Lucubrations

\Lu`cu*bra"tion\, n. [l. lucubratio;cf. F. lucubration.] 1. The act of lucubrating, or studying by candlelight; nocturnal study; meditation. 2. That which is composed by night; that which is produced by meditation in retirement; hence (loosely) any literary composition.


Monday, January 05, 2009

Here's something I'm thinking about: can it be argued that all life is a psychological or philological construct if materialism is true. If so, either life does not exist or there is more than the material.
I need to go back and review what the five requirements for defining life are from a biological perspective (it's been a while since freshman biology). I only remember three of them. But at any rate, there is a big point in the evolution/creation debate about where life came from. It seems to me that one way to solve the issue is to claim that there is no life and that what we understand as life is simply a mental construct (in itself a complex chemical reaction, if there is such a thing as complexity) which describes a set of large scale chemical reactions. Of course, this is nonsense, but it brings up the question of what is life anyways. We can recognize it, but we cannot measure it. A live person and a dead person are chemically identical. The only way to tell the difference is the actions or lack of actions which are simply indicators, not components, of life.

I need to sleep. All my thoughts are jumbled, but I feel there is potential here.

In Other News...
I just visited a favorite comic site and found a comic from an idea that I had submitted a while ago. It's not terribly funny, but what makes it interesting is that when I submitted the idea I didn't put my name down and this comic is credited to someone named Andrew. I wonder if someone else had the same not very original idea I did and submitted it at just about the same time.