Still More Evidence that We’re Organisms in Einstein’s Universe

The lead paragraph of this article, Genomic Changes Found In Brains Of People Who Commit Suicide, asks questions which I’ve been handling in my first book and my blogs for the past two years:

Are genes destiny? Alternatively, are we simply the products of our environment? There is a growing sense that neither of these two possibilities fully captures the essence of the risk for psychiatric disorders. New light is being shed on the complex interaction of genetic and environmental factors as the result of growth in the field of epigenetics.

This paragraph gets close to the truth but still misses the bulls-eye. We need to recognize importance of the soma which is shaped not only by genes and the later environment but also the environment in the womb and all that goes into the development of that human being, including sheer chance. I think we even need to start thinking of ourselves as being boundary phenomena of a sort. Crudely speaking: our innards, soma and genes, exist to create the movements which are our interaction with our environments.

This is one reason for my efforts to explore those powerful ways of looking at being which are found in modern physics and not yet in metaphysics or theology. I’m thinking in this context of the geometric techniques developed first by Einstein to describe the very nature of that complex entity space-time as well as the various forms of energy embedded in that entity. Techniques that work well in describing physical being at a fundamental level, even work well in predicting behavior of that being, won’t provide a complete description of complex entities composed of that fundamental being. It’s likely that even stars and galaxies have individual histories that can be fully expressed only by narrative techniques — if we could know enough about those histories. For all our differences, we human beings share our fundamental being with stars, our collective natures probably share some of the nature of galaxies. This isn’t so different from our current assumptions except that modern biologists and social-scientists, even when not reductionists, think in terms of an earlier mechanical phase of man’s efforts to understand physical and metaphysical physical being and space-time.

The more sophisticated models, such as various differential geometries, used by Einstein and his successors can most likely be used to describe our basic being. After all, we were born into and developed within that same universe which Einstein described so well. It seems unlikely to me that God created Aristotelian creatures within an Einsteinian universe. It also seems likely to me that a qualitative understanding of our basic being which uses the more sophisticated models of modern physics might well allow us to come up with good ways of speaking of our limited but real freedom to move about and to respond to our environments.