Studio day at ArtEZ main campus. Our Masters class are doing a printing workshop. I&m running super late because I am looking at potential new accommodation. I feel a bit weird to go solicit in my skin-tight suit – they’ll probably think I am insane and not rent to me. But no one notices and the interview goes well. It&s a charming house. Much nicer than the one I live in now, but it is far from uni and the train schedule doesn’t match my work schedule. I’ll never be in time for class. I&ll have to skip it.
No one looks at me weird in lycra, probably because I am wearing a jacket over it. Can’t look like a penis of you are covered in wool.
I thought I would get some stares at the art campus when I rock up late to the workshop. No one bats an eyelid. I’m not the most interesting thing by far. The guy at the printing workshop already knows me and doesn’t bother giving me the instructions. ‘You already know what to do right?’, he exclaims. I am surprised to learn that he is about 8 years younger than me. Funny he feels like an OOM but the way he conducts himself.
A lot of my classmates are not successful with their prints, they all help me! My narcissistic indulgence. I am printing a picture of myself cross-legged on a spinning chair. The wisdom of lycra. The unbearable lightness of lycra. I have to make a garment with all the cool prints we got. It got quite experimental. I copied how to print a gradient from an experienced student next to me. She gladly shared her wisdom. Everyone is so nice at the Art University. So different from my Art high school where people were pretentious assholes.
Strange quantum souls:
If both organisms and inanimate objects are made up of atoms, what intrinsically makes an organism alive versus an object like my coffee table?
Answers from Quora
Chris Carvell, BSc Physics, King’s College London (1975)
Answered Jan 15, 2020
When a proton and an electron become close enough they form a bond between two differing wave systems, a hydrogen atom, so they are conscious of each other since they have a “memory” telling them how to behave because at a distant point in our past, all in our physical universe was quantum entangled as a tiny point of (+)ve and (-)ve mass-energy.
However animate (alive) entities have a more complex memory of how to react to their environment (eg. bacteria and birds) thanks to DNA etc.
Thirdly we humans have a unique special Quantum Consciousness (QC), and unlike the abovementioned 2 classes of consciousness, we are “conscious that we are conscious”, having a Non-material soul, so our strange memories involve both material and non-physical memories (love etc.).
I tried to rationalise these subjects in my books “Strange Entities” and “Strange Quantum Souls”.
So I do not believe that inanimate objects are alive, although poltergeist phenomena suggest “mind over matter” is possible.
Answers from Reddit
- Yes, OP’s question can be reduced to the study of self-replicating molecules. From there it’s just a evolutionary slope toward more complex creatures. We don’t know what the first replicator looked like, but maybe it was something similar to RNA.
- There are six criteria that separate living things from coffee or a book; Organism undergo metabolism, maintain homeostasis, grow, respond to stimuli, reproduce, and evolve. (Check out the second paragraph) http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life#/search
- An interesting point, viruses contain some of these characteristics, but not all. Some consider viruses to be alive, some don’t. I encourage you to read up on those too.
- The requirement for life differs depending on what you need it for. If you had a table, a cat and some lettuce you can have one set of criteria on which you base your labels of ‘alive’ or ‘not alive’. On the other hand, if you have a prion, a virus and a mycobacterium you will need a modified set of rules if you want to draw various conclusions.
- It’s like in physics, where different models will hold up under specific conditions. For example, Newtonian laws will hold up in every day interactions, but as you approach the speed of light, or work in very small scale interactions, Newtonian physics is not a very good model.