Philosophy

True colours

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Understanding the world we live in is not a matter for science alone, because science remains embedded in the psychology and philosophy framing our understandings. Nor is nature being exclusively scientific and mathematical in accommodating our unscientific theories. And even our best theories can be found to dissolve into unknowns that are surrounded by beliefs and misunderstandings. Indeed an appropriate understanding might entail foregoing our aspirations to ‘certain knowledge’ as the epitome of truth – and the reason is simple, for our theories cannot capture a cosmos that is bigger than us by concentrating on an abstract, lifeless, insensate version of nature as the real fact of it.

Then what of reality? The fact that reality now contains the medium of perception and understanding shows that things have changed radically from the anaemic truth we look to and seek to promote as its objective explanation. In fact, matters of truth and reality become relevant only in the presence of an inquiring mind. So we begin by knowing that we live in a medium that is more than the material facts that know nothing, but then we pretend to demote that subjective reality in order to discover a greater truth about its origin in a nature that is devoid – in a reductive truth that we imagine might explain for us the fact of subjective existence, as if that truth could ever exist apart from the imagination.

So what can we understand about the extent of a universe that apparently expands to exceed itself in the evolution of appearances and understanding? Where might we begin? What can we prioritise as the factual basis for an explanation of existence? We like to think that we can begin at the beginning, but explanation is a secondary truth and the notion of ‘beginnings’ is as much of a psychological threshold. And whereas we learn from experience that a new beginning marks a change from what was, explanation tries to identify its own origins with the thing explained, as if there is no difference – as if explanation begins and ends with the facts referenced, as if it is the facts that have explained things to us. However, we learn from the fallibilities of our explanations that there is an unavoidable difference, that explanation marks a new beginning in a nature that has no cause to explain things to itself.

We have invented explanation as a means of explaining things to ourselves on the pretext that the facts are in charge; and by affiliating our retrospective observations with the idea of causality, we demonstrate to ourselves that our suppositions are real, that indeed we can eliminate ourselves from the equation by being objective – by allowing the facts to speak for themselves. In fact, explanation is a myth we hold onto in the belief that the facts can ‘explain things to us’ and show us, by what they are, what can and cannot happen next.   Thereby we deceive ourselves in believing that the facts select themselves and stand alone as concepts of necessity ‘leading us’ to an explanation of existence, including ourselves, in the pre-existence of causes, or nature, or God, even to the existence of alternative forms of existence which, by comparison to everything else we know, amount to forms of non-existence.

Paradoxically, in countenancing the possibility of a comparative reality of non-existence we find ourselves there – in a mind observable as no more than a brain generating motives, purposes, reasons and desires now existing as a part of nature. But we also know these qualities are neither typical of nor fundamental to that nature; yet in thinking about ourselves as a part of a nature containing thought we catch this erstwhile nature accomplishing something new and unnatural – as we think. Thereby, it becomes self-evident, as only it can, that we occupy a reality that can be one thing and another – a reality which challenges our ideas of existence and non-existence – since it is now apparent, in the fact of their emergence, that things now exist which cannot be identified as something else, in things as they were; but neither can they be written off as ‘immaterial’.

The nature of change shows us something remarkable about the nature of nature – that the ordinary is filled with the extraordinary, which we then deem to explain in terms of things as they were, especially when there is nothing else to see. However, change cannot be adequately explained by that means – otherwise we would be concluding that things hadn’t really changed. And this debate about fact and change goes to the heart of our ability to perceive nature and ourselves, bearing in mind that self-perception is not an original part of nature as we see it.   So it should be of no surprise to us, that this tangle of explanatory deficiencies has its roots in the certainties we attach to our perceptions in the everyday.

For instance, an inquiring mind might well wonder about the true nature of sound, light and colour – is it in the reality of the unperceived, or does it depend upon a convergence of possibilities within an emergent reality of mind – in the new nature of perception? And does our qualification to know as much not come from the facts of perception known only to us? Then are we not entitled to say that perception adds something to the physical world – that perception generates the sounds and colours in life, in ‘bringing them to life’; so might it also be true to say that without this living perception such ‘things’ exist in an incomplete state of reality, in a truth ‘for sure’, which is not the whole truth? Even so, why should this realisation endow us with an absolute knowledge of the yet wider reality, in the possibility of things to come? Is it not feasible that our truths could remain subject to endless conjecture for as long as we cannot conceive of the possibility that they too exist as a part of a much bigger truth, beyond explanation in terms of things as they are now?

Mike Laidler

Tooth Fairies

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We tell children that the tooth fairies take their teeth away, but are we being any more realistic in believing that nature gave us teeth in the first place – that nature is the place where everything comes from – because everything has to come from something and belong somewhere, because we know for sure that this is how things work, because everything is traceable to something else which acts as its cause, because it all comes down to nature and because natural events can properly explain ourselves and existence at large? In fact, despite ‘its’ apparent prepotency, there is no thing called ‘nature’ that exists apart from the events that happen, which means that there is no cause called ‘nature’ to precede those events and explain them. ‘Natural causes’ are a myth of explanation, not because they can’t be seen to exist, but because they don’t provide us with an explanation. Our ideas of nature are in need of a Copernican revolution.

The funny thing about our knowledge of nature is that we are immersed in an abundance of factual events showing us what it is like, yet we know nothing about what ‘it’ really is. Indeed, the identification of nature as the essential origin of everything amounts to no more than a creation myth, whilst our concept of ‘natural facts’ amount to no more than an approbation of our ignorance. Nor can we account for the evolving state of reality by calling it ‘natural’ or ‘evolved’. Meanwhile, our certainty about what we know underlines the fact of our ignorance by what it prevents us from acknowledging above the line – for if we can be certain that we know nature for what it is, thereby to account for things as ‘natural’, then what else might we be certain about in our ignorance?

Consider our knowledge of the evolution of teeth and what this says about the ‘nature of nature’. There is no doubt why certain species of animals needed to evolve teeth, because if they can’t eat they soon perish. But still we don’t know why some animals, namely ourselves, acquired perishable teeth. And even though we now have the resourcefulness to outlive our teeth by artificial means, evolution isn’t assuaged by the fact that we might be able to ‘intervene’ in such ways – it simply adds another turning point to the process, as also happened when our ancestors took to wearing furs. Seemingly, we can’t escape ‘nature’ – we remain in the throws of a constant evolutionary pressure to change; nonetheless, the shift in reality is now marked by the fact of its artificiality – an artificiality now existing as a part of nature. So, as things change, we find that not everything is explicable ‘naturally’, unless we are prepared to broaden our definition of nature. But do we know what we are doing?

Ultimately, it is our ignorance of what is to come that proves to be the real obstacle to understanding – a problem that is exacerbated by what we purport to know for certain. Nor can we pretend to solve the problem with a knowledge of what is needed. We know that animals need teeth and chickens need eggs, and though we may be able to artificially engineer things so that we no longer need real teeth, or chickens no longer need to lay eggs, it still does not give us more than a retrospective knowledge of what can happen. But it is now an ‘artificial reality’ that occupies the threshold of what happens next, and one that is skewed in its own way by the artificiality of what we presume to know. Then, just as we remain certain about something called ‘nature’, which we really don’t understand, so we presume to understand ourselves on that basis – by explaining away the facts in the same vein – by claiming to know that our existence really comes down to something explicable in terms of something else acting as its cause – having adopted ‘natural causes’ as our explanatory fairy godmother. ​

Mike Laidler

Seven wonders of existence

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It is little wonder, in the light of what we know, that our cause to wonder changes, indeed grows, in the light of what we come to know. It should be of no surprise then to find that official listings of the ‘Seven wonders of …’ remain inadequate despite their range. Fortunately, Wikipedia offers a suitably democratic forum for further resolution; after all, ‘a wonder’ can only belong to the mind that wonders, and cannot be prescribed by an authority that tells us what to wonder about – a point emphasised by no less of a mind than that of Albert Einstein.

It is with some bewilderment then, that I find cause to wonder about a conspicuous omission from Wikipedia’s coverage. Despite all the interest, I can find no listing for the wonders of the universe or existence? Nor can I find evidence elsewhere for the topics being addressed separately. Therefore I am moved to fill the gap with some interim suggestions, in humble recognition of the fact that this is not a task I can accomplish on my own. So I would like to get the ball rolling by making the following tentative suggestions for a provisional listing of the ‘Seven wonders of the universe’, which I see as being a subset of a bigger issue, namely, the ‘Seven wonders of existence’ – a topic which I felt a little more able to expand upon below:

Seven wonders of the universe

1. The ‘big bang’/ inflation
2. Space-time
3. Gravity/ strings/ branes
4. Stars, galaxies and black holes
5. Dark matter/ energy
6. Quantum uncertainty
7. Lawfulness/ order

Seven wonders of existence

Preamble: In compiling this list I am mindful that the notion of ‘wonders of existence’ evokes the related idea of a mystery. And in this centenary year of Einstein’s enduring masterwork, it might be fitting to defer to the master’s insight – that although wonder is the driving force of inquiry, no amount of discovery is likely to prove sufficient to do away with the need for ever more discovery, or our underlying awe of the persisting mystery of it all. Suffice it for me to add the following observation: that we cannot dispel the mystery of existence by finding out how it works, since the facts can show how it works only because it exists.

1. Energy: The universal presence, prime mover and perpetuator. The formless former. We ‘understand it’ as ‘a thing’ in transition – a beginning with no discernible beginning, the progenitor of other beginnings – the ‘sub-thing’ at the source of all things, which we associate with things as they are and then as they change again to become more than they were.

2. Matter: The form of ‘the thing’ seen as its substantive nature and explained as a conversion of energy. A locus of space and time wherein the physical earth exhibits dimensionality whilst being one thing and another in a relativistic state of reality – massive yet diminutive, solid yet filled with space, inert yet brimming with life – risen of a darkness and oblivion that is now filled with light and thought.

3. Life: The synergy of structure, function and organisation within a motility appearing as a radical change in the nature of nature – re-animating it with need, drive, motivation and purpose – adorning the material universe with properties that were hitherto absent from and alien to its character and reflecting the inexplicable fact that every living thing is made of stardust coming to life, yet it all remains as it was beneath the surface, unliving and unchanged.

4. ‘Being’: The pivot of reality. The larger character of things. An evolved state. The perceived nature of ‘reality’ manifest as a pattern of activity built upon previous patterns. We see the process of becoming in the shaping of reality; but it is not possible to predict the shape of things to come by examining the possibilities obtaining beforehand – as if the nature of dust can reveal the nature of life.

5. Awareness: Sight seeking insight. The subject of subjectivity – vacillating between awareness ‘of’ and awareness ‘in’. Being beholds itself in awareness, forming the sense of ‘I’ and locating its recognition in a source seen as giving rise to the perception, which is also the way regard is paid to an outside world. Nevertheless, there is more to awareness than its rendition as a ‘self’ contrived in the desire for its own perception; but to the extent that we obsess over ‘self-awareness’ we lose the ability to see perception as anything other than a fact owing to its object – which is, in the case of ourselves, ‘ourselves’ – in a self we feel obliged to look for as a part of a world that apparently doesn’t know it is being observed.

6. Mind: The font of meaning and belief. The differentiation of awareness into conscious thought. The purposive selector. The arbiter of the arbitrary. The agent of knowledge, deliberation and realisation known to itself as the person. Knowledge introduces the paradox of the knower choosing to know whilst deferring to the facts for an authority they do not have – as if the facts tell us what to know – a stratagem that breaks down spectacularly in the bid to know ourselves. In the same vein we try to reduce our ethical deliberations to independent matters of logic and reason, as if to put them in charge. However, the expansion of the mind (and reality) involved in getting to know suggests that our minds are adumbrated by something bigger, which doesn’t belong to the facts that remain oblivious to what is known about them.

7. Power: The capacity to be. The possibility for there to be possibilities. The ineffable isness that is simultaneously one thing and another, nothing and all things. The dynamic fulcrum of stability and change moving between nothing and something, chaos and order, cause and effect, chance and synchronisation, oblivion and knowledge. Things in existence occupy a power in being which we tend to ascribe to the process of becoming, yet in everything we know of ourselves and the rest of existence, we discover that it is all remains a mere reflection of a greater power to be – an holistic power that is at least sentient, because we are.

Mike Laidler

Questions: ‘Loaded dice’ and ‘a theory of everything’

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’What is a theory of everything?
Based upon the current idiom of science, it is a theory that can capture the whole of existence in a single factual or mathematical proof – as if that fact or equation can stand apart from the realms of theory, and as if reality dictates to theory that everything reduces to that one thing.

What is a theory of chance?
We are surrounded by chance events, which prompts us to ask whether the universe might have started that way. Chance can be seen to operate within certain boundaries to yield uncertain outcomes. For instance, rolling a die can have uncertain outcomes, but they are limited by the nature of the die, which doesn’t look like it got here by chance. Of course there may be additional uncertain consequences, such as an ensuing fight, but these are indirect and tend to remain only notionally connected. Normally, chance and probability are used to calculate the likelihood of an outcome, but that’s not quite the same thing as explaining it; however, other, more fanciful suppositions court the idea that anything can happen by chance – that a rolling rock could in theory turn itself into a die – although fewer still would go so far as to say it is theoretically possible for a rolling rock to turn into a chicken. Yet many hypotheses are promulgated, to varying degrees of nonsense, in the attempt to explain changes we can’t explain except by putting them down to chance – even to the point of decrying the importance of known non-chance events – as if the works of Shakespeare could, in theory, be replicated by placing typewriters in an infinite monkey cage. Other theories place chance at the origin of ‘life, the universe and everything’ – as the essential pre-existing or spontaneously exiting cause, or as a nexus in multiple universes.

If the answer isn’t ‘in the beginning’, where is it?
It’s likely to be in ‘an end-point’ outside of our reach. That’s why we prefer to look to beginnings – because they seem more accessible and there are still clues to be found, although we tend to treat each discoverable beginning as not the actual beginning of ‘it all’. However, an ‘ultimate beginning’ is not likely to be a repository of everything in any event, simply because of the fact that we can see things changing to become more than they were, and it is happening right before our eyes. So we are witnessing new beginnings all the time and remain challenged by the inexplicable facts of change, which we try to make explicable by looking in vein to ever more distant beginnings for a more ample cause. Meanwhile, theories of beginnings and ends remain highly theoretical – for isn’t every end a new beginning in the bigger picture of a dynamic universe where effects adorn the reality of their causes with something new? Furthermore, the idea of a first cause setting up a consistent chain of events, seems to suggest that ‘the dice were loaded from the start’, unless this consistency is an illusion of our place and time in ‘our universe’ – because the infinite variety of alternatives that are consistent with chance remain hidden from us in an unobservable ‘multiverse’.

Is there a purpose to existence?
This is a question we can feel more at home with, indeed we can also make some firm inroads towards an answer, because we already know there is purpose and meaning in existence, if only by way of our own presence, nature and outlook – and since we happen to be a real part of the universe we bear proof in ourselves of what can transpire. This change in the nature of nature is no less significant in cosmic terms just because we find it happens to be peculiar to us. But questions remain to be answered: where does it all lead and does it end with us? It seems that the answers lie in the bigger picture, where ends turn out to be bigger than beginnings – whereby our sense of meaning and purpose, despite manifesting as a part of us, may in fact be a staging point of a further beginning. (The question of ‘a bigger picture’ has been examined above).
So it may well be the case that we are privy to only a part of the answer, given that it is fair to assume that we exist in a universe that is bigger than us and that the nature of our being owes to more than we bring to it. Nevertheless, we can take comfort from the incompleteness of our situation, in the stark realisation that the purpose in existence is likely to be bigger than all we can make of it, just as the facts are likely to remain bigger than all we can make of them. Thereafter, the main obstacle to our progress is ourselves and our equally deficient observation that reality is confined to the facts of a purposeless nature that fixes the fate of what it all adds up to, which we uphold by promising ourselves that this explanation will win through in the end – as if we can deem ourselves adequate to explain the existence of existence or the extent of its nature and possibilities.

Mike Laidler

Loaded dice: The chances of a ‘theory of everything’.

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If the mystery of existence is that it exists, then that mystery carries through into every aspect of it, including our observations of necessity and all the explanations built upon them. Also the question of necessity persists despite all the revelations of observation and explanation – since we still don’t know how the universe came to be as a necessary fact, and if not, why it came to be at all? Meanwhile, the mystery deepens in the knowledge that everything can be observed to come down to something less than itself – indeed explanation seems to rely on this fact.

On the other hand, things can be seen to change to become more than they were – such as when the universe takes form, or chemicals constitute bodies that become alive, or thoughts emerge with knowledge to frame ‘the facts’. Yet things don’t change, remaining as they were beneath the surface, everything being reducible to the basic elements. So change is at the centre of the mystery of existence – being shrouded in the paradox that things change without changing in a universe that appears to grow from nothing in the same way – because everything is traceable to something less than it becomes, which remains unchanged beneath it all.

In short, explanation doesn’t do justice to the facts that are simultaneously one thing and another. For example, to claim that we are just atomic particles because ‘in reality’ that’s all there is, neither represents the reality of atomic particles nor ourselves, and does not instate atomic particles as the source of feelings, intentions and purposes. So a ‘reductionist’ explanation of the origins of the universe cannot count as ‘a theory of everything’. Neither can we expect knowledge, as part of the universe, to encapsulate the reality in which it is encapsulated – for it seems that realities, like dice, turn on outcomes and inevitabilities bigger than themselves in which the ‘laws of necessity’ get redefined. Meanwhile explanation is fated to chase perpetually the facts that outstrip it.

Furthermore, a theory of chance neither explains itself nor the necessities that come to overlay it, or how causes lead to change. Nor can explanation pin its authority on the consistency of causes – since the observation of a ‘necessary outcome’, in providing a premise for explanation, doesn’t yield an adequate explanation of its beginning in something less. Thus, in the paradoxical reality of fact, everything reveals the fact of itself in a reality bigger than itself; and reality presents ‘itself’ as a plurality of realities: in unity and diversity, stasis and change, explanation and contradiction – the plural ‘it’ encompassing the living and the unliving, chance and design, action and inertia, possibility and limitation, inevitability and uncertainty, coincidence and intention, necessity and choice, knowledge and oblivion, meaning and irrelevance. Then if there is more to reality in its outcomes than its origins, the ‘absolutes’ remain definitive only of truths that are incomplete truths in a reality bound to change, together with its mantle of explanation.

Mike Laidler

Being Realistic

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Who can claim that there is no such thing as truth without affirming the truth of their denial? Who can attest to the absence of meaning without upholding what they mean? Whose experiences can lay claim to the facts? Who can countenance the mind of God, or know by default that there is nothing to behold? How can we know what is ours, even of our thoughts – does it suffice to think that that our brains are doing the thinking for us? Can we see the bigger picture in its elements, by recognising the greater in the lesser or the end in its beginning? Does reality reveal to us its beginning and end in our realisations?

Mike Laidler

Words of Reason

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If there was no ambiguity about the nature of ‘the real’ there would be no need to single out or believe in the fact of it. As it happens, most of us live in a literal reality – our understandings being shaped by the words used to divine ‘the real’, with the intellect aspiring to truths couched in words of reason, echoing facts said to speak for themselves. Yet words are but foils for ‘the truth’, expounding a logic drawn from the precepts of which we explain our understandings – or is it understand our explanations? – in any case, being expressly validated as a outlook that defers to the facts, as if the facts tell us what to know. But this derived form of realism sidesteps the real task of philosophy – to expose the fictions and unseen contradictions generated by a reasoning that sees no greater truth than itself. For despite knowing that the reasons of today can turn into the regrets of tomorrow, we dutifully abandon our doubts and rationalise away problematic truths with ever more sophisticated forms of sophistry – thereby to convince ourselves that the rhetoric of reason remains our ultimate mentor – as if it is ‘the truth’ that abhors the contradictions – as if the intellectual impasse of contradiction also delimits the nature of ‘the facts’.

Mike Laidler

Points of view

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Every point of view is a microcosm of the bigger picture, which we do not see because of our focus upon the facts within our view.  Nor can all the points of view in the world add up to that bigger picture, as if they can capture it all and perceive full-on the reality that remains greater in its inexplicable power to be – as if ‘explanation’ can equate to that power in which reality perceives itself.

Mike Laidler

Reading the Stones

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Being is an agent of change – redefining the facts – introducing sensibilities into a nature without, realising meanings that are inexplicable in terms of a purposeless nature or in terms of chance having charge of order. Thus we occupy a nature that is the same and different – that has changed through one nature building on another – supplying new directions.

Then in what nature lies the belief that ‘nature’ defines our beliefs and governs the reality: that reality shapes itself, evolution creates and the runes of destiny are set in stone – as if life is somehow created by unliving powers, or the passive stones engineer their building and the undeniable presence of intention remains quite unintended?

Mike Laidler

Insight

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The world can be seen as nothing but matter in motion, except we may see it otherwise – and it is the seeing that makes the difference, for without that insight the world remains nothing but matter in motion.