New Criticals

I want to begin the project of trying to describe why the same physical principles which made some kind of chemical organization necessary on the early earth also ensured that this organization would evolve and differentiate with the passage of time. But first I wanna talk a little philosophy.

I don’t have any dogmatic faith in the notion of the big bang, but from what I’ve heard it seems like its doing a pretty good job of explaining most of the observations astronomers make, so let’s assume for the sake of argument that the universe began approximately 14 billion years ago. One thing that immediately follows, if this statement is true, is that the universe is a process. It’s something that is happening, and continues to happen...right now even. I’m inclined to the view that every structure we observe which comes into and out of existence should be rightfully considered a process, although its convenient and practical to consider very stable, long-lived, or particularly inert structures as being “merely things.” Really though, all things are processes on some time-scale, as is the entirety of the universe itself. So there’s a general, ontological claim which you may have heard before in a very different context: Being is being-in-time.