Once Upon a Post

Once upon a post, I questioned a statement, and stated a question. Finding no answer the thought was left to drift upon the wind. But now, a bout with geologic thermodynamics has brought it back.





Life is





There is is again, that unpunctuated mystery of the grand cosmic scheme of things. We will make our round to it once again, but first, we will start with the geology.





Earth is alive. This idea is called the Gaia Hypothesis. It was developed in 1978 and the argument is as follows. Life is a property that makes possible growth, cycling of nutrients, adaptation to surroundings, and enables reproduction. Growth-a process of development. Ok let's see. Earth started as a cloud of dust. It developed into a molten solid. From this water and land developed. Life. Air, oxygen, plants, etc soon followed (give or take a few billion). Though it may not have necessarily gotten bigger Earth has grown. Earth is not the same as it was when it first started, it has developed significantly since. Ergo, growth.


Ah but what about the cycling of nutrients--Carbon cycle, nitrogen cycle, phosphorus cycle, sulfur, nitrogen, water cycle, rock cycle--Earth recycles (so remind me again why aren't we?)!


Ok, but is Earth adapting? Yes. During the period nearly 2 billion years ago life developed a taste for a highly toxic substance known as oxygen. So much of it was released, so quickly it actually rusted the entirety of our planet.

http://www.emc.maricopa.edu/faculty/farabee/BIOBK/mich03.gif

Exhibit A. A chunk of alternating rusted and non-rusted Iron. The only explaination for this is oxygen and lots of it, which killed of the creatures who made it leaving a period where there wasn't as much leading to another period of developement where we as life forms produced it again making it red again then having it build up and kill us repeating for a few million years until Earth finally adapted reached a suitable mixture of both and has never looked back. Oxygen now consists of 21% of the composition of Earth's air. Yet Earth has not shut down, it has not ceased functioning even though a major component of its composition Carbon dioxide is now a trace compound. Nor did it shut off when a formerlly trace element such as oxygen now dominates the scene. No. Earth has adapted, and continues to exist in its new role as an oxygen rich carbon poor planet. It exists just as life still exists despite the cataclysmic changes.
Growth, Check! Nutrient Cycling, Check!, Adaptation, Check! So far so good, but what about reproduction? Check! The moon. Earth's moon is composed of the same materials as Earth. It is a weird way of thinking about it, but our moon is a budding of the mother planet Earth. I will freely admit, Earth is not a life form as we are used to thinking of them, but she is alive nonetheless. By definition she meets every criterion for life. She is a single cell of enormous proportions and we are the mitochondria and organelles that make her go.

[ If instead you would prefer a somewhat more religious argument, then consider this, How many cultures have personafied her? She is "Mother Earth" and "Gaia" to name just two. For those of you who are of the LDS persuasion peruse the Book of Moses chapter 7 or so. Admittedly, these claims do not prove that Earth is alive, but it does show that it is at least a very old idea that has been pased around before.]

If you will but permit me, I am going to take the claim that, Earth really is a form of life, as an axiom, and for kicks and giggles, let us see what develops if we do. We have developed axiom 1, Earth can be thought of as something living. Something living composed of smaller individual units who are themselves living, whose interactions make up the whole. There is another example that also follows this pattern. Us. We too are large organisms existing because of the contributions of literally trillions of smaller living wholes. Ahh!! My brain hurts tiny wholes making up the big wholes filling in the holes. This post is getting as bad THIS one. I need to go get something to eat. You should too.

Munch ...munch...munch.

Ah good! You're back! Consider what just happened there. You decided that you would uncork yourself from your formerly seated position. Stroll over to your designated food source. Reach out, open it or buy it. Make it. Eat it. And now you are enjoying your contented post consumption bliss. I must say, a very well planned action. But you must admit, it was pretty spontaneous too, just getting up like that and eating spur of the moment. There aren't too many laws of the US government that at precisely X:03 must grab something to eat. It was your own free will that compelled you to do that. But, and this one is the kicker, let's go a step further. What were your cells doing? One cell gets a signal from another, its just a faint signal an increase in this ion triggering a release of that compound. That's no big deal says that cell I make this every day. Another day, another compound. I don't know why I do this. I don't know where it goes. I just secrete this. I just do what I'm told. That substance made by Stan over in cubical 127365 is sent to the muscles. Joe down the lane got a letter from some cell named Stan it says flex. Ok says Joe, I'll flex. Martha, Billy, Roberta all got similar messages. Some from Stan, some from all of the others over in the neuron division. They go about doing their thing and the leg muscles flex and extend. But there are a few trouble makers. Those clowns over in adductor longus had a late night last night and just aren't up to contracting. That's cool. They can choose to do that. They have just as much free will as you or I, but what happens if they do? Your leg cramps up, your ability to complete your plan is hindered--you have a cramp. Now at this juncture you have several options. You can go on painfully, you still get food, it hurt, but you have forced you will upon the leg. Food comes and happiness resumes. You could try to work with the fellas in adductor longus cell block B reach a compromise after some rubbing and continue when they choose to cooperate. You could change your plans and not go get food. You could have someone else help you and have them go get food. The food was attained. Happiness achieved, but how did it happen?

What would happen if we took this analogy and instead applied it to religion? The body is God. The freewill of God is our small subtle command the ion that told stan to secrete an extra potassium. Stan's part was but a small one. Individually Stan may not have been needed. He probably could have done something else. But what if every cell acted this way? Could anything get done? Billions of cells a day die. Some die horrible deaths, some die after their energy stores wear out quitely in passing, but everyone of them had a purpose, played a part. The actions of one affect the actions of another. Yet, if we will choose to follow the plan, great food, new stores of glycogen, and glucogone await us all. Because of one cramp no one is willing to amputate the leg, but what about continous pain?

Hmm, our example holds on so many levels. We are the cells of God, his conscience is a will that will lead us to great rewards. But why must the analogy stop? Could not Earth be the single cell of the universe as a whole? Are not the atoms the cells held sway by the organelles.

Hamlet once said that he could hold himself the master of a nutshell and consider himself content. I am of the LDS faith. My faith says that when we die we too will become Gods. Perhaps in death the realization comes that in a way we already are. Why must we be good, do good? Because if we are not concerned for the health of our cells, the health of our subjects we too may die! If we are but the cells of a great and grand God, how very inspiring to note that perhaps if we do not follow his will we are the cancers of God, If my hairbrained ideas hold true sin may literally be the death of God! In a way it was. Christ died for our sins! Maybe instead, he died BECAUSE of them! Sobering thoughts, but we are not done, not yet. What is this property of life, this property that allows us to grow, develop, change, adapt, reproduce and seek happiness? What if this property is an aspect of the Holy Ghost? We showed earlier that the Holy Ghost stems from an integral taken over our entire lives--That would count all of our cells that we have ever had, what if his power comes from the power of life even the tiniest life smaller than a cell, and yet everywhere at once. If the power of the Holy Ghost is intimately tied in with life, it would explain why the Holy Ghost has so many aspects of a heavenly mother. Not because it IS the heavenly mother, but because it is the force of life, a force strongly in tune in mothers.

Good ideas, the lot of them, but how do I test it? And where did that bit about thermodynamics come in how does that relate? Well the ideas for this post stemmed from the conservation of energy, but before I tackle that, I am going to need to do a bit more reading. More posts to come. I hope you enjoy. Good luck! Good night.

More Equations of the Universe

First an addendum. I have said in the past that God is light. This cannot wholey be true, for God said "let there be light, and there was!" If God IS light it is somewhat pathological for God to say "let there be me, and I was!" But, because God is able to command light he must be greater than or equal to light. This is good news for us because this means our faith need not be canceled out, our faith may very well be infinite.


But enough of that. Today's post is a graph. First we shall define our axes. Let one axis be God's choices, his optimal plan for us. We will let the other axis be our choices, our response to His plan. Ah but which will be the orthogonal and which will be the absyssa (Y, and X respectively)? The answer is simple. God is no respector of persons, for He is God. God's choice is independant of ours. However, our choice depends on what God wants for us. And since Y depends upon X, we are dependent upon God, our responses will the Y values, God will be the X values.


Now consider that God cannot make a choice that would go against God. It would violate all trust in him, the Universe would no longer obey him. He would cease to be God. Therefore, in the freightening parlance of math, God's choices may be expressed as a semistable invariant line through Y=0 with a critical point at X=0. What!?


In simple terms, it means God's choices will always lead toward what is good. They will always increase. How can they not? He is God. Or, another way of looking at it is if God is running the Universe, wouldn't his choices be what we observe as time?" Ah! I see! So it must always be increasing.
But what about our choices? We have the option of following God, or of not following him. If we did not have this option, then we would have no freewill, there would be no sin--because we would be forced to commit it and therefore unable to stop it and therefore not a sin. Moreover, and more importantly if we did not have a choice to go against what God has willed for us there could be no dK term, no term of changes we have made in our lives. If dK=0 our salvation too goes to 0. Thus, we are allowed to either follow the will of God, or to go against it. We will denote a following of God's will as an increasing ammount, and a divergence of God's will will be denoted by a negative sign. I also propose that at the instant that we are born we have not yet had the ability to make a choice our graph must be at zero. No choices means that we cannot have yet chosen to follow ours, or God's will. If we put all of these things together and connect the paths that our resultant vectors must follow, we will quickly come up with a graph that looks a bit like this.

How do we know it looks like this? We'll start with Christ. Did Christ ever choose a path that was not in accordance with his father's will? No. He resisted the Devil, he resisted temptation, he resisted the world. This means that every choice that Christ made was what his father wanted. Christ thus chose the optimal path. His slope is 1-1. Y=X. Careful examination shows that nowhere else can we have as steep a graph as that of Christ's. Eventually even the paths of the angels will approximate that of Christ's.

At this juncture, contrast the path of Christ with that of the Devil. If the Devil would but follow the path laidout for him, it is possible that even he could return to God, the father. Since he does not, this must mean that the devil is opposing God at every step. At every point in life the Devil does that which will lead away from God. Thus his slope is -1. His line is Y=-X, the perpendicular line to that of Christ's. Thus the Devil is the opposite and reciprocal of Christ. e.g. the Antichrist. The Devil's path will take you farthest from God fastest. Our Graph seems to tell us what has already been said. There are but two churches, the one that will lead you toward God. And the one that will lead you away from Him.

Ah, but what happens at the point where Y=X=0? It also happens to be the point where Y=-X=0. Wait what? There is somepoint where the Devil was an equal to Christ? That point is at the origin. The Begining. Time = 0. God has not yet created us, and at that point Christ=Devil=God. They are together. They have not yet diverged. Satan has not yet offered up his plan, before then they were one. After, the path of one leads to light, the path of the other leads into darkness.

So we have seen what happens after time =0. We are offered two choices--Follow God and Christ, or follow the Devil away from God and Christ. But hold on, if we consider only what happens where X is positive we are not getting the full picture. Where X is positive represents only quadrants I and IV. We missing fully half of the graph! But time =0 is the earliest we can possibly exist. Once my mind is developed I can then make choices. Once this happens we start our clock and begin at time = 0. But as we have said, God is independant of our actions (Though that statement itself is interesting. Is God's plan really independant of our plan? Is it even possible to ask how would God's plan change if we weren't here? We have the choice of commiting suicide. We have shown previously that if one does commit suicide TL is cut short, and the ultimate goal of S-Salvation is reduced. Thus even though suicide is an option we are probably safe in assuming that it is not an option encouraged by God, and thus probably not a part of his plan. But, because we do have the power to commit such an act, and because the universe has not appeared to stop when people do commit suicide this suggests that even though God has a plan for us, if we choose not to follow it it is not grossly dissarrayed. Since his plan still comes to completion with or without us, it must be independant of us even though we may have an enormous part in it. We may even be able to shape it ala prayer. However for now we will assume independence even if a sort of strange non-linear self intwined parallel independence whatever that means. I think what I mean by that is that God has a back up plan. We are a part of his plan, but if we choose not to follow it it is a simple matter of going to plan B. I think the number of plans God has is proportional to our faith in him. The greater our faith in Him the fewer the number of backup plans and the greater his faith in us. Hence, Christ whom God had infinite faith required no back up plans. However, in science we often see numerous inventions developed simultaneously. Myriads of discoveries independently corroborated and often each with a great deal of "accident" leading up to it. Hundreds of miles apart similar ideas emerge in almost perfect unison. From supernovas, to calculus, Discovery of Mendell's paper on genetics, development of the telephone, Bronsed and Lowry, Arrhenius, and Lewis all coming up with similar definitions of acids and bases weeks apart. It happens quite alot. My interpretation of these events are that they are evidence of God having a backup plan. Thus God is able to know a result long before, if maybe not an individual. Even though he knows quite intimately the individuals involved. Thus God's plan IS independent of our actions, albeit only sort of.) Returning to the original thread of our argument. If God's plan is truly indepent of our actions, and we will assume that it is, he created much of the world without us, we will therefore assume that he can function without us. This means that God is still making choices long before we enter the scene. This means that quadrants II and III exist! This strongly implies that there is a premortal existance. If we take this to be the case it would explain where the Angels written of in the Bible came from. they are simply those who were created before we were living on a higher plane whose paths take them ito our neighborhood of existence. Moreover, observe the bottom half of our graph from the point on the X axis (-1,0) traveling anticlockwise until arriving at the line Y=-X one quickly notices that this represents one third of a heavenly host lost to the darkness with their leader being the one who opposed God at every step. We also note that every trajectory of our premortal existances will converge eventually with the path that Christ set out for us, or with that of the Devil!

Ah, but can I relate any of this to the equations I have thus demonstrated? Well, consider this. Let's see what would happen if I suggested that Salvation (S) was really our slope. S=dY/dX where dY we said was our choices. The terms that we have control over in my previous equations are the F,E, dK, & Tl terms. We have control over our faith, the energy we devote to others, the things we overcome, and the life we lead. God has control over C^2Te. Light and by it the universe and his plan for us and what is expected of us. S=(FETldK)/(C^2Te)=dY/dX and sure enough we have chosen our choices to represent the Y axis, with God's choice to be the X. Since God has a plan for us, if he did not, why then should Christ have to die? If there is no plan why is there order? Why do things happen the way they do? If there is no plan, then why are we here? If there is no plan, nothing to come later, why is there pain, especially emotional pain? Shouldn't that have evolved out by now? Yet if there is something to come is not pain but a training ground for what is yet to come? I claim there IS a plan. If there is a plan Te =/= 0 which implies that dx =/= 0 which implies that on our graphs there should never be a point where there is a vertical tangent line. And indeed there isn't. There are places where we refuse to change and are equal to zero. The maximum change comes with infine E and dK or infinite love and helping ourselves and others change. At this stage we have become exactly what Christ has taught us, at this point we do become Christ like as our expression tells us. The other bit of speculation comes if one ponders what happens on the otherside of the asymtote? Is this really a phase diagram? Does it really repeat? Maybe it just so happens to be that our after life is really just another pre-mortal existance's begining? Perhaps there really are three kingdoms of heaven. This one is the heaven from the last one, the next one is the pre-life for the one following and on and on the cycle continues. This last bit is admitedly a bit of errant speculation and will require much more testing. But the ideas are interesting. On that note, for tonight I leave you. Good night! Good luck! Stay enlightened!

I hope you noticed....

Off to the right, in the little linky section--There is a link that says "Venture Crew." This is the link to the Steiner Venture Crew Homepage! You should all check it out. I am posting it as a place for past, present and future steiner staffers, or anyone else who is interested in venturing. Please feel free to post and visit frequently to keep track of what activities are going on. To check it out click here.

Hooray for the English Department!