Life is Made of Non-life

Life is made of non-life components like fermions. When they are in an appropriate configuration the condition named life exists. No one knows what the primary field is made of; it could be spirit.

It is useful for mechanics that work with matter to understand how it works. Philosophers probably want to understand what the fundamental substance really is.

Select Factors Affecting Einstein's Religious Ideas

Einstein was a German Jew that had to leave Germany with his family and move to Switzerland because of the rise of the Nazis and that unhealthy business environment for his father’s generator manufacturing business. Many Europeans don’t like the Catholic Church or even German state sponsored churches because of their historical role in owning great tracts of land. Americans don’t have any sense of that because their was about only one colony of the original 13 that was Catholic (Maryland).

Europeans didn’t have the same sense of freedom from authority Americans had (with some notable exceptions). One need consider the Holocaust and. Einstein’s help getting the Manhattan Project started. He definitely wouldn’t have appreciated the raving doctrines of Hitler, Mussolini or fellow travelers.

The European Churches were no safe place either. One should place figures like Albert Einstein in their historical context. He wasn’t Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Intellectuals; Another Endangered Specie

It will be an interesting time for people of the future. Between AI and ten billion human like robots by 2040 Musk expects to exist there may not be much need for humans besides the rich. I think middle class and poor intellectuals may disappear when even the illiterate can tell AI to write a brilliant political tract and publish it.

The ongoing Anthropocene era mass extinction, micro plastics and hundreds of chemicals in the ocean, atmospheric heating etc make it look bad. If Joe Biden's try at getting a perennial war or WW 3 to flower fall through and global concerns besides war reappear there may be no political context to fix anything anymore. 

I am sure there is a bright spot in it all that the poor may not see right now.

The Problem with Ayn Rand's Philosophy

She argued against altruism and said it's bad. I believe she misunderstood altruism. It is also good for the individual in a Socratic sense of advancing the general good.

Ayn Rand wrote in an era when monolithic communism was an empirical threat. She had a good business sense and knew what side her bread was buttered on. Her's was anti-communism for the common CEO.

One could use the military for countless examples of self sacrifice for the good of the team. Selfishness does not play at all well in team sports, reducing global warming and social activities that require mass action prompted by emergent circumstances.

Basically she misunderstood the idea of the general good and how one gets a society to advance. Maybe it's an explanation for massive public debt created by selfishness in several levels.

One needs moderation in pursuit of self-interest sometimes as a sort of reciprocal or coefficient of keeping the political economy health.  Plainly if public interests repress individual interests pervasively and arbitrarily society too, and the general good will suffer.

Sacrificing others isn't altruism. Personal egoism may be the most materially effective outlook for an individual yet it borders on being sociopathic.

Teamwork benefits by self-sacrifice. I met a medal of honor recipient once who had a day off and choose to get on a helicopter to go help rescue his friends when he learned they were surrounded by the enemy. He was shot and stabbed about 20 times in conducting a defense while loading his platoon on evacuation helos. Most of the Medal of Honor recipients were saving lives, so sure I believe that valor is a virtue as Socrates might have stipulated. God sacrificed his Son so those that have faith in him could be saved and have eternal life.

Ayn Rand worked hard during the Cold War to support freedom yet the virtue of selfishness can add a lot of positive spin to bad political and social ethics.

I understood her sense of selfishness as good and self-sacrifice as bad. It is the definition of good that is the point of disagreement. Ethics is the way people implement moral norms. That doesn't seem like a meaningful point in regard to sacrifice. She did move the needle more toward personal egoism as a moral norm and that is bad for social well being and pragmatic politics of balanced budgets and healthy ecospherics. It can be good if it prevents mass spaced out dopey selflessness in the herd because people mind their health better. Pragmatism in politics matters as much as theory. One needs a healthy society. I have been uncomfortable with Pres Biden's hegemonic position for W.W. 3.

The sophism of greed, selfishness and exploiting others will have support from the advantaged. A society with many such people in leadership positions probably will sink. Aristotle noted that the commons are neglected and democracy cycles into tyranny. Someone needs to be minding the store. A nation won't do well with a lot of predators running it until they destroy each other and vanish from the scene so democracy may return.

Nathan Hale said; "I regret that I have but one life to lose for my country" before being hanged. People like that are why America exists.

Energy, Mass and Fission

Energy is a measurement of the ability to work, rather than a substance. The amount of energy a volume of mass has is mass times the speed of light squared. Hence E=M(c²).

An example is nuclear fission. When mass undergoes fission it splits some of the mass into fission products that radiate and that is 'energy'. Mass has simply changed some of its form and location in the Higgs field in space-time. It lost part of its original mass in the process. I don't know how efficient atomic fission is at converting mass like plutonium yet I gather it isn't 100%.

Science hasn't found the most basic quanta. Quarks are made of gluons. String theory is just a theory. Maybe they use the infinite dimensions of Hilbert Space to find math formula that support one-dimension strings in four dimensions.

A problem is that massless particles pick up a third dimension slowing, entangled in the Higgs Field. Did primary massless two dimensional particles appear after becoming entangled in an unknown field?

Another question is how massless particles are ever subject to gravity and if not why they should have been bound to a singularity.

Mars Exploration and Earth Eco-recovery together

N.A.S.A. has just .2% of the federal budget. They are underfunded if anything.  It’s about 30 billion a year. The money sent to Ukraine for weapons is 174 billion comparatively. No one in either major party knows what ecological economics is. Getting the private sector to change its way of doing business to the degree that the Earth would be in recovery environmentally is nearly impossible. James Lovelock and Jacque Cousteau each believed the world would sustain human life just for 200 years more. It’s hard to predict the future yet exploration has tended to make more resources available for humanity. They just don’t know how to use them conservatively.

The federal budget for 2023 was more than 6 trillion dollars. Space programs are quite underfunded when one considers their value. There are weather satellites, GPS satellites, programs to track asteroids that might hit Earth, missions to study the ☀️ and inform the world of solar events that can effect Earth systems. Studying other planets and stars helps scientists understand Earth heating and cooling. Actually there is a Coursera course that lets one design their own solar system, planet and feedback loops. The greenhouse effect structure is actually fairly complex. Some of the heat from the sun hits the earth and the bounces back into the atmosphere and down to Earth again. It is important to study other worlds to understand volcanism and more.

 Space is also a contested area and is part of the high frontier of military completion. Spy satellites and space based weapons components are now part of the political economy. Humanity is corrupted by original sin, greed, I security, pettiness and would rather he does than cooperative as a matter of course. President Biden forgot what environment remedies exist if he ever knew any who h is doubtful, and Kamala Harris didn't concern herself with it either.

Hume's Guillotine; Moral Systems and God

The ought-is paradigm of Hume was largely developed to illustrate the basis of moral systems. He didn’t prefer the inference of natural law nor those inducted with reason (like Kant’s moral imperative). He wasn’t addressing the issue of divine command or revelation that is not promulgated by human faculties.

Humanity is corrupt and cannot create a perfect moral system. God is perfect and omniscient and it is remarkable hubris to imply that he would require moral correction or that there is any sort of ought in regard to I AM.

One could use an is ought phase transition paradigm for the singularity, big bang and inflation changing what is to an ought within space-time continua of an eternal now.

Hume believed sentiment was the basis of human morality, and as morality is a description of what rules or procedures of human conduct that are normative Hume’s paradigm is not inconsistent as a formalization of sentiment for normative conduct.

Cicero’s ‘On Natural Law’ expressed a different approach to moral norms yet it to is not inconsistent with sentiment adjusted inter culturally for different historical and environmental challenges prompting variations in response.

Hume was somewhat of a linguistic philosopher centuries before the existed. He thought he could disprove cause and effect with analysis of propositions. Rather he did not comprehend the analytic synthetic distinction or clearly understand the relationship between words and objects. Because he sought to jettison causal relationships the effort to negate is-ought relationships follows.

Not that I would say that one can find is ought relationships outside of physics. If something is out of place in a quantum configuration and ought to be somewhere else there must be a force acting up on it or it has hidden properties. On the other hand when one structures synthetic propositions with analytically valid propositions one hasn't proven anything about the world.

Natural law may exist yet they need be discovered with observation instead of analytic propositions. Divine commands and revelation transcends any paradigms of analytic and synthetic propositions since they are from the Author of Reality. Some would not accept that status plainly.

What is the nature of natural law embedded in physics pertaining to human morality? That would need to be discovered scientifically. When Hume jettison causality he hadn't knowledge of the singularity and inflation of a universal continuum. Physicists ordinarily write about T=0 at singularity to the present on the premise that a progression and arrow in space-time exists. T=2 follows T=1. One can know that certain changes occur in time as subsequent because of prior structures. That continuum is one of causality although like the increase of positive integers there is an order. One can know what follows at select positions. With quantum entanglement one can know the status of remote quanta given the value of proximal quanta when observed. One shouldn't let language structures eclipse knowledge of real structures and causality where a continuum of valid selection and ordinarily is.