Pensamiento Cósmico

I

The cosmic perspective

Two scales that are usually kept apart. On the physical one, human life takes up a small and brief region of the universe. On the scale of experience, that region holds memory, cooperation and questions about the whole it belongs to. The disproportion does not prove we are irrelevant: it asks what value can be built without mistaking size for importance.

II

Dissipative islands

A living organism sustains a local order it could not keep in isolation: it takes in matter and energy, transforms them, and returns heat and waste to its surroundings. It is no exception to the second law of thermodynamics; it depends on flows that obey it. Each life is a dissipative island: organised, situated and temporary.

The membrane — skin, senses, attention — is the boundary that sets a body apart from its surroundings without making it independent of them. It is permeable, active, and dependent on what lies outside it.

Beneath every deliberation lies the belly: the need to feed, to keep oneself and to reproduce. Reason does not appear outside that condition; it regulates it and sometimes reorders its priorities. Brains, language, tools and collective memory allow a partial escape from the belly: spending energy on what does not meet an immediate need. In that surplus, one part of the universe represents other parts and can revise its own actions.

The cosmos studies itself.

Not because the universe has a mind, but because those who study it are made of the same matter they study.

III

The other is us

If there is no human substance set apart from the rest of the universe, each person is a singular configuration of a common reality. But sharing an origin is not sharing an experience: each life receives the world through its own membrane and cannot inhabit another’s perspective.

“The other is us” expresses that continuity without erasing the difference. The other is not a copy of me, nor a piece of a collective consciousness: it is another instance of the same world, from which that world is felt differently.

In the egocentric circle, one imagines oneself as the centre and orders everything around oneself. In the ellipse, two foci hold the figure: the self remains, but it is no longer the only point that gives meaning.

Altruism does not follow from material unity. It takes an explicit premise: the wellbeing and suffering of others count, even when I do not live them. With it, cooperation stops being a slogan and becomes a condition of lives that sustain one another, without dissolving each person’s responsibility for what they do.

IV

A heuristic ethics

Keeping perspective means placing a decision on more than one scale: the immediate need, the lives of those around us, and the conditions that sustain knowledge and cooperation. Striving by heuristics means acting on revisable rules of thumb when the consequences are uncertain. Three questions to examine an action:

The questions correct one another: technology without orientation widens harm; self-construction without others turns into self-absorption; help that cannot sustain itself soon runs out.

A heuristic can fail: the impact may be ambiguous, unevenly shared, or hide paternalism. The three questions do not replace deliberation, evidence or accountability; they show what is being built and whom it reaches.

V

Transcendence and partial success

Earth is not a home guaranteed forever: the Sun has about five billion years left before it swells into a red giant. That horizon does not make space expansion urgent, nor does it guarantee we survive; it does mean that any project that values the continuity of life must acknowledge the planet’s limits.

Interplanetary transcendence names a technological and political possibility, not a destiny: building, through sustained cooperation, the conditions for life not to depend forever on a single planet. The ethical question comes before the technical feat: which forms of life we want to preserve, and which present costs we are willing to impose.

Artificial intelligence is an artefact of our history: an instrumental extension and a symbolic memory of a human culture. Changing substrate does not remove fragility; machines fail in their own ways. That is why biological continuity remains the primary goal.

If that goal failed and machines carrying our memory and our imperatives persisted, it would be a partial success: the continuity of an inheritance, not of those who lived it. The forest that survives the fall of the mother tree keeps something real; it does not bring the tree back.

Preserving a work is not preserving its authors.

VI

Where each claim comes from

The argument mixes science, metaphor and values, but does not treat them as interchangeable. Thermodynamics describes conditions of organisation; it deduces no duty. Monism expresses material continuity; it does not prove that all experiences are one. Each statement declares where it comes from, so it can be attacked on its own:

1. Empirical base

   Organisms are open systems that sustain local order through exchanges with their surroundings (Schrödinger; Nicolis and Prigogine). It describes; it does not prescribe.

2. Postulates O1–O3

   Material continuity: we are not observers outside the cosmos. The organism as a dissipative organisation with a membrane. Each other as a distinct perspective within a shared reality.

3. Ethical premises E1–E2

   E1: the wellbeing and suffering of others count morally. E2: the continuity of biological life takes priority over keeping only its records or artefacts. They are declared values, not conclusions of physics.

4. Heuristics H1–H3

   Self-construction, viable technology and operative altruism: questions for applying E1–E2 under uncertainty. They are not laws.

5. Conclusions

   The theses on artificial intelligence, interplanetary expansion and partial success depend on all of the above: they are revised if the evidence changes or a premise is rejected.

⇢ needs an added premise

What it does not prove

• Monism does not prove an ethics.
• Heuristics do not settle every conflict.
• Interplanetary exploration remains uncertain.
• Artificial continuity is not human continuity.

Making these limits explicit keeps hope from turning into certainty. An idea that cannot be refuted cannot be upheld either.