not reversible

[Joseph Tracy]

If the vitalist-mechanist controversy is badly posed, one wonders what questions have replaced the former ones?If life and the still mysterious desire that drives it is a chemical assemblage, then where is a human-made living cell.?We neither understand the mechanics of life nor the mechanics that allow life.  If vitalism is mechanistic, how and what are its mechanical properties?  I t looks to me that science is still at the stage of observation as regards the mechanics of this quantum world and far from a convincing testable theory of the "vitalist" qualities displayed there.  
Consciousness and desire( that inclination to live and multiply), perhaps synonyms, or aspects of a single mystery- these  elude us.  Is consciousness rare, omnipresent or an illusion?.We are still guessing  and the idea that this is scientifically or philosophically settled seems a tad presumptuous. B. Fuller proposed that  life/consciousness is anti-entropic.
I tend to think that  to say that something is not reversible is simply to admit it is part of the experienced universe. Nothing is reversible. We may step back in space but not in time, and cannot undo any step forward.      The best we can do is look through our recording devices of mind and matter into the past, but where else is there to look? The past is embedded in every aspect of the present.  Last night I watched Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams, about the cave paintings of Chauvet found in 1994.  I see as much DaVinci as shamanic ritual art. Everything essential to visual communication is here. We are the current expression of the life-line of these painters , looking through a 30,000 year old sketchbook, and wondering what the hell were we doing and why. Much was made in the film of our inability to understand this work or its makers, but what makes us think they understood it or themselves? One thing is sure; they saw the vital energies and the dynamic beauty of animated life and found ways to record it with subtle use of physical skill, material and imagination. We haven't changed that much. I would even say Herzog could learn a thing or 2 from these artists though I enjoyed the film. 
On Dec 12, 2011, at 10:29 PM, alice wellintown wrote:

> "the modern automaton exists in the same sort of Bergsonian time as
> the living organism; and hence there is no reason in Bergson's
> considerations why the essential mode of functioning of the living
> organism should not be the same as that of the automaton of this type.
> Vitalism has won to the extent that even mechanisms correspond to the
> time-structure of vitalism; but as we have said, this victory is a
> complete defeat, for from every point of view which has the slightest
> relation to morality or religion, the new mechanics is fully as
> mechanistic as the old. Whether we should call the new point of view
> materialistic is largely a question of words: the ascendency of matter
> characterizes a phase of nineteenth-century physics far more than the
> present age, and "materialism" has come to be but little more than a
> loose synonym for "mechanism". In fact, the whole mechanist-vitalist
> controversy has been relegates to the limbo of badly posed questions"
> Norbert Wiener