Heres a short paper I just wrote for my intro philosophy class. The part part I actually cared about is the 50% in the very middle. The rest is mostly just filler to make it look like I paid attention in class more than I really did…

Central in early philosophy was the desire to find and isolate the fundamental essences which make up the natural world. Early cosmologists from city-states all over the ancient world in places like Greece, India, the Middle East, and China, all came to similar conclusions early on. They reduced the world into four major essences, Fire, Air, Earth, and Water, which all had counterparts in the human psyche. Fire represents the human soul, burning bright with the eternity of the heavens. Air represents the the spirit, Earth, strength and the body, and Water, desire and destruction. Before modern science could provide any tools to the great rational minds such as those of Heraclitus and Plato, these philosophers broke the world down as objectively as they could, with all the logic available at the time. What today remains so surprising, is not that this approach was shared by so many cultures, almost universally, for it described a framework for both mind and matter that seemed to fit the world quite well; rather, it’s almost astounding how, after centuries of deviation from this age old system as hard scientists, the so-called experts, slowly pieced together a modern view of the world, one that was based on math and theory instead of blind speculation, cutting edge science has just begun to take a step back, realizing that the fundamental questions it sought to answer are in fact, one and the same with the fundamental questions people have been looking to answer since the first primitive humanoids had the nerve to ask, how did we get here? Heraclitus for one would be likely to point out that these “experts” have just gotten caught up in questioning their own schema for describing the world, while really they likely just know a great deal more about something the average person wouldn’t care about. On the other hand, skepticism of knowledge can only get one so far. Both the proponents of knowledge to put forth new ideas, and the skeptics weeding out the bad ones have allowed humanity’s wisdom to evolve and shape the world around us with marvelous new technologies. The double edge’d sword is that this opens up new branches of desire, making it increasingly easier to affiliate oneself among material goods and personal gain instead of getting any closer to the real order of the universe, the mysterious Oneness, or purity of soul, often symbolized by the lotus in India and in the East, and everywhere by the eternal burning Fire of the heavens.
What everyone seemed to be coming back to, however, was the four tiered model of fire, air, earth, and water. These proved to be powerful symbols used to represent four major forces in the universe. First, there is fire, the all eternal essence. According to Plato, everything is made up of this element in its purest form. The core of all that exists and ever could exists is represented by fire – the energy which fuels our world. Second, air, the spirit of the universe. This wind is the means behind all the action in the world. This pathos, or passion, is the puppet-master of the universe – the force which derived from the fire moves the world. Third, there is Earth, the substance out of which mountains as well as our homes, tools, and even our bodies are made. Solid and dense, this matter carries with it much gravity, or weight. Is the building material of which semi-permanent objects are comprised – those puppets, including the manifestation of our physical being. But nothing physical in the world is permanent. Subject to the law of entropy, everything decays, and eventually dies. Water is the most temporal of the elements, responsible for erosion and destruction, as well as the brevity of pleasure found in fulfilling a worldly desire, for that feeling too wanes over time. The point of this last paragraph was not to simply be a reiteration of one of the most common themes in early philosophy. Amongst the passage I threw in a few key terms drawn from modern physics theory. Energy, Force, Matter, and Entropy. It is these four concepts which exclusively create everything we experience in the universe.
Energy is all eternal. Since the moment of the big bang, there has always been, and always will be the same amount of energy in the universe. It’s astonishing how insightful early thinkers were in coming up with the concept of something eternal which makes up everything, shifting from one form to another, and later having modern science prove this is indeed how the universe works. Matter is made purely of energy, everything we experience is a signal caused by a flow of energy, and even our thoughts are nothing but energy flowing through nearly infinitely complicated networks in our brains. Energy alone however, is only part of the picture. A rock on a hill may have a lot of potential energy compared to one in a valley, but unless some force acts upon it, there is no movement. Force provides that push which makes us able to say something happened. Derived from energy (literally the second derivative w/ respect to time), force is entirely analogous to air in the metaphor of fire heating up the breath and causing action to occur. Force is what drives the puppets, and what allows the universe to take on structure. Pretty much everything we see and interact with is made of matter, which Einstein famously derived was in fact, just a highly dense form of energy. It seems eerily appropriate that Plato had also suggested that all mater was made of those little triangle fire atom thingys which represented elemental fire, when in reality, we know for a fact that matter does not really exist in any sort of “real” physical way. Once thought to be made of tiny atomic units of matter, it was later discovered that the atoms themselves were made of even smaller particles, and that those were made of even smaller more fundamental particles which have no mass and take up no space. Then quantum mechanics comes in and tells us that even this view is flawed. These point particles may or may not even exist at any given time or place, and exist more or less as a sort of cloud smeared out across both time and space. (Though, even clouds are made of “stuff”. “Stuff” itself isn’t even made of stuff!) Although possibly getting more esoteric, but still prudent to the point I’m trying to make, one cosmologist was quoted saying that everything we have ever known or loved is nothing more than eigenvalues in a wave mechanics equation. Essentially nothing exists as more than blips of energy waving in and out of existence. In other words, fundamentally, what we are made of are things like the amplitude, frequency, and phase, of an oscillating chord or spring, not the springs or chords themselves. The notes played by a cosmic symphony, but not the orchestra. At the very most basic level, everything is made purely out of information and ideas, which goes back to the idea of Fire being the universal root of everything from mind to matter. Fundamentally, information and matter/energy are the same thing.
Lastly, after defining what everything fundamentally is comprised, and how everything interacts with itself, a giant question remains: why should everything always be in motion and in constant flux? Fortunately, there is one element left: Water! This constantly flowing substance is the perfect metaphor to describe entropy. Just as water always flows from higher to lower ground, seeking out the path of least resistance, and usually gaining speed becoming more and more chaotic, kicking up mud and silt as well as eroding the land to make new riverbeds, entropy always goes from high to low, or from high order, such as a tranquil mountain lake, towards chaos, like the volatile rapids and waterfalls downstream. This natural tendency things have for scattering into a million pieces when dropped rather than reforming to the original ceramic before your eyes as you reach for the dustpan and broom, is another fundamental feature of our universe which early philosophers were quick to point out. Nothing is permanent, everything changes, and it is through this experience that we found our notions of time (before/after, cause and effect). Though some philosophies and religions disregard Water as something to always get away from (especially like the Jain metaphor of plugging and bailing), others like the Taoists realized they could use the watery aspect of fluidity and flexibility to their advantage. If not for those mountain lakes, there would be no hydroelectric generators, and similarly, without heat constantly flowing away from the sun, there could be no life here on Earth.
Over the past two millennia, human technologies have evolved in ways early people could likely never have imagined. Conversely, human thought has stayed very much the same, with the same models and techniques of analysis prevailing only to become finer in scope as we gather more technology. As Confucius said, “Yin borrowed from the ritual of Xia: we can know what was dropped and what was added. Zhou borrowed from the rituals of Yin: we can know what was dropped and what was added. If Zhou has successors, we can know what they will be like, even 100 generations hence.”