A plant is a plant, and not simply a bag of chemicals, because energy from the sun is put to work overcoming the tendency to be nothing more than a bag of chemicals. Life exists for the same reason anything at all besides a plain hydrogen soup exists - energy makes organization possible. The same thing that allows rocks and stars to exist allows you to exist.
I agree with you general 'that engergy makes organization possible.' But is it not so that the more refined and more "complex" the order, the more energy must be very specifically and intentionally directed?
If energy is all that is needed, then shouldn't Mercury and Venus be tropical paradises? Afterall, they both get a LOT MORE engergy from Mr. Sun than we do...
It's not so much a matter of how it's directed as what sort of organization you're looking for. A snowflake represents a reduction in entropy over liquid water, but there aren't any snowflakes on Mercury - not because the energy isn't "directed" properly, but because there's just too much of it around to be conducive to snowflakes.
The sorts of chemicals that make up life on earth tend not to work in the absence of liquid water as a universal solvent - if there's too much energy around to have liquid water, it won't do its thing. This doesn't mean that life is flat-out impossible at 700 degrees or whatever, but it certainly wouldn't be life as we know it. Energy is a necessary component for self-organizing systems, but that's not all there is to it - other conditions have to be in place. And in fact, in the sense that crystalline mineral deposits probably exist on Mercury and Venus, there's a certain amount of self-organization and entropy reduction there too - just not the sort we're interested in.
Excellent point, Ronzo. They have a constant energy source, as we do here on Earth; but life must be more than the presence of an energy source, or Mercury and Venus would presumably be teeming with life....
"If energy is all that is needed, then shouldn't Mercury and Venus be tropical paradises? Afterall, they both get a LOT MORE engergy from Mr. Sun than we do..."
Actually, that's a great point, because it gets to what I have been trying to express, that while Darwinian evolution certainly is a driving force, there is also a directedness to evolution, it seems channeled in very specific directions.
It looks like you need carbon, nitrogen and water at the right temperatures to get the thing going. If you are sitting on a rock, the reaction rate for recomposing aluminum oxide is just too slow for anything resembling life to get going. So the earth is a truly remarkable jewel with the right conditions for evolutionary processes to occur, almost as if someone planned it to happen that way. So, I think there is plenty of room to be both metaphysical AND a true scientist at the same time.
Here's what bothers me, if there is no soul, no super intelligence, then why should I know I'm me? I mean, I think robots can be designed to be aware of their surroundings, but I don't think they are self aware.
And here is the kicker, if I am intelligent and self aware, and I conjecture the rest of you I'm chatting with are the same, then how can I as a scientist not be open o the conjecture that no higher forms of intellect and awareness exist, ones which might exist at the cosmic level?
As a few of us have noted, it would seem the second law REQUITES evolution. If it does so at our level, does the same not apply to galaxies?