Existence

What next?

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The past may be seen to predict the future for all solid-state elements in a mechanistic universe. This excludes the sub-elements of the quantum universe and the supra-elements of the sentient universe.

However, what is known of the quantum universe, in the context of the everyday physical reality that is ‘more real’ to us, is that the peculiarities of the former support, but don’t resemble the nature of the latter, which can be seen to exist in addition, ‘on top’ – in a supra-reality that now includes the fact of the seeing.

Only it seems that we have yet to learn this lesson with respect to the sentient universe regarding itself, a lesson that can only begin by recognising it as a reality known to be peculiar to the nature of itself – a reality as real as the peculiar nature of solid rock, which we also know is really not solid in a different reality.

Perhaps the difference is due to the diverging nature of reality, whereby what is and what ‘is next’ simultaneously occupy different realities. And as we learn that there is more to existence than either quantum or Newtonian physics can explain, we know that we can know it because of our first-hand experience of a peculiar reality of a different order – of knowing, learning and explanation in a reality that simultaneously occupies the physical universe, yet is not peculiar to it.

Mike Laidler

The problem of happiness

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The problem of happiness is that we have made it into a problem. Children are born with happiness in their being, which they systematically unlearn in learning to be happy.

There is no thing in the world that encapsulates happiness, apart from the things in the world said to make us happy. Thus ‘being happy’ is a construct that is conditional upon finding out how to be happy, which usually depends upon finding the things that make us happy – as if happiness is a thing to be found in the world.

Ironically, the quest to be happy can undermine our well-being on the premise there is something to be found that we do not have, as if it might flood into our lives to fill a vacuum – as if happiness is the experience of that it.

Unfortunately there is much sadness to behold in this quest for happiness – for those who need happiness to be defined for them will never find it on those terms.

Mike Laidler.

A look at luck

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We all know what luck is, most of us have seen it in action and some of us may claim to have benefited from it, but it is no ‘it’.

In fact luck doesn’t exist, yet it does. It exists as a state of knowledge about the world and the facts in that world. It exists in the world as known, and in that world we see people being lucky and unlucky to varying degrees. However, knowledge is another ‘none-it’ in existence. Coincidentally, we can talk about what we know, point to the books that have changed what we know, and learn from what we are told. Nevertheless, things are not as they seem – yet so they are, given that the seeming is now a fact in action.

In fact luck, like the knowledge by which we assess it, operates in a metaphysical reality of existence and non-existence – a dual reality where there are both facts and non-facts, according to our comparisons – facts that are so different from one another that they bear no point of comparison, except by way of contrast. So it is also true to say that we make our own luck, knowing that, in truth, there is more to existence than all we can make of it.

In the same vein, there can be more to coincidence than all we can attribute to luck, chance or our knowledge of it, just as there is more to knowledge than all we can know of it at any one time. Perhaps we are ‘lucky’ to be able to know anything at all, given the reality of oblivion and ignorance in which it operates on the way to becoming something more than it was.

And who dares say what is real and not real in the world of coincidence, a world in which opposites come together.

Mike Laidler

Infinity in an atom

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No thing compares to nothingness without the creation of an infinity in comparison. So compared to nothingness, the existence of something is already infinitely greater than the ‘antithesis’ it is seen to replace, even when that infinity is condensed into the presence of a ‘single atom’ – displacing the infinity of ‘nothingness’ into a different universe.

And the reality that prevails over all seems to be an infinity of infinities, created in no small part by our attempts to see it as something finite.

Mike Laidler

Aeons of creation

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The singularly most significant singularity behind all singularities in aeons of universes to become, is the power of becoming, which we know of indirectly by its manifest non-random implications in this universe.

“Whatever the big bang was, it must have been a state of very very small entropy – a highly organised state.” – Sir Roger Penrose, Copernicus Centre Lecture 2010: ‘Aeons before the Big Bang’.

Mike Laidler

The appearance of evolution

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Evolution is meant to have its limits, it is not meant to be everything, and it is meant to be understood within those limits; otherwise it will set limits to our understanding, otherwise we will tend to see it as the it that is meant to make possibility possible.

We see nature revolving around evolution and its possibilities, instead of looking at evolution revolving around nature and its possibilities. We see things change and call it evolution, and then we say the evolution explains the change. Yet evolution is not everything. It does not determine the possibility of what can happen, though it certainly appears to – that is, if certainty can be attributed to appearances. But did Copernicus not teach us a lesson in that regard?

“It’s true to say that evolution is not an ascent. There is no march towards complexity in evolution.” Professor Brian Cox. (20.10.14). http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-29686627

Mike Laidler

Why existence?

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Why is there not nothing? This question remains as fundamental to modern science and philosophy as it did to the ancients. But it has been overlaid with so much detail that it appears to be outside the scope of common sense, to which it must return.

Yet the answer lies in the very sense by which we recognise there is a question to be asked – for we know there is not nothing and that ‘the something’ is capable of asking questions about the state of being in which it recognises itself. The problem comes in ‘being’ trying to look outside itself, as if the question about ‘why existence exists’ can be answered by something else – which precludes the questioner from ever knowing whether the answer is really the answer.

So to imagine a ‘something else’ leaves us to speculate forever about the ‘more of it’ in which the answer lies. And is it not sensible to assume that the ‘more’ extends beyond what is already – which takes us straight into the territory of a greater form of being – a power-to-be that we already know to be far greater than nothingness and all the forms of being we can imagine?

Mike Laidler

What God Where?

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Who can say there is no power of being in existence or deny that the power takes the form of a sentient reality? Who can say that the power of personal being belongs to something else, wherein it is absent? What is the evidence to show that consciousness can be understood better as something unconscious? And how do we discover the origin of consciousness in something else, as if to say that consciousness is really an after-effect? Is not everything seen as an after-effect? Is that not how power appears to be?

Do we not avail ourselves of consciousness in order to begin to look for it as something else, said to be its cause? So how can we say that it is explained by tracing its nature to a different, unconscious nature, as if to say that the one reality reduces to the other? And in the process do we not underrate the very thing we are looking from whilst attending to its preconditions in the lesser reality we are looking at? Then by what criterion do we identify the change to awareness, which we are eminently qualified to recognise of ourselves, as a fact of something less, deemed to be more substantive in being the cause?

Is it not time to re-evaluate the evidence we look to when we claim that sentience and subjectivity, knowledge and understanding are merely after-effects of something more real – that things are more real when reduced to something less? Is it any less realistic to regard change as a fact of what can be, of something more – a power-to-be?

Mike Laidler

Aristotle or bust?

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Two astronauts visit a distant rock strewn planet and stumble upon a rock that is an exact three-dimensional effigy of the philosopher Aristotle. There is nothing else remotely like it and no evidence of prior habitation or visitation.

Is the astronaut who supposes it must have been created naturally, by chance, more realistic than the one who supposes the opposite? And if it could be created naturally, who would believe the mountaineer on earth, who happened to stumble across an equivalent example?

So how far does chance go towards the explanation of things natural, or vice versa? More particularly, how far does nature go in the explanation of things artificial, or vice versa?

Mike Laidler