A Synthesis Of Sorts

William H. Briggs posted Essence Is Of The Essence, to which I needed to reply, not because he was necessarily wrong, but because people generally get in trouble with essence.

This led me to think again about Jack Kruse's DIVORCING EINSTEIN USING TIME’S POINTED ARROW, in which he said, "It turns out all life, is a dissipative system."

Which makes me wonder if biologists should read St. Palamas' discourse on essences and energies.

Well, that, and a commentor at Briggs' blog mentioned red as an aristotelian accident.

Well, you can experience red as energy. As a wave. But I know there's a photon there so you can go back to saying the photon is a thing and has an essence. If you want to.

I was also reminded recently, somewhere, about how the Eastern Orthodox hold God's energies will be given to all, but that we shall either experience it as light or as fire, depending on our disposition. Of course, in the West, we developed purgatory. Apparently, we needed some otherworldly geography to house the thing, and thus the essence, of purification.

But the biological explanation sounds more like the Orthodox theological one. We get energy from our environment. If we know how to use it correctly- especially how to dissipate it correctly we get healthy and strong. If we don't know how to use it, problems build up. Illness and death are a robust collection of these problems. Oxidation is a fire.