place to live for much the same reasons (motivated by different scales of similar chemistry). For that reason alone, I feel that I'm a viral kindred at least at that level. I like the idea that life, at its core, is a feedback element that interacts with its world in a complex but experiential way. People say viruses aren't alive because they can't live separate from other 'more advanced' lifeforms. They may be the oldest style of carbon based life in the local part of the galaxy arising from non-living stews but really, who knows? Evolution may look more like a macrame sheet than a linear tree of life. And what organism is truly free from its environment? They are finding virus like things in the ocean that seem to be cooperative workshops. Making virus DNA doesn't have to be pathological for a higher lifeform. We are 80% viral DNA! [ Link] The naturalists sought to define nature and life on human terms with a monotheistic point-in-time creation model. Kurt Goedel is probably the single greatest factor in breaking the naturalists grip with that philosophy. Physicists like Heisenberg, Feynman, John Wheeler, Roger Penrose, Brian Greene and others popularized holistic viewpoints that are rooted in phenomenological truths coming from physics (like indeterminacy for complex mechanistic systems and emergent properties coming from quantum physics).