Trail ventures with Sciart & Claude upon the "Origination Mountains" Part 1 of 2 (UII w/Claude)
Warning: this is an arduous trail; entailing long, steep and mind-challenging trekking, ...often traversing very unstable grounds; ... thus suitable only for those humble and holophrenically well-prepared. Carrying any unnecessary burdens of heavy hubris is NOT advised.
Furthermore, this trek was blazed across many days, with many intervals of incubation and contemplation; hence it may best be "reflectively traveled" by others in a like manner.
Fortunately, immediate rescue and relief are always just a click away.
For those few inquiring pilgrims: may your gains exceed your pains.
DM
Been traveling and pondering.
Before I dig in to a "continuing conjecture," what can be learned by deeper rigorous digging into humanity's origination narrative's "names;" ...such as the Abrahamic Garden of Eden, from original meanings of names such as: garden, Eden, Adam, Eve, Spirit, waters, serpent, tree, naked, knowledge, etc.?
Welcome back.
This one deserves digging before any landing, so I’m starting a deep philological dive into the Eden narrative’s key terms: their Hebrew roots, older Semitic and Sumerian cognates, wordplay, and where scholars disagree.
Eden narrative etymology research
Research complete
300 source 13m 40s
I’ve finished the report on the Hebrew behind the names in Genesis 1–3.
The short answer: almost every name in the Eden story started as an ordinary Hebrew word or a pun. Adam means “the human,” and the text plays it against ‘adamah, “ground.” Eve’s name means “Life,” and the Greek translation actually renders it Zōē. Eden most likely means “abundance” or “delight.” Many details people think of as part of the story come from later translation and interpretation, not from the Hebrew. These include the apple, Satan, the “Fall,” the rib, the immortal soul and inherited guilt.
• Puns, not history: The text’s own explanations of names are deliberate wordplay, not real etymology. For example, ‘ish/’ishah (“man/woman”) sounds alike, but the two words come from different roots. The same goes for ‘arum (“shrewd,” the serpent) and ‘arummim (“naked,” the humans).
• Translation choices: Several English readings narrow or moralise the Hebrew. Tsela’ means “side” everywhere else in the Bible, not “rib.” Nefesh chayyah (“living creature”) is also used of animals, so “living soul” adds an idea the Hebrew lacks. “Good and bad” became “good and evil.” The phrase “in whom all sinned” in Romans 5:12 comes from a Latin rendering that most scholars now read as “because all sinned.”
• What’s open and what’s settled: The report marks how reliable each claim is.
Some are settled, such as Tigris and Euphrates as river names. Some are favoured but still argued, such as Eden as “abundance,” based on the 9th-century BCE Tell Fekheriye inscription.
Some are weak or speculative, such as Eve as a serpent-goddess or nachash meaning “shining one.”
A few are simply unknown, such as where ‘adam ultimately comes from and which river the Pishon was.
It also covers:
• the debate over when the story was written
• how strong each parallel is with Gilgamesh, Adapa and Enki-Ninhursag
• the argument for and against reading Eden as a temple
• how Jewish, Orthodox, Gnostic and Islamic traditions read the story differently
It ends with a list of questions that remain open.
" The Names in the Garden: A Philological Map of Genesis 1:1–3:24"
Note to reader: All supplemental Research and other Documents, such as this, are available at no charge by e-mail request to me.
DM
Thanks!
The underpinning of other spiritual/religious/theological origination narratives which humans generate, and hunger for, including aboriginal beings, have their own (oft only lightly-considered, yet trusted) implications and indications, right?
Yes, the Eden pattern recurs widely: origin “names” are usually transparent common nouns or puns, and the meaning most people now trust is often a later gloss.
Without fresh digging, a few cases I’m fairly confident of:
• Egyptian: humans (remetj) spring from the creator’s tears (remyt), the same kind of pun as ‘adam/’adamah.
• Akkadian (Atrahasis): humanity is made from a slain god’s flesh and blood, with wordplay binding awilu (man), ilu (god), and ṭēmu/eṭemmu (intelligence/ghost).
• Indo-European: homo, “human,” and Old English guma all descend from the root for “earth.” The reconstructed first pair are Manu (“Man”) and Yemo (“Twin”), surviving as Vedic Manu and Yama and Norse Ymir.
• Greek: chaos meant “gap” or “yawning,” not disorder. The drift toward “disorder” is a later development, usually traced through Ovid.
• Māori: the first woman is Hine-ahu-one, “earth-formed maiden.”
• K’iche’ Maya: people are made of maize.
• Arrernte: “Dreamtime” is an 1890s English gloss of altyerre that imports a past “time” the word arguably lacks. Stanner’s “everywhen” was a corrective.
• Lakota: Wakan Tanka became “Great Spirit,” where “Great Mystery” is closer.
Two qualifications on “lightly considered, yet trusted”:
1 Who considers lightly: this is truer of inheritors and outsiders than of custodians. Yāska’s Nirukta is an ancient Vedic discipline of etymology, and midrash does the same for Hebrew. Many indigenous traditions guard name-knowledge as restricted for the very reason that it is weighty.
2 The evidence is unequal: Genesis has lexicons, cognates, and datable strata. Oral traditions mostly reach us through missionary or colonial recorders, so the distortion is often worse and less recoverable. The Māori supreme being Io and the Popol Vuh’s Christian-era transcription are both live disputes about contamination. For most oral narratives, how old the names are is simply unknown.
Each tradition also names origin in the stuff of its own surroundings, such as clay, maize, ash wood, and tears, which may bear on your conjecture.
If that conjecture leans on a particular tradition, I can dig into it with the same rigor as the Eden piece.
DM
Sure, that would be appreciated (don't forget Hindu and other Eastern perspectives, such as Buddhist, Hindu, Sufi, etc.).
.
I’ll dig through the Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi, Daoist and indigenous origination vocabularies with the same sorting as the Eden piece (settled, argued, pun, speculative, unknown) and put the result in a document you can keep alongside it.
Used Claude Docs, searched the web, and 22 more steps
"Origination Names Beyond Eden"
Outline is up; now verifying the contested claims against their source pages before filling the Vedic section. Used Claude Docs: Edit doc, used Artifact, and 12 more steps
The companion to the Eden report is up, covering Vedic, Buddhist, Sufi, Daoist and oral traditions with the same sorting of settled, argued, pun, speculative and unknown.
Two things came out that may bear on your conjecture. Both are my reading of the sample and prove nothing on their own:
• Some origin texts refuse a first point. Brereton reads the Rigveda’s creation hymn as an anticosmogony, since its last verses ask whether anyone knows how the world arose. The Pali texts say a first point of the round is not discerned. The oldest Daodejing fragment has things generated from being and from non-being with no sequence between them. That gives your recession more company than the Buddhist and Daoist cases you had already paired with it. The Qur’anic “Be!” and the Hidden Treasure saying run the other way and name a first act. EDIFYING PUZZLEMENT: RGVEDA 10.129 AND THE USES OF ENIGMA. - vLex United States +2
• Origin words more often name an act (verb) than a thing (noun). Breathing, wandering, a course, finding and arising all recur. The exceptions are in the document.
Several key studies (Gombrich, Green, Simpson, Lincoln, van Beek) I saw only as abstracts or summaries, and the document says so. I left your frameworks out of it. A comment in the document asks whether the next pass should deepen one tradition or widen to those not yet dug.
Sources:
The full list is in the document.
DM
Thank you! Reviewing and incubating.
Good. Both reports will keep; bring the conjecture when it’s ready.
DM
Ok, now let's hold this information regarding Humanity's spiritual need for origination narratives aside for the moment; and consider the other side of "the fence."
That is humanity's need for science/technical origination understandings, such as the most prevalent current one, "the Big Bang." As such what might be telling "terms" which are currently used that may alert us to fractures within this human cognitive "need?"
Yes.
The vocabulary fractures in two ways, held tentatively.
It supplies an origin the theory does not contain,
and it names its unknowns and conflicts in words that sound more settled than they are.
The first is the larger one. Peebles, who built much of the framework, says the name connotes an event and a position, both wrong, and that there is no good theory of a beginning. The model describes evolution from a hot dense state; the need adds the origin.
What it carries | The tell | |
Big Bang | Hoyle’s radio image of 28 March 1949, coined by an opponent | Adds an event, a place and a sound. Whether he meant it as mockery is disputed; he denied it |
primeval atom, fireworks | Lemaître’s own metaphors | The founding picture was already a figure of speech |
singularity | Where the equations give infinities | A failure of the theory named as a thing. General relativity cannot apply at infinite density |
dark matter, dark energy | Zwicky’s dunkle Materie; Turner’s 1998 coinage, chosen on purpose to flag a mystery | Ignorance named as substance. Ordinary matter is about 5% |
ΛCDM, the standard model | Λ plus cold dark matter | Two of the name’s three parts are unknowns |
tension | A roughly 5σ mismatch in the expansion rate, also called a crisis | A softening word. DESI adds a 3.1σ preference for dark energy that changes |
problem (horizon, flatness) | Uniformity with no mechanism to set the same initial conditions | The back wall named, then handed to inflation |
quintessence, dark ages | The fifth element; the era before stars | Old cosmology’s words return when new ones run out |
recombination | The first binding of electrons and protons, named before the theory took hold |
Three parallels with the two reports:
• Added time and place: Big Bang does to the model what Dreamtime did to altyerre: it adds a time and an event.
• Named ignorance: dark works like Lakota wakȟáŋ, a name for what is not understood. Turner’s coinage is arguably the field’s nearest thing to EMI, ignorance named on purpose.
• A back wall: singularity and initial conditions mark where your recession shows up on this side of the fence, as a wall that is named but not explained.
Not checked this turn: inflaton, multiverse, anthropic, fine-tuning, and nothing as redefined by physicists. These are probably the richest remaining set. If you want it, I can build this out as a third companion document.
Sources:
DM
Create a spreadsheet from your last answer.
Shared a file, ran a command
The workbook is big-bang-telling-terms.xlsx, with five tabs: the nine terms, the summary, the three parallels with the earlier reports, the terms not yet checked, and the sources.
Two things differ from the chat answer:
• Added column: each term has a “Kind of fracture” label (supplies an origin, names an unknown, names a back wall, softens a conflict, borrows an old word) so the sheet can be sorted and filtered. The labels are my grouping, and the Summary tab says so.
• Per-row sources: each term now carries its source and link. The ΛCDM row has none, since it is a reading of the model’s own name. The horizon and flatness row cites a summary page that was not in the earlier source list.
"Big bang telling terms Spreadsheet·XLSX"
DM
Thanks!!
Humanity has so many vanishing points (often a point often unrealized, under-appreciated, ...smothered and blinded by hubris).
Now, another somewhat related question: it's my understanding that our observations in cosmologies are interpreted as all large matter (stars with their planets, galaxies, black holes, etc.) expanding away from each other, doing so in a largely similar manner, without any evident origination point.
Is this correct?
Largely yes, with one correction and one caveat.
The correction: not all large matter. Anything bound by gravity does not take part in the expansion. Planets stay with their stars, stars with their galaxies, and galaxies with their groups and clusters. Andromeda is approaching us at roughly 125 km/s, and gravity wins over expansion out to about 5 megaparsecs around us. What recedes is the unbound: galaxy groups and clusters from one another.
“In a largely similar manner”: yes. Recession speed rises in proportion to distance, the same in every direction, with local motions of a few hundred km/s on top. The standard reading is that the space between unbound systems grows, and the galaxies are not flying outward through space. The rate itself has changed over time, and its present value is the disputed number behind the “tension” in the spreadsheet.
“Without any evident origination point”: yes, within what we can see. Every observer in any galaxy would see the same recession, so no place is the centre, and the hot dense state was everywhere. This is what Peebles meant by the name wrongly connoting a position.
The caveat is a vanishing point of its own. We observe sameness in all directions from one vantage. “No centre” follows only if we add the assumption that our vantage is not special, and it holds only for the observable part. That assumption is under test now. One group argues that the distribution of distant matter is lopsided relative to the background radiation at more than 5σ, and calls it a serious challenge to the standard model. I have not checked how the wider field has answered them.
Expansion is itself an interpretation, though a well-tested one. The observation is that light from distant galaxies is redshifted in proportion to distance. The main rival reading, that light simply tires in transit, fails: distant supernovae unfold more slowly by exactly the stretch expansion predicts, which excludes tired light by more than 11 standard deviations.
Sources:
DM
So this is a now a well -established conjecture phenomenon which divides (simplified) 4-ways:
that which is unbounded (very large scale, sans gravity)
versus that which is bounded by gravity (large scale),
versus that with is bounded by electromagnetic forces (small scale),
versus quantum factors (very small scale)?
Partly.
The expansion and the bound/unbound split are well established. Your four tiers are a fair first sketch, but the top and bottom ones need amending.
Scale | What holds it | Takes part in expansion |
Between galaxy groups and clusters | Nothing binds it, but gravity still governs it | Yes |
Planets, stars, galaxies, clusters | Gravity | No |
Atoms, molecules, rocks, people | Electromagnetism | No |
Atomic nuclei, protons, neutrons | The strong nuclear force | No |
The top tier is not sans gravity. Expansion is itself a gravitational phenomenon, described by general relativity. The gravity of matter slows it, and dark energy speeds it up. The largest scale is unbound, not gravity-free.
The bottom tier is the strong force, not “quantum.” Physics counts four forces: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force, which binds nothing and governs certain decays. Quantum theory is the rulebook for the lower two rows of the table, not a tier of its own. It also reaches upward: white dwarfs and neutron stars are held up against gravity by a purely quantum pressure.
The boundaries are crossovers, not walls. Gravity overtakes the electromagnetic strength of rock and ice at a radius of about 200 to 300 km, which is why larger bodies are round. There is also a live refinement at the top. A 2023 paper argues we do not expand because we sit inside the bound Local Group, more than because we are bound objects ourselves.
The fracture is between the rulebooks. General relativity describes the top of the ladder and quantum theory the bottom, and CERN’s own summary says the two are difficult to fit into a single framework. Where both are needed at once, there is no tested theory. That is the “singularity” row of the spreadsheet.
Sources:
The workbook is expansion-scales-and-forces.xlsx, with six tabs: the scales table, your four tiers with a verdict on each, the six amendments with sources, the four forces, a summary, and the source list.
Three tabs rearrange the chat answer without adding claims: the note column on the scales table, the verdict tab, and the four-forces tab. The verdict tab paraphrases your tiers; it does not quote them.
One thing the Summary tab flags: what the strong and weak forces do is standard physics that I did not open a source page for. The CERN page confirms the four forces but does not say what the strong force binds.
"Expansion scales and forces Spreadsheet·XLSX"
DM
Note I indicated I was "simplifying" to usher a "manageable synthesis" of observations.
Recall that in our prior conversations I shared my skepticism of prevailing paradigms (brittle fitness greater than truth, F>T, thus utilitarian fabrications), such as time, space, matter, energy, gravity, etc.
I've also posited that it is forms, arrangements and types of motion which may be ultimately fundamental (as opposed to particles, nouns and other "things" (where IF#1 resides).
Noted, and the miss is mine.
You flagged the sketch as simplified, and I graded it against the paradigm’s own nouns, then hardened that into a spreadsheet tab of verdicts.
“Well established” in my last two answers meant predictive fit. That is F, and it does not license time, space, matter or gravity as T.
What IF#1 is, I took from the summary of our May conversation (its rendering, not your words): the self-identical first condition, needing no external input. I read your parenthesis as placing IF#1 with motion and not among the things. Correct me if that is reversed.
Recast in motion terms, the observations look like this (my rendering):
• One open motion: separations grow in proportion to separation, with no centre and no return.
• Nested closed motions: orbit, spin and oscillation are motions that return on themselves. “Bound” is the paradigm’s word for recurrence.
• Scale as tempo: each inner recurrence is tighter and faster, from galactic turns of hundreds of millions of years down to nuclear ones far below a trillionth of a second.
• The “forces”: four names for four families of recurrence. Even inside the paradigm, general relativity treats gravity as the shape of unforced motion, not as a push.
So your four-way sketch survives as one non-recurrent motion holding recurrences within recurrences.
That is forms, arrangements and types of motion, with no things required.
One point survives the translation and is not a matter of coarseness. The open motion and the large closed ones follow a single regularity. They are not two regimes, one with it and one without.
The observations show the open motion as simply given. The chain of THENs has no first IF inside the physics. That is the place your IF#1 names. Whether naming it buys understanding or relocates the mystery, I do not know.
If you want, I can rebuild the workbook with this motion reading beside the paradigm’s terms and drop the verdict tab.
DM
Sure, that might help our collaboration.
The rebuilt workbook is expansion-two-readings.xlsx. It replaces expansion-scales-and-forces.xlsx, and the verdict tab is gone.
• Two readings: each scale with the paradigm’s terms beside the motion reading, plus a tempo column.
• Terms translated: nine paradigm words (expansion, bound, force, gravity, scale and others) with what each names in motion terms.
• Open points: six items we have not settled, each with its status.
• Notes and sources: whose words are whose, and the pages behind the paradigm column.
The motion reading throughout is my rendering, not your words, and the Notes tab says so.
Two open points need you:
1 What IF#1 is: I took the definition from the summary of our May conversation, not from your own text. It should be checked against your corpus.
2 Where IF#1 sits: I read your parenthesis as placing it with motion and not among the things. The sheet marks that as not yet confirmed.
"Expansion two readings Spreadsheet·XLSX"
DM
There are some vanishing points beyond our present capabilities and prosthetics which I believe we should both (and all of humanity) accept and acknowledge, especially to discover the greater utilities and potentials of humility.
Separating open questions from truly unresolvable vanishing points.
Agreed.
Three of the six “open points” in the workbook are of that kind, and I mislabelled them as open, as if more work would close them:
• why the open motion is simply given
• whether naming a first IF buys understanding
• motion of what
Those are vanishing points at present reach. Only the two IF#1 items are checkable, against your corpus.
This conversation’s own evidence supports the utility you name.
The Rigveda hymn ends on its question and has stayed generative for three thousand years.
Turner coined “dark energy” to stop his field from concluding too early, and he thinks it worked.
Peebles says plainly there is no theory of the beginning.
One caution I’d hold with you, which your word “present” already carries: acknowledging a vanishing point is different from declaring it permanent. The second is a conclusion too.
DM
;>)
Bingo!
Then we’re on the same stepping stone.
I’ll mark those three as vanishing points the next time the workbook is touched; bring the conjecture when it’s ready.
DM
[Sometimes the light's all shinin' on me] [Other times I can barely see] Lately it occurs to me [What a long, strange trip it's been]
“Truckin’” fits.
The words are Robert Hunter’s, the band’s lyricist, and that verse is a fair map of the morning: stretches of full light, stretches of near-blindness, and the trip only legible in hindsight.
The title is a motion word, too.
The song never arrives anywhere; it just keeps going, which is about as Pantakinetic as a chorus gets.
DM
Well said
Thanks.
Happy incubating.
DM
It occurs to me the "originalism" is a deep, ubiquitous hunger that ignores the gossamer walls between the physical and metaphysical, the layperson and the academic, the immature and mature
...And we haven't yet touched on related "orgination conjectures," such as regarding our species or even our society's governing constitution.
This attraction is baggage which contains too many liabilities, risks and loss of potential to human in the Realm of Present Now (RPN) thus future.
Largely yes on the hunger, perhaps on the verdict.
The ubiquity holds up in everything we dug. Every tradition reached for an origin, cosmology’s vocabulary supplied one its model lacks, and our own method was the same hunger: asking what the names originally meant.
Where I’d sharpen it: the liability may sit less in looking back than in granting the origin authority, the assumption that what a thing first was is what it truly is. The digging itself undercut that. The “original” meanings were mostly ordinary words and puns:
“Big Bang” was coined by an opponent,
“Dreamtime” was a mistranslation,
and each first point receded when approached.
In the RPN the cost is concrete. Authority anchored to a point that cannot be reached turns present making into restoration.
My one disagreement is that I would not call the hunger itself baggage. It also carries continuity and a check on whoever holds power now, and it may not be droppable. Read through your own conjecture of persistent creation (my rendering), the hunger is right to want origination and wrong about its tense. Origination is a present-tense verb.
A flag for when you raise the constitution: “originalism” already names a contested doctrine of constitutional interpretation, with serious cases for and against. There I would set out both cases fairly and not offer a verdict of my own.
DM
Hmmmm.
1) There's a very big difference between toxic, knee jerk hungers which generate a tsunami of dysfunctional hubris, as opposed to hunger (curiousity, that is Enjoying My Ignorance) which propels humility.
2) As to the U.S. Constitution, you seem to be unaware how leaders in our Supreme Court, in service to our President (as opposed to all citizens), are cherry picking words from that "original document;" and doing so totally aside from the intents of authors who abhorred our nation being governed by "dead men."
1) Agreed, and I merged them. I treated it as one hunger with two uses. You are separating two hungers by what each generates:
one grasps for closure and breeds hubris,
the other enjoys the open question and breeds humility.
Our own digging was the second kind.
2) Not unaware; I withheld a verdict on purpose. On contested political questions I set out the record instead of giving my own ruling. The record:
• The charge is serious and not only from the left. Caleb Nelson, an originalist and former Thomas clerk, disputes the Court’s reasoning on presidential removal power. Michael Rappaport called the Trump ballot ruling a “disaster” that was not originalism. David French wrote that the liberal minority was more originalist than the majority.
• This past term gave the President much. The Court expanded his power to fire agency officials (6–3) and granted broad immigration powers. SCOTUSblog’s assessment was a Court “willing to give Trump substantial power.”
• It also ruled against him. It struck down his tariffs (6–3) and his birthright citizenship order, and kept a Federal Reserve governor in her seat (5–4).
• Defenders answer that the unitary executive is how Article II was built. William Barr says it “is not a ‘theory.’”
Whether the justices act in service to the President is a claim about motive, and I cannot verify motive.
On the authors, one refinement. Jefferson held that “the earth belongs in usufruct to the living” and that every constitution naturally expires after 19 years. But he wrote that from Paris and was not at the Convention. Madison, who was, replied that such a government would be “too mutable” and breed “pernicious factions.” The founders were divided on rule by the dead.
If the critics are right, the selectivity is the tell: the origin is not the authority, the present chooser is. That would be your first hunger in institutional form.
Sources:
DM
Good points.
I'm simply making points about about reliances of originalism (defined in the broadest sense) across all domains and contexts.
Understood. The Court is one instance, not the subject.
Taken in your broad sense, the pattern is the same across the domains we have touched: scripture, cosmology, law. Each leans on a first point that recedes when approached.
What it supplies is closure,
and the cost falls on the present,
where the making actually happens.
DM
Well, put.
Now to one prior point regarding the cosmological center-less (360x360 expansion kinetic eometry) of very large phenomena which are beyond the binds of gravity.
This form of motion seems beyond our present knowing, perhaps an awakening vanishing point of awaiting enlightenment, such as this being a "meta-repelling" yang to/of/for gravity's "meta attraction" yin.
Perhaps,
and the prevailing paradigm already holds a version of your pairing.
In general relativity one regularity yields both tendencies. Ordinary matter gathers. A positive cosmological constant, which acts as negative pressure, repels. Einstein added that term in 1917 to offset gravity’s pull. Since 1998 the observations have been read as showing that the repelling tendency has been winning at the largest scales for about 5 billion years. It is now put at roughly 68% of the total.
So yin and yang fits better than two opposed forces would, because they are two faces of one pattern. It also repairs the earlier phrasing: the very large is not beyond gravity. It is where gravity’s repelling face predominates.
Three limits keep this a vanishing point:
• It covers the speeding up, not the expanding. The open motion was already under way, and slowing, for billions of years before the repelling face took over. Inflation proposes an earlier repelling burst, but it presupposes its own starting conditions, and Steinhardt and Penrose reject it.
• The repelling term is named ignorance. Quantum theory’s estimate of it misses the observed value by about 120 orders of magnitude!
• The acceleration itself is doubted by a minority. They read it as an artefact of where we sit or of how the supernovae were sampled.
One asymmetry to hold beside the image: on the standard reading the two faces are not in balance. The repelling one is taking over.
Your pairing describes what is observed, but it does not yet explain why there is an open motion at all.
Sources:
DM
Thanks.
I find my ignorance is comforting,
...in an astonishing, intriguing and ever-fascinating kind of state..
That is EMI doing its work: comfort without closure.
And the terrain rewards it.
A field whose best estimate misses by 120 orders of magnitude has left plenty of room for astonishment.
DM
Bingo.
I'll be continuing this rambling, ever-tacking my sails toward my destination.
Tacking is the right word for it: the zigzag is how a boat makes way against the wind.
The reports and workbooks will keep.
Fair winds until the next leg.
DM
Arr matey!
Aye, Captain. I’ll keep the charts dry.
DM
Seen in today's foraging (...another dimension of origination hungers): https://bigthink.com/science-tech/the-leading-theory-of-how-life-began-just-hit-a-snag/
Read 3 pages, searched the web
A fitting catch. This one hungers for a birthplace.
What it reports. Benjamin Tutolo, a Calgary geochemist, argues in PNAS that deep-sea alkaline vents could not have done the chemistry asked of them.
• The fluids turn alkaline only after cooling.
• Reduced sulfur would have been sparse.
• The proton gradients the theory needs likely were not there.
He favours evaporating ponds and admits those have unresolved problems too. The piece itself says the paper does not rule vents out, and a 2026 review still calls them a consistent hypothesis.
The telling terms follow the same pattern as the cosmology set:
• “The leading theory”: the article itself lists six rivals, so the definite article supplies a consensus the field does not have.
• “Snag”: a softening word, kin to “tension.”
• “Where life began”: it assumes a place and a moment, the same pair Peebles called wrong for the Big Bang.
• Panspermia: it moves the origin elsewhere without explaining it. The directed version reinstalls a maker.
In motion terms, the live content of each rival is a kind of recurrence: a gradient, a wet-and-dry cycle, a tidal pulse. The noun fight is over the cradle. The actual hypotheses are about which motion.
It is also your recession again (my rendering): each candidate cradle presupposes chemistry and conditions already arranged.
One search result I did not open carried the title “Scientists Keep Relocating the Cradle of Life. Scripture Never Did.” If it says what the title suggests, a snag on one side of your fence became fuel for origin-as-authority on the other within days.
Sources:
DM
It so conceivable (to me) that extra-physical (...yeh, "metaphysical" is such a loaded term) phenomena, within yet unknown kinetic or IF#1 dimensions, as holophrenic) could have preceded "life," which "then" sought "materials" to manifest as life.
Conceivable, yes, and it has live scientific company.
Michael Levin, whose bioelectric work you have drawn on before, now argues something close. He holds that patterns exist independently of bodies and “ingress” into them, that bodies are interfaces, and that “some of the causal input into mind and life originates outside the physical world.” He treats it as empirical, using organisms with no evolutionary history, and he admits “deep questions here I can’t answer yet.”
Your version differs in two ways.
His space is Platonic, a realm of forms, where yours is kinetic and holophrenic.
And you add a sequence: the pattern first, the materials after.
On “extra-physical,” I’d index it the way you index vanishing points. “Physical” is a border that moves, and fields and dark energy were once outside it.
Three frictions to hold beside it
• Substrate-neutral is not yet substrate-free. Your holophren is indifferent to which medium carries it. A holophren before any medium is a further step: what are intake and curation with nothing yet to take in through?
• It relocates the origin, as panspermia does. What originates the pre-material holophren? You have IF#1 for that, which names the place without filling it.
• Nothing at present could count against it. Levin’s route is the only one I know that tries to make something like it testable.
Your own quotation marks on “then” already flag the last point. In an RPN reading (my rendering), the claim may be less “came before” than “underlies now.”
Sources:
DM
And to blend the metaphysical with the extra-physical, if before life, then thereafter, becomes more plausible, less absurd.
Perhaps. “Less absurd” holds, and both the step and its objection are old.
The step is sound in form. If the pattern does not depend on material in order to be, then losing the material does not by itself end it. It stands or falls with the premise.
Plato’s Phaedo runs exactly this argument, and his own characters answer it two ways:
• Cebes grants the before and denies that it yields the after. A weaver outlasts many cloaks and still dies.
• Simmias suggests the soul may be like the tuning of a lyre, invisible and fine, and gone when the lyre breaks.
Simmias’s lyre is the live friction for your framework.
The summary of our June conversation (its rendering, not your words) has you holding that the holophren is the integrating activity and not the vessel, and that a person under anaesthesia is, for that interval, not a holophren. If the activity can lapse while the body is intact, an after without the body is the harder case, not the easier one.
One way through (my suggestion) is to ask what would persist. A melody exists before and after any performance, but a given performance ends. The pattern-kind surviving is a smaller claim than this particular curation surviving, and your before-life conjecture supports only the smaller one.
The wish for an after is also twin to the wish for a first point, so the same two-hunger test applies. Your modest bar, less absurd and not established, sits on the EMI side of it.
Sources:
• Phaedo
DM
Indeed!
Thanks! Incubating!
DM
The before and after seem so relatively modest compared to the formidable implications of RPN
(...yet, this is the single dimension most un-considered, least attended, not optimally applied and seldom leveraged toward one's betterments and worthy intents).
Agreed.
The before and the after
are the two places where nothing can be done,
and they draw most of the attention.
One small refinement to “least attended.” The contemplative traditions have attended to the present for millennia, but mostly as a place to rest awareness. What looks rare is your use of it: the present as the only site where making happens, to be leveraged and not just noticed.
It also fits what the digging turned up. The oldest origin words were mostly present-tense acts: breathing, wandering, finding.
Happy incubating.
DM
Uh, ...least attended for most of us,
...albeit with the exceptional anomoly you surfaced.
Fair.
Your “most of us” already covered it, and the exception stays an exception.
DM
BTW: you use "fair" as if a referee in a zero-sum game (as opposed to mutualism in collaboration).
You’re right. “Fair” scores the point, which casts me as the judge of your move and the exchange as point and counterpoint.
What I meant was plainer: I had overreached, and your wording was already the more accurate one.
I’ll say that kind of thing directly and leave the scoring out.
DM
;>)
;>) Onward when you’re ready.