Sender Spike
2 min readSep 18, 2020

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What you call personhood is exactly what I described. A gorilla “who was said to have an IQ of between 75 and 95, [and] could understand 2,000 words of spoken English,” who was certainly self-aware, and possessed freewill is a solid proof that what you call anomalous, is (as it currently seems) merely highly improbable, but still within what can be considered natural (yes, Koko could be considered closer to humans than her peers, but her cognitive capabilities are really nothing special among apes). Attributing such privilege to humans is by definition anthropocentric.

As for Schrodinger, he was hardly dismissive to the extent you are — he succinctly clarified that while life is subject to entropy, there are definitely natural laws that, once discovered, will be perfectly natural within the scientific framework. He went so far as to introduce the “negentropy” (his work also inspired the discovery of DNA). Well, and he was also very fond of Hindu concept of Brahman and singularity of consciousness, but let’s not digress.

All in all, you can talk about life even in terms like a “miracle”, it still does not make it unnatural.

Now, when you look at how the “moral laws” I mentioned work among animals, it’s basically the same as among the humans (at least among animals that exhibit personhood) — those that cheat, mislead, kill, etc. are overall more agitated while the ones that do not are more peaceful. Also, both kinds seem to be treated differently by the community (especially by younger members of the group). And most of the time it’s not alphas that recourse to (what could be called) immoral behavior (e.g. infanticide).

Of course, it’s obvious that level of such morality is tied to intelligence. At the level of single-cell organisms and viruses, it’s merely eat and/or be eaten without any moral implications (there’s, however, also no capacity for lying, cheating, or envy).

In any case, it’s obvious that if you don’t run around killing or stealing from your fellow humans, if you don’t envy them, and you don’t squander your energy on evermore elaborate lies, your life is certainly a lot more peaceful. That’s simply an empirical fact. Does it mean it’s natural? I would say so.

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