Abstract
The time-honored questions concerning the meaning and significance of life should be discussed not only in the light of various philosophical and literary considerations but also from the natural scientific perspectives as human beings are conditioned parts of nature as a whole. Hence, in this paper, I discuss these questions from the perspectives of two major and universal scientific fields, namely, generalized crystallography and quantum mechanics. On the philosophical grounds, the question of the meaning and, especially, the significance of life should be focused on the assumption that each human being is a singular individual whose significance is universal. Such a philosophical approach is compatible with the two above-mentioned natural scientific aspects.
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Notes
I have elaborated on this issue in Gilead (2019). In the current section, I use some passages of this paper and embed them in quite a different context, i.e., the meaning and significance of life.
Can information be meaningless? Adriaans (2019) reads: In 1953, “Bar-Hillel and Carnap developed a theory of Semantic Information.... Floridi... defines semantic information as well-formed, meaningful and truthful data. Formal entropy based definitions of information work (by Fisher, Shannon, and Kolmogorov) on a more general level and do not necessarily measure information in meaningful truthful datasets, although one might defend the view that in order to be measurable the data must be well-formed.” Hence, I may conclude that information is necessarily meaningful or, at least, well-formed. Well-formed can be considered as well-structured. Discussing the problem of the incompleteness of arithmetic, Adriaans also writes: “the semantics of a formal system rich enough to contain elementary mathematics cannot be defined in terms of mathematical functions within the system, i.e., there are statements that contain semantic information about the system in the sense of being well-formed, meaningful and truthful without being computable” (ibid.). I believe that meaningless information is not information at all. When someone answers a question with the words, “There is nothing to tell” it means that he or she has no information to provide us with, since what really happened was meaningless or insignificant.
As Plato’s Socrates declares, “To let no day pass without discussing goodness and all the other subjects about which you hear me talking and examining both myself and others is really the very best thing that a man can do, and that life without this sort of examination is not worth living” (op. cit., Hugh Tredennick’s translation, p. 23).
See: "And the candle by which she had been reading the book filled with trouble and deceit, sorrow and evil, flared up with a brighter light, illuminating for her everything that before had been had been enshrouded in darkness, flickered, grew dim and went out for ever” (op. cit., p. 802).
As before this scene, quite a different thought had occurred to her thus: “Suddenly the darkness that enveloped everything for her lifted, and for an instant life glowed before her with all its past joys. But she did not take her eyes off the wheels of the approaching second truck” (op. cit., p. 801).
This is an assumption of my original metaphysics, panenmentalism, to which so far I have devoted six books. As I have discussed in them and in some papers in my philosophy of science, individual pure (non-actual) possibilities are vital for scientific progress and for our self-knowledge as well.
My panenmentalist treatment of individual singularity and its universal significance is greatly influenced by my interpretation of Spinoza’s philosophy (Gilead forthcoming). According to this interpretation, though each individual entity, including human beings, entirely depends on the whole of Nature (Spinoza’s Substance or God), as Nature is a network system of coherence (rather than foundational-deductive linear system), in a second kind of conditioning, God or Nature depends on each of His finite modes. This endows each such a mode with a universal significance. Furthermore, as each individual entity is defined in Spinoza’s philosophy as a singular being and as the law of sufficient reason is valid for each details of reality as a whole, there cannot be two identical, or entirely similar, entities in Nature as a whole, and the singularity of each entity is universal. Panenmentalism bases its notion of individual singularity on quite different grounds, for Spinoza is a consistent actualist whereas panenmentalism is a realism about individual pure (non-actual) possibilities. Moreover, panenmentalism ascribes singular individuality only to human beings.
Capital punishment was extremely rare in Jewish history, for the Halakha has put various restrictive and stringent conditions on the testimonies and the witnesses involved that it became almost impossible to carry out such a punishment. The reason for this was that human life is considered highly important according to Jewish tradition and the Halakha.
Bacteria may contribute a lot to human individuality and meaningful information (Margulis and Sagan 1997). Biological and genetic information plays a vital role in the function of bacteria or of a single cell, as a crystal or as a “free” structure, no less than in that of consciousness. See Ventegodt, Andersen, and Merrick 2003, p. 1186: “We are just beginning to acknowledge the enormous flow of information that is needed to make everything function in a healthy organism, including consciousness, where every cell does exactly what it has to do to make the organs function. A concept that seems to be able to bridge the scientifically very different domains of matter, life, and consciousness seems to be ‘biological information.’ If a cell is seen as a liquid crystal in which the cell’s molecules constantly connect in firm mutual relationships only to dissolve again and become fluid and free, whenever the cell needs it, the backbone of the cell seems to be the information that organizes the cell.... How cells co-create consciousness is also an enigma. All we can do is describe the cell and the organisms arising from its cells as filled with energy and information as well as an unbeatable ability to organize itself way down to the molecular level, where apparently the cell is in control of almost every single molecule;... Perhaps people that become ill actually are the ones who, through life, did not take care of their experience of happiness and a meaningful life? And those who become well again could be the ones who have managed to reclaim the meaning of life? This explanation suggests that you may understand illness by imagining the cells’ communication and the biological information. Maybe we need not to think about physics or chemistry at all in order to understand what happens when we become ill and what is needed to become well again. Maybe we just need to look at the correlation between quality of life and the biological order?” [op. cit., p. 1195]).
“Two-State-Vector Formalism (TSVF)... is a time-symmetric formulation of quantum mechanics, using two state vectors to describe a quantum system instead of the single one in mainstream Quantum Mechanics. When using two boundary states for a quantum system, its evolution seems symmetric in both time directions” (Aharonov, Cohen, Grossman, and Elitzur 2013, p. 1).
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Gilead, A. A comment about the meaning and significance of life in the light of generalized crystallography. Found Chem 23, 31–40 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10698-020-09367-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10698-020-09367-3