I regard everything as “Things.” I try not to pour anything more into “Things” than is needed to make their reality somatic and understandable to me. Smarter men and women than I have divided Things up into genera and species, as each Thing more or less resembles other Things. One of the speciators, as it were, is the relationship between Things consisting of greater or lesser density.
To my way of thinking, Space is merely a Thing. It is postulated that there is no place in Space where there is nothing, i.e. an absolute vacuum (as we conceive it). Even in the farthest reaches of it, scientists indicate that other Things (more or less) are passing through almost every square inch of Space. In the least dense areas of it, it may be a singular photon, speeding through on its way somewhere, and certain fields (e.g., gravity) exist in it.
So, for me Space is that Thing that is the least dense of everything we conceive of as Things. Other Things of greater, equal, or lesser density are able to pass through it with more or less ease (even though they might be slowed down because of friction). E.g., a bullet easily passes into and through a human body. The primary component of the bullet which is lead, is denser than skin and other human tissue, and so passes into and through it until it slows perhaps to some indistinct stop.
The MOHS scale ranks many types of Things as to their hardness, which is a reflection of each’s density, to some degree, as well as how the primary components of it adhere to one another. A stainless steel bullet will pass through lead (until ultimately slowed by friction).
Things hold together by natural processes we understand to be “hooks” of various kinds: electro-magnetic forces, the inexorable pull of opposite charges, laminin hooks, things swimming in simple solutions, the mere affinities of things within a spatial manifold, and so forth. But, what I’ve been thinking about is this: at what point do we reach that level of matter where absolute, i.e., perfect, Space exists? Is absolute Space akin to spiritual matter? Certainly spiritual matter can pass through any kind of matter we can think of, no matter the thickness. And, every species of matter, or any conceived alloy of it, no matter how hard or how dense, i.e., diamond (at “10” on the MOHS scale) or 18:10 (or greater?) stainless steel (virtually incorruptible), has Space within it.
The question I have is, “Is this the ‘limit?’ Is there not yet one more (or more) level(s) of vacuum-perfection, or thing-perfection, that we know and have named, “Spirit?”
All of this is simple enough – almost grade school stuff. Pure Space is postulated into possibility because we are capable of envisioning it within an enclosure. I can, for example, envision myself traveling out into space with a fish tank and an extra piece of glass for a top. I can don a spacesuit, take the fish tank outside of the machine that got me there, then seal up the fish tank by putting the lid on it and sealing it to the other four, glass walls. We can’t see it, but, we know Space is there. It can only be made less perfect by allowing a leak. In the meantime, it co-exists with atmosphere almost in the same way that it co-exists with our atmosphere.
So, how can we be so sure that there are no such things as spirits or souls? How can we be so sure that there is no ultimate spirit, which we call “God?” I witness posters herein always requiring material proof. In the absence of such, they conclude that there are no souls, nor any spiritual posibility of a being known to us as God. There is no stretch to spiritual stuff from the postulated reality of a pure vacuum, or from the postulated reality of even less perfect vacuums.
Now, it looks as though all Things tend towards greater and greater entropy – until, ultimately, there can be places where no photons or any other quantum and even sub-quantum stuff exists. Of course, there are those places already: they exist in between: in between physical and material stuff, in between protons and neutrons, in between electrons and nuclei. They are there and we know they are there. We perceive no interaction with matter or the physical - that we know of - in the sense that we expect to have from our scientific understandings.
How is this wrong?
jd
