If there is a bigger scheme of things in which life and death are part, then is it not possible that death is no opponent of life, or neutraliser of personal existence, any more than individuality is our creator?
Mike Laidler
Philosophy
Translations
Every word is a translation of a meaning, which we change by degrees when translating words into words, believing the words to be the source of meanings to be discovered. And so we find ourselves actively exploring what we have to say in the process of saying it.
Yet all the words ever stated and yet to be stated cannot encompass the meanings by which we bring them to life. And so we are able to debate interminably the meaning of what was said, sometimes admitting: ‘I think what I am saying is ….’.
Mike Laidler
Indebted to money
World debt may be ubiquitous but things aren’t quite as they seem. The world is not in debt, not as a world – the Earth owes nothing financially to the planet Mars. So if world debt is ubiquitous, then as a world we are no worse off financially. We remain as exquisitely wealthy as we can be, because creating debt doesn’t mean the money escapes.
What it comes down to is the old problem of distribution, but debt can’t be the enemy, not if everyone prospers from the wealth on their doorstep – doorstep Earth. However the real enemy is the service paid to money as our motivation – for making money. Hence we change our lives in the pursuit of money, which at best is meant to serve our lifestyle, now changed because of the need for money.
And we can see the results at the most fundamental levels of life and family, where the pursuit of money overtakes the priorities it is meant to serve. Thus debt is merely a device that binds us to the service of money – lest we forget that we have willingly chosen to make it our master.
Mike Laidler
A look at luck
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
Aeons of creation
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
Why existence?
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
‘I’ Thinking
The most momentous pronouncement of human thought relates to the recognition of thought as itself, in the recognition that ‘ideas are bigger than the brain that hatches them’.
Mike Laidler
What God Where?
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?
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
Nature trails
Ideas of nature once pitched it as something apart, something different from us, but now we regard ourselves and our theories as having evolved as a part of that nature, so we can’t be that different in reality because there is only one nature – in which case our theory of evolution is really a theory of nature about itself, about a nature that now observes itself.
So what does this say about the differences we can see between a nature that thinks and one that doesn’t? Does it mean that one side of the difference, namely the nature that can’t see the difference, is more real than the side that can, or vice versa; or is this double-sided coin of nature created by a difference so startling that we can’t understand the one in terms of the other – as observers of something that is and is not something else?
Mike Laidler
Philosophy Alive 