Meaning of life – Page 2 – Harmonia Philosophica

Forgetting who you are… One experience at a time…

Researchers have revealed that infants aged 4- to 5-months already hold a primary cerebral representation of audiovisual integration of material information in their right hemisphere, and the number of types of material which can be processed by infants’ brain increases with the experience of the materials. This finding may lead to understand the trajectory of acquiring general knowledge about objects around us. (1)

The more you do something the more easily you can do it.

The more you breathe, the more easily you can breathe. The more you walk, the more easily you can walk. The more you experience the material cosmos, the more easily you can gain new experience of that cosmos.

But there is a catch in this gift. And Silenus will soon come to warn us. At the end, we will experience everything. But we will lose everything we could have without experiencing nothing. Like Midas, we will be rich. But we will die out of starvation…

Kids playing on the beach.

Happier than ever.

Dying a slow death…

One experience at a time…

Deadly life…

A once-maligned genetic parasite may actually be essential for survival.

Mouse embryos need that genetic freeloader — a type of jumping gene causing mutations, or transposon, called LINE-1 — to continue developing past the two-cell stage, researchers reported in Cell.

Transposons certainly can hop into and break genes, and cells deploy numerous tools to prevent the jumping genes from making RNA and protein copies of themselves. But, in early development, LINE-1 is turned on nearly full blast, packing RNA into embryonic cells as well as “germline” cells, which later give rise to eggs and sperm.

To see what the jumping gene was doing in the cells, scientists used a short piece of RNA that could pair up with LINE-1 RNA and cause the transposon to be degraded, essentially turning off the jumping gene. (The researchers couldn’t simply remove LINE-1 from a cell; there are thousands of copies) Without LINE-1 RNA, embryonic stem cells stopped making more of themselves and mouse embryos failed to progress past the two-cell stage of development. (1)

Meet life.

In death.

Look into the ground you step upon.

For mother Earth, life and death were never important.

Live. Die. Be.

This is the essence of life.

Building theories. Seeing what we want to see. Existing.

Scientists have created, for the first time a three-dimensional skyrmion in a quantum gas. The skyrmion was predicted theoretically over 40 years ago, but only now has it been observed experimentally. (1)

We always “see” things we have theories about first. Even if we happen to see something totally unexpected, we always create theories to fit what we’ve seen inside those little boxes we build inside our little heads.

We like to tear reality apart and make it comprehensible. And if it is not, we change it so that it is. We create what we believe. We love understanding. We love controlling. Us. Nature. The cosmos itself.

But we do not know the answer to the most important question of them all…

Why are we alive? Why does the cosmos exist?

Alone and perplexed. In a dark and incomprehensible cosmos.

There is no theory for that. Life and existence itself is raw.

Embrace it. Accept it.

In theory, Achilles will never reach the turtle.

In practice, he will just step on it. And keep running.

You are here. The turtle is there.

You don’t know why.

But the impulse inside you is rising…

You just can’t stand still.

You have an urge to… run!

Poor Achilles…

Staying alive for ever. Being dead long ago. Dying. Being born.

Can we stay young forever, or even recapture lost youth?

Research from the laboratory of Professor Julian Chen in the School of Molecular Sciences at Arizona State University recently uncovered a crucial step in the telomerase enzyme catalytic cycle. This catalytic cycle determines the ability of the human telomerase enzyme to synthesize DNA “repeats” (specific DNA segments of six nucleotides) onto chromosome ends, and so afford immortality in cells. Understanding the underlying mechanism of telomerase action offers new avenues toward effective anti-aging therapeutics. illustration depicting the enzyme telomerase This figure depicts the enzyme telomerase as well as telomeres relative to a chromosome. (1)

We so much long for immortality. We try to make our cells and our bodies last forever. Because no matter how old we are, we still feel young. We like life even though our bodies die. Because we are not our bodies. We believe in existence even though our cells will never experience it. Because we are more than our cells.

Meaningful creatures.

Trapped in meaningless states.

You cried at birth.

Now all you need to do is laugh at your death…

Eternal recurrence… Cycles… Dasein into nothingness…

It is one of the most astonishing results of physics: when a complex system is left alone, it will return to its initial state with almost perfect precision.

Gas particles, for example, chaotically swirling around in a container, will return almost exactly to their starting positions after some time. This “Poincaré Recurrence Theorem” is the foundation of modern chaos theory. For decades, scientists have investigated how this theorem can be applied to the world of quantum physics. Recently, researchers at TU Wien (Vienna) successfully demonstrated a kind of “Poincaré recurrence” in a multi-particle quantum system. The results have been published in the journal Science. (1)

The world moves in cycles.

What is, will once be again.

What is not, never was.

The world moves in cycles.

But not great cycles.

Take a step back and look again.

We are spinning on a single point.

Fierce dancers we are.

Balancing on nothingness…