Could Everything Be Alive?

Hylozoism, the idea that everything is alive, may be such an old idea that it isn’t an idea at all. It may also be such an early idea in people’s minds that it may not be an idea at all in our personal life histories. Imagine you come to awareness in a dim, warm, red world like the inside of someone’s mouth, in your mother’s womb. Everything you know is alive. Or is it? Is the amniotic fluid alive? How finely must matter be divided before non-living parts emerge? How much of something has to be dead before the whole thing is dead? Are my bones and teeth alive? What about the water in my stomach? What makes it alive?

There are three related ideas here, but perhaps I’m naming them in spite of them always having been there, or naming the same thing three different ways: hylozoism, pantheism and panpsychism. As I’ve said, hylozoism is everything being alive, pantheism is everything being God, or perhaps each thing being a deity, and panpsychism is everything being conscious. Pantheism is distinct in that it may in fact be a form of atheism, whereas it doesn’t seem like the other two are anything like atheism, although maybe they’re similar to their apparent opposite in their own ways. In that case, hylozoism may be the view that everything is dead and panpsychism that there is no consciousness. But there is consciousness. That’s undeniable. And at least some things are alive.

The word is from two Greek words, `υλη – substance, stuff, and ζωον, which I’ve always understood to mean “animal” rather than “life”, which is βιος as I understand it. Perhaps that’s important. Perhaps the idea is that the world is in motion and wriggling like an earthworm or buzzing and swirling around like a swarm of gnats. The Greeks are known for using this idea. For instance, some of them would’ve argued that a magnet was alive, which is an interesting choice because I tend to use magnets as a metaphor to illustrate panpsychism – correctly arranged matter can attract opposites physically and repel like matter, and needn’t be made of iron to do so, and differently arranged matter can express its consciousness. Giordano Bruno also believed in hylozoism. I say that, but maybe that’s not remarkable because maybe we all start off assuming it, and perceive ourselves as growing out of it.

Cats are keen on crunchy things and rustling noises because their evolutionary imperatives attract them to small animals whose bones they can crunch after they’ve heard them rustling, or perhaps chirping or squeaking. In that sense, maybe the whole world is alive to a cat, but along with that they cannot afford to extend the faculty of empathy towards that world because then they couldn’t survive. As humans, we are not carnivores and we are social animals, so we require empathy. We’re the opposite to predators even though we have preyed upon other animals. Sometimes when we’ve done so, we’ve treated their dead with reverence and honoured their spirits.

Amœbæ are, much simplified, envelopes of phospholipid into and from whom water passes and we apparently decide that once that water is within their bodies, it participates in the lives of those organisms. Yet it’s merely a molecule of a very special substance. There’s a sense in which most of a tree or coral is dead. Both arrangements of matter only have a thin veneer in which living processes continue, in the case of the tree joined by a transportation system of vessels moving their sustenance between the living parts. Yet the whole organism in both cases is alive. As far as we know, Earth is the same. A thin skin of life, the biosphere, surrounds an apparently dead planet. There doesn’t seem to be much difference between the situations. Hence maybe Earth is alive.

This brings me rather delightedly to ‘Blake’s 7’, Series B episode six, ‘Trial’, in which I feel more may be happening than appears. Gan has just been, possibly pointlessly, killed in the previous episode. Having been confronted with death of a crew member, Roj Blake asks Zen to find him an appropriate planet to be passive-aggressive on and go for a walk. It looks like a jungle and he is rather surprised to meet a being on it called Zil who thinks it’s his mother and needs protection. Zil turns out to be one of a race of parasites who live on this entirely living planet, described in the show as a “flea”. Just as an aside, something is definitely going on here. This is William Blake’s painting ‘The Ghost Of A Flea’:

And this is Zil:

It’s a terrible costume and the whole thing is poorly-executed but the idea is there. I don’t think it’s accidental. But in any case, the planet, like others in science fiction such as Lem’s Solaris or Marvel’s Ego, is depicted as alive in that it is infested with parasites and eats or destroys those parasites when things have gone too far. The ground opens up and swallows them, but they also feed off the ground, and ultimately the land is inundated by the saliva ocean to digest Zil and its mates. This is not merely a metaphorically living planet, although the entire story is a metaphor, and the question arises, taking the tale literally, what are the significant differences between this unnamed globe and Earth?

The major difference that comes to mind is that our planet’s biosphere can be thought of as a dog-eat-dog, competitive situation with everyone struggling against everyone else to survive, and a single living organism who does that is not healthy. Autoimmune diseases, for example, involve the body attempting to destroy itself from within because it’s mistaken part of itself for a foreign body or infection, and they’re not part of a healthy state. However, is this really the way the living world is, or are we projecting that onto it because it’s merely the way we tend to live? Also, touching back to ‘Blake’s 7’, Zil is going to get eaten by its planet and that’s not peaceful coexistence. I have an image of Cynthia (“the Moon”) backing away from Earth because she’s got the lurgy we call human beings and has already had a mild infestation back in the early 1970s which she does not wish to re-acquire. Humans are scabies?

Biology defines life as the confluence of seven characteristics: reproduction, growth, sensitivity, respiration (not the same as breathing), excretion, movement and eating. This is an older list which is more to do with what can be observed easily on the macro level. I’m not sure where it comes from but it may be from Aristotle. More recent characteristics lists look more closely and include such things as passing genes on and homoeostasis, but whereas this is more well-informed, I don’t think this is the way to go in this case, at least for now. I actually suspect that there are complex life-like processes elsewhere in the Universe which we would count as alive on cursory examination which in fact lack one or more of these criteria. For instance, what if there is a Solaris-like living ocean which sustains itself but counts as a single organism? It wouldn’t reproduce, but it would be kind of bureaucratic to deny it was alive. I’m also not sure that this rather reductive list works particularly well on an intuitive level. Nowadays we have art and science in separate categories, but in antiquity this was not so: astrology and astronomy were basically the same thing.

Another aspect of this is the hierarchy of emergent properties we have imposed on epistemology. Biology is applied biochemistry operating on a larger scale. Biochemistry is a special case of mainly organic chemistry (not entirely, as there are plenty of inorganic compounds in living things such as salts and inorganic acids) and chemistry is a special case of physics. Does it have to be in that order though? Have we imposed our own reductivist understanding on science where it doesn’t belong? What would happen if biology was considered the basis of other sciences? This may sound absurd, but we could just take the view, without needing to justify it, that the Universe is alive and that the life we think of, such as bacteria and anteaters, is just a special case. Is there a kind of homoeostasis to the way a star manages to balance the pressure of light and gravity? It could be argued, of course, that everything depends on physics, but perhaps science would still make sense if life was considered some kind of focus at the centre of the conceptual universe, gradually fading out into viruses, crystals, organic compounds in the interstellar medium and so on.

So far I’ve been talking about matter as potentially alive, but what if that isn’t the limit? Could space itself be alive? The philosopher Baruch Spinoza thought so, or rather he saw space as God, partly because it had various characteristics often attributed to God such as omnipresence, eternity and infinity, at least as he understood space. My problems with this are that this may not be the same as life. Does the concept of God require God to be alive as opposed to a consciousness? According to Christianity, God has reproduced, and the same is often true with polytheism, but it’s vital to Islam, Judaism and Baha’i that God does not and never would reproduce, so going by a possibly rather crass biological definition of life, God is not alive. But the claim that God is dead, made of course by Friedrich Nietzsche, is generally taken to mean that we have transcended the concept of God and now realise that God never existed. It doesn’t mean that God existed at some point and no longer is, and in general, when one speaks of a formerly living thing being dead, we tend to mean that it no longer exists.

Not always though. Centuries ago, some Christians used to claim that fossils were put there by Satan to deceive humanity into thinking that Earth was more than a few thousand years old. One of the many problems with making that claim today would be that many sedimentary rocks and minerals are in fact made of fossils, such as chalk, flint, coal, oil and gas. This means that saying Satan made fossils is tantamount to saying that he created much of the surface of the Earth, such as the chalk downs of Kent and Sussex, the coal deposits in Kent, the flint from which many churches are built and so on. This illustrates how the surface of this planet is in a sense alive in many places, in that it consists of the bodies of organisms. These are only dead in the same sense as hair and the surface of the skin are. When we look at each other, most of what we see is dead in that sense, but it’s counterintuitive to think of it in that way because it makes it sound like we’re a load of zombies or something.

This way of thinking, though, is a portal into what might be called the “world of It”. Forgive me a brief foray into gender identity issues here. It’s currently considered advisable to introduce oneself using one’s pronouns in some circles, and various requests are made here, usually amounting to “she”, “he”, “they” or something like the quixotic Spivak pronouns. As far as I know, I’m the only person who prefers the pronoun “it”. The reason for this, of course, is that “it” has been weaponised by gender-critical people, or more precisely, people who seem to have a moderately unmediated view of gender identity based on presumed genitals and karyotype. To counter that objection, just briefly, there are quite successful attempts to recuperate “queer” from its status as an insult, so why not “it”? But there is a lot of truth in the thought that we are, first of all, “it” rather than “she/they/he”, because we are objects which happen to be alive and conscious. And if we’re “it”, what about all the other things which we habitually refer to as “it”? Is their status so different from our own or are we just putting on airs?

There is a case to answer here to the claim that hylozoism could just be a bit vapid, in the same way as pantheism is perhaps just a word used by squeamish atheists. If we’re saying everything alive, are we also saying that nothing is? Using pantheism as an example, Spinoza claimed that only “God or Nature” exists, that phrase not representing alternatives but a single reality which could be thought of in either way. This pantheistic God doesn’t seem to act, hear prayer or give anything. Richard Dawkins has described pantheism as “sexed-up atheism”, and here the view is definitely assumed to be combined with metaphysical naturalism, that is, the denial of the supernatural. Pantheists who accept that there are no miracles, souls of the same status but essentially different from bodies, or psychic abilities, then it does seem that people calling themselves that are really just holding onto something out of sentiment. But even in that case, it would seem to cultivate some kind of reverence for the world and the Universe which is worth having and which there may be an ethical imperative to adopt. It makes sense, for example, to consider inanimate objects as having rights, assuming that there is such a category. A deforested area of the Amazon which is going to be ploughed up and have grass grown on it for cattle destined to become burgers does seem intuitively to have had its rights violated in some way, even if there is no God or consciousness involved.

Controversially perhaps, I am not metaphysically naturalistic. There is a problem with delineating what constitutes the natural as opposed to the supernatural that makes it difficult for me to express what I mean, but I believe, for example, that prayers are answered. You may be uncomfortable with that, but there are other possibilities which are less theistic, but in which I don’t necessarily believe personally. For instance, someone might believe it’s possible to communicate with the souls of the departed or have accurate foreknowledge of the future acquired without ratiocination. Either way, this is seen as supernatural, but the question arises of whether it would still be supernatural if it turned out, for example, that our brains are sensitive to tachyons and that’s how we perceive the future. That would be a radical naturalistic explanation. This is not what I mean though. What I mean is that there are many things, not least consciousness, which are beyond our understanding simply because we evolved as hunter-gatherers on the Afrikan savannah, so why would that mean we would be able to understand the finest intricacies of the Cosmos? If we can, that is itself a bit weird from a naturalistic perspective. I presume that we are hampered with respect to the world of odours, for example, because we lack a good sense of smell, and other species may have a more intuitive grasp of magnetic fields because they use them to navigate or detect potential prey or predators. There doesn’t seem to be any reason why the supernatural would not in some way exist simply because all possible projects of the human mind occur in a particular arena, outside which a lot more could be going on. This is in a sense the supernatural but perhaps not in the sense we generally understand the word. In any case, this supernatural realm, whether or not it’s a psychic supernatural realm, could provide scope for the existence of either a pantheist God or a sense in which the Universe is alive, but this would then not be the kind of meaning which could be reduced to a mere definition.

Finally, there’s the question of the Marxist metaphysics of dialectical materialism. In the Marxist view, everything must be seen as dynamic rather than static and also as connected, and contradictions exist objectively. It’s quite odd that this aspect of Marxism as applied to physical reality seems to get “bleeped out” of most depictions of the ideology both left- and right-wing. However, maybe this kind of constant flow and change is a way of conceiving the Universe as alive, and if biology is given primacy as opposed to physics, thereby couching all scientific findings in terms of life, it’s even closer.