What is this ‘thing’ called life
which carries us forwards
into oblivion?
Was it there at the beginning
when the universe was new
and unfinished?
Was the stardust reborn
– imbrued
with fresh possibilities
– now animated
with needs and purposes
and conscious
of being
both a part of
yet apart from
the cosmic dawn?
Mike Laidler
Change presents the eye with a paradox – because things can be seen to change without changing – because the flow of change reveals nothing of the step to come – because a fact may be seen as one thing and another. Consequently, change raises more questions than answers. Some famous examples from antiquity include the paradoxes of Theseus’ ship and the heap: A heap of grains can be reduced to nothing by removing one grain at a time, but there is no definite point of change – unless one grain constitutes a heap. The paradox of the ship is more challenging: by systematically replacing every piece of the original it ceases to be the same ship, and yet it is. In sum, these puzzles carry an enduring message because they point to a fundamental problem of explanation that we would rather not think about – that there is more to change than its observable causes.
Shifting to the modern era, we see the same problem redefined. Science shows us that the universe is constituted of sub-atomic particles – a fact that includes ourselves – but there is no point at which we can see those particles becoming conscious. Indeed we do not see consciousness as a feature of the physical world until we rely upon the end result as a means of observing a world that is constituted of nothing but physical processes. So we observe the change as an effect that may be regarded for the sake of explanation as a variation on what is – which means that things do yet do not really change. Either way, the putative cause, namely the changing configuration of physical processes, doesn’t actually explain the untypical nature of the result – even though, logically, it must if there is no other cause to be found.
Mike Laidler
Perhaps there is more to it than any unbounded extension in the dimensions of matter, space and/or time – for even the galaxies are not necessarily infinite, let alone the timeless tracts of primordial possibility. And we can also encounter ‘it’ as a diverse property of content and form in number, geometry, language, music, art, literature and thought.
Then perhaps the indeterminable limits of our concepts hold the key to the ‘redefinition’ of infinity as an infinity of differences, which science now posits, in part, with the theory of a multiverse.
Nonetheless, the concept of infinity presents the mind with a paradox, since the definition of infinity, by definition, defies definition.
Mike Laidler
Myths exist to ‘explain the inexplicable’, and insofar as we believe that existence is potentially explicable we are supporting an epic myth – namely that we can define the greater fact of existence from a lesser perspective that subsists as a part of it.
Ultimately, there is a paradox at the heart of all explanation which leaves us with two strands of logic appertaining to things as they are and are not: observable and unobservable, definitive and indefinite, one thing and another – explicable and inexplicable.
The ancients knew of this as the paradox of change: that it is logically possible to explain why Achilles cannot beat a tortoise in a race, or how an arrow cannot move through the air, or that we cannot step into the same river twice.
As things currently stand, we explain the process of change as a transition from what was to what is, because this is the observable component of the reality. But the flow of change is not something we can capture analytically.
So it is because we know we exist biologically that we say biology is the cause of our existence, but it doesn’t explain the ‘biological changes’ that place us in the elevated state of being able to observe biology – to wrestle with the fact that biology is and is not explaining itself.
Mike Laidler
Once upon a time Goldilocks chanced upon a baby bear’s bowl of porridge that was just right for the eating. Sometime later, scientists took a fresh look at the fact of a universe that happened to be just right for the emergence of life, and recognised that the necessary fine tuning of the manifold preconditions, the ‘physical constants’, seems more like a contrivance than a coincidence – a conspiracy of coincidences – so named the ‘Goldilocks enigma’ because there is no settled evidence for it beginning other than by chance. But what if both scenarios are true: chance and non-chance – the evidence for the co-existence of chance and non-chance possibilities being everywhere in the world that surrounds us? Then perhaps the enigma is actually a paradox which reflects the true state of existence – something we cannot reduce to our logical truths by which we demarcate the facts as either right or wrong, true or false, possible or impossible. Paradoxically, there is more to the fact of existence than the prerequisite of an explanation that requires itself to be logical. And it is logic, not truth, that requires the facts to be logical. Perhaps our belief in logic is holding us back – believing that logic gives us exclusive access to the ultimate truth – a truth to withstand all contradiction.
Perhaps paradox is nearer to ‘the truth’ than the logic that demands its resolution. So let’s begin with three truisms: ‘the universe’ is vast, ‘everything’ and ‘contains’ life. Given the scale and scope of it all, together with the potential diversity of planetary environments, then the right conditions for life on more than one of these planets becomes a loaded possibility. And though we see life as a novel possibility, it is explained as an effect of causes that subsist within existing boundaries of possibility. Yet the effect causes profound changes. It looks like non-living causes determine the mix of possible preconditions, but, ultimately, it is the potential for life that sets the limits. Furthermore, that potential remains a defiant mystery, regardless of how much we learn about the preconditions for life on earth, or indeed the preconditions for different types of life on different kinds of planet. Moreover, no amount of causal analysis explains how effects ratchet up the course of change, beginning in the observable differences between cause and effect. Indeed the paradox at the heart of existence is the pre-existence of its possibilities, despite their probable absence in certain forms at certain times – subsequently to ‘emerge’ in the times and events an observer chances upon, in the form of co-incidence called ‘reality’.
Mike Laidler
There is a simple truth that defies all explanation because it forms the basis of all explanation. It towers over our philosophies, religions and sciences, dwarfing the edifices of knowledge by which we claim to know. It can’t be magnified by theory, refined by belief, or preserved in tablets of stone. Neither is the ratification of discovery or reification in fact sufficient to define its boundaries. Nor can it be captured by the finesse of the artist, or the subtleties of scholarship, or the trappings of authority. Indeed, it empowers knowledge by stripping away all authority in what we can claim to know – for the knowledge that needs to be bolstered by authority is not true knowledge. And history shows that it is not with the mouth of truth that the facts are said to speak for themselves.
In the name of reason, we reject the possibility of a knowledge beyond the reach of our understanding, except as we allow it to be held in trust for us by others believed to know better. Thus we entertain proxy truths in relying upon the edicts of appointed authorities to tell us what we can and cannot know – as if personal knowledge is a recipe for ignorance, contradiction and delusion – as if reason can resolve the paradox of existence – as if paradox is the antithesis of truth. So we try to overrule the simple truth, believing that it must give way to the necessity of explanation. Yet the more we come to know, the more we come to realise the sheer scale of what we don’t know. Meanwhile, the fact of existence remains a mystery and the simple truth remains silent within the paradoxical pre-existence of possibility.
Mike Laidler
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
Reality is a paradox – the whole that is more than the sum of its parts, the ‘is’ that is greater than the was, the cause in the effect.
It seems rational to understand how things change by looking to what there was beforehand, but this doesn’t tell us what might happen next. And when we strip away the reality we know we see another kind of reality beneath so our interest and understanding naturally centre on its discovery. However, the fact of the difference tends to be read as a sign that the action is really taking place at a primary level – that the familiar world is somewhat ancilliary, that our discovery of the fundamentals has ‘shown us’ the true state of affairs – that change is caused.
We see change as caused instead of the cause. Thus we claim to explain the fact of change as caused by something else – by putting it down to discernible causes showing that there is nothing more to it, and by mechanising the process to confirm that the whole is no more than the sum of its parts because there is nothing else to see. Then we proceed to identify the changed facts with the unchanged facts, by seeing the manifest ‘change’ as a mere detail compared with things in their rudimentary forms. And, for good measure, the change to complexity is seen as the cause of the thing we need to explain, as affirming that the difference between cause and effect comes down to the change at the level of the cause, revealing causal complexities hitherto unseen.
Likewise we seek to explain ourselves by referencing our thoughts, intentions and beliefs to their physical causes – to understand our actions in terms of the activities of the brain, as if the consummate properties of one state of reality can be understood in terms of the vacant properties of another – as if everything is actually something else and therefore the fact of change, the one thing we cannot really explain, doesn’t stand apart from what we know of its causes in terms of something else. So we end up identifying, defining and explaining the nature of change by the activity of its cause; but everything is active and effects instantiate a different kind of activity in addition to the activity of their perceived causes. Hence change is the true cause, the active cause of causality, the efficacy of the effect. In fact everything in existence adds up to the inexplicable fact of change instantiating itself, as it was at the beginning of the universe.
Ultimately, the ‘environmental causes’ of change are merely accompanying factors of change that do not explain its instantiation in terms of things changed or changing any more than they explain those environmental changes, or indeed, the initiation of an environment. And no amount of environmental feedback can equate to or explain for us the change to cognition and explanation – though this amounts to our best attempt at understanding a potential that defies explanation, an inexplicable potential that is inherent to all things. For the potential in change cannot be explained incidentally by the properties of things that differ, or by the differing properties of things that remain stable.
Mike Laidler
Consciousness is bigger than anything we can set-up in consciousness as the form of our awareness.
We are certain that we are conscious and yet we cannot discern its nature in any preconscious state of nature. Nor can we prove that such preconscious states relate to the fact of consciousness without relying implicitly on the very fact we are trying to establish explicitly in terms of those other facts. In other words, we can know the essential nature of consciousness only from within and must start from that knowledge in order to assess any fact about its nature and origin.
Furthermore, every time we probe the form of our consciousness in order to find out something new about it we alter the state of our awareness in the wake of our discovery – we generate a new state of consciousness, so ensuring that there is always something new to learn. And if, as it would seem, consciousness remains bigger than any fact we can determine about it, then our awareness of that paradoxical fact holds the key to expanding our horizons.
Mike Laidler
There is more to existence than can be captured by that part of it called explanation, because explanation is merely a part of it. Accordingly, there is a dark matter in science that science attributes to the ‘dark matter’ of the universe – the 95% of the ‘known’ universe that remains inexplicable. This inexplicability is currently described as the problem of ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’, as if the problem lies with the facts of nature. However, the problem of explanation does not rest with the facts of nature, for science’s inability to explain is actually explanation’s inability to explain.
Explanation is a selective statement of fact that reveals, upon reflection, a fact about itself – that there are many ways to look at reality, but no way to see it as a whole. And the selectivity in explanation creates the parameters of the inexplicable – in terms of what is necessarily excluded. It doesn’t matter whether this is intentional or unintentional, the result is the same – explanation carries a cost that we accept as a fair trade, a price that we are willing to pay to find out what we want to know. And so long as the knowledge we glean accords with the facts we know about, we are content to claim that the facts can’t be wrong, as if the facts are the source of their explanation, indeed as if knowledge belongs to those facts. Factual knowledge becomes the agency of its own ignorance.
The relative nature of explanation highlights a longstanding problem of what it actually explains, for explanation has to be more than a matter of faith or acceptance, indeed it purports to be more. But the whole basis of explanation sits on a point of faith – that one thing explains another – so the universe owes its explanation to something else – facts that we deem ourselves privileged to know from a position of neutrality. However nothing is altogether neutral, not even the ‘nothingness’ of dark matter, and especially the urge to know. Everything known is relative to a point of reference. We tentatively proceed to commission explanations as ‘objective’ observers of reality, but objectivity is a subtle version of subjectivity, for there can be no objective point of view without a point of view – objectivity owes its existence to a subjective presence.
All knowledge attests to a fact that objectivity tries to preclude – the inexplicable nature of subjectivity in the fact of the known, in the nature of existence itself. Explanation has much to do with what is said to be the fact of the matter, on the premise that it is the ‘objective’ facts that are saying something about themselves. We like to think that the fact of a mental entity sitting in the midst of the universe has no relevance to the place or form of explanation, so we believe that the place of explanation is outside us, thereby giving credibility to explanation – and to make doubly sure that our explanations are not misunderstood as belonging to us, we claim that they belong to science, as if science is out there waiting to explain things for us.
Unfortunately this view of explanation is a myth and its fault lines are evident once we stop keeping faith. The myth is built on a false belief in what causality explains. We believe that everything has a cause and that causes explain how things change. But there is a problem; whereas we can see how this works in reality, in our perceptions of reality, it fails as an explanation of how ‘existence got here’ – that is, in the realities outside our participation as subjective entities, where the explanation of the universe and existence is meant to be found. Our view on causality represents our predilection toward the idea of what comes first – first being a fact of elevated psychological significance in our partial viewpoint on reality.
Explanation doesn’t work as an explanation of existence if explanation implies that everything owes its existence to something else – for the evidence we uncover as a validation of that paradigm merely pushes the problem back one stage, into the realms of dark explanation, currently manifesting as the ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’ of science. And the problem gathers momentum with the observation that everything has a definitive cause – as if the change, of which causality is the vehicle, is explained by hitching a ride.
Paradoxically, the energy invested in the elevated status of explanation is the true dark matter awaiting its enlightenment in the realisation that explanation neither explains things for us nor ourselves in the bargain. Science sees the problem otherwise, in terms of a shortage of facts, in terms of the dark matter out there in nature, on the premise that matter is a conversion of energy explicable by the fact that it happens. But how are we to calculate a conversion of energy, such as we are, to exist in the midst of the universe in a form that is animated to explain itself and the rest of existence in the process? Are we not deluding ourselves that existence is inherently explicable because it happens, in the same way that our explanations are intrinsically viable because they ‘explain’.
Mike Laidler
Philosophy Alive 