Power in ascendance
Resonance of possibility
Bounds beyond bounds
Laws above laws
More than us
yet less apart.
Somewhere
‘out there’
something astounding
waiting to be known
– of ‘what is’
and ‘what for’.
Mike Laidler
Universe
The Pinocchio factor
Did life come to earth from another planet? But what explains the origins of alien life – what accounts for the birth of life in the universe? Are planetary environments enough to explain its emergence? Can its evolution explain its existence? Does life belong to the physical fabric of the universe, or does the universe ‘come to life’ because of possibilities in addition? And what makes us believe that possibility becomes explicable by observing its incidence? Indeed, putting all the theories to one side, do we actually know where the answers might come from – or lead us?
There are alternative ways to look at the evidence. Perhaps life manifests properties that differ from its non-living causes, which ‘become alive’; or the causes are inherently prepotent, though ‘in the event’ the ‘possibility of life’ depends upon the environmental triggers. Then does it mean that life is a latent property of its preconditions in the physical world – that like a Pinocchio, it is already in situ, just waiting to be carved out? And what makes us believe that life would be explicable if only we could observe the transition from the non-living to the living?
Mike Laidler
As if in fact
Here we are. It’s a fact, except our knowledge of the ‘here’ and the ‘we’ is incomplete and compromised by our understandings of the ‘isness’ of it all – as is, indeed, our understanding of the ‘isness’ of understanding. In fact, we know precious little, but that’s not how we play the game of knowing. And it is a game insofar as we interpret ‘self and reality’ using theories borrowed from others appointed to do the understanding for us.
So what does knowing that we live in ‘this universe’ tell us about ‘who or what we are’ or even ‘what we are about’? The first mistake is to believe that knowledge tells us anything – as if there were two sides to it which we can understand as ‘the facts’ conveying a message. But we only think about it that way because that’s how we convey ‘the facts’ to one another – as messages to be understood.
And the message we receive is that reality must be ‘out there’ in the nature of the universe – as if our nature is reducible to that nature – as if objectivity is more than a way of looking because it is also a fact of existence in which objects are paramount – as if we might understand this ‘for ourselves’ once we defer our understandings to those who say that they are more ‘conversant with the facts’.
Mike Laidler
The Burden of Proof
I The ‘big bang’ of change
If ‘everything is stardust’ then stardust does more than replenish the universe with lumps; yet even if we could see it all unfold before our eyes, into a living, conscious intelligence, we might gain no more than a cursory overview – courtesy of those somehow ‘enabled’ lumps perceiving themselves – otherwise the stardust isn’t everything. In fact, we don’t understand these changes, despite all their conspicuous causes. For instance, the emergent properties of life do not ‘boil down’ to its unliving chemistry – something changes, but it is not germinal to the chemistry, which enables, supports and sustains a difference by remaining as it is. These dualisms pose problems for proof and explanation that show up in the reasoning we apply to the perception of change – either by identifying a ‘transformative event’ with things as they are, so ‘nothing really changes’, or by differentiating it from things as they were, which taxes logic and leaves the explanation wanting. In other words, we cannot explain a fundamental change in terms of the properties of a cause without begging the question; and whenever causes are found to diverge, the ‘explanation’ runs into a convolution of uncertain proofs – which is why scientific conclusions are ever prone to error. Thus no one can prove that order in the universe was caused by ‘the big bang’ or that energy gives definition to form any more than the properties of stardust cause consciousness or the nature of existence comes from the pre-existing nature of its causes. Indeed, every explanation carries inferences based upon the form of our reasoning in excess of the facts – with the result that facts considered to be self-evident, such as: ‘everything is a part of nature’ and ‘everything has a cause’ lead into explanatory quagmires over ‘the cause of everything’, the necessity of change and the primacy of possibility. So, if nature is the ‘bedrock of our being’, and everything remains a part of ‘nature’, then our faculties, like everything else, function as natural effects of natural causes, to the extent that nature is now ‘perceiving itself through us’.
II The ‘little bang’ of chance
Proof begins in the imagination, by imagining that the world is explicable by its causes, as if we can find the nature of one thing in another because an effect is derived from its cause, with the same being true for acquired states of knowledge. However, such explanations diminish the very fact they purport to explain, namely the fact of change. Neither do the laws of nature prove that everything has its beginning in the pre-existence of a master cause that provides a blueprint for the universe becoming what it is from what it wasn’t, or otherwise changing from what it was to become more like itself. Nor can we make the inexplicable explicable by presuming that chance changes the boundaries of possibility when, as a matter of fact, the evidence points to the converse. Nevertheless, our acknowledgement of a causal continuum serves us well in rationalising our place in existence, as proved by the prerequisites for survival; except that our nature and evolution provide only the semblance of an explanation of the course of change towards an agency that is deliberate intentional and inquisitive – properties that are alien to their ‘primal causes’ in nature as it was. In fact, all we know is that change introduces new properties – new boundaries of possibility by which we can also see that we differ from our origins in the oblivious morass enough to be threatened by it. And we can also see that nature is more than a ‘chance engine’ for creating and shaping these possibilities – since chance has no internal mechanism for transcending itself – to become more than itself by chance – whereas ‘nature’ diverges to become a plurality of natures containing meanings, purposes and necessities that stand in stark and inexplicable contrast to things without. Furthermore, we do not explain change simply by observing it then determining that our observations must explain it if there is nothing else to discern; and no perspective can be big enough to prove the necessity of change by way of the necessities we import into our proofs in order to make them logically tight, and ours.
III Effects as causes
‘Seeing is believing’ when belief stands in for proof – and the question of proof confronts us once we try to look beyond appearances, to seek the reality behind ‘the seeming’. Even so, we don’t look to the resolution as amounting to a difference of our making; instead, we experience it as coming through the perception in the same way as we experience perception as coming to us from the world. Yet there are realities within realities – as when perceived sounds and colours come to transcend their primary causes. Also, the vast array of our self-conscious perceptions mark a step-change in reality, just as perception marks a step-change from its causes in an oblivious world. And all the evidence points to the same fact – that our knowledge of the world, even as perceived to be caused by it, is not necessarily the same thing, though we may wish to presume there is no ‘real’ difference for the sake of its validation. Likewise, we see necessary connections between causes and effects, but it is not the cause that turns first to make the difference real. That is, the perceived difference ‘arrives’ with the appearance of the effect, there being no change till then, and the fact that the ‘effect’ is as much of a cause in such transitions is known in the event that it becomes a necessity for any further ‘causal changes’ to be perceived, otherwise its existence is superfluous. Nevertheless, we expect that the change can be explained by identifying it with a preceding cause, as if the cause now belongs in two versions of itself – to be better known in retrospect, for what it ‘really is’ in prospect. Unfortunately, original causes aren’t amenable to explanation, but undaunted by this, we prefer to perceive the universe, qua existence, as a developed property of an ‘original cause’, as if the possibilities remain defined by this ‘fact’ – thereby proving to ourselves that all subsequent changes are somewhat less than original, and that our perception of everything as a version of stardust goes to show that we are perceiving reality ‘as it is’.
Mike Laidler
Cogito ergo est
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
Categorically conscious
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
Are we alone in the universe?
We know there is life out there in the universe because we are out there. Perhaps it’s because of our perception of life as belonging here, to the earth, that we fail to see its origins in the universal properties of which the earth is a beneficiary.
It’s not that life is a random accident here on earth, it’s that it is a cosmic potential empowering it’s inception everywhere the conditions are right.
The question about whether there is life out there is merely a question of where not if. The question of whether life can become intelligent is already answered, so it’s just as plausible to expect that we are not alone.
© Mike Laidler 2014
Philosophy Alive 