Stages

BetterFailling

Oct 31

"Denn selbst muss der Freie sich schaffen"
Hence the free must define their own nature
Richard Wagner, Die Walkuere

In my previous post, I related to 'life' as a living creature. I described life from the inside. The perception of a living organism.
But what if 'life', as a phenomenon, is how meaning is created by the environment where the process takes place?

For an outside observer, there are three stages.
Pre-biotic, self-driven and meaning-driven life.

Life, as we know it, cannot exist on the surface of the Sun. Or on the surface of any other star.
But neither can life exist without the processes taking place inside the stars. Without the energy being radiated by the stars and without the atoms being 'cooked' inside them and spewed out during the last stages of their 'lives'.

Having said that, the rest is simple.
Where ever conditions are 'right', atoms get together in such a manner that 'structures' become 'alive'. Those structures become organisms and display the characteristics we've come to associate with life.
In this stage, the only 'force' which drives the process is what we call 'evolution'. Species cease to exist as they are no longer able to weather changes in their environment and new species arise along with the advent of new opportunities.
And, at this stage, a second 'disturbing agent' starts to influence the environment.
Living organisms, in order to live, need to ingest portions of where they live. To excrete the by-products of their metabolism. And they leave behind 'empty carcasses' at the moment of their death.
For example, the oxygen we breathe in is the by product offered to us by the plants which live at our side.
And the fertile soil those plants 'eat' in order to provide us - the oxygen breathing organisms - with what we need to survive, is the consequence of previously living creatures.

In the third stage, that where 'meaning' becomes a force to be reckoned with, the changes perpetrated to the environment cease to remain 'natural'. As they used to be during the second, self-driven, stage.
In the third stage, an increasing number of changes to the environment are driven by purpose. Are purposefully staged by agents acting according to the meaning they have found.