| Glad it was enlightening, sorry saddening. This lecture definitely made an impact on me. I think there's a few insights from science that are so deep that it takes generations to absorb them and some are still being absorbed, like the size and age of the universe, our evolutionary heritage and deep history/ecology. One of the most striking ideas that Wald lays bare, and for me it's paradigmatic like those others, is that Life doesn't begin, it continues. There's no discrete point where a parent ends and a child begins. The cells just change shape and reorganize the furniture inside a bit. Otherwise, they're always doing the same thing of replicating when need be, or dying when need be. There's an implicit philosophy of abundance that's hard to put words to. You also bring up the sentience of emergent organisms. I think that sentience is innate to the cells, just like the other major life processes of respiration, reproduction, etc.. It's also a paradigmatic shift the realization that each cell in our body (maybe some exceptions in the soma?), if separated from its tissue/community, reverts back to an amoeba form and goes off exploring. There's also the notion e.g. from Nick Lane of the probable ease with which life gets started from substrate.. that it's not a very unlikely path-dependent accumulation of just the right RNA, but rather a fairly prescribed set of energetics that turn metabolic in the fairly common planetary environments of ocean thermals. Couple that with the ideas of panspermia, and this implies such a universality to life that we ought to imagine the night sky's stars and galaxies as teeming jungle. To me, this almost unfathomable continuity of ageless sentience in such a beguilingly adaptive polymorphic package, in universal abundance.. far exceeds the wildest technologies of science fiction or fantasy magic conjuring. It's a character whose story on the universal stage I watch with awe and kinship. And so, I guess I've been fully propagandized ;) I find comfort in that vast plan. |