Natura Sentiens
The weather is changing, and with it, I'm looking to adjust my running routines for the summer. On Tuesday, I ran 8.8 km, and today, 10.5 km. The summer heat is already starting to be felt.
One of the topics that always gets me thinking—not just when I'm running, or when I'm in the pool or on the terrace—no, all the time—is living beings. I've always been fascinated by how they respond to the environment and the way their life cycles synchronize with seasonal changes. But not only that: how they integrate with the other living beings they live with, forming complex trophic structures, who feeds on whom. We create surprisingly complex systems, which we call ecosystems. This is because living beings can perceive and process information from the environment. In this way, they determine when conditions are right for carrying out different activities when they are at risk, and what that risk is when the necessary food source is available. And the right time to reproduce, and so on.
A few months ago I commented here the characteristics of living beings, I mentioned 5 characteristics, commenting that something was missing.
What was missing is the sixth characteristic of life: the ability to perceive information from the environment and respond to it expeditiously and efficiently, as sentience. The consequence of this definition is:
LIVING BEINGS ARE SENTIENT.
Living beings have the sensory capacity to perceive what is happening around them, and based on that, their organism responds, not only physiologically, but also behaviorally.
Now, if the simplest definition of consciousness is a being's awareness of itself and its surroundings, at what point does a sentient being become conscious?
For me, life involves consciousness.
Therefore, for me, all living beings are spirits and deserve respect.
That brings me to another important point.
Is there an omnipresent, eternal, and all-powerful entity?
Yes, it's called nature. God is nature, that's what Pantheism says.
The main proponent of this view, though not the first, was Baruch Spinoza. He argued that there is only one substance and everything, absolutely everything is part of that single substance: nothing can exist unless it is part of that substance. That substance is God, and God is Nature.
Spinoza calls it substance natural nature (the properties of the single substance) and is the causal and productive principle that gives rise and sustenance to all things in the universe: NATURE. What is a product of nature is called natural nature (which is what scientists can measure, and manipulate).
But, leaving Spinoza aside, I believe there is something else. Within the consequences of natura naturans, natura naturata, there is a manifestation of the substance that becomes sentient, what I call, feeling nature, life.
What is undeniable is that life, feeling natureThe only place we know it exists is on planet Earth. I believe that if it exists here, it must exist elsewhere.
I often hear alarmed people, and rightly so, comment: “WE ARE DESTROYING NATURE.” That's a mistake: nature will continue to exist independently of us.
What is certain is that we are destroying the biosphere as we currently know it, the terrestrial ecosystem in which we developed as a species, not only biologically but also culturally and technologically, the ecosystem that sustains us humans.
That's what we're destroying.
As far as I understand we are destroying the most beautiful place in the Universe.
This is part of what I discuss in the final chapter of “HISTORY OF THE EARTH, A PERSONAL COSMOGONY”, now available on Amazon ((Amazon MX:https://acortar.link/mcne0Y, Amazon USA:https://acortar.link/fynhfl ).
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