Strange Objects

An introductory chapter, intended to set the tone for the entire book. Living things are passing strange. They are bound by all the laws that govern inanimate matter, yet they flaunt capacities that vastly exceed those of rocks, clouds, and water. Their basic building blocks are cells, either one cell or many, each of them an organized and purposeful entity that invariably arises by the reproduction of a previous cell. Life has a long history, nearly as long as that of earth itself, most of it microbial. To understand life one must begin with microorganisms, for the higher organisms that receive most of our attention are all latecomers.

On Life

Living things are truly strange objects. They stand squarely within the material world, but at the same time flaunt capacities that far exceed those of inanimate matter. Life is in some sense a singular phenomenon: astonishingly, all creatures from bacteria to elephants, redwoods and humans belong to a single enormous family. What life is, how living things work, how they mesh with the realm of physics and chemistry, and how they came to be as we find them—these are the questions that define the science of biology. A rational sense of the world requires finding in it a place for life. Many of the answers are known, but as knowledge expands relentlessly it becomes ever harder to grasp the phenomenon of life whole. This book aims to make the phenomenon of life intelligible to serious readers who are not professional biologists by giving them a sense of the biological landscape: presenting the principles as currently understood and the major issues that remain unresolved, as simply and concisely as may be. What emerges is a biology that is internally consistent and buttressed by a wealth of factual knowledge, but also inescapably historical and complex. The hallmark of life is organization, order that has purpose; and that sets biology apart from the physical sciences. Despite a century of spectacular progress the phenomenon of life remains tantalizingly beyond our grasp, bracketed by two stubborn mysteries: the origin of life at one end, the nature of mind at the other.

Neither remnants nor commodities: Spirit objects in early twentieth century Chinese regional fiction

This paper examines the regional fiction of early twentieth century China in order to understand how such texts presented the object world of rural life. In doing so it addresses a gap in the historiography of material culture in modern China, which has emphasized urban commodity regimes and has paid far less attention to the ways in which pre-existing object practices endured into the time of the modern Republic. Building off of the methodological insights of scholars such as Bill Brownand Janet Poole regarding the contribution that literary study can make to historical understandings of material cultures, this paper argues that the regional texts of Lu Xun, Xu Qinwen, Ye Shengtao, and Yu Dafu were bewitched by overlapping life worlds: one represented by the secular rationalism of the text's narrators, and the other represented by the animistic practices of the rural others they encounter, which was expressed through objects such as joss sticks, temple doorsills, and ancestral alters. These literary works reflected upon how objects were used to make meaning in ways that were not reducible to urban commodity fetishism or remnant “superstition.” As presented in these works, spiritual objects remain powerfully active parts of the affective worlds of rural people, collapsing binary distinctions between living language and inanimate matter, the human and the ghostly, the past and the present. For the narrators of these texts, these object practices invoke a complicated mixture of modernizing critique and empathetic recognition. As such, these texts allow readers to witness the early expressions of a complex dialectic of rejection and recognition/accommodation that has marked the attitude modernizing states in China have taken in relation to animistic material cultures over the past century.

On the nature of the sustainability of the process in time

Introduction. Why do the ideas about time in ‘The Iliad’ and in the conditions of modern transmission speeds of large flows of information unexpectedly converge, and the key point is the study of the forms of stability of the process in time? What do we really mean by ingrained thinking and sustainable development, and how do they relate to the evolutionary nature of sustainable processes? The purpose of this paper is to present the form of a sustainable process, its constructive deployment in time by means of a natural science analysis. Materials and Methods. Based on the materials and methods of measuring time-varying quantities, as well as set-theoretic prerequisites for branching the process, it is proposed to look for natural scientific grounds for analyzing the sustainable development of trends in culture in general, in information processes and the education system, in particular. Here we will also try to take a well-known point of view (K. Lorentz, I. Prigozhin), when time, irreversibility, randomness in some constructive process relate to inanimate matter, to life, and to human. Results. Based on the analysis carried out by the author, the answer to the question of whether there are natural conditions for the sustainability of the object-process, in what aspect we can discuss the constructiveness of time, the evolutionary rooting of sustainable processes, branching points and the ‘stretching’ of a sustainable educational process into the future is presented. Conclusions. Our ideas about the processes in time and the conditions of their sustainability in the broadest cultural aspect, including the education system, need to be clarified. The constructive deployment of the process in time has its own structure that ensures the evolutionary rooting of the process and, in particular, the educational process.

Artificially making Lifeform

The word ‘life’ is a mysterious word with a chart of attributes that have neither been completed nor has been agreed upon by the race of humans. Probably the proper definition of life is impossible to identify for humans (the proof for this claim is given later) but the handbook to the secret shall be updated till the end, thanks to the inquisitive attitude of humans. For this piece, we shall adopt the description from the professional medical community of today. Though this topic falls midway between science and philosophy, this project is strictly technical. To quote dictionary.com, Life is the condition that distinguishes organisms from inorganic objects and dead organisms, being manifested by growth through metabolism, reproduction and the power of adaptation to environment- through changes originating internally; cambridge.com teaches Life is the period between birth and death, or the experience or state of being alive; medicaldictionary.thefreedictionary.com states Life is the property or quality that distinguishes living organisms from dead organisms and inanimate matter, manifested in functions such as metabolism, growth, reproduction and response to stimuli or adaptation to the environment originating from within the organisms. There are several other definitions but to summarize, we can safely state that though the concept is somewhat vague, we could indeed point out some common principles. We shall, in this project, try to replicate the characteristics so as to attain life in medical terms. (The order does not base upon importance of the listed character since the characters, all of them are absolute essentials and cannot possibly be categorized as more or less important). 1) Metabolism 2) Growth 3) Adaptability 4) Birth 5) Death 6) Self-stimulated response to environment 7) Reproduction 8) Can sustain self without foreign intervention Keywords: artificial, life, intelligence, computer, programming, algorithm This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Shielding of Cosmic Radiation by Fibrous Materials

Cosmic radiation belongs to the challenges engineers have to deal with when further developing space travel. Besides the severe risks for humans due to high-energy particles or waves, the impact of cosmic radiation on electronics and diverse materials cannot be neglected, even in microsatellites or other unmanned spacecraft. Here, we explain the different particles or waves found in cosmic radiation and their potential impact on biological and inanimate matter. We give an overview of fiber-based shielding materials, mostly applied in the form of composites, and explain why these materials can help shielding spaceships or satellites from cosmic radiation.

Animism in the Anthropocene

Following upon Bruno Latour’s famous injunction that ‘we have never been modern’, Graham Harvey has recently added that perhaps ‘we have always been animists.’ With the massive ecosystem destruction that is underway in the Anthropocene, this realization could represent a necessary paradigm shift to address anthropogenic climate change. If the expropriation and destruction intrinsic to the modern division between a world of cultural values attributed exclusively to humans and a world of inanimate matter devoid of value has become untenable, then showing the illusory nature of this divide should open the way for a transvaluation of values capable of developing an animistic relational ontology to replace the dualisms of the Western paradigm. Developing the four traits typical of animistic cultures – personhood, relationality, location and ontological boundary crossing – a postmodern ‘machinic animism’ is defended as a new ecological paradigm for the Anthropocene.

The Aesthetics of ‘Speaking Objects’ in Aniki-Bóbó’s Anthropo-cosmo-morphic Material

The surface of the things which make up the pro-filmic constitutes the shell/ signifier chosen to shape the soul of the filmic world or its anthropo-cosmo-morphic image rendered by the techniques of film language. The result is the creation of a complex and multi-layered “possible world”, consisting of discursive parts that speak through the dramaturgy and aesthetics of the film, a socio-semantics which transfigures the matter of bodies and objects through the mechanisms of filmic re-signification. Amongst these, the intellectual montage as well as all the graphic and audio signs that appear on the scene can be identified. These signs stand out because of their metaphorical-discursive capacity, as will be analysed in the film Aniki-Bóbó (1942) by Manoel de Oliveira: the written words that serve to give voice to inanimate matter (Carlitos’ bag); the modelled forms which reproduce material allegories or doubles of the human body (the doll); the fragile materials that refer to the children’s fragility itself; the steel and iron of mechanised infrastructures showing the modernisation of the country; the classical architecture, the nature of the place and the free, open-air spaces of games, as opposed to closed spaces that recall underdeveloped pedagogical institutions; and among the latter, the liminal place par excellence, symbolised by the ‘Shop of Temptations’. In the filmic whole, bodies, places and objects are thus configured as interconnected parts of a single compact world, in which the cosmos is reflected in the anthropo, and the anthropo in the cosmos, in order to transfigure, in a metaphorical key, the immaterial culture referring to the changes in national identity. This allegorical fable of Portuguese pedagogical culture ultimately proposes the possibility of a social (and political) change, projected into a ‘just’ future without dictatorship (victory of good over evil).

Biological matter as a material

Although it is usually obvious whether matter is animate or inanimate, it is far from easy to define life. Here we adopt as a definition the three principles identified by Paul Nurse in his recent book ‘What is life?’ There is a resurgence in the physics of life, in particular the materials science of animate matter and the emergence of complexity. This is a departure from molecular biology to a more holistic approach to understanding living matter as a self-organised complex system comprising energy-consuming, purposeful molecular machines, or agents, working collectively. An ultimate goal of synthetic biology is to create animate matter from inanimate matter. First steps have been taken, but there is still a long way to go.

To What Inanimate Matter Are We Most Closely Related and Does the Origin of Life Harbor Meaning?

The question concerning the meaning of life is important, but it immediately confronts the present authors with insurmountable obstacles from a philosophical standpoint, as it would require us to define not only what we hold to be life, but what we hold to be meaning in addition, requiring us to do both in a properly researched context. We unconditionally surrender to that challenge. Instead, we offer a vernacular, armchair approach to life’s origin and meaning, with some layman’s thoughts on the meaning of origins as viewed from the biologist’s standpoint. One can observe that biologists generally approach the concept of biological meaning in the context of evolution. This is the basis for the broad resonance behind Dobzhansky’s appraisal that “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”. Biologists try to understand living things in the historical context of how they arose, without giving much thought to the definition of what life or living things are, which for a biologist is usually not an interesting question in the practical context of daily dealings with organisms. Do humans generally understand life’s meaning in the context of history? If we consider the problem of life’s origin, the question of what constitutes a living thing becomes somewhat more acute for the biologist, though not more answerable, because it is inescapable that there was a time when there were no organisms on Earth, followed by a time when there were, the latter time having persisted in continuity to the present. This raises the question of where, in that transition, chemicals on Earth became alive, requiring, in turn, a set of premises for how life arose in order to conceptualize the problem in relation to organisms we know today, including ourselves, which brings us to the point of this paper: In the same way that cultural narratives for origins always start with a setting, scientific narratives for origins also always start with a setting, a place on Earth or elsewhere where we can imagine what happened for the sake of structuring both the problem and the narrative for its solution. This raises the question of whether scientific origins settings convey meaning to humans in that they suggest to us from what kind of place and what kinds of chemicals we are descended, that is, to which inanimate things we are most closely related.