A planted rock doesn't grow. – Neoplato
Rom says a rock is alive according to his definition of life: even though one may not be able to strictly refute it, many will not be able to empathise with it. -nandu
Just repeating some others here I know, but maybe from a different angle.
I’m reminded of the old joke about; “the secret the old Native American shaman told me about the rain dance, ……… it’s timing”. And so is the rock to the acorn. The rock is made up of, the energy, the point particles, the atoms, the molecules, and after planting the rock and its decaying (dies), the tree ends up made out of the same ‘material’. Fitting that into our reference of time is the problem.
The interesting thing is that rom and Neo each arrive at their own definition of monism though.
Didn’t the potential of the plant exist in the rock all along? Take that same thought back as far as is known in one pole, say energy or point particles, and then as far as potential has reached in the other, say the human brain, and then extrapolate that to beyond known in either direction. And then I put it in this model; matter precedes life yet life ‘permeates’ it (sorry that’s the best word I can think of off hand but as in, moves though it, exists within it, is also a part of it, within it exists the potential of), life precedes mind yet mind permeates it, mind precedes soul yet soul permeates it, and soul precedes spirit yet spirit permeates it.
As nundu said the break down of categories is only relative to frame of reference.
I’m guessing that rom might not extend the model out beyond mind at this point, but he is willing should science take him there. The point is he has come to the same understanding through a scientific view as found earlier by Stoics, Alchemists, Indians, Native Americans, Aborigines, Christianity, and yes Plotinus, or……. Well you get the idea. A basis for monism. IMO it can be seen as one of the common threads in the big picture of all stories. Maybe all the stories together are the workings of a model that each gets to figure out for themselves, that really is the nature of humans, yet ending up with one model, and that really is the nature of myth, and science.
This brings me back to the heart of the question, I think. What can we know about that something that makes the plant become more complex than the rock? Perhaps one can trace that back as a casual chain to primordial soup, but as Campbell said the science of the day requires a bigger story, and I think bigger than that. Nature is made up of what ever survives the best in the conditions at the time, so far as we can tell. So I would go a little farther and suppose what we know of Nature is only the energy that ‘survives’ in the conditions in this time. What we don’t know for certain, IMO, is where the design, the beauty,and the potentials intrinsic to the game came from. Simply chance?, preexisting condition?, God?, Who knows, but go ahead and take a guess, they really are free and freeing
. Our evidence is that Nature rewards change toward complexity with survival, so it seems reasonable to our nature as a human, to keep understanding and striving for those things as well. Mind is what leads us into the unknown, and a monistic understanding of that, seems very perennial.
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A circle that becomes elongated with parallel sides, is linear, but just bend it a little and it’s a circle again.