Re-reading chapter one brings back my initial fury concerning how the book appears to sweep specific crimes committed by specific people under the rug, to apologize for crime.

I can get past all that and work on the objective perspective offered by Bloom.

Of late, after reading much of the book, digesting it, and now working on understanding, I’ve arrived at a way of communicating the message I get so far from the book.

Living organisms, beings, are curious by accident or by design, it matters not to me right now, the fact is what it is, living organisms seek. That happens. Living organism seek.

Living organisms are curious beings, but these are just words. Careful observation of living organisms, driven by a curious need to know, uncovers the observable facts of what living organisms do in time and space. Living organisms seek. They move. They move on specific paths, making tracks, building paths, roads, and these roads connect one place to another. Living organisms also understand.

Again the use of a word isn’t the same thing as what actually happens in reality. The word isn’t the thing measured by the word. A living thing, in the process of living, moves from place to place. If the movement is repetitive, then, it seems to me, the living being understands that movement. The living being moves to a place where food exists. The living being moves to a place where shelter exists. The living being moves to a place where reproduction can occur. That, to me, is understanding, an accomplishment of life.

Rocks don’t understand in this way, they don’t move on purpose. What causes a living being to gain the power of movement? Is it curiosity?

That is what I get out of chapter 1, when I look past the apologies for crimes committed by criminals (legal or otherwise).

My viewpoint is based upon a power perspective, a perspective earned by traveling on paths driven by curiosity, on paths that are confusing, paths that are not easily understood, not well traveled, not beaten into roads, paths that challenge, paths that compete with current understanding.

I do not wish to hog the bandwidth.

From the observation that living organisms seek, I draw from Bloom the inference that all life is somehow conscious. Bloom describes in natural biological terms how within each living cell there are 'many who seek but few who find', and that those few manage to draw resources into the paths they have found. This metaphor at cellular level is a brilliant explanation of the potential working of the modern economy as a healthy market.

I'm interested in the relation between life and non-life. Non-living matter is part of the universe, and moves into 'evolutionarily stable strategies' where all parts of the system combine to produce a cosmic harmony ruled by gravity. If we can't hear the music of the spheres we are just not listening on a big and old enough scale. This is how I see the solar system, that the sun and planets are the context for life on earth, so can be seen as evolving together with the earth as a whole system.

I share a similar (sympathetic?) perception, inspired by the viewpoint offered by Bloom. In terms of progress, or evolution, or growth, or just that which occurs, there are now living things where once there were only non-living things, measurable as observable complexity, even behavior.

What is the missing link between non-life and life? What caused the occurrence, what actually happened, when life spawned at its most basic level? In which chapter of the book does Bloom describe the emergence of living beings that consume rock?

How did those beings spring forth from a less animated form of matter?

For that matter how has any form of matter come into being? If that question is answered accurately will the answer also explain how matter reached a level of complexity that we call living?

Gravity and sunlight cause events where mass changes form, and the variety of forms of mass subject to change by gravity and sunlight certainly increases the possibilities of what can be produced by those occurrences. If only hydrogen were in existence, for example, there would still be mass, so there would be gravity, but would there be sunlight – the stuff that goes outward and heats things up.

Gravity goes inward and heats things up. I guess the analogy is such that gravity is conservative and sunlight is liberal?

I’d like to offer a perspective on that whole label game where some people gravitate to conservatism and others gravitate to liberalism and if I find the link I’ll link it. The idea here is to expose the effort behind label evolution. Labels evolve, they have evolved.

A liberal in 1775 was someone who gravitated toward the effort to minimize the power of government.

Why has that label undergone such a drastic change?