existence

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

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

Cogito ergo est

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I think about thinking and find that it is more than all I can think about.

Thinking represents a bigger change for the universe than it does for us – because we represent that change.  The big changes for us come of what we think.  In any case, there is something unique about thinking, something that we know about uniquely from the inside.

That we think locates thought, not as a subjective retreat but as a substantive presence in existence; and if we are to assume anything about a universe that is bigger than us, it is that it begins for us in the presence of thought – a presence of which we are a part – a thinking presence that is more than all we can think about by reference to ourselves alone.  We are internal to all that is not confined to us

And the clearest view of ‘external reality’ is not by the assumption of an extended physical realm as a matter of primary necessity, but by way of a wider reality that embraces us as a fact of inevitable distinction – a facilitating mental realm.  For we do not awaken to the panoply of a sentient universe in the belief that it has merely awakened in us, or as something that is secondary to a ‘real’ universe that is devoid.

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

Armageddon in pieces

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Human being espouses friendship and enmity with equal conviction. Indeed, the intensity of the one easily converts into the intensity of the other when emotions run wild. And all the advances of technology are rendered primitive in the hands of those ready to wage war, whilst civilisation is reduced to a merciless grab for money in the belief that it solves all problems and makes us wealthy. But our final degradation is sealed of the power to lie to ourselves.

27.1.15 – 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

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

The Meaning Well

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There is no meaning to existence to be found without the meaning in existence. And we know there is meaning in existence, even in our deficient quest for it, even when our quest for it is rendered deficient by our expectations of what we want to find.

Yet our commitment to the quest is enough to change the reality, and gird our failures along the way, for how else would we judge our own failure without a sense of what we are looking for – which is our hidden strength.

Only sometimes we hide that strength from ourselves – sometimes by giving in to failure, sometimes by reducing it to serve our ill-judged wants, which never satisfy. Thereby we forget how much more is to be gained when we stop looking for it as something to get, and see it instead as something to give, thereafter to be refreshed from the fathomless depths of its creative abundance.

Mike Laidler

Categorically conscious

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Is it possible for a tiny dot of consciousness in a corner of a physical universe to add anything significant to it? Can we say consciousness belongs to the physical because it belongs in the physical? Do we not diminish the change to mental existence in assuming that nothing has really changed because consciousness doesn’t make a ‘real’ difference to the physical facts? Can we measure the whole of existence by the standards of the physical? But what is the alternative? What gives us cause to think there is something other than the physical in the first place? What gives us cause to think of the physical as an external reality?

It seems that we can’t perceive anything without adopting a perspective that sets up a difference between perceiver and perceived. And even doubting our originality as perceivers, by seeing ourselves as a subset of a larger nature, cannot dilute the categorical change that leads to that nature doubting itself. In other words, the reality of the world with sentience is more than the supposed greater reality of a world without. So to adopt a view on the physical, as a whole, requires a starting point in perception as something else. And if perception is another ‘thing’, even in our imagination, we still have grounds for accepting it as something more than we suppose to perceive as existing without. Thus the universe is a wholly bigger place than we can discover or explain in terms of its physical roots, or perceptions of ourselves as physically grounded.

In short, we think, therefore we know there is more to existence than a nature we can suppose to exist without thought, in the supposed pervasiveness of its stark physicality. Otherwise there is no discernible difference to give cause to look and explore, or means to deny.

Mike Laidler