Church of the Churchless

Likely we don't even know the questions to ask of the cosmos

We all have questions. About all kinds of stuff. What's wrong with my computer? Who will win the next presidential election? Is that lump on my chest anything to be concerned about?

Almost always, our questions are presumed to have answers. Maybe not right now, but eventually. The winner of the 2024 presidential election will be known after the votes are counted, not before. Until then all we can do is wait.

And hope. That's when I turn a bit religious, even though I'm an atheist: Dear God, please don't let Donald Trump win a second term!

But the questions I find most interesting, especially after imbibing some Oregon marijuana courtesy of my beloved PAX vaporizer, are the ones that we humans are clueless about. Meaning, not only don't we know the answers, we don't even know the questions to which we lack the answers.

It'd be good if I could give some examples, but of course I can't. No one can.

Because what I'm talking about is a fundamental inability of us humans to grasp the Deep Unknown well enough to even fathom the basic contours of what we don't know.

This isn't just a difference in degree of, say, our inability to know what sperm whales are saying with their clicking sounds. That was the subject of a fascinating story in The New Yorker, "Talk to Me: Can artificial intelligence allow us to speak to another species?"

Most of us have heard of the famous philosophical/neuroscientific question, What is it like to be a bat? In this case, researchers trying to decipher the meaning of sperm whale clicks, which travel great distances through the water, are faced with the problem of how the whales look upon the world.

Surely very differently than we do.

But through artificial intelligence, it is hoped that with a large enough database of whale click patterns, known as codas, "it [AI] could then -- once again in theory -- generate sequences of codas that a sperm whale would find convincing. The model wouldn't understand sperm whale-ese, but it could, in a manner of speaking, speak it. Call it ClickGPT."

OK. That'd be way cool.

However, the story says that it's possible that nothing in our human experience matches up with some, or even all, of sperm whale experience. Researchers are hopeful this isn't true, but it might be.

And this relates to a fellow mammal on our very own planet. Imagine how much more difficult -- I'd say impossible -- it would be to grasp the fundamental questions of the cosmos, leaving aside the answers. This presumes, of course, that such questions exist.

I suspect that they do, though naturally I'm clueless about what the questions might be. The best I can do is gesture in the direction of where my intuition causes me to believe that such questions might be lurking.

What boggles my mind above all other boggles is the notion that something always has been, is now, and always will be. That sounds like a religious notion, but it really isn't. 

Sure, religious believers consider that God is the everlasting entity. However, as I've pointed out many times on this blog, and surely will do so many times in the future, saying that God always has existed brings us no closer to fathoming the boggle than saying the cosmos always has existed.

Actually, less close, since we know the cosmos, in the form of our universe, exists, while there's no convincing evidence that God does.

Regardless, it seems to me that we humans are very limited in our ability to comprehend eternal existence. We don't even know whether, when it comes to the cosmos, "eternal" means endless time or outside of time.

And for sure we don't know what even farther out questions about the cosmos could be asked if the human brain had a capacity to ask them. Again, I'm not assuming that the questions could be answered.

What I'm saying is that we humans, no matter how wise, intelligent, or enlightened we might be, lack the ability to come up with those questions because all we're capable of is fathoming queries that relate to our human experience -- which lacks any experience of existence having always existed.

Religion hates mystery. Science loves mystery.

Recently there's been a comment conversation on this blog about the religious philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, a medieval Christian.

I've never been interested in his theology, since like most avid religious believers, Aquinas wants to use philosophy to defend his faith, not to engage in a search for truth. Wikipedia has a cogent criticism of Aquinas by Bertrand Russell.

He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. He is not engaged in an inquiry, the result of which it is impossible to know in advance. Before he begins to philosophize, he already knows the truth; it is declared in the Catholic faith.

If he can find apparently rational arguments for some parts of the faith, so much the better; if he cannot, he need only fall back on revelation. The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading. I cannot, therefore, feel that he deserves to be put on a level with the best philosophers either of Greece or of modern times.

Right on, Mr. Russell. 

If someone has to resort to dredging up some bit of pre-scientific philosophizing by Aquinas in an attempt to prove the existence of God, this shows that there is zero evidence for God other than what exists in the empty words of holy books and the equally empty mental gyrations of people desperate to convince others that God is more than a fantasy.

For example, from reading some of the Aquinas-related comments on this blog, I gather that he argued that God must exist because everything has a cause, and that sequence of causes and effects evident in our universe must have a first cause, which Aquinas somehow labels as "God."

This makes such little sense, it's hard to see how anyone could take the argument seriously in the 13th century, much less the 21st century. For Aquinas is concerned with the same question as I've addressed many times on this blog, why is there something rather than nothing?

Let's agree with Aquinas that either the cosmos had a primal cause, or has existed forever. In no way does this point to a supernatural being, God. It points to either a natural primal cause, since nature is evident and God isn't, or the eternal nature of, well, nature.

For if something has to be eternal to avoid an assumption that the cosmos sprang into being out of nothing -- an admittedly difficult notion for us humans to wrap our minds around -- that eternal something is much more likely to be the observable physical world than an unseen God.

Now, I heartily agree that the idea of existence having always existed is mind-blowing. For in everyday life we never encounter anything that has always been, is now, and always will be. People are born; then they die. Stars are born, then they die. 

Everywhere we look, causes lead to effects that turn into more causes and more effects. Aquinas, like most religious people of any historical time, is uncomfortable with the mystery of existence having always existed.

Me, I'm with those who find this idea hard to grasp and mystifying, but I don't find it uncomfortable. Because I believe in science rather than faith, I'm fine with not knowing an important question: How did the cosmos come to be?

So are scientists who study the cosmos. They wrestle with what came before the big bang, if "before" even has any meaning in regard to the instant our universe blossomed into existence, forming time and space. 

Scientists, along with atheists such as myself, are comfortable with saying "I don't know." I don't know how existence came to exist, or if existence has existed eternally, how eternity came to be. (Again, we're reaching the limits of language here, since pretty clearly eternity never came to be if it has always existed.)

Religious believers, on the other hand, can't tolerate not-knowing the deepest mysteries of the cosmos. So they wrap up all of those mysteries into a tidy conceptual package typically called "God." They then believe in God as the answer to all unanswered questions.

Of course, those believers don't have the answers either. But they have faith that one day, usually after death, all will be revealed to them through God's grace and mercy. Nice story. I prefer unvarnished not-knowing, though.

Back to Aquinas. This web page has a nice rundown of all the bullshit arguments put forward for God's existence. Aquinas gets a mention.

The Classic Cosmological Argument: Thomas Aquinas

“We see in the world around us that there is an order of efficient causes. Nor is it ever found (in fact it is impossible) that something is its own efficient cause. If it were, it would be prior to itself, which is impossible. Nevertheless, the order of efficient causes cannot proceed to infinity, for in any such order the first is cause of the middle (whether one or many) and the middle of the last. Without the cause, the effect does not follow. Thus, if the first cause did not exist, neither would the middle and last causes in the sequence. If, however, there were an infinite regression of efficient causes, there would be no first efficient cause and therefore no middle causes or final effects, which is obviously not the case. Thus it is necessary to posit some first efficient cause, which everyone calls ‘God.'”
—Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, c.1260 CE

Dating back to Aristotle, the cosmological argument is very probably the oldest argument offered in support of the existence of God, and probably the most frequently used by lay apologists as well. As formulated above by Thomas Aquinas, the cosmological argument states that every event has a cause; but every cause is itself caused by something else. To avoid an infinite regression, the argument concludes, we must postulate a first cause that is itself uncaused and eternal, and it identifies this first cause as God.

If the flaw of the ontological argument is circularity, the fallacy of the cosmological argument is special pleading. Namely, it asserts without good reason that everything except God needs a cause. But why should this be? If anything can exist without a cause, we could just as well conclude that it is the universe itself that is uncaused, existing eternally and giving rise to all other cause and effect. This hypothesis has just as much explanatory power as the hypothesis that God created the universe, and it is more parsimonious, requiring fewer additional assumptions. Therefore, all other things being equal, it is to be preferred.

Aquinas’ objection to the possibility of an infinite regress is also poorly founded. He claims that an infinite regression of causes could not exist because there would be no first cause, but this shows a failure to understand the notion of an infinite series. In such a series, every individual event would have a perfectly good cause: the event preceding it.

Alternatively, if we accept Aquinas’ logic on this point, we can then ask, how many thoughts did God have before creating the universe? Every thought God had must have been caused by another thought preceding it, since Aquinas claims nothing can be its own cause. But since by Aquinas’ argument an infinite beginningless series is impossible, God must have had a single thought preceding all others – i.e., there must have been a point at which God came into existence. We can then ask the cause of this initial thought, and so on ad infinitum.

There is one final attack on the classic cosmological argument. Say for the sake of argument that we ignore the above difficulty and grant this argument everything it asks – then it still does nothing to establish the existence of God.

Even if we accept this argument’s logic, all it proves is that there was a first cause. It does not prove that this first cause still exists today; it does not prove that this first cause has any interest in or awareness of human beings; it does not prove that this first cause is omnipotent or omniscient or benevolent. It does not even prove that the first cause is conscious or a person. An atheist could accept this entire chain of logic and then posit that the first cause was a purely natural phenomenon.

New Scientist story by Heinrich Päs about quantum oneness

I got excited when I saw the cover of the most recent issue of New Scientist that appeared in our mailbox a few days ago. Ooh! "A bold new way to think about how the universe fits together" Bring it on!

When I turned to the cover story, which is called Reality Reconstructed in the print edition, I saw that the author was Heinrich Päs, the theoretical physicist who wrote The One: How An Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics, which I've written previous blog posts about here, here, and here. 

As noted in the third post, Päs devotes several chapters in the middle of his book to discussing the history of monism's relationship with duality in religion, science, and philosophy over the past few thousand years. That was interesting to me, but was a detour from his more rigorous discussion of quantum mechanics.

Now I'm back to the hard science chapters. Since I've copied in his New Scientist article below (the magazine wouldn't let me export a PDF file), and there's plenty of hard science to digest in the article, for the moment I won't talk about what Päs says in the chapters I've read the past few days.

I will, though, share a photo of an image in the book that summarizes his view of how quantum mechanics could be the One spoken of throughout the ages, because it is the most fundamental aspect of reality.

Here's the New Scientist article. Like I said, it is pretty much straight science, so isn't the easiest reading. However, it reflects the core of what Päs argues in his book, which is about 300 pages long. Thus the article is a great way to get the gist of his quantum hypothesis in just a few thousand words.

Rethinking reality: Is the entire universe a single quantum object?
In the face of new evidence, physicists are starting to view the cosmos not as made up of disparate layers, but as a quantum whole linked by entanglement

IMAGINE you could see through everyday objects to the stuff they are made of. If you zoomed in on the arm of a chair, say, you would see that it is made of atoms. Zoom in again and you would see that those atoms contain subatomic particles called protons, neutrons and electrons. Zooming further still, you would see that the protons and neutrons are composed of quarks.

These are the layers of reality, and this is how physicists understand the universe: by breaking everything down into its constituent parts, an approach known as reductionism. As a particle physicist, I grew up on this philosophy. It has brought physics a long way – it is how we built our current picture of matter and its workings, after all. But now, with further progress stalling, I am convinced we need to go about things differently from here.

Rather than zooming ever further inwards, I think we need to zoom out. In doing so, we may see that everything there is, including such seemingly fundamental things as space and time, fragment out of a unified whole. This might sound like philosophy or mysticism, but it is in fact a direct result of applying quantum mechanics to the entire cosmos. When you do that, you realise that the universe isn’t fundamentally made of separate parts at all, but is instead a single, quantum object.

It is a radical idea, and one we are just beginning to test experimentally. But if it is correct, it could help solve some of the most puzzling mysteries in physics and upend the way we think about the universe.

For almost a century, physicists attempting to understand the most fundamental layers of reality have been inadvertently describing systems without knowing what is going on inside them. In the 1930s, when Enrico Fermi worked out how a neutron decays into a proton and spits out an electron – known as beta decay – he did so only by considering the electrons, protons and neutrons involved. Only decades later, when physicists discovered an intermediary particle called the W boson, did they realise there was a deeper layer of interactions playing out at tinier scales.

From today’s perspective, Fermi’s description is the prime example of an effective field theory (EFT), a mathematical framework that allows us to divide reality into different size scales and analyse them separately. In this way, physics behaves like a set of Russian Matryoshka dolls, where you can understand the outer doll without knowing anything about the dolls inside.

Effective field theory

An EFT is the name given to any work that exploits this idea. Whenever physicists want to describe effects beyond an established but incomplete theory, without specifying what the new physics is, they use EFTs. “Everything is an EFT,” says Cliff Burgess, a physicist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, who has written a book about the approach.

Crucial to EFTs is the concept that the different size scales of the universe correspond to different energies. At the largest distances are the lowest energies, while the tiniest parts of reality are associated with the highest energies. Fermi didn’t have a particle accelerator like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), so he couldn’t reach the high energies needed to reveal the smaller-scale reality of the W boson.

Fermi’s description works well for nuclear physics, though, and was an approximation of an even better, more fundamental theory: the standard model of particle physics, our best picture of matter and its workings. Now we know that the standard model is also incomplete, since it doesn’t include gravity, a particle for the universe’s enigmatic dark matter or a mechanism to generate the perplexing masses of subatomic particles called neutrinos. When this became clear, physicists realised that the standard model itself was also an EFT.

For all the convenience they provide, EFTs might be obscuring a truer understanding of the universe. This is because they introduce problems. One that particle theorists have been worried about for years involves the Higgs boson, the particle responsible for giving mass to quarks and electrons. In theories like the standard model, particles can temporarily change into short-lived particles, known as virtual particles, only to quickly decay back into the original particle. In a quirk of quantum mechanics, the rules that govern the world of particles, these fluctuations contribute to a particle’s mass. The extent of this contribution depends on the highest energy the virtual particles may have.

Importantly, working out the contributions to a particle’s mass depends on the boundaries of energy within which the standard model applies – or the size of the Russian doll. As far as we know, the upper energy threshold is the Planck scale, the smallest scale there is and the point at which gravitational effects become important and the standard model must be replaced by something that unites gravity and quantum mechanics. According to this idea, the mass of the Higgs boson is expected be determined by the Planck scale. But the prediction is 17 orders of magnitude larger than the actual mass we measured when the particle was eventually discovered at the LHC.

The only way around this conundrum is to accept that totally unrelated contributions to the Higgs mass from fleeting virtual particles just so happen to almost completely cancel each other out. This makes the conditions we see in our universe as unlikely as a pencil balancing on its tip. It is known as the fine-tuning problem.

A similar puzzle crops up in cosmology, too. This one involves dark energy, the mysterious force that propels the accelerated expansion of the universe. The expansion is thought to be caused by the energy stored in the vacuum of space. But here, our observed reality differs even more from prediction: the value of the vacuum energy we measure is some 30 orders of magnitude too small.

Particle physics in crisis

There have been some attempts to solve these two puzzles. An approach known as supersymmetry, for example, predicts new particles that cancel the quantum fluctuations produced by standard model particles. An alternative solution involves additional dimensions of space-time. This idea – proposed by Nima Arkani-Hamed, now at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and his colleagues – says that gravity may leak out into these extra dimensions, making it look weaker than it actually is. Models based on this idea predict a lower Planck scale, meaning a smaller Higgs mass. The extra dimensions are invisible since they are curled up so tightly that they have escaped experimental detection so far.

Both supersymmetry and the extra dimensions idea predicted the discovery of new physics at the LHC, in the form of either new supersymmetric particles or excitations in quantum fields that would run around the curled-up dimensions. So far, however, the LHC has found the Higgs boson and nothing else. The possible solutions to the fine-tuning problem have become increasingly fine-tuned themselves, because the LHC keeps ruling out hiding places.

In short, particle physics is in crisis. This is why a small group of theorists, including me, has recently started to explore another, radical approach – one that proposes an alternative to reductionism as we know it. Instead of treating the different energy scales of the universe separately, it treats them as if they all have some bearing on each other.

To understand how this works, consider an analogy used by physicists that invokes the boundaries where the colours of a rainbow become invisible. At the highest energies, and therefore lowest sizes, beyond the violet colour in a rainbow is what we call the ultraviolet (UV). At the lowest energies and largest sizes, you have what we call the infrared (IR). In between the two, in the visible part of the rainbow, is the realm in which the standard model works.

It has been generally accepted for a while that the model stops working at the infinitesimal sizes and high energies of the Planck scale. This is what we call the UV region, where the effects of quantum gravity would kick in. But in the late 1990s, Andrew Cohen at Boston University in Massachusetts, along with David Kaplan and Ann Nelson, then at the University of Washington in Seattle, wondered if there was also a limit at the very large distances, or low energies, that we call the infrared.

While studying black holes, Cohen and his colleagues calculated that there is a maximum length, or minimum energy, at which the standard model stops being valid. Beyond it, gravity takes over. It might seem intuitive that if there is a lower limit, there must also be an upper one. But crucially the researchers found that these seemingly unrelated cutoffs aren’t independent of each other. In other words, the physics at these vastly different energy scales seems to be related – a phenomenon dubbed UV/IR mixing.

The calculations didn’t suggest any concrete values for the low-energy cutoff. So Cohen and his collaborators tried out the largest scale they could think of: the radius of the observable universe. In a further fascinating twist, the corresponding UV cutoff to this IR cutoff turned out to be exactly the tiny energy value of the universe’s dark energy – not the Planck scale, after all. If the virtual particles contributing to dark energy abide by this limit, that could explain why these effects don’t drive dark energy to ridiculously large values.

For a long time, no one took much notice of this result. Most people had their sights set on supersymmetry and its ability to resolve the problem of the Higgs particle. But recently the crisis in physics has become more apparent, as many potential solutions to the fine-tuning problem have fallen away. As a result, the insights of Cohen and his colleagues have been receiving a huge amount of interest from theorists like myself. I started to wonder: if UV/IR mixing might help to solve the dark energy problem, could it also assist with the second major problem in fundamental physics, namely the unbearable lightness of the Higgs?

To answer this question, Tom Kephart at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and I first attempted to work out what the IR cutoff might be for the Higgs boson based on the limited lifetime of the particle. We determined a UV cutoff that is 11 orders of magnitude below the Planck scale. It is better than what we had, and yet still a million times too large for the Higgs mass we see. Adding extra dimensions could resolve the problem entirely.

Over recent years, theorists like me have tried several other ways to solve the Higgs problem using variations of UV/IR mixing – each coming from various angles. Some, like ours, take their inspiration from Cohen and his colleagues’ work on black holes. Others were born in string theory, which suggests everything is made of unbelievably tiny strings. None of the attempts so far is supported by experimental evidence, but they may get us a step in the right direction. A few of them even point to one fundamental property of underlying reality that could be causing this mixing to happen, with big implications for how we see the universe.

Quantum entanglement is usually described as a startling correlation between quantum objects. Prepare two particles in a particular way and a measurement of one immediately fixes the other, regardless of the distance between them. But these correlations can be thought of as proof of the fact that entangled quantum systems can’t be understood as being made out of parts: they are one and the same. Just as this indivisibility links faraway particles, it also can link quantum effects at different energies. In other words, quantum entanglement could be responsible for the UV and the IR scales of the universe seemingly talking to each other.

As we proceed up the size scale and down in energy, the effects of lower energies could be broken by a process called decoherence. This well-understood quantum phenomenon hides entanglement from the eye of a local observer. It is the reason why we experience no quantum weirdness in our daily lives.

Some work has found a relationship between entanglement and UV/IR mixing, but the bounds in Cohen and his colleagues’ study were caused by gravity rather than entanglement. Excitingly, recent work by leading researchers in string theory offers a solution: by suggesting gravity itself may be entanglement in disguise.

It is a bold idea, but I suspect entanglement causes UV/IR mixing. If so, there are huge implications for understanding reality at its most fundamental. If entanglement can be applied to the entire cosmos, then instead of everything being made of smaller and smaller pieces, it would turn the universe into “a single, indivisible unit”, in the words of quantum pioneer David Bohm. All objects in existence would be encoded in a universal wave function, a mathematical entity that describes a single, entangled state.

Soon, we may know if this matches up with reality. Cohen and his collaborators suggested UV/IR mixing would affect the interaction of electrons or subatomic particles called muons with electromagnetic fields, showing up as a mismatch between the standard model’s predictions and measurements. And the phenomenon may crop up in other processes, too. One example my colleagues and I are currently exploring relates to neutrino masses. Unlike any other particles, the almost non-existent masses of the elusive neutrinos can be entirely generated by virtual particles, according to some models. This means they should be more sensitive than other particles to any UV/IR mixing effects.

If we do find evidence to support this idea, it would dramatically alter the way we conceive of the cosmos. It would mean we could not only see a world in a grain of sand, as the poet William Blake once said, but we could also quite literally see the entire universe in its tiniest pieces and particles. While this might sound like just a different way of going about physics, it is much more than that. I believe that we are on the way to a completely new understanding of how the universe is put together.

Heinrich Päs is a theoretical physicist at the Technical University of Dortmund in Germany and the author of All is One

The universe has a plan for me. It's what's happening right now.

Religious people often say, "God has a plan for me." People who fall into the spiritual-but-not-religious camp often say, "The universe has a plan for me." Deepak Chopra assures us this is the case.

Some Googling revealed lots of examples of the second variety of planning. I looked at a few. 

In The Universe Always Has A Plan, I read: 

You aren’t sad because you are an unhappy person. You are experiencing sadness as part of your healing journey, to create space for more light to be embodied. You will receive everything you desire at exactly the moment in time it is meant to arrive.

There is a destiny. It is guaranteed, and it also requires your participation. It may include outcomes the ego may desire, but it can only be fulfilled by the light of your soul.

In 6 Ways to Accept the Universe's Plan For You, I read:

However, eventually things turned around for me and I did find some answers by learning to trust that the Universe had simply put me on a much more suitable path. In the process of making my life better, the first step that I made was to put aside my university dreams and study astrology instead.

I did much of my coursework from my bed during my illness, but, as I made changes, the Universe showed me signs that I was on the right track. At first, I didn’t understand these signs. I didn’t know the meaning behind seeing the number 11:11 everywhere I looked, or by seeing other number patterns and coincidences. At this time I had no idea that other young people all over the world were having the same experiences with seeing 111, 222, 333, etc.

Well, I have difficulty understanding the difference between God having a plan for me and the universe having a plan for me, since in either case a supernatural sentient being is aware of me and is actively working to change the direction of my life in a way that the being views as desirable.

Seemingly the main benefit to viewing the universe as my planner, rather than God, is that the universe doesn't demand that I do anything special, like going to church or praying. And the universe is, not surprisingly, universal, while God comes in all kinds of guises depending on what religion is followed.

My personal position is that I see no reason to believe that anyone has a plan for me. Sure, it'd be nice to have an all-powerful being on my side. But the idea that such a being exists makes no sense, and the notion that this being wants to direct my life in a certain fashion makes even less sense. 

However, I do accept that the universe has a plan for me in this way.

There are laws of nature. Causes and effects take place in accord with the laws of nature. Whatever happens occurs in accord with those causes and effects. So whatever is happening right now in my mental and physical life can be thought of as the universe's plan for me. 

It isn't a conscious plan. It isn't a plan created prior to happenings. It is simply that portion of the unimaginably vast network of causes and effects in the universe that impact little me.

Tonight I was drawn to write this blog post. I know this was the universe's plan for me because it is what happened. Now I'm going to eat a small slice of frosted carrot cake, my favorite evening snack. That also was the universe's plan for me, assuming it happens in the next few minutes, as I suspect it will.

Meister Eckhart, the great medieval mystic theologian, had a similar view about God's will, as I quoted him in a 2006 post.

Now I hear you ask: “How do I know that it is God’s will? My answer is that if it were not God’s will even for a moment, then it would not exist. Whatever is must be his will. If God’s will is pleasing to you, then whatever happens to you, or does not happen to you, will be heaven.

Science says about dark energy: "So the mystery continues"

One of the most amazing scientific facts is how much of the universe is unknown to science. About 95%.

As discussed in the NASA article below (I copied it from a NASA web site), currently about 68% of all the stuff in the universe is considered to be dark energy, and nobody knows what it is. Another 27% is dark matter, and nobody knows what it is. That leaves 5% normal matter, and we do know what that is. 

Except the article says, Come to think of it, maybe it shouldn't be called "normal" matter at all, since it is such a small fraction of the universe.

I love the honest humility of science. On the whole, scientists don't try to pretend that they know something when they're actually clueless about it.

They do this in part because science has some pretty damn good bullshit detectors, so any scientist who claims to know something without evidence to back that claim up likely will be challenged by other scientists. Also, scientists embrace mystery.

That's how they make progress -- by tackling mysteries, large or small, with the goal of making the mysterious less so. You'll see that the article says repeatedly about unproven dark energy possibilities, So the mystery continues.

Contrast this with religions and religious believers.

How often do you hear someone preach from a pulpit on the theme, "When it comes to God, the mystery continues"? How many people would follow a guru who says, "While I'm trying to understand what the cosmos is all about, the mystery continues"?

Illusory certainty gets high marks in religion, but a failing grade in science. Here's the NASA article.

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Dark Energy, Dark Matter

In the early 1990s, one thing was fairly certain about the expansion of the universe. It might have enough energy density to stop its expansion and recollapse, it might have so little energy density that it would never stop expanding, but gravity was certain to slow the expansion as time went on. Granted, the slowing had not been observed, but, theoretically, the universe had to slow. The universe is full of matter and the attractive force of gravity pulls all matter together.

Then came 1998 and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations of very distant supernovae that showed that, a long time ago, the universe was actually expanding more slowly than it is today. So the expansion of the universe has not been slowing due to gravity, as everyone thought, it has been accelerating. No one expected this, no one knew how to explain it. But something was causing it.

Eventually theorists came up with three sorts of explanations. Maybe it was a result of a long-discarded version of Einstein's theory of gravity, one that contained what was called a "cosmological constant." Maybe there was some strange kind of energy-fluid that filled space. Maybe there is something wrong with Einstein's theory of gravity and a new theory could include some kind of field that creates this cosmic acceleration. Theorists still don't know what the correct explanation is, but they have given the solution a name. It is called dark energy.

What Is Dark Energy?

More is unknown than is known. We know how much dark energy there is because we know how it affects the universe's expansion. Other than that, it is a complete mystery. But it is an important mystery. It turns out that roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest - everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter - adds up to less than 5% of the universe. Come to think of it, maybe it shouldn't be called "normal" matter at all, since it is such a small fraction of the universe.

Universe Dark Energy-1 Expanding Universe

This diagram reveals changes in the rate of expansion since the universe's birth 15 billion years ago. The more shallow the curve, the faster the rate of expansion. The curve changes noticeably about 7.5 billion years ago, when objects in the universe began flying apart as a faster rate. Astronomers theorize that the faster expansion rate is due to a mysterious, dark force that is pulling galaxies apart.

Credit: NASA/STSci/Ann Feild

One explanation for dark energy is that it is a property of space. Albert Einstein was the first person to realize that empty space is not nothing. Space has amazing properties, many of which are just beginning to be understood. The first property that Einstein discovered is that it is possible for more space to come into existence. Then one version of Einstein's gravity theory, the version that contains a cosmological constant, makes a second prediction: "empty space" can possess its own energy.

Because this energy is a property of space itself, it would not be diluted as space expands. As more space comes into existence, more of this energy-of-space would appear. As a result, this form of energy would cause the universe to expand faster and faster. Unfortunately, no one understands why the cosmological constant should even be there, much less why it would have exactly the right value to cause the observed acceleration of the universe. 

Dark Matter Core Defies Explanation

This image shows the distribution of dark matter, galaxies, and hot gas in the core of the merging galaxy cluster Abell 520. The result could present a challenge to basic theories of dark matter.

Another explanation for how space acquires energy comes from the quantum theory of matter. In this theory, "empty space" is actually full of temporary ("virtual") particles that continually form and then disappear. But when physicists tried to calculate how much energy this would give empty space, the answer came out wrong - wrong by a lot. The number came out 10¹²⁰ times too big. That's a 1 with 120 zeros after it. It's hard to get an answer that bad. So the mystery continues.

Another explanation for dark energy is that it is a new kind of dynamical energy fluid or field, something that fills all of space but something whose effect on the expansion of the universe is the opposite of that of matter and normal energy. Some theorists have named this "quintessence," after the fifth element of the Greek philosophers. But, if quintessence is the answer, we still don't know what it is like, what it interacts with, or why it exists. So the mystery continues.

A last possibility is that Einstein's theory of gravity is not correct. That would not only affect the expansion of the universe, but it would also affect the way that normal matter in galaxies and clusters of galaxies behaved. This fact would provide a way to decide if the solution to the dark energy problem is a new gravity theory or not: we could observe how galaxies come together in clusters.

But if it does turn out that a new theory of gravity is needed, what kind of theory would it be? How could it correctly describe the motion of the bodies in the Solar System, as Einstein's theory is known to do, and still give us the different prediction for the universe that we need? There are candidate theories, but none are compelling. So the mystery continues.

The thing that is needed to decide between dark energy possibilities - a property of space, a new dynamic fluid, or a new theory of gravity - is more data, better data.

What Is Dark Matter?

By fitting a theoretical model of the composition of the universe to the combined set of cosmological observations, scientists have come up with the composition that we described above, ~68% dark energy, ~27% dark matter, ~5% normal matter. What is dark matter?

We are much more certain what dark matter is not than we are what it is. First, it is dark, meaning that it is not in the form of stars and planets that we see. Observations show that there is far too little visible matter in the universe to make up the 27% required by the observations.

Second, it is not in the form of dark clouds of normal matter, matter made up of particles called baryons. We know this because we would be able to detect baryonic clouds by their absorption of radiation passing through them.

Third, dark matter is not antimatter, because we do not see the unique gamma rays that are produced when antimatter annihilates with matter.

Finally, we can rule out large galaxy-sized black holes on the basis of how many gravitational lenses we see. High concentrations of matter bend light passing near them from objects further away, but we do not see enough lensing events to suggest that such objects to make up the required 25% dark matter contribution.

Abell 2744: Pandora's Cluster Revealed

One of the most complicated and dramatic collisions between galaxy clusters ever seen is captured in this new composite image of Abell 2744. The blue shows a map of the total mass concentration (mostly dark matter).

However, at this point, there are still a few dark matter possibilities that are viable. Baryonic matter could still make up the dark matter if it were all tied up in brown dwarfs or in small, dense chunks of heavy elements. These possibilities are known as massive compact halo objects, or "MACHOs". But the most common view is that dark matter is not baryonic at all, but that it is made up of other, more exotic particles like axions or WIMPS (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles).

Dark Matter Goes Missing in Oddball Galaxy

Researchers were surprised when they uncovered galaxy NGC 1052-DF2 which is missing most, if not all, of its dark matter.

 

The universe is mind-blowingly huge

In my current atheist state of mind, I find thoughts about God thoroughly uninspiring.

After all, how is it possible to be inspired or awestruck by an entity that almost certainly doesn't exist? Or at the very least, has no demonstrable evidence in support of its existence.

But the universe...

Ah, that's something which obviously exists, and science knows enough about it for awe to be an entirely reasonable reaction to the immensity that not only surrounds us, but is us.

The July 30 issue of New Scientist features a cover story called Your Brief Guide to Everything Ever: An inventory of the universe from rogue planets to the cosmic web.

There's a lot of fascinating facts in those ten pages.

Here's some about the immensity of the universe -- which is so far beyond our capacity to visualize, all we can do is let our minds be transported to an oh-so-incomplete understanding of what lies in the vastness beyond the night sky.

The furthest any human has made it from Earth is just beyond the moon -- some 400,000 kilometres away, or 1.3 seconds at light speed. The edge of the observable universe lies 46.5 billion light years away.

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In the Milky Way alone, there are an estimated 100 billion stars, and beyond our galaxy there are billions of other galaxies. This means there are thought to be around 200 billion trillion stars in the universe.

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Every star we see in the night sky is part of just one galaxy -- our own Milky Way. Up until around 100 years ago, astronomers believed this was all there was. Now we know the Milky Way is just one of billions of galaxies in the universe, if not more. NASA estimates there could be 2 trillion. 

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If you could zoom out of the Milky Way, you would start to see the Local Group -- a collection of at least 80 galaxies set in a dumb-bell shape. At one end is the Milky Way and its satellite galaxies, and at the other is our closest large neighbour, Andromeda, and its satellites.

Zoom out a bit further and you see that the Local Group is next door to a cluster of thousands of galaxies called the Virgo Cluster. That cluster and the Local Group are both, in turn, part of a much larger structure that is more than 100 million light years across and contains another 100 groups of galaxies, called the Virgo Supercluster.

Astronomers believe there to be some 10 million such superclusters in the observable universe. And yet a study in 2014 indicated that the Virgo Supercluster is part of an even bigger supercluster called Laniakea, showing that the universe is ordered on a much larger scale that we originally thought. 

Here's a BBC video that shows the scale of the universe.

In science, intuition arises from facts, not facts from intuition

I found a column by Chandra Prescod-Weinstein in the July 9, 2022 issue of New Scientist interesting for several reasons. 

This professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Hampshire has a take on the expanding universe that I hadn't come across before. As she says in the column, the simplest way to describe this is a familiar one: just as the distance between dots on a balloon that fills with air will increase as the balloon expands, so do galaxies within our universe.

But this image is misleading, because a balloon exists in a larger reality, like a room. So we can be led to think that the universe is expanding into a larger space, which can't be correct, since space-time is what's expanding. You'll see that Prescod-Weinstein finds the mathematics of relativity theory to be much superior to the balloon analogy. Unfortunately, most of us can't grasp that mathematics.

It's often said that intuition plays a big role in science, as in everyday life. However, intuition isn't divorced from facts, but is an outgrowth of facts. I experience this whenever I'm in the market for a new car. I'll research some automotive options for months, reading reviews, perusing car manufacturer web sites, watching You Tube videos, and such.

All that information will confuse me at first. I'll see the pros and cons of various cars, unable to decide which would be best for me. Then one day... I know. I don't consciously arrive at the knowing. My mind just settles on an intuitive choice: Car X is what I should buy, not Cars A, B, or C. But without all the facts I'd learned, my brain wouldn't have been able to come up with a wise intuitive decision. Prescod-Weinstein speaks of something similar.

I've ordered her book, The Disordered Cosmos. At first I was going to pass on it after looking at the Amazon listing, since the book includes more than science. In the end, though, I decided that I liked her non-traditional outlook on science, as described in the listing.

One of the leading physicists of her generation, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is also one of fewer than one hundred Black American women to earn a PhD from a department of physics. Her vision of the cosmos is vibrant, buoyantly nontraditional, and grounded in Black and queer feminist lineages. 

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein urges us to recognize how science, like most fields, is rife with racism, misogyny, and other forms of oppression. She lays out a bold new approach to science and society, beginning with the belief that we all have a fundamental right to know and love the night sky. The Disordered Cosmos dreams into existence a world that allows everyone to experience and understand the wonders of the universe.

Here's her New Scientist column.

THE origin story we tell about the universe goes roughly like this: there may have been a big bang (we aren’t sure), then space-time expanded extremely rapidly (we think) and has continued to expand ever since, even picking up the pace in relatively recent times (we are fairly certain). It is a nice story, and one I largely believe is true. But what does it mean when we say that space-time expanded?

In presentations to broad audiences, I explain by asking people to imagine an unfilled balloon with special dots on it. Imagine that as the balloon fills with air, the dots stay the same size, but, as one would expect, the distance between the dots expands. Pretend those dots are galaxies and, roughly speaking, this is what is happening to space-time.

The expansion of space-time means the space-time between galaxies grows, making the distance between galaxies larger as time goes on. There are exceptions to this. Galaxies that are gravitationally bound to each other won’t be pulled apart; for example, the Milky Way and Andromeda are on course to eventually collide and merge. The Milky Way also has many satellite galaxies in its orbit or otherwise gravitationally bound to it.

Other than ties through gravity, galaxies are generally “moving” away from each other because space-time continues to grow between them. The balloon analogy helps us understand this with some intuition, without needing to take several years of courses in order to fully understand general relativity as a technical subject. However, it also introduces problems that one can avoid if the subject is only looked at in mathematical terms.

As a scientist with deep knowledge of general relativity – the first advanced physics subject I trained in – I don’t necessarily need to spend a lot of time interpreting the equations to suit my intuition. Rather, part of my job is to develop new intuition based on the latest results from mathematical derivations, lab experiments and astronomical observations. The way I lead my life as a scientist involves a foundational commitment to looking at the world as it is and revising my understanding as I gather new information.

In the case of expanding space-time, I have to think carefully about what I mean by “space-time”. General relativity teaches me to think about space-time as a phenomenon that is described by the ruler we use to measure distances, an equation we call the metric. Therefore, expanding space-time means that the metric changes with time in such a way that spatial distances get larger as time goes on. This is something of an idealisation: we know this isn’t happening on the scales of everyday life here on Earth.

I am lucky because I can work through the equations and get a feeling for how this works mathematically, which makes it intuitive in a language that has more words than everyday English. This raises the question of translation from my technical, mathematical vocabulary into phrases that are comprehensible to broader audiences.

So we return to the balloon, which, yes, gives some good intuition, but can also get a reader thinking. Specifically, I know at least one person who is a regular reader of this column (thank you!) started to wonder where the space-time is expanding into. Certainly that is a limit of the balloon analogy. When we are blowing up a balloon, the balloon is expanding into the room we are in. Another way of putting it is that the balloon exists in a background, where the room is that background.

I introduce this way of thinking because it is one we scientists use when we describe general relativity, which we call a “background independent theory”. Relativity is described in this way because it doesn’t matter how we map out the coordinates in this theory, the physical reality it describes stays the same. There is a lot more to unpack here and not enough space (or time!), so let me just point out that this implies the space-time of general relativity doesn’t have a room. In other words, space-time is expanding, but into nothing in particular. The expansion is simply a growth in distances. It isn’t a material either, so it isn’t coming from somewhere. The distances just grow and grow.

Weird, right? If you don’t think so, that itself is odd. As I write in The Disordered Cosmos (now available in paperback), the universe is always more queer and fantastical than we think. The fundamental nature of space-time is an example of this fact. We exist in space-time and nothing in daily life necessarily makes us think it is a particularly strange phenomenon. Then again, we exist, and we are pretty odd, so maybe we should expect the nature of most things to be, on some level, unexpected.

Mystery of existence is a chill up the spine, not a concept

For many years I've gotten a thrill out of the mystery of existence. 

This has nothing to do with what exists. It's all about the brute fact that something exists. Now, that something might well be infinite.

For sure it's huge -- countless billions of light years huge. And it's old -- at least 13.8 billion years old and possibly infinitely old.

All that is irrelevant when talking about the mystery of existence. 

What blows my mind with marvelous regularity is the chill-up-the-spine realization that all this, no matter what it consists of -- is equally present at the tips of my fingers typing these words and a galaxy at the farthest reaches of the universe.

There's no why at question here.

Why's have to do with stuff that exists. Why won't my car start? The answer is found in a chain of causes and effects. 

But existence must always have existed. At least, this is the inescapable conclusion of a human consciousness. Maybe a different form of consciousness would see things differently.

We humans have no acquaintance with existence. All we understand are things that exist. (Arguably, existence doesn't actually exist, but it makes sense to speak as if it does.)

Each of those things comes and goes. Even the universe, which arose in a big bang, according to modern science, and may depart at some point, according to some theories.

However, existence stands apart from comings and goings.

If existence hadn't always existed, nothing could have arisen within existence. Positing a god doesn't help, since an eternal god is just another way of saying eternal existence. Anyway, there's no proof of any god, while there's plenty of evidence for existence.

Whenever I write about this, it doesn't take long for me to feel like words are a very poor substitute for the feeling that leads me to search for those words.

Which basically can be expressed as simply Wow. Though those three letters -- W...o...w -- don't capture the feeling either.

Here's some of the blog posts I've written that attempt to describe that Wow in a much greater number of words.

Grappling with the fact that existence has always existed
Wow. Existence has always existed.
Existence exists. Amazing!
"Existence exists" -- the cosmic lock to which humans have no key
Existence is the only unchanging thing. If it exists.
Robert Kuhn's nine levels of nothing: mind-blowing
The beauty of boundless existence
Boundless existence--the backdrop to life's meaning

Grappling with the fact that existence has always existed

Recently I got this email from a fellow marveler at the inescapable fact that existence must always have existed in some form, or the universe we are a part of couldn't have come to be. 

Hello Brian, I recently read this article of yours and was amazed how precisely it described the issue that's been on my mind for a long time. It seems inescapable to posit that something has always existed, something that never had a beginning. And as you point out in the article, trying to conceive and imagine that seems impossible: "the very possibility of cognizing an answer vanishes".

And I agree with that, but the reason I'm writing you is that this realization is a source of great anxiety to me. I can't seem to accept this incomprehensibility of existence. Do you have some word of advice or maybe some resources that could help me deal with this?

The article referred to was written in 2015 for the Spiritual Naturalist Society. I also shared the piece in a blog post, "Wow! Existence has always existed." Here's an excerpt.

Thus I’ve lost interest in the why of existence. Why is there something rather than nothing? is a meaningless question. As Kuhn points out, absolute nothing contains no way for existence to exist.

 

So while religious believers are awestruck at the supposed existence of God, I find an equal or greater measure of awe in the fact of existence itself.

 

This isn’t a feeling of being in the presence of something greater than myself. After all, I exist. A grain of sand exists. A subatomic particle exists. We all are on the same basic ontological level; we exist. For me it’s more like looking into a bottomless pit. I feel like I’ve reached the end of my knowing. And not only that: anyone’s knowing.

I could be wrong, an ever-present possibility.

Perhaps some human with a consciousness far different than mine, or an alien being with abilities beyond my capacity to fathom, would be able to look upon the mystery of existence and see it as…

Words fail me. Unsurprisingly.

I simply am open to the idea that however dizzying I find the notion of ever-existing existence, the necessity of existence having always existed, the blunt facticity of the cosmos that is at odds with my experience of everything else having a why, a cause — my mind could be as incapable of grasping the essence of reality as a chimpanzee’s is incapable of grasping calculus.

There’s another possibility: the mystery of existence is a non-existent problem.

So that's the easy answer to the question I was asked about how to deal with the incomprehensibility of existence: accept that some things defy human understanding, leaving open the possibility that some other form of consciousness could grasp a notion like existence has always existed. 

Assuming there is anything to grasp. 

My suspicion is that existence is simply a given, a brute fact incapable of being delved into. For any delving presupposes the existence of the entity wishing to grasp the existential nature of existence. 

In other words, there is no place to stand other than existence if one wants to ponder existence. Anything nonexistent isn't going to be doing any pondering, whether of existence or something else.

The way I see it, existence stands alone in this regard.

Consciousness might seem to be similar, in that any investigation into the nature of consciousness requires that someone be conscious. However, it's possible to study non-conscious entities, such as someone in a deep coma, in an attempt to learn what differentiates consciousness and a lack of consciousness. .

It may also be possible for machines to become conscious, which would provide valuable insights into the foundation of consciousness. 

But it isn't possible to do an experiment that compares existence with non-existence, since a comparison requires two existing things. Nothing obviously isn't a thing.

I've been dancing around the question I was asked because it is so difficult to talk about the anxiety of being confronted with an unanswerable question. Unanswerable, at least, by us Homo sapiens, whose sapience is bounded by the limitations of the human brain, as marvelously complex as it is.

For me -- and naturally I'm speaking only about myself here, not the person who wrote to me -- I find considerable comfort in simply acknowledging, "I don't know, and I never will." 

How is it that existence has always existed? I don't know, and I never will. 

It is difficult for me to feel anxious about something that I'm incapable of grasping. My anxieties relate to what could have been, but wasn't; to what might occur, but probably won't; to what is happening, which I wish wasn't. 

The idea that existence always has existed fills me with awe, not anxiety. I'm fine with living from birth until death with some Big Cosmic Questions unanswered. And not only unanswered -- incapable of any steps, even tiny ones, being made toward an answer. 

If someone said to me, "Have you ever wondered what it would be like if you never existed?" I'd say, "No." 

After all, if I had never existed, there would be no me to wonder about this, nor about anything else. Likewise, if existence hadn't always existed, there would be no anything. Something can't be produced from absolute nothing. 

I don't think I've done a great job responding to the person who emailed me. But this is the best I can do. 

Rejoice in the glorious indifference of the universe

I'm no Carl Sagan, but after coming up with the thought expressed in the title of this blog post I did some Googling to find an image to share which expressed that sentiment.

So Carl Sagan and I are on the same indifferent wavelength, the difference regarding our realization of indifference perhaps being that I find this worthy of rejoicing in the gloriousness of it.

Which is a decidedly minority opinion, because most people fall into these Belief Camps, which are not mutually exclusive:

(1) Believing in a God who loves us, cares for us, watches out for us. Usually only if we follow the tenets of some religion, though.
(2) Believing in a Devil or negative force that leads us astray, punishes us, wishes bad things for us.
(3) Believing that the Universe often, or always, has a message for us.
(4) Believing that karma, fate, destiny, or some other cosmic power directs our actions in certain ways.
(5) Believing in psychic connections between us and other people, animals, angelic beings, nature, or whatever.

I understand the appeal of these sorts of beliefs, because I used to embrace most of them myself. It made me feel warm and protected to believe that I wasn't an isolated blip of consciousness in a universe that not only didn't care about me, it wasn't even aware of me -- aside from the relatively few other isolated blips of consciousness I came into contact with (friends, dog, wife, squirrels, etc.).

Now, though, I realize the downside of believing in a universe that has an interest in me, whether this be benign or hostile, as Sagan put it. 

For one thing, and this really is the most important thing, that belief is almost certainly false. There is no demonstrable evidence that the universe or cosmos as a whole possesses a consciousness that could care about me, nor that it actually does. I've come to the point that I'd rather embrace reality as it is, rather than as how I would like it to be. 

Such strikes me as the most courageous and honest way to live what almost certainly is my one and only life.

Also, I now see how much misguided energy and effort I used to put into trying to figure out what I was supposed to do and why this or that was happening to me. Actions and events in my life weren't just whatever they were. They also had some mysterious subtext to them, some cosmic meaning that I was sure was there, but never could quite figure out.

How does one please God? How does one please the universe? It's tough enough just to please myself, my loved ones, my friends, all the other obviously existent entities I come in contact with. Trying to please a nonexistent, but supposedly real, conscious entity like "God" or "Universe" was wearing. I didn't realize how exhausting it was at the time, but now I do.

Lastly, accepting that the universe is indifferent toward me is a pointer toward the marvelous realization that whatever meaning I find in my life is going to come from moi, not anybody or anything else. There's no need to worry about whether I'm living up to some cosmic, divine, or universal standard. The measuring stick against which I assess the meaningfulness of my life is within my own psyche, not anywhere outside.

So yes, let's rejoice in the glorious indifference of the universe.  

Subjectivity is innate to material reality

Since I'm not privy to the Secret of Ultimate Reality, naturally I don't know whether this letter-writer's thesis is correct: that subjectivity is innate to material reality.

But what Godwin says in his letter in the December 10 issue of New Scientist is both provocative and possible.

He raises good questions. "What would be the substance of a universe with no subjectivity, unable to experience its own existence? How could such a universe ever be shown to exist, and by and to whom?"

At first I thought this sounded unduly anthropomorphic. However, on second thought this letter points at issues raised in my recent post about a book that advocates for an "information rather than stuff" approach to understanding the universe.

For example, how do unconscious particles "know" how to behave in accord with the laws of nature? What is the foundational nature of the universe in the absence of an observer? Can we say that it is anything at all absent observation? 

Perhaps, as Godwin suggests, the universe is observing itself in some way we currently can't grasp. Read on...

From Nick Godwin, Edinburgh, UK

I write in opposition to the view that consciousness somehow of necessity arises from matter, rather than being intrinsic to it. That view is implied several times in Anil Ananthaswamy's review of Susan Greenfield's book A Day in the Life of the Brain (29 October, p 44).

He says, for example, that “objective neural activity turns into the ‘wine’ of subjective conscious experience.” The statement that “we fade into unconsciousness during anaesthesia” reflects the error. In my experience, anaesthesia acts with the immediacy of a switch: the only way I could detect that I had been “under” was that the anaesthetist appeared suddenly to “flip” to the other side of my hospital bed.

It seems to me more likely that the essence of consciousness (albeit in a simplified state) forms part of the primary substance of material reality. The part played by neural activity would then be not to “give rise” to consciousness, but to create a path of connection to an innate subjectivity existing behind all of material reality.

Don't misunderstand me, this is not a call for belief in some kind of “mystical being”. Rather, it is a call to consider the possibility of something intrinsic to reality that takes the form of subjective perception. After all, what would be the substance of a universe with no subjectivity, unable to experience its own existence? How could such a universe ever be shown to exist, and by and to whom?

"Existence exists" -- the cosmic lock to which humans have no key

I'm obsessed, in a pleasing way, with a cosmic notion: existence exists. 

(A Google search of my blogs reveals the posts where I've tried to "eff" this ineffable subject. Some are here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

Seemingly there's not much I could add to what I've said about this ultimate mystery. Except... what I'm going to add right now.

Which is another attempt to speak about the unspeakable feeling that comes over me when I contemplate the fact that existence exists.

This feeling can't be produced on demand.

Right now I'm talking about a memory of it, not the feeling itself. For me, it's a sort of godless grace. When the feeling happens, I'm grateful for the sensation of getting a glimpse of what can't be known. 

At least, I'm pretty sure, not by a human brain. Any human brain. Doesn't matter if you're a genius, a mystic, a Nobel prize winner, a poet, a savant, a philosophical mastermind. 

I'm convinced that the feeling I've talked about in my blog posts is a cosmic lock, not a key. It vaguely points in the general direction of Ultimate Mystery, but in no way does it lead closer to an understanding. 

Here's one of my attempts to talk about the cosmic lock.

It happened again today. That sudden "bottom falling out from under me" feeling, sort of the mental equivalent of being startled by an elevator going into free fall.

I like the feeling. It's the most genuine sensation of spirituality, not really an apt word, but best I can come up with, that comes over me in my churchless way of looking at the world.

What it is -- and I'm also struggling to find the right words here -- is awe that existence exists. 

I was walking along with one of our dogs on a pleasant rainless mild Oregon day, enjoying the early spring sprouting greenness on a trail that leads through woods to a nearby lake. 

I'd been thinking about how nature has no straight lines, no obvious rigid order, no firm demarcations between this and that. Only the human-built structures along my way possessed those features.

Then my vision of nature became much more cosmic. In an instant I was swept past all the various manifestations of nature into a void of mystery which was as much an ultimate fullness as an absolute emptiness.

Down the rabbit hole. Cut the elevator cable. Dive out of the balloon with no parachute. Exhilarating. 

Time stood still. Or rather, time no longer existed. I was face to face with what is for me the only unarguably true spiritual sensation:

Existence exists. Always has. Always will. Is now. 

After my most recent "bottom falling out from under me" feeling I had this intuition: that sensation is mind-blowing because the human brain lacks the ability to cognize the primal reality of existence existing... eternally, uncaused, uncreated, just freaking there. 

Evolution has brought us Homo sapiens some marvelous cognitive abilities compared to other species. We have unraveled many cosmic mysteries -- quantum mechanics, relativity theory, and so much else. 

There are significant gaps in our knowledge of the universe. But I agree with leading scientists that there don't appear to be any insurmountable obstacles to vastly expanding our already-immense grasp of how the cosmos is put together and operates.

When it comes to the sheer facticity of existence, though, the is'ness of reality, it seems extremely unlikely that we humans ever will be able to open that cosmic knowledge lock. The feeling I have when contemplating existence exists is akin to a psychological short-circuit.

My brain just doesn't seem capable of grasping the fact that all facts can be friends with "why?" -- except the primal fact of existence. I have the sense that natural selection has given us humans the ability to unravel complex tangles of cause and effect, but NOT the ability to grasp the meaning of existence pure and simple. 

Assuming there is such a meaning. Or such a thing as "existence pure and simple."

Maybe advanced beings from an alien civilization in a galaxy far, far away possess the cosmic understanding of existence exists that eludes me, and seemingly every other member of my species. 

But how would we know this, even if we came into contact with such a civilization? I strongly suspect that if an alien being handed me the key to the ultimate cosmic lock, I'd have no idea how to use it.

Or, how to grasp what lay beyond the open door. 

The "self" is like a web without a spider

Self... who am I? Will... who controls what I do? Being... do I continue on after death?

These are big questions. Humans have struggled to find answers to them from the beginning of recorded history, and surely long before that. 

Most people accept a view that is common to most religions: I am something other than my physical body; call it soul or spirit. I have free will; so I am responsible for my actions. I possess, or am, a non-material essence that is unaffected by physical death.

Well, maybe. 

But these answers go against the grain of modern science. Including, neuroscience. Granted, the answers are intuitively appealing. This doesn't make them correct, though. 

In the final chapter of "The Mind Club: Who Thinks, What Feels, and Why it Matters," psychologists Daniel Wegner and Kurt Gray address the question of The Self. 

Interestingly, answering this question correctly makes the three questions I started with disappear. Or at least, appear much easier to answer. Why? Because if us humans don't have the sort of self we believe we do, what we are is pretty damn obvious:

A web without a spider.

This also is what the cosmos is. In fact, it is what everything in existence is.

Wegner and Gray don't venture into this far-out philosophical territory, but it is a valid conclusion given what science knows about big bang cosmology, evolution, quantum physics, relativity theory, ecology, biology, and many other disciplines.

Here's how The Self chapter of "The Mind Club", and thus the entire book, ends. Wegner and Gray echo the many other books I've read about modern neuroscience and psychology.

It's a beautiful way of looking at the world, once one gets over the resistance to not being a spider, and accepts being simply an integral part of the web.

Daniel Dennett makes an elegant analogy between the self and the center of gravity. Any object with mass -- whether a bowl, a piece of lumber, or even a brain -- has a mathematical center, a precise location that would allow you to balance that object if you were to put it on a pointed stake. 

However, this center of gravity is not a "thing" that exists independently of all the stuff around it, and if you took apart the object, you would never find a separate little object that is the center of gravity.

The self is a lot like that -- it's just the theoretical point that lies at the center of all your mental experiences, memories, thoughts, feelings, sensations, goals, desires, and personal relationships. 

"You" is like a web without a spider, a collection of memories, thoughts, desires, and feelings that is fragile and tenuous and yet still glimmers in the sunshine of perception. 

Or perhaps a better, if less elegant, analogy is that the self is like particleboard, that mainstay of affordable furniture. To all appearances particleboard is hard and very real, and like the self, it can -- metaphorically -- bear the weight of other people, break if struck too hard, and has sharp points that can hurt others.

It is also fundamentally separate from other pieces of of particleboard. However, upon closer inspection you would see that this material is merely a collection of little fibers pressed together and bound with glue. If you placed separate pieces of particleboard in a pool of water, the glue would slowly dissolve until all the fibers separated and floated together, completely intermingling.

In the case of your mind, the glue that binds together your memories -- the fibers of your past experiences -- is the fact that they happened to the same body, the same collection of cells that looks back at you in the mirror every morning.

Despite the ultimate uncertainty surrounding the question of other minds, it is likely that everyone you know has the same powerful emotions and deep thoughts as you do. 

Unfortunately, your own collection of memories, thoughts, and feelings -- your mind -- prevents you from truly appreciating that fact. Being one mind prevents you from truly appreciating the minds of others. This is perhaps the deepest of paradoxes from the mind club.

Being trapped in our own minds prevents us from fundamentally connecting with others, and there is no way to escape our own minds. We are forever a point of view: even if we lose our memories, meditate away our desires, and quiet our constant quest for mental control, we are still a source of perception.

But recognizing this fact provides the secret to transcending ourselves as much as we possibly can. By understanding that we perceive the world instead of understanding it directly, we can realize not only that the self is fragile and that free will is an illusion but also that other minds can be both more and less than they appear. 

Through our odyssey of mysterious minds ranging from dogs to gods, we have seen that all the minds around us -- and our very self -- rest upon perception. 

Nevertheless, these perceptions have the psychological force of raw reality and are what compel us to love and to hate, to harm and to protect. The idea of the "mind club" could be interpreted as meaning that these perceptions of mind are not objectively real, but we suggest that they are the only thing that is real. 

We are perceivers, and from the perspective of perceivers, our perceptions are all we have, and that makes solid the ethereal. As the Buddha said, "Things are not as they are seen, nor are they otherwise." We couldn't agree more.

Wow! Existence has always existed.

I've done a lot of pondering about the primal mystery of existence.

As noted in the essay I wrote this month for the Spiritual Naturalist Society, I've gone from being blown away by the classic question Why is there something rather than nothing? to being awestruck at the amazing affirmation, There is something rather than nothing.

Read on...

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Wow! Existence has always existed.

Awe-inspiring. Spine-tingling. Vertigo-inducing. Something frequently produces these feelings in me.

It isn’t a theme park ride. In fact, it isn’t even a thing. It is everything.

Existence. Just typing that word produced a chill up my spine — a familiar sensation, because I’ve done a lot of grokking about existence.

The usual way of approaching this primal enigma is with a question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” I used to resonate with the why.

I thought that just as the things in the world we’re familiar with can be traced to a cause, so can the everything of existence. But this doesn’t make sense to me now.

There’s a difference between things that come into being, and being itself, a.k.a. existence. Positing a cause for a specific entity entails no philosophical quandary, even if that thing is the entire universe.

This caused that. No problem.

Science says, “The Big Bang created the universe.” Religion says, “God created the universe.” We can argue about the plausibility of rival explanations, but not with the logic of seeking a why for a what.

At some point, though, the chain of why reaches an end. Why the Big Bang? Why God? Why, why, why.

We can come up with possible explanations until… we can’t. Then we’re into mind-blowing territory. Terra firma not only turns into terra incognita, seemingly the very possibility of cognizing an answer vanishes.

In “The Mystery of Existence: Why is There Anything At All?,” a collection of essays edited by John Leslie and Robert-Lawrence Kuhn, Kuhn speaks to this in his own contribution, Why Not Nothing?

The question would become my life partner, and even as I learned the rich philosophical legacy of Nothing, I do not pass a day without its disquieting presence.

I am haunted. Here we are, human beings, conscious and abruptly self-aware, with lives fleetingly short, engulfed by a vast, seemingly oblivious cosmos of unimaginable enormousness.

…Now for my secret. No matter how sensible and controlled I may seem to be, Why Not Nothing still drives me nuts. Every time I revisit the stupefying question, I want to scream. Why this Universe? Does God Exist? In comparison, both questions are small beer. Why is there anything at all? That’s the magisterial Question.

…Why is there Something Rather than Nothing? Why Not Nothing? If you don’t get dizzy, you really don’t get it.

I agree. However, I feel equally dizzy pondering a statement rather than a question: There is something rather than nothing.

Wow. The cosmos is. Always has been. Always will be. Probably.

I need that caveat, “probably,” because there’s no way to know whether the human mind is capable of coming to grips with the is’ness of existence. Most of us visualize existence as, well, existing.

In space and time, as a sort of thing. But how could existence be a thing? It’s what makes things possible. No existence, no things.

In Kuhn’s essay, he lists nine levels of Nothings. Which, in reverse, implies nine levels of Somethings. Here’s #1 and #9, the alpha and omega of nothingness.

(1) Nothing as existing space and time that just happens to be totally empty of all visible objects (particles and energy are permitted — an utterly simplistic view).

(9) Nothing where not only there are none of the above (so that, as in Nothing 8, there are no abstract objects), but also there are no possibilities of any kind (recognizing that possibilities and abstract objects overlap, though allowing that they can be distinguished).

No possibilities of any kind. Now, that is really nothing. So much so, I can’t imagine this ultimate Nothing could exist.

Of course, that’s an absurd word to use for it: exist. Level 9 Nothing is the absolute absence of existence. There is no way it (of course, it isn’t an “it”) could have preceded existence, since that Nothing has no possibility of being other than what it is.

Or rather, isn’t.

Thus I’ve lost interest in the why of existence. Why is there something rather than nothing? is a meaningless question. As Kuhn points out, absolute nothing contains no way for existence to exist.

So while religious believers are awestruck at the supposed existence of God, I find an equal or greater measure of awe in the fact of existence itself.

This isn’t a feeling of being in the presence of something greater than myself. After all, I exist. A grain of sand exists. A subatomic particle exists. We all are on the same basic ontological level; we exist.

For me it’s more like looking into a bottomless pit. I feel like I’ve reached the end of my knowing. And not only that: anyone’s knowing.

I could be wrong, an ever-present possibility.

Perhaps some human with a consciousness far different than mine, or an alien being with abilities beyond my capacity to fathom, would be able to look upon the mystery of existence and see it as…

Words fail me. Unsurprisingly.

I simply am open to the idea that however dizzying I find the notion of ever-existing existence, the necessity of existence having always existed, the blunt facticity of the cosmos that is at odds with my experience of everything else having a why, a cause — my mind could be as incapable of grasping the essence of reality as a chimpanzee’s is incapable of grasping calculus.

There’s another possibility: the mystery of existence is a non-existent problem.

“It is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing.”
— Ludwig Wittgenstein

“I should say that the universe is just there, and that is all.”
— Bertrand Russell

Well, it’s hard to argue with these perspectives. But being more wonder-filled than Wittgenstein, I’ll end by quoting myself (one of my favorite activities):

My mind gets boggled when I try to envision existence existing eternally, outside of time. This is the far side of the mystery of existence. Endlessness. Eternity. Being without becoming. Effect absent cause. Yet I’m equally boggled by the near side of the mystery of existence.

This present moment. What’s right here, right now. The fact that I’m experiencing what I am, given how much is’ness there is in the cosmos.

Mystery doesn’t only lie beyond the horizon of my consciousness. Mystery is immediately before me. In fact, is me. Because I exist, and no one knows why anything exists, nor if “why?” is even a valid question when asked of the entirety of existence.

In between the near and far sides of the mystery of existence, knowledge can be known. Science guides us. Explorations of causes and effects can steadily enlighten the darkness of what it is possible to know, yet presently isn’t. This illuminating has no end.

Except at the near side and far side of the mystery of existence.

Here, I believe, all we can do is WOW! And that one word is, for me, all the religion, spirituality, and mysticism I need in my current churchlessness.

Given size of the universe, is creation really all about us?

Religious belief involves lots of absurdities. For me, one of the biggest ones is the assumption that humans are the Big Deal of the universe. 

Whether it be Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, or some other major religion, theologies differ about how people are special in the eye of God, Brahman, or whatever, but they agree that members of a recently evolved species on Earth, Homo sapiens, occupy a central place in the cosmic scheme of things.

This is really difficult for me to accept for various reasons. One is our modern understanding of the size of the universe. Consider...

(1) Light travels 5.88 trillion miles in a year. That's 5,880,000,000,000 miles. Impossible to imagine, right? I mean, the Earth is about 25,000 miles in circumference. That's a long way to go. Traveling almost 6 trillion miles in a year: mind-blowing. 

(2) The Milky Way galaxy, where we are, is about 100,000 light years across. So to get from one end to the other, you'd need to travel 6 trillion miles every year for 100,000 years. Even more mind-blowing.

(3) There are lots more galaxies in the universe. Best estimate is 100 billion to 200 billion. This means that in the entire universe, there's around 70 billion trillion stars. Our Sun is one of those. One. Of 70 billion trillion.

(4) Even though the universe is 13.8 billion years old, the size of the observable universe is much larger than 13.8 billion light years, since space expands faster than the speed of light. So the distance from Earth to the edge of the observable universe is about 46 billion light years.

(5) As noted before, light travels about 6 trillion miles a year. So the number of miles to the edge of the observable universe is 6 trillion times 46 billion. Too far to walk, for sure. Even at the speed of light.

I can't begin to visualize how large the universe is. The human mind isn't used to such scales.

Religions, though, come from a pre-scientific era when the size of the universe was considered to be little more than the Earth, sun, and a few nearby astronomical objects.

(HInduism is sort of an exception, in that it posits a cosmos that is vastly old and vastly large, coming much closer to the scale of what modern science tells us is true, while being wrong about many other scientific things.)

So how can all this -- the incredible vastness of the physical universe -- be all about us? I've never seen a cogent explanation from a religious perspective. 

Even if one assumes that God or some other conscious creative power exists, and it cares about humans in some special way, why go to the trouble of fashioning such an immense universe if the purpose of creation has something to do with us, Homo sapiens? 

Even God can't explain the mystery of existence

Re-reading the first chapter of Luther Askeland's "Ways in Mystery" this morning (one of my favorite meaning-of-life books), I liked how Askeland addressed The Seemingly Really Big Question of Existence.

The Way of Unknowing chapter starts off with a Wittgenstein quote:

Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.

Now, I've come to doubt that this that mystery is really as mystically mysterious as it appears to be.

Maybe the classic question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" simply should be rephrased as a statement: "There is something rather than nothing."

Offering support to  this way of looking at existence, Askeland says:

Whenever we try to account for the existence of someone or something, we do so by referring to some other being... our explanations for the existence of things involve the prior existence of other things. Since there were other things, however, there clearly must already have been a "world"... But if we are looking for an explanation of the world's existence, we obviously cannot make that assumption.

It is becoming evident that the question "Why does the world exist?" is radically different from the question "Why does A exist?"

The latter question assumes that something that is not A and that existed before A led to A. But what existed before the world? Only "nothingness." The latter question wants to find the something that leads to something else. The former asks how we get from nothing to something... It is looking for something in a place where it is simultaneously assuming there is nothing at all.

This is why I have an intuitive -- hey, why not call it mystical -- understanding that as New Agey as this may sound, the "is'ness" of the cosmos needs to be accepted as our best current knowledge of why existence exists. 

And by current, I'm being overly optimistic, since there is good reason to argue that "It just is" always will be the foundational truth about existence. 

I've written a lot of blog posts about the mystery of existence. It fascinates me more than any other question about the cosmos. It's most intriguing quality is the lack of ability to answer it, as noted in my "Mystery of existence eludes both religion and science."

God, whether viewed as a personal or impersonal power, fills precisely the same role in theology as do the laws of physics in science.

That is, a given. Something for which no cause is offered. A brute fact, wihout which no other facts are possible.

OK. To me, it's a tie. Both religion and science are clueless about the ultimate question: why is there something rather than nothing? Each offers up an answer that doesn't satisfy.

"God created the universe." Fine. So tell me, what created God?

"The universe was created by a quantum fluctuation." Fine. So tell me, what created the quantum fluctuation?

What is simply is. There is something rather than nothing. I find this eminently satisfying. More than that, actually, much more. It's awesome. Mindblowing. Astoundingly meaningful.

Why? LIke existence itself, there's no why.

Askeland addresses the issue in this way.

It is important to note that if we explain the world's existence by reference to a divine Creator, we are only postponing and complicating the dilemma. For then we can account for why the world exists, but how are we to account for the fact that God does?

...The question here is not whether God exists. Rather, even assuming that God exists, the question here is how this is possible. How do gods "happen"? How are we to explain the fact that there is an eternal God instead of no eternal God? Further, along what lines might we even try to imagine a conceivable answer? 

If we again postulate a prior being or higher divinity, we are only postponing the dilemma once more. But if we don't posit another being -- if we posit nothingness as the alternative -- we find ourselves once again hopelessly looking for some kind of explanation or cause within that very nothingnesss.

...Apparently we have raised a question that has no possible, plausible, or even conceivable answer. All the intellect can do is repeat the question, "Why does the world exist?" while recognizing that nothing coherent accompanies the sound and that no toehold seems possible anywhere.

What we and our intellects have run up against is the absolutely unique, irreducible, impenetrable, astonishing fact of being. The central fact of existence, the wholly unintelligible fact that the world is, that, we can now say with Wittgenstein is "the mystical."

In the rest of his book, Askeland elaborates upon the implications of this.

In previous blog posts (type "Askeland" in the Google search box in the right sidebar to find them) I've tried to describe his subtle, sensitive, honest approach to spirituality. One attempt is a 2013 post, "In this moment, be the mystery of existence."

It ends with...

This is one of Askeland's creative insights. Religiosity, mysticism, spirituality -- these are just other ways we use to pretend to ourselves that we've got some sort of grasp on the mystery that can't be grasped. We expand our repertoire of illusory mystery-penetrating mechanisms to include supposedly metaphysical ways.

Same difference. 

We still imagine, in other words, that we can name and describe the world, ourselves, and our spiritual lives, only we now add to our repertoire world by adding to it images of a perfect condition contrasting sharply with our present state... we imagine that this perfected condition as one that will someday be ours.

In all this, however, we are just like a chick that, still enclosed in the egg, thinks it knows what the world is like, for we have at that point no more knowledge of other "worlds" than does the chick in the egg or the butterfly still working free of its cocoon. 

Here's the thing: there's no outside of the egg, no freedom from the cocoon. 

How could there be? How is it possible to get outside of existence, to be free of "God" -- whatever you want to call the mystery of the source?

Give it up, dudes and dudettes. In this moment, says Askeland, is all there ever was and ever shall be. Mystery. The mystery of us is identical with the mystery of the cosmos. 

Accept that you will never know either. Because it isn't possible to get outside of either yourself or the cosmos and know it as an object. Best approach, no, the only approach, says Askeland, is to open up a hole of mystery within, or as, yourself.

Then the mystery within and the mystery without are realized as a single mystery. Which doesn't make it less mysterious. Just a much more intimate mystery.

Which brings me to closing time. And a final sip of coffee. Now.

Here's a science book with a radical view of reality

Oh, man. I'm so glad I got pulled in by the Book Magnet. 

That's how I explained my purchase of two thick, serious books to the cashier at the Book Bin in downtown Salem, Oregon. I'd parked my car in front of the bookstore, gone to my Tai Chi class, and was all set to drive home until, poised to unlock the car door...

Go inside and check out the new books, the everpresent voice inside my head told me. Must obey, I happily told myself.

"The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time" stared me in the face almost right away. After just a bit of thumbing through the 532 page book, I knew we'd hit it off. 

What's weird -- and a strong argument for physical bookstores -- is that I'm pretty sure I'd looked at the Amazon listing for this book. I seem to remember deciding not to buy it because some reviewers thought the authors were way off-base in their criticisms of modern science, mostly physics and cosmology.

But when I read a few paragraphs in the bookstore, I was blown away by the clear writing about some very dense subjects. Having now gotten all the way to page 65, I'm liking the book even more than I thought I would.

The first 350 pages or so are written by Roberto Mangabeira Unger, described on the cover as "a philosopher, social and legal theorist, and politician." The rest of the book is written by Lee Smolin, a theoretical physicist.

Unger is clearly a hugely brilliant guy with a very attractive writing style. I have to read "The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time" slowly, but not because the writing is bad. Rather, it's very good. It's Unger's subject matter that requires careful, deliberative, often mind-blowing cognitive digestion.

The book's subtitle is A Proposal in Natural Philosophy.

Meaning, the authors have returned to a mindset of the old days when philosophers tried to come up with ways to look at the entire universe, as contrasted with specific philosophical problems.

Yet their concern is with the very new days -- cutting-edge cosmology and physics. Which they view, persuasively so far in my reading, as having inappropriately gone off a scientific deep-end into waters that don't offer any solid footing.

A first paragraph sums up the book.

This book develops three connected ideas about the nature of the universe and of our relation to it. The first idea is that there is only one universe at a time. The second idea is that time is real and inclusive. Nothing, including the laws of nature, stands outside time. The third idea is that mathematics has this one real, time-drenched world as its subject matter, from a vantage point abstracting from both time and phenomenal particularity.

This puts Unger and Smolin at odds with the majority of physicists and cosmologists. Also, I'd say, with those who use certain precepts of modern science as a subtle (or not so subtle) justification for various religious concepts.

First, the "one universe at a time" idea. This seems like common sense, since we're only aware of this one universe Earth is a part of.

However, notions of a multiverse consisting of countless universes, perhaps an infinity of them, have taken hold in the scientific community -- in large part because of an infatuation with the mathematics of string theory. 

Here we see an example of the connections between the book's ideas. String theory can't explain why this universe we inhabit is how it is.

But since the mathematics of string theory posit a near-infinity of possible universes, this solves the problem of explaining our universe by dissolving the problem: life has evolved in this particular universe because its conditions are peculiarly suitable for life, whereas the conditions in most other universes of the multiverse aren't.

Unger considers this bad science. Science, he says, should deal with what actually is known to exist.

Mathematical reality shouldn't be viewed as more real than the physical universe. Rather, as noted above, mathematics should be used to describe how things work in this universe, and not used to justify mathematically possible, but unobservable, theoretical alternate universes in a multiverse.

So in the part of the book I've read Unger criticizes attempts to explain our universe in structural terms. Meaning, theorizing that this universe is just a minuscule drop in an ocean of other universes that will forever remain unknown to us.

Rather, he and Smolin favor a historical emphasis for cosmology. Look at what science can tell us about how the universe has changed since the big bang. Don't throw in theoretical mathematical hypotheses concerning a multiverse, or whatever. 

And don't assume that time began at the big bang. Time, for Unger and Smolin, is the only thing that doesn't change. Time rules. There is no timeless realm. Everything changes with time. Including the laws of nature. 

For me, this is one of the most interesting subjects in the book. I've always wondered, "Where are the laws of nature?" Most physicists and mathematicians view them as existing in some sort of unchanging Platonic realm outside or beyond the physical universe.

Meaning, the laws of nature (like most conceptions of God) are assumed to be distinct from all the stuff in this universe that obeys those laws. This allows scientists to picture our universe banging into being via some currently unknown mechanism that was guided by some currently unknown law, or meta-law, of nature.

Intriguingly, Unger says:

The laws and symmetries by which we explain events in natural history manifest themselves together with the phenomena whose workings we use them to explain... The phenomena change, and so, together with them, does the way in which they change: that is to say, their laws. That is the principle of the co-evolution of phenomena and laws.

What this leads to is a very different view of the universe than modern physics normally posits. There aren't Laws of Nature floating around somewhere in a realm separate from physical reality. Instead, these laws come into existence along with the phenomena that are guided by them.

Unger says, "Change changes."

When DNA appeared in multi-celled organisms, this introduced a whole new way of how life changes. Thus Unger considers that biology, geology, and even history have a lot to teach physics and cosmology, since the supposedly less-foundational sciences are primarily concerned with studying how things change, rather than looking for unchanging laws describing why things change.

Well, if what I've written here doesn't make sense to you, join the club. I'll be trying to better understand the message of Unger and Smolin as I read the rest of their book. 

Here's some reviews and commentary I've found that relate to "The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time."

A review in The Guardian
An interview with Lee Smolin
A blog post by science writer Bryan Appleyard

No, the universe didn't "have a message for me"

Giving up religiosity doesn't happen all at once. At least, not in my case. I wasn't able to go cold turkey, so to speak, and give up my addiction to unfounded faith-based beliefs all at once.

They just have gradually lessened, weakened, become much less powerful. 

Yet in subtler forms, my previous attachment to feeling that I'm being watched over by an all-knowing, all-loving transcendental presence still is evident from time to time. 

Like, last Thursday. 

It was a potentially traumatic day for me. After having my hair cut by the same person for 37 years, Betsy departed for central Oregon. But she gave me the name of a replacement hair cutter.

Who I'd phoned and made an appointment with for Thursday at 1:30. There it was, in my Mac's calendar: September 25, 1:30 pm.

Nervous about how my precious hair would fare in the hands of another woman, I left home early enough to arrive at the salon a few minutes early -- wanting to ease into this brave new world of haircutting after more than a third of a century in Betsy's comforting realm.

Only to be met with a "Um, did you have an appointment? I can fit you in, but I had you down for tomorrow."

Oops. Somebody had screwed up. I didn't think it was me. It was possible, though. After this awkward beginning, I felt OK as we got into the business of trimming. 

She and I agreed on how much to take off (half an inch). I appreciated her comment, "You have nice hair." For someone my age, at least. 

But then she looked out the window and said, "Just a second. I was going to have lunch with my mother. She just drove up. I need to run outside and tell her we'll do it another day." That made me feel sort of guilty, since I might have been the one who screwed up on the appointment time.

However, when she got back to trimming my hair, I was told "Actually it's no big deal. I see my mother all the time. And I learned that tomorrow my father is coming to town. It's good that I'm cutting your hair today."

Driving away after my haircut, I mulled over what had just transpired. 

Was it a good thing or a bad thing that I'd showed up at the salon on a day my haircutter hadn't expected? What did this mean? Could it be a sign that I should stick with getting my hair cut by her? Or maybe I should take my wife's advice and try the woman who takes care of her hair, in part because I wouldn't have to drive as far?

Then another thought popped up. 

Subconsciously I'd been assuming that the "universe has a message for me" thing was valid.

Meaning, there was some meaning to these hair-cutting events beyond how I felt about them, some sort of hidden purpose  that could be discerned if I was perceptive enough to understand "what the universe was trying to say."

Naturally I didn't think that God or some other divine entity was the source of this hidden purpose. Hey, I'm churchless! 

I really, really, doubt this is true

Still, I could tell that a lingering telelogical leaning was still present in my psyche. I was looking for an end, a reason,  an overriding explanation for my arriving at the salon on an expected (for my haircutter) day.

Realizing this, my mind then shifted gears.

Stuff just happens, I reminded myself. What happened today doesn't mean anything more than the meaning I ascribe to it. At that moment, I felt a weight depart from my wondering mind.

There's no need to try to figure out what the universe is telling me. The universe isn't saying anything to me. There's no cosmic message here, no meaning-puzzle to be assembled, no secret code to be deciphered.

Like I said back in 2010...

I don't see "stuff happens" as negative. Rather, it is an affirmation of reality and the mystery that looms when we try to understand its depths (notwithstanding how the most famous popularizer of that phrase used it).

I'm not sure why what has already happened to me, did. I'm not sure why what lies in the future for me, will be. I'm not sure why this present moment, is.

The chains of causes and effects -- including what appears to be randomness -- linked to even the simplest event are breathtakingly beyond the complete comprehension of even the smartest people in the world, or the most advanced computers. 

Stuff happens. Then other stuff happens. Until we die. That's beautiful!

No need for "making" in a mathematical universe. It just "is."

I've finished Max Tegmark's fascinating "Our Mathematical Universe," a book I blogged about before here. The final chapter was a bit of a letdown. Tegmark ambled off into extraneous subjects, like how Earth might come to its demise and whether other conscious entities exist in the universe.

Surprisingly, Tegmark thinks we humans probably are the most intelligent life-form in the universe. If true, and I doubt that it is, that's depressing. Geez, 14 billion years have passed since the Big Bang, and Homo sapiens are the most sapient entities the cosmos could come up with?

But I still enjoyed the book.

I'm fascinated by the notion that existence exists, though I readily admit that if the opposite was true -- if existence didn't exist -- nobody would be around to know it. So I've come to feel that the pertinent question isn't "Why is there something rather than nothing?" but a statement: "There is something rather than nothing."

Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, MUH, is compatible with this way of looking at existence. Here's some excerpts from his book:

The MUH says that a mathematical structure is our external physical reality, rather than being merely a description thereof. This equivalence between physical and mathematical existence means that if a mathematical structure contains a self-aware substructure, it will perceive itself as existing in a physically real universe, just as you and I do (albeit generically a universe with different properties from ours).

Stephen Hawking famously asked, "What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?" 

In the context of the MUH, there's thus no fire-breathing required, since the point isn't that a mathematical structure describes a universe, but that it is a universe. Moreover, there's no making required either. You can't make a mathematical structure -- it simply exists. It doesn't exist in space and time -- space and time may exist in it.

In other words, all structures that exist mathematically have the same ontological status, and the most interesting question isn't which ones exist physically (they all do), but which ones contain life -- and perhaps us.

Many mathematical structures -- the dodecahedron, for example -- lack the complexity to support any kind of self-aware substructures, so it's likely that the Level IV multiverse resembles a vast and mostly uninhabitable desert, with life confined to rare oases, bio-friendly mathematical structures such as the one we inhabit.

...When talking about parallel universes, we distinguished between four different levels: Level I (other such regions far away in space where the apparent laws of physics are the same, but where history played out differently because things started out differently), Level II (regions of space where even the apparent laws of physics are different), Level III (parallel worlds elsewhere in Hilbert space where quantum reality plays out) and Level 4 (totally disconnected realities governed by different mathematical equations).

Far-out ideas. And this barely scratches the surface of the strangeness, all supported by theories of modern physics, that Tegmark describes in his book.

I have no idea if what he says is true.

However, at least Tegmark backs up his hypotheses with scientific reasoning and facts. So if someone is attracted to mind-blowing cosmic possibilities, which I am, he or she is a lot better off embracing far-out physics than far-out religiosity. 

If nothing is truly alive, maybe everything is

I'm not sure how I feel about Ferris Babr's opinion piece in the New York Times, "Why Nothing is Truly Alive."  On the whole, I think I like the idea.

Why so much ambivalence? Why is it so difficult for scientists to cleanly separate the living and nonliving and make a final decision about ambiguously animate viruses? Because they have been trying to define something that never existed in the first place.

Here is my conclusion: Life is a concept, not a reality.

To better understand this argument, it’s helpful to distinguish between mental models and pure concepts. Sometimes the brain creates a representation of a thing: light bounces off a pine tree and into our eyes; molecules waft from its needles and ping neurons in our nose; the brain instantly weaves together these sensations with our memories to create a mental model of that tree.

Other times the brain develops a pure concept based on observations — a useful way of thinking about the world.

Our idealized notion of “a tree” is a pure concept. There is no such thing as “a tree” in the world outside the mind. Rather, there are billions of individual plants we have collectively named trees. You might think botanists have a precise unfailing definition of a tree — they don’t. Sometimes it’s really difficult to say whether a plant is a tree or shrub because “tree” and “shrub” are not properties intrinsic to plants — they are ideas we impinged on them.

Likewise, “life” is an idea. We find it useful to think of some things as alive and others as inanimate, but this division exists only in our heads.

This is a jarring notion. I'm used to perceiving myself as someone who is alive. And, one day, won't be.

Yet what if my nature is no different from how everything in the universe is? Everything including, of course, both what we humans consider to be alive, and what isn't alive. When a rock erodes, or a star explodes as a supernova, we don't mourn its passing or view the dissolution of the entity as the loss of something special.

Part of the universe just changed form. The rock became dirt, in which plants can grow. The star was transformed into heavy elements, which enable Earth to be what it is, and us to be what we are.

Consciousness does seem to be a characteristic of some forms of life that acts to differentiate "living" from "not-living." I know that I am what I am. Seemingly a rock or a star doesn't. 

But the presence of consciousness can be fitted into Babr's nothing is truly alive perspective. Clearly, consciousness is a continuum. Some entities are more conscious than others. Say, an ant compared to a human.

Our self-consciousness appears to give us a special edge in the What is Alive? sweepstakes. However, so far as we know, the human brain that generates consciousness is made up of atoms and chemical elements guided by the forces of nature.

Like everything else in the universe is. 

So Babr may be right: "life" is just a concept, a product of the Homo sapiens brain. It is a way of organizing reality into conceptual boxes, yet arguably not a reflection of how the universe really is. (Assuming "really" has any more meaing than "life.")

Here's the beginning of "Why Nothing is Truly Alive." 

On a windy day in Ypenburg, the Netherlands, you can sometimes see sculptures the size of buses scuttling across a sandy hill. Made mostly from intricately conjoined plastic tubes, wood and sails, the many-legged skeletons move so fluidly and autonomously that it’s tempting to think of them as alive.

Their maker, the Dutch artist Theo Jansen, certainly does. “Since 1990, I have been occupied creating new forms of life,” he says on his website. He calls them Strandbeest. “Eventually I want to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives.”

Poetic, most would say, but Strandbeest are not alive. They are just machines — elaborate, beautiful ones, but inanimate contraptions nonetheless.

A few months ago I would have agreed with this reasoning. But that was before I had a remarkable insight about the nature of life. Now, I would argue that Strandbeest are no more or less alive than animals, fungi and plants. In fact, nothing is truly alive.

Together my wife and I watched a video of the Strandbeest cavorting. After seeing these amazing creatures do their thing, I said to her, "It almost looks as if they are conscious. But they aren't deciding how to move. The wind blows them."

Laurel replied, "How do we know that humans are any more in control of their actions? We might be just as subject to deterministic causes and effects."

Have a look. Maybe you will agree with Babr that the Strandbeest are just as alive as we are. And that "life" is a word that doesn't point to anything truly real.

 

Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey -- great 44 minute science sermon

I don't go to church any more. But last Sunday I experienced an inspiring sermon... about the cosmic wonders discovered by science. 

Here's the best thing about the new series featuring Neil Degrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist: "Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey" is all about reality. Not religious fantasy. 

(First uplifting episode can be viewed online.)

The computer graphics are excellent. Sure, these are simulations of how the universe appears beyond Earth's immediate surroundings. But given the immensity of the cosmos, there's no other way to describe expanses of space and time far beyond everyday understanding.

I was deeply moved. Particularly, by the part where Tyson starts from Earth and then shows the scale of the universe: solar system, Milky Way galaxy, local cluster of galaxies, supercluster of clusters, entire universe. 

I felt really, really small. Which is reality. To say that Earth is a speck in the cosmic scheme of things gives our planet too prominent a place in the cosmos. (See my post, "Scale of the universe.")

One of the arguments against a Judeo-Christian-Islamic personal creator God is that the universe is way too large if it was created just for us humans. Often religious believers of both a western and eastern persuasion talk about the Homo sapiens species as being the top of creation.

Well, after watching the first episode of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey I find that exceedingly hard to believe. Even if we're just talking about physical reality. 

The universe is so vast, almost certainly it contains beings and civilizations that would boggle our human minds if we were able to know about them. Tyson said that if the age of the universe, about 14 billion years, were compressed to a single year, all of human recorded history would fit into the last 14 seconds.

Amazingly, though, modern science has learned a tremendous amount about the universe in a fraction of the last second of that cosmic year. 

Pre-scientific myths have been revealed to be false. Like, the Earth being the center of everything. Tyson spent quite a bit of time explaining how the Church freaked out when Copernicus, Bruno, and Galileo spoke the truth about the Earth revolving around the Sun.

Bruno was burned at the stake because he dared to challenge religious dogmatism.

He correctly surmised that the universe was filled with countless worlds other than our own. However, it appears that Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey failed to point out that Bruno's heresies went considerably beyond cosmological ones. 

See: What 'Cosmos' Got Wrong About Giordano Bruno, the Heretic Scientist.

But the truth is that Bruno's scientific theories weren't what got him killed. Sure, his refusal to recant his belief in a plurality of worlds contributed to his sentence. But it's important to note that the Catholic Church didn't even have an official position on the heliocentric universe in 1600, and support for it was not considered heresy during Bruno's trial.

On top of that, his support for Copernican cosmology was the least heretical position he propagated. His opinions on theology were far more pyrotechnic. For example, Bruno had the balls to suggest that Satan was destined to be saved and redeemed by God.

He didn't think Jesus was the son of God, but rather “an unusually skilled magician.” He even publicly disputed Mary's virginity. The Church could let astronomical theories slide, but calling the Mother of God out on her sex life? There's no doubt that these were the ideas that landed Bruno on the stake.

I liked how blunt Neal Degrasse Tyson was about religion. It's a crappy way of learning about reality. Truth seekers need to embrace the scientific method, which is the only way of sorting out true from false when it comes to the world outside our subjective psyches.

In an interview with Brian Stelter, Tyson talked about how scientific facts can't be cherry-picked:

Stelter showed a clip of President Obama’s climate speech last year, in which he decried climate deniers by saying the country didn’t have time for a “meeting of the flat Earth society.” Tyson said the president’s reference was a good example of how the idea of “balance” in scientific stories doesn’t make sense.

“In the clip you showed of the president — you don’t talk about the spherical Earth with NASA, and then say ‘now let’s give equal time to the flat Earthers,” he said. “Plus, science is not there for you to cherry pick…You can decide whether or not to believe in it but that doesn’t change the reality of an emergent scientific truth.”

...Tyson also said he hopes Cosmos, which premiered March 9, can help Americans learn how to decipher scientific facts from political spin and that it can help Americans become better stewards of the Earth.

“The goal is to convey why science matters to the person, to our society, to us as shepherds of this planet,” he said. “It involves presenting science in ways that connect to you, so Cosmos can influence you not only intellectually but emotionally, with a celebration of wonder and awe.”

Absolutely. There's no need to go to church to worship the Creator. Here and now, wherever you are and whatever you're doing, what the Big Bang has wrought is what you are experiencing. 

Further, science reveals mysteries of the cosmos beyond our capacity to know with unaided senses. But when we appreciate how amazing the universe is, every bit of it, whether near or far, can seem filled with the wonder and awe Tyson speaks of.

There's no need to call that a spiritual sensibility.

To me, it is simply a natural response to understanding reality. However, if you want to be "spiritual," whatever that word means, embracing science is the way to go.

Free will debate continues: Harris crushes Dennett

I don't believe in free will.

There are good reasons for why I feel this way. And given the conditions of the universe at every instant during my lifetime, which encompasses those reasons, it isn't possible for me to believe or feel about free will in any way other than the way I do now. 

That's why I don't believe in free will: I understand that I'm part of a whole, as Einstein put it, called "universe." 

As I blogged about a few weeks ago, philosopher Daniel Dennett took some shots at Sam Harris, author of the excellent "Free Will."

Dennett's specious arguments in favor of his confused view of this subject -- we're sort of free, sort of not, because we feel we are -- were ably refuted by Daniel Miessler. 

Now Sam Harris has done his own refuting of Dennett. Harris' response includes some philosophical geekiness that I didn't find very interesting. But most of his piece is right on. Well worth reading, especially if you consider that you're free to think, do, and feel whatever you want.

To me, this would be a horrible way to exist. Isolated. Cut off from reality. An island unto myself. Fortunately, there's much more reason to deny free will, than to accept it.

Here's some excerpts from Harris' The Marionette's Lament.

Let’s begin by noticing a few things we actually agree about: We agree that human thought and behavior are determined by prior states of the universe and its laws—and that any contributions of indeterminism are completely irrelevant to the question of free will. We also agree that our thoughts and actions in the present influence how we think and act in the future.

We both acknowledge that people can change, acquire skills, and become better equipped to get what they want out of life. We know that there is a difference between a morally healthy person and a psychopath, as well as between one who is motivated and disciplined, and thus able to accomplish his aims, and one who suffers a terminal case of apathy or weakness of will.

We both understand that planning and reasoning guide human behavior in innumerable ways and that an ability to follow plans and to be responsive to reasons is part of what makes us human.

...We agree that given past states of the universe and its laws, we can only do what we in fact do, and not do otherwise. You don’t think this truth has many psychological or moral consequences. In fact, you describe the lawful propagation of certain types of events as a form of “freedom.”

But consider the emergence of this freedom in any specific human being: It is fully determined by genes and the environment (add as much randomness as you like). Imagine the first moment it comes online—in, say, the brain of a four-year-old child. Consider this first, “free” increment of executive control to emerge from the clockwork.

It will emerge precisely to the degree that it does, and when, according to causes that have nothing to do with this person’s freedom. And it will perpetuate its effects on future states of his nervous system in total conformity to natural laws.

In each instant, Austin will make his putt or miss it; and he will try his best or not. Yes, he is “free” to do whatever it is he does based on past states of the universe.

But the same could be said of a chimp or a computer—or, indeed, a line of dominoes. Perhaps such mechanical equivalences don’t bother you, but they might come as a shock to those who think that you have rescued their felt sense of autonomy from the gears of determinism.

...An illusion about mental freedom seems to be very widespread. My argument is that such freedom is incompatible with any form of causation (deterministic or otherwise)—which, as you know, is not a novel view.

But I also argue that it is incompatible with the actual character of our subjective experience. That is why I say that the illusion of free will is itself an illusion—which is another way of saying that if one really pays attention (and this is difficult), the illusion of free will disappears.

...In my book, I argue that an honest look at the causal underpinnings of human behavior, as well as at one’s own moment-to-moment experience, reveals free will to be an illusion. (I would say the same about the conventional sense of “self,” but that requires more discussion, and it is the topic of my next book.)

I also claim that this fact has consequences—good ones, for the most part—and that is another reason it is worth exploring.

Robert Kuhn's nine levels of nothing: mind-blowing

I'm a big fan of the age-old question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?"

However, after spending many years marveling at the evident fact that existence exists, I'm inclined to take out the why. A statement seems more apt than a question.

"There is something rather than nothing." 

In other words, I'm highly dubious that the question is meaningful. We can ask why things within existence exist. But to ask why existence itself exists... absurd. My attitude is: It just is, dude.

Nonetheless, I can understand the appeal of asking why there is something rather than nothing. I haven't entirely given up on the question myself.

So I had to buy a recent issue of Skeptic magazine when I saw it contained an article by Robert Lawrence Kuhn, "Levels of Nothing: There are Multiple Answers to the Question of Why the Universe Exists."

Well, more accurately Kuhn lays out the kinds of nothing that are the alternative to something.

This frames the question more neatly, depending on which level of nothing one chooses, yet doesn't get us closer to understanding why this sort of nothing doesn't exist rather than the something that does.

Kuhn writes:

Defining “Nothing” may seem simple -- no thing, not a thing. But what’s a “thing?” I invoke the term “thing” in the most general possible way, and therefore, given some possible notions of Nothing, it is no contradiction to find “things” that compose these different kinds or levels of Nothing. Teasing apart these constituent things, as if scaffolds or sinews of Nothings, may help enrich understanding of the nature of Nothing, yielding a taxonomy that arrays opposing kinds of Nothing that could be conceived and might have existed.

This taxonomy is structured as a deconstruction or as a dissection, as it were, a reverse layering, a peeling, a progressive reduction of the content of each Nothing in a hierarchy of Nothings. As such, this taxonomy takes its heritage from the so-called Subtraction Argument, which seeks to show that the absence of all concrete objects would be metaphysically possible.

...Developing this way of thinking, there might be nine levels of Nothing, with a general progression from Nothing most simplistic (Nothing One) to Nothing most absolute (Nothing Nine).

...Following are nine levels of Nothings.

• (1) Nothing as existing space and time that just happened to be totally empty of all visible objects (particles and energy are permitted) -- an utterly simplistic, pre-scientific view.
• (2) Nothing as existing space and time that just happens to be totally empty of all matter (no particles, but energy is permitted -- flouting the law of mass-energy equivalence).
• (3) Nothing as existing space and time that just happens to be totally empty of all matter and energy.
• (4) Nothing as existing space and time that is by necessity -- irremediably and permanently in all directions, temporal as well as spatial -- totally empty of all matter and energy.
• (5) Nothing of the kind found in some theoretical formulations by physicists, where, although space-time (unified) as well as mass-energy (unified) do not exist, pre-existing laws, particularly laws of quantum mechanics, do exist. And it is these laws that make it the case that universes can and do, from time to time, pop into existence from “Nothing,” creating space-time as well as mass-energy. (It is standard physics to assume that empty space must seethe with virtual particles, reflecting the uncertainty principle of quantum physics, where particle-antiparticle pairs come into being and then, almost always, in a fleetingly brief moment, annihilate one another.)
• (6) Nothing where not only is there no space-time and no mass-energy, but also there are no pre-existing laws of physics that could generate space-time or mass-energy (universes).
• (7) Nothing where not only is there are no space-time, no mass-energy, and no pre-existing laws of physics, but also there are no non-physical things or kinds that are concrete (rather than abstract) --no God, no gods, and no consciousness (cosmic or otherwise). This means that there are no physical or non-physical beings or existents of any kind -- nothing, whether natural or supernatural, that is concrete (rather than abstract).
• (8) Nothing where not only is there none of the above (so that, as in Nothing 7, there are no concrete existing things, physical or non-physical), but also there are no abstract objects of any kind -- no numbers, no sets, no logic, no general propositions, no universals, no Platonic forms (e.g., no value).
• (9) Nothing where not only is there none of the above (so that, as in Nothing 8, there are no abstract objects), but also there are no possibilities of any kind (recognizing that possibilities and abstract objects overlap, though allowing that they can be distinguished).

...Note that among all these levels of Nothing, one of the "lesser Nothings" -- that is, a kind of Nothing with more "things" in it -- is the Nothing of physicists. What physicists contemplate -- the sudden emergence of "tunneling" of universes from "Nothing" -- is fascinating and indeed may be cosmogenic, but the tunneling process or capacity is not Nothing.

The Nothing of physicists is thick with the complete set of the laws of physics, and so between physicists' Nothing and Real Nothing lies a vast, unbridgeable gulf. On this taxonomic scale, physicists' Nothing is Nothing Level 5, barely halfway to utterly Nothing. 

If physicists' Nothing were in reality Real Nothing (i.e. ultimate reality), the laws of quantum physics (or whatever might turn out to be the most fundamental physical laws underlying quantum physics) would have to be either impossible to remove (meaning that removing them would involve logical contradiction) or a brute fact about existence beyond which explanation would be meaningless. I doubt I could ever get over the odd idea that something so intricate, so involved, so organized and so accessible as the laws of physics would be the ultimate brute fact.

As a separate consideration, some philosophers of religion argue that God is a "necessity" -- meaning that it would be impossible for God not to exist -- thus precluding Nothing 7 (which has no non-physical concrete things such as God but still has abstract objects) and crowning Nothing 6 (which has no space-time, no mass-energy, no laws of physics but still has God and other nonphysical things) as the metaphysical limit of what is to be explained.

I find the move challenging. Moreover, based on the levels of Nothing in this taxonomy, it would seem less of a leap to imagine a world without God (Nothing 7) than to imagine a world without abstract objects (Nothing 8). For the traditional God, that won't do.

...Setting aside my taxonomy and consulting my gut, I come to only two kinds of answers. The first is that there is no answer: Existence is a brute fact without explanation. The second is that at the primordial beginning, explanatorily and timelessly prior to time, some thing was self-existing. The essence of this something necessitated its existence such than non-existence to it would be as inherently impossible as physically immortality to us is factually impossible.

Various things or substances could conceivably contain this deeply centered self-existing essence, from the most fundamental meta-laws of physics to diverse kinds of consciousness, one of which could be God or something like god. Perhaps even these explanations are so mundane and bedrock is so bizarre that abstract objects or pure possibilities somehow harbor generative powers.

Why is there Something rather than Nothing? Why Not Nothing? If you don't get dizzy, you really don't get it.

Well, I get dizzy.

But I don't really get Kuhn's second kind of answer. His "self-existing essence" sure sounds a lot like God to me. Maybe not the Western personal sort of God, but a lot like the Eastern impersonal God, such as Brahman.

So why Brahman? Why a self-existing essence? Why should Kuhn's abstract Nothing 8 exist, but not Nothing 9?

Like I said, I lean toward Kuhn's first kind of answer: there is no answer. Existence just is.

There's no "nothing" to compare with the cosmos' "something"

Like I said a few days ago, it's absolutely awesome that existence exists. Oh, guess I should add, "awesome, dude... ."

Which reflects how marvelously meaningful what I said is. And also how meaningless. 

It happened again today. That sudden "bottom falling out from under me" feeling, sort of the mental equivalent of being startled by an elevator going into free fall.

I like the feeling. It's the most genuine sensation of spirituality, not really an apt word, but best I can come up with, that comes over me in my churchless way of looking at the world.

What it is -- and I'm also struggling to find the right words here -- is awe that existence exists. 

Haven't changed my mind about that. But after finishing re-reading P.W. Atkins' fascinating "Creation Revisited," I had some additional insights into my awesome feeling. 

(Let's make that a re-re-reading; just realized that I'd blogged before about a re-reading.)

Atkins, a distinguished chemist, does a good job of arguing that there's no need to posit a creator of the universe. In his view, the universe didn't need any assistance in creating everything that exists. That everything springs neatly from..

Nothing. 

Let's leave aside the details of his argument in this post and jump right to Atkins' final chapter, the money shot of his book, so to speak. 

In the beginning there was nothing. Absolute void, not merely empty space. There was no space; nor was there time, for this was before time. The universe was without form and void.

By chance there was a fluctuation, and a set of points, emerging from nothing and taking their existence from the pattern they formed, defined a time. The chance formation of a pattern resulted in the emergence of time from coalesced opposites, its emergence from nothing.

From absolute nothing, absolutely without intervention, there came into being rudimentary existence. The emergence of the dust of points and their chance organization into time was the haphazard, unmotivated action that brought them into being. 

Extreme simplicities, emerged from nothing.

Though I liked the godlessness of this passage, I highlighted in three question marks in the margin of the page on which these lines appeared.

I was bothered by Atkins' assertion that absolute nothing could be jolted into producing rudimentary existence by "chance."

Isn't chance something? How can this guy assert that absolutely nothing co-exists with chance? Didn't he say nothing existed prior to chance acting on an absolute void? Wouldn't chance have to come into being before chance brought everything else into being?

From one point of view, those are good questions. From another, they aren't. I talked about this in Science's "nothing" different from religion's "nothing."

It was like I was some sort of Godlike being looking upon existence from a transcendent realm, contemplating two cosmic possibilities: one where "nothing" prevailed eternally; another where the "something" we are aware of is existent.

I'd wonder why there's something rather than nothing. It just seemed so mysterious, so awesome, so marvelous, that instead of nothing, there was something, and I'm a part of it! 

My mistake, as Lawrence Krauss points out, was in assuming that nothing and something are both realistic possibilities. Actually, there's no such thing as nothing, in the sense of nonbeing. Material existence is what there is. The opposite of reality isn't nothing, nonbeing, or nonexistence. Such is a theological or philosophical idea, an abstraction, present only in the human brain/imagination.

Religions, particularly of the Western monotheisitic variety, adore the idea ofcreatio ex nihilo, "creation out of nothing."

But that's all it is: an idea. There's no evidence of the absolute "nothing" so loved by the religionists who take issue with Krauss's scientific view of a quantum nothing that creates universes instead of God. The quantum nothingness of empty space is filled with energy, potential, possibility.

So the everlasting God of religion, which is nowhere to be observed, is replaced by the everlasting quantum nothing which has been proven to exist even in seemingly absolutely empty spacetime.

Thus those question marks I put in the margins, and even my feeling of awe that wow, existence exists, strikes me as betraying a lingering quasi-religious philosophical attitude that appears and disappears in my psyche.

I find it really difficult to totally set aside the notion that "nothing" is a viable alternative to "something." I can't get my head fully around the notion that an absolute void, non-existence without any trace of something existing, is a human abstraction, a concept, a mental hypothesis with no basis in reality.

Saying any more would probably result in me saying less.

Sit back. Have a glass of wine. Smoke a joint. Meditate on Om. Whatever... dude. Contemplate how I ended my previous post.

As Krauss says, religious true believers argue with this scientific godless understanding of the cosmos. "But the quantum vacuum isn't really nothing," they say. "It is governed by the laws of nature." Well, who says that reality has to conform with how God-crazy humans want things to be?

Reality is what it is. Nothing isn't really nothing. Deal with it, religionists.

Scale of the universe makes belief in God look very small

I'm not religious.

But if I were ever to embrace a religion, I'd want it to be a modern one. A scientific one. Meaning, a religion that seeks to explain whatever might lie beyond the physical universe without denying the reality of what does indisputably exist.

The dogmas of every major world religion, though, date from prescientific times. Back then, most people believed that the Earth was the center of the cosmos. The Sun and stars orbited around our planet.

We humans were special.

Both in terms of our relation to the rest of the universe, and of our relation with God. God had created the universe with us Homo sapiens singled out to be "the top of creation." Oh, how good it felt to know that everything revolved around us.

Now science has revealed a very different picture of the universe. I was reminded of this when the AppAdvice app on my iPhone told me about the free Khan app. 

"Khan" refers to Salman Khan, founder of the amazing Khan Academy, a free online learning community. It features thousands of videos on a wide variety of subjects. My first Khan iPhone pick was in the Cosmology and Astronomy category, an eleven minute video called Intergalactic Scale.

 

Wow.

I watched it in my morning meditation area. Then I turned off my iPhone, shut my eyes, and contemplated my place in the cosmos during my usual breath/mantra focused meditating. The video had moved me deeply. Something about reality is, well, so damn real. 

There's no way to describe how indescribably small our planet -- indeed, even our entire galaxy -- is compared to the observable universe. Watch the video and you'll see this. 

Back in 2005 I wrote a "Scale of the Universe" post. Re-reading it a little while ago, my mind was re-boggled in the same way as the Kahn video boggled me.

I’m finding that embracing insignificance can be exhilarating. I rushed back to Google for more web pages and found Steven Dutch’s Scale of the Solar System and Universe. This is a more straightforward treatment of the subject, but it has some nice sand-related facts. I learned that if the Earth were the size of a grain of sand, then our Milky Way galaxy would be 5,000,000 miles across.

Five million miles vs. a grain of sand. That’s the relation between our galaxy and our planet. And me? A sub-atomic particle on the grain—maybe not even that. More: if the Sun were the size of a grain of sand, then the nearest neighbor galaxy to us, Andromeda, would be 1,500,000 miles away. The nearest.

There are at least 100 billion galaxies in the universe vastly further away from us than Andromeda. What we see of the cosmos when we look up at the night sky is essentially nothing, just a few thousand stars that lie near us in our corner of a single galaxy.

Good God. I have no idea, none at all.

Yet religions think they do. Theologies based on false ideas about our place in the universe proclaim that humanity occupies a privileged place in the cosmic scheme of things. 

God sacrificed his only Son for us, says Christianity. God dictated in Arabic a book that contains ultimate truth, says Islam. God gave ten commandments to Moses, says Judaism. God/Brahman is essentially the same as the human soul/Atman, says Hinduism. 

Yeah, right. Tell me how this makes sense after you watch Khan's "Intergalactic Scale" video.

If we humans are so central to God, why is the universe so astoundingly, massively, gigantically indifferent to us? Earth is barely above nothing compared to the everything known to science, much less the Unseen More which lies beyond the observable universe.

I might, just possibly, be inclined to accept a theistic religion which was able to perusasively explain how it is that humanity can have a special relationship with God when God's creation leaves us in such an impressively unspecial place in the universe.

Most likely conclusion from this undeniable fact: we are not special. And there's nothing wrong with that. We're still part of everything. Just a insignificant part, exactly as Carl Sagan told us.

Free will is a wonderful thing to lose

Most of us are afraid of losing our freedom.

We like being able to say what we want, go where we want, do what we want. Within limits, of course. Absolute freedom is impossible. Constraints are part of the human condition.

This helps explain the almost universal belief in free will, and the desire to exercise free will to the fullest.

Even if we're constrained by outer circumstances, such as not being able to drive 200 miles an hour because our car won't go that fast, most people have the feeling that what they are capable of choosing to do is within their control.

I walk into Starbucks. I'm asked "What would you like?" It certainly seems as if I'm free to order whatever is on the menu, even though I've never had a desire for any drink other than a latte or regular coffee.

In one sense, this is true.

My brain and vocal cords are capable of speaking the sounds that correspond to the dizzying variety of beverages that can be ordered at Starbucks. However, the notion that I can freely will to do whatever at any moment is ridiculously wrong.

Free will is an illusion. More accurately, as Richard Oerton says in his book "The Nonsense of Free Will," it is an illusion of an illusion.

Determinists sometimes speak of "the illusion of free will", but this is a very odd sort of illusion. If you see a mirage in the desert, the illusion is of something which conforms with the laws of nature and might really be there. But the illusion of free will, surely, is an illusion of something incomprehensible: an illusion of an illusion?

Incomprehensible, because genuine free will (as contrasted with watered-down varieties such as compatibilism) can't coexist with causality. And everywhere we look, causes and effects rule the roost. Oerton writes:

Human beings, according to a believer in free will, manage somehow to stand outside the natural laws which govern the rest of the universe and, despite being inextricably a part of it, are somehow exempt from the inter-dependent causal relationships of its other elements.

So that's why I titled this post as I did.

Free will, if it existed, would cut us loose from everything else in the cosmos. We'd be free-floating bits of... what? Hard to imagine. What would it be like to be unaffected by anything in existence, utterly detached from every other sentient being and insentient object, having no relationship with them?

Sounds like hell to me. Which got me to thinking about why the illusion of free will is worshipped so highly by most religions.

Shouldn't a primary life goal, whether spiritual or secular, involve relating more intimately, lovingly, caringly, and compassionately with other parts of the universe? Isn't it better to be connected than alone, part of the pattern woven into the fabric of the All rather than an isolated thread?

In Christianity, probably along with other monotheistic religions, God supposedly gave humans free will. (Of course, if we weren't free to accept or reject that gift, that seems to limit our freedom.) This supports notions of heaven, hell, salvation, redemption, and such.

Because if everything we do and all that we are is determined by forces outside our control, the theological basis for divine rewards and punishments dissolves. Stuff just happens naturally, causes and effects proceeding in accord with the laws of nature.

Eastern views of karma thus seem closer to reality than Western views of sin and virtue. However, there still remains the question of what gets the karmic ball rolling for an individual soul/self.

Meaning, if what we do is determined by previous causes and effects, yet we still have to go through rewards and punishments of our current actions, where is the fairness in that if free will wasn't present at the beginning of a long causative chain?

That's one problem with karma-based spirituality. Another is that our interconnectedness with the cosmos through causes and effects generally is viewed by Eastern religions as something to escape from, rather than to embrace.

Traditionally, Hinduism and Buddhism speak of being freed from cycles of birth and rebirth controlled by karmic law. We keep being born in different bodies, human or otherwise, until our store of karma is exhausted through some means: meditation, selfless service, guru's grace, or whatever.

This used to make sense to me. So much sense, I spent several years writing a book, "Life is Fair," about the karmic rationale for vegetarianism that was published in India. (A PDF file of the book can be downloaded via the previous link.)

Now, though, I'm happy to see myself as nothing special. I'm just a temporarily existing part of a vast cosmos that existed long before me and will continue on long after me. I'm affected by the countless connections I have with other things and people.

Those interrelationships have made me who I am, and continue to form me. I'm not free to do whatever I will. My will, intentions, desires, actions, and such spring from causes which, ultimately, can be traced all the way back to the big bang some 14 billion years ago.

And also are as recent as the sights and sounds cascading into my brain right now, along with every other influence acting upon me at the moment.

Would I have it any other way? No. Thankfully, because I've got no choice.

Free will doesn't exist, and I don't exist apart from everything else in the cosmos. I'm a part of the whole, dependent, not independent. Naturally I also am not free to lose my belief in free will; that's just happened, for reasons not of my own making.

There's no answer to "Why does the world exist?"

Here's the sort of spoiler alert that irritates me when it pops up in a movie review -- a warning about a giving away of the key plot element that's so close to the spoiler itself, I can't help but see what I'm not supposed to see if I want to keep the movie's meaning a surprise.

Ha-ha! If you read the title of this blog post, it's too late. You know. There's no answer to "Why does the world exist?"

Hope this doesn't ruin your day.

Probably it will, if you're a religious devotee, because likely you think that God is the reason the world exists. It might also be a bummer of an answer if you're a fervent believer in science, because some cosmologists hold out hope that a Theory of Everything could explain, well, everything. Including why the universe exists.

Now, why am I so confident in saying there's no answer? Because I've finished reading Jim Holt's book, "Why Does the World Exist?"

I recommend it highly.

Holt fulfills the promise of his subtitle, an existential detective story. There's lots of twists and turns as Holt travels around, interviewing scientists, religious types, philosophers, and others who have deeply pondered the classic question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?"

As I said recently in a post about Holt's book, I find an exclamatory statement much more interesting. "There is something rather than nothing." I feel this way partly because it seems obvious that no answer is possible to the question why existence?

Who the hell do we puny humans think we are? What makes us think we're capable of fathoming the ultimate mystery of existence? Assuming there's any mystery to fathom, which is another aspect of the mystery: Is there really any mystery involving existence?

Holt doesn't just listen to the people he interviews. Holt challenges them, questions their assumptions, tests the solidity of the foundation their existential theories rest on. In the end, he doesn't find any satisfying answers to "Why does the world exist?" 

But it's an entertaining ride to nowhere.

In an epilogue Holt describes a televised book chat show (hosted by Bernard Pivot) he watched while in Paris. The guests were a Dominican priest, a theoretical physicist, and a Buddhist monk. The subject was Why is there Something rather than Nothing?

Holt seems to reveal where his sympathies lie, even if he isn't convinced that any of the answers given is true. I also resonate with the Buddhist monk -- though not completely. (French punctuation marks are omitted in some passages below; deal with it, French speakers.)

The monk, attired in crimson and saffron robes, with bare shoulders and a freshly shaved head, has the most interesting line on the question. He also has the most pleasant demeanor. In contrast to the prim-mouthed Jesuit priest and the irritable old physicist, the monk beams happiness. A smile continuously plays about his lips.

As a Buddhist, he says, he believes that the universe had no beginning. Il n'ya pas de debut. Nothingness -- le neant -- could never give way to being, he says, because it is defined in opposition to that which exists. 

A billion causes could not make a universe come into existence out of what does not exist. That is why, the monk says, the Buddhist doctrine of a beginningless-less universe makes the most metaphysical sense. C'est encore plus simple.

Vous trouvez? interjects Bernard Pivot, eyebrow arched.

The Buddhist monk genially protests that he is not evading the question of origins. Rather, he is using it to explore the nature of reality. What is the universe, after all? C'est n'est pas bien sur le neant. It is not nothingness. Yet it is somehting very close: an emptiness -- une vacuite. 

Things don't really have the solidity we attribute to them. The world is like a dream, an illusion. But in our thinking, we transform its fluidity into something fixed and solid seeming. This engenders le desir, l'orgueil, la jalousie. 

Buddhism, by correcting our metaphysical error, thus has a therapeutic purpose. It offers un chemin vers l'eveil -- a path to enlightenment. And it also resolves the mystery of being. When Leibniz asked, Pourquoi quelque chose plutot que rien? his question presupposed that something really and truly exists. And that's an illusion.

Ah oui? says Pivot, again skeptically arching an eyebrow.

Oui! replies the monk, smiling radiantly.

I'm pretty sure that Christopher Hitchens had little sympathy for Buddhism, being not only an atheist, but an antitheist. So the philosophical/intellectual credibility of the Buddhist monk's views are bolstered by the blurb Jim Holt got from Hitchens, which is featured on the cover of "Why Does the World Exist?"

What makes you so sure that there's anything?

Somehow I doubt there ever will be a convincing answer to that question, just as Why is there something rather than nothing? likely will remain an eternal enigma. 

Holt talks about how some philosophers are repelled by the notion of a Brute Fact. Me, I'm not bothered. Existence is. Nothing more to say. Which reminds me of the ending quotation in Holt's book.

Philosophy, n. A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.
    -- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary 

More thoughts on Jim Holt's "Why Does the World Exist?"

Via an email (thanks, Nick) I learned about a Slate article that's based on a chapter in "Why Does the World Exist?" by Jim Holt, a book I blogged about recently.

Updike on the Universe describes Holt's interview from John Updike, a noted novelist who has mused about the mystery of existence in his writing. It's worth a read. Here's a sample:

“When you think about it,” he continued, “we rationalists—and we’re all, to an extent, rationalist—we accept propositions about the early universe which boggle the mind more than any of the biblical miracles do. Your mind can intuitively grasp the notion of a dead man coming back again to life, as people in deep comas do, and as we do when we wake up every morning out of a sound sleep. But to believe that the universe, immeasurably vast as it appears to be, was once compressed into a tiny space—into a tiny point—is in truth very hard to believe. I’m not saying I can disprove the equations that back it up. I’m just saying that it’s as much a matter of faith to accept that.”

Here I was moved to demur. The theories that imply this picture of the early universe—general relativity, the standard model of particle physics, and so forth—work beautifully at predicting our present-day observations. Even the theory of cosmic inflation, which admittedly is a bit conjectural, has been confirmed by the shape of the cosmic background radiation, as measured by the Hubble space telescope. If these theories are so good at accounting for the evidence we see at present, why shouldn’t we trust them as we extrapolate backward in time toward the beginning of the universe?

“I’m just saying I can’t trust them,” Updike replied. “My reptile brain won’t let me. It’s impossible to imagine that even the Earth was once compressed to the size of a pea, let alone the whole universe.”

l resonate with Updike. It is impossible to imagine.

But lots of modern science is exceedingly difficult to understand using the tools of everyday experience: common sense, perceptions, emotions, observable causes and effects.

So I don't have a problem with modern cosmologies which tell us that the entire universe, a hundred billion galaxies, each containing on average a hundred billion stars, once was as large as a grain of sand (or smaller).

However, the question remains: what's up with that "grain of sand"?

It isn't nothing. It's almost nothing. So someone who believes that an explanation is needed for the existence of the universe won't be content with an answer that says it arose from nearly nothing.

The big debate is between science's view of nothing and religion's/philosophy's view of nothing. (I wrote about this earlier in the year.) I've become comfortable with how most scientists basically look upon nothing: as the least amount of something we know about.

Thus the quantum vacuum counts as nothing. Empty space counts as nothing. Yes, a vacuum and empty space are minimal something's. But nobody has ever experienced absolute nothing, and no one ever will, because an experiencer obviously is something.

Another Slate article discusses this nothing vs. nothing debate. Check out "Has the Meaning of Nothing Changed?" by Ron Rosenbaum if you're a fan of the mystery of existence. 

In the past couple of decades, quantum cosmologists claim to have pulled a rabbit out of a hat and explained "how something came from nothing" with quantum theories of the origins of the universe. But is the nothing these theorists claim to be describing true nothing, capital-N Nothing, the Really Big O, the Ultimate Zero?

Or are the quantum cosmologists peddling a nothing that comes encumbered with more than few somethings: space, time, even the entire conceptual edifice of quantum theory invisibly calling the shots?

Why should you care about nothing? Well, I know what I care most about is the purity of the nothing invoked in this maddening question. Pure nothingness: It’s the last unspoiled, uncluttered concept in the cosmos. I don't believe in God, but I do believe in Nothing, in the sense I want to believe in mysteries beyond the reach of the mind. It makes life more interesting if existence can't yet be reduced to a series of equations.

Mystery of existence is near and far -- not in between

Why is there something rather than nothing? Or more positively (my preference): There is something rather than nothing!

A great question. And a great exclamation.

I hugely enjoy pondering both, especially the latter. But the mystery of existence is much more than a pondering to me. It's an immediate, um, existential experience that always is lurking not far from the surface of my consciousness.

I'm easily drawn into the depths of WOW! by ducking my everyday conscious mind just a little ways below the surface of the perceptions, thoughts, sensations, emotions and what-not which normally are the focus of my attention.

(I've blogged quite a bit about the mystery of existence. Google knows. Here's a fairly recent offering.)

So when I learned about Jim Holt's book, "Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story," I raced into Amazon's always-eagerly-embracing arms as fast as my laptop-typing fingers would take me. I haven't been disappointed.

Highly recommended, though I'm only a bit over halfway through the book. Holt is a terrific writer, a frequent contributor to the New Yorker, New York Times, and other esteemed publications. 

He describes an all-encompassing search for what Deep Thinkers about the mystery of existence have to say about it. Philosophers, scientists, religious types, novelists. Holt's interviews are fascinating. Even when highly technical theories or esoteric logic is being discussed, I remain engrossed in the conversation. 

The guy I agree with the most so far (no gals have been interviewed in the chapters I've read; maybe pondering the mystery of existence is a guy thing) is Adolf Grünbaum, a noted philosopher of science. His attitude is almost exactly the same as mine, though he can explain his viewpoint in a much more sophisticated way than I can.

...Grünbaum finds the existence of the world utterly unastonishing. And he is utterly convinced that it is rational for him to be unastonished.

Consider again the basic mystery as originally stated by Leibniz: why is there something rather than nothing? Grünbaum dubs this, with appropriate grandeur (and perhaps a bit of irony), the Primordial Existential Question. But what makes it legitimate?

Like any other why question, he observes, it rests on hidden presuppositions. Not only does it presuppose that there must be some explanation for the existence of the world. It also takes for granted that the world needs an explanation -- that, in the absence of some overriding cause or reason, nothingness would be expected to prevail.

Now you might be wondering how I could agree so much with Grünbaum given that I feel WOW! when I grok the mystery of existence, while he finds the mystery utterly unastonishing. 

Well, Grünbaum's unastonishment is rooted in his dislike for the question, why is there something rather than nothing? I too am uninterested in the "why?," though I used to believe there could be an answer to it.

As noted above, it's there is something rather than nothing which truly amazes me. I get a chill up my psyche's spine when I lie in bed at night and visualize something being something for infinity, ever and ever, something without beginning or end. 

This has no connection with God. There's no need for God in the mystery of existence. The cosmos is. For me (and Grünbaum) that's the end of the story. And the beginning of it. 

My mind gets boggled when I try to envision existence existing eternally, outside of time. This is the far side of the mystery of existence. Endlessness. Eternity. Being without becoming. Effect absent cause. Yet I'm equally boggled by the near side of the mystery of existence.

This present moment. What's right here, right now. The fact that I'm experiencing what I am, given how much is'ness there is in the cosmos. Mystery doesn't only lie beyond the horizon of my consciousness. Mystery is immediately before me. 

In fact, is me. Because I exist, and no one knows why anything exists, nor if "why?" is even a valid question when asked of the entirety of existence.

Inbetween the near and far sides of the mystery of existence, knowledge can be known. Science guides us. Explorations of causes and effects can steadily enlighten the darkness of what it is possible to know, yet presently isn't. This illuminating has no end.

Except at the near side and far side of the mystery of existence.

Here, I believe, all we can do is WOW! And that one word is, for me, all the religion, spirituality, and mysticism I need in my current churchlessness.

My Amazon review of "The Mystery Experience"

Killing two birds with one stone (or rather, slicing two pieces of tofu with one knife, since I'm an animal-loving vegetarian), I'm going to talk about my overall impression of Tim Freke's The Mystery Experience in the form of an Amazon reader review.

I read a lot more Amazon reviews than I write. This will help make up for that imbalance. Usually I'm only drawn to submit a review on books that I liked a lot. Such is true with The Mystery Experience, which I've blogged about before here, here, here, and here.

But "liking" isn't the same as "agreeing with." I like to be challenged, to be drawn into a deeper examination of how I look upon life, to be encouraged to reconsider assumptions which may or may not be valid. 

Freke's book did all that. However, I can't agree with him about the mystery of existence. Here's why:

---------------------

I bought "The Mystery of Existence" because, like TIm Freke, I have a longstanding love affair with an unfathomable, exotic, alluring, mysterious mistress: existence. Not the existence of this or that, particular things, but existence pure and simple. Is'ness. The raw fact that any "this or that" exists.

For about the first hundred pages of Freke's book, I felt like he and I were on almost exactly the same mystery-loving wavelength. "Yes!" I kept saying to myself, as I read passages like this:

"The mystery of life is so enormous it takes my breath away and leaves me speechless. It's not some riddle I will one day unravel, but real magic to be marvelled at. It's not a darkness my intellect can illuminate, but a dazzling radiance so splendid that my most brilliant ideas seem dull.

I may go about my daily life as if I know what's going on, but the truth is I really don't know what life is. Nobody does."

Absolutely. Again, what we're talking about here isn't the particulars of life, such as how the brain and body are fashioned, or how evolution has brought about us humans.

Rather, Freke is pointing to the unarguable fact that nobody knows why existence exists -- or even if "why?" makes any sense when the question pertains not to the existence of some particular thing, but to the famous query "Why is there something rather than nothing?"

There is nothing more mind-blowing than to ponder the astonishing mystery of "is." Personally, I suspect that the fascination we humans have with the philosophical, religious, and mystical questions surrounding why existence exists is a byproduct of our all-too-human cognitive abilities and brain processes.

A more advanced alien intelligence might look upon the question of "Why is there something rather than nothing?" with a resounding Huh? This is a meaningless question. The answer is obvious. Which, however, we wouldn't be able to understand. 

As shown by the quote above, at first Freke seems to agree that because nobody can know anything about the basic "is" of existence (in part, or in full, because any answer presumes a pre-existing "is," such as God), everything within existence, including life, is fully submerged in the all-pervading atmosphere of mystery.

Freke correctly says that we need to have our stories, but these don't penetrate the mystery. There are religious stories, scientific stories, philosophical stories, poetic stories. Each of us picks and chooses from these stories, elaborating and adding upon them in our own ways. Then we over-confidently say, "This is what life is all about."

Given how Freke started off his book, I figured that he would maintain a core position: the mystery of life and existence can be subjectively intuited by us humans, but never really known, understood, penetrated, or grasped. After all, Freke said: "I may go about my daily life as if I know what's going on, but the truth is I really don't know what life is. Nobody does."

Well, this isn't the stance in the latter part of the book. Nor in the Mystery Experience retreats that Freke puts on and talks about frequently, sometimes in a rather annoyingly infomercial sort of fashion. 

Because we're told that actually Tim Freke DOES know what life is all about. 

"As a person I am a form in the flow of time. But the deep self is outside of time. It is timeless being... I think most of us have this sense that our deep self is the same now as when we were much younger. I know I do... What I am is timeless awareness witnessing TIm's journey through time.

When I live lucidly I see that I am both mortal and immortal. The person I appear to be in time had a beginning and will come to an end. But the deep self isn't in time, just like a dreamer isn't in a dream. 

As a person, I'm a body that is born to die. But the deep self can't die because it was never born. My essential being is immortal, because being by it's very nature must always be." 

Freke believes that God, or timeless awareness, becomes conscious of itself through the consciousness of beings in time, like us humans. A Koranic hadith has Allah speaking somewhat similarly: "I am a hidden treasure who wanted to be known." This notion also is akin to HIndu teachings of atman and brahman, soul and God, part and whole.

To which I say, fine. But it was disappointing to find such a large dose of mystery-dissolving spiritual dogmatism in the last two-thirds or so of the book. Mystery takes a back seat to various exercises taught at Freke's workshops where people are shown how to get in touch with their "deep self." Finally, he says:

Our pilgrimage has led us to deep love, which is the sacred ground towards which we have been heading all along. When we're conscious of ourselves as an individual expression of the primal oneness, it's an experience of all-encompassing love, This is the heart of the mystery experience.

I can't agree. The heart of the mystery experience is to experience the mystery of life/existence (they're linked, because only conscious living beings can be aware of cosmic mystery). In his workshops, and in his book, Freke claims to know what this mystery consists of. Spoiler alert! He writes:

"My deep love affair is with God as the ground of being and Goddess as the appearances of being. The natural world is an objective expression of the unconscious oneness from which we have arisen. It is the unconscious foundation from which conscious bodies have evolved. When I see the numinous in nature, I see the mystery in the manifest."

OK. That's Freke's story. And it's an appealing story. I can understand why other people would resonate with it. To some extent, I do myself.

I just wish that Freke had stuck with his initial "nobody knows" theme, and emphasized that how he looks upon the mystery of life and existence is his personal way of relating to unfathomable mystery. Religions attract converts by claiming they -- and only they -- understand the ultimate nature of the cosmos. But no religion has any demonstrable evidence to back up its claim. 

And given the seeming impossibility of anyone knowing how, why, or what existence is all about, no sage, prophet, guru, or other person ever could penetrate the mystery. Freke can't either, notwithstanding the author's claim to be able to lead people to a "spiritual awakening."

All that said, and I've said a lot in this review, I still liked "The Mystery Experience" a lot, and can recommend it to lovers of existential mystery. Just be aware that the mystery will remain shrouded in darkness after you finish the book, even though Freke claims to have illuminated it.

First sermon from the Church of What the Fuck

I'm glad I named this blog Church of the Churchless when I started it up back in 2004. But since I no longer adhere to any religious dogma, I'm free to experiment with my churchlessness.

So here's a mini-sermon from the Church of What the Fuck. The name came to me yesterday as I was thinking some more about why I started to disagree with what Tim Freke was saying in his book, "The Mystery Experience." 

(Reasons described in my previous blog post, "Allow cosmic mystery to live, not killing it with religion.")

As I read deeper into Freke's book this morning, I learned that he's big into God is Love. Well, I've got no problem with love. In fact, I love love. But I'm not attracted to the sort of lovey-dovey spiritual God is Love stuff that clearly turns Freke on.

Especially when the source of that love, the ground of that love, is believed to be cosmic being -- which Freke considers to be unconscious of itself until conscious creatures like us humans come along and start loving, along with all the other stuff we experience.

This is conjecture.

Yes, love is real. It's part of what we Homo sapiens do.

However, there's no good reason (nor any good intuition) to support a belief that what lies in the realm of Mystery beyond all human knowing is love. While I'm not out to be a love killjoy, it irks me when people claim that love is the wellspring of existence.

Here's what we know about the wellspring of existence: nothing.

Nobody has any idea why there is something rather than nothing, or even if that question makes any sense. So nothing is known about existence pure and simple, which some prefer to call being.

I love to ponder the mystery of existence. That's why I bought Freke's book, "The Mystery of Existence." I loved the title. But I can't accept God is love as the essence of that mystery. I much prefer three other words.

What the fuck? or What the fuck! 

(It'd take a whole other sermon to discuss what a difference the ? and ! make to these three holy words; brief answer is that they differ somewhat as to how fuck is used as an intensive; aspiring theologians in the Church of What the Fuck may wish to study here and here.)

What the fuck is my preferred way of relating to cosmic mystery. It's a terrific phrase, pregnant with meaning, as befits its sexual overtones. Here's the Wiktionary definition:

what the fuck!

1.  
   1. (vulgar) Used to express astonishment, shock, incredulity, or disbelief (as a shortened form of expressions such as "What the fuck is going on?", "...are you doing?", or "...is that?").
   2. (vulgar) Used to express nonchalance or the dismissal of any consequences of something one is about to do. I finally said “eh, what the fuck” and quit my job.

Beautiful.

What the fuck? exactly expresses, both emotionally and cognitively, how I feel when I envision the mystery of existence -- how it is that here I am, doing what I'm doing on planet Earth, which is circling one of hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, which is one of hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe, which came into existence some fourteen billion years ago, yet existence itself has existed for... What the fuck?... nobody knows... probably eternally.

So since nobody has any idea about what existence/being is all about; since nothing is the only honest answer to what is known about the mystery of existence -- I choose to proclaim a truthful What the fuck? before the majesty of our not-knowing, rather than the much less defensible God is love.

Leave mystery mysterious. Don't contaminate cosmic mystery with human conjecture. Honor honest not-knowing. These are the main points of my first Church of What the Fuck sermon.

I'll end with a preview of a follow-up sermon, where I'll discuss the sacred differences between What the fuck! and What the fuck? As noted in the Wiktionary definition above, What the fuck! expresses nonchalance and lack of regard for consequences.

I'm not suggesting this as a wise course of action in many circumstances, such as smoke coming out of an electrical outlet in your home, or a hacking cough that won't go away. No, I'm talking about a sense of cosmic nonchalance.

What the fuck! is a highly recommended attitude for those in recovery from religious dogmatism, rigid commandments, fear of falling into the Devil's hands, and other fundamentalist bullshit. If you feel like doing something, and can't think of any reason not to other than your religious conditioning, embrace...

What the fuck! Just do it.

God isn't happy with deeply religious Americans

I had a conversation with God today. I'm sure of it. Just as sure, at least, as so many other prophets, gurus, masters, and other purported communicators with the divine have been. 

In my case, a godly voice didn't come out of a burning bush. It was more intimate than that: God spoke to me from right inside my own head, which makes it difficult for me to doubt a divine encounter that was so direct.

Below you'll learn what God commanded me to preach.

Be warned, God has a foul mouth. He doesn't mince words when he's seriously pissed. And believe me, He is. Given his omniscience, God was right on top of yesterday's Gallup poll news release.

PRINCETON, NJ -- Forty-six percent of Americans believe in the creationist view that God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years. The prevalence of this creationist view of the origin of humans is essentially unchanged from 30 years ago, when Gallup first asked the question. About a third of Americans believe that humans evolved, but with God's guidance; 15% say humans evolved, but that God had no part in the process.

...The Most Religious Americans Are Most Likely to Be Creationists

Gallup's question wording explicitly frames the three alternatives in terms of God's involvement in the process of human development, making it less than surprising to find that the more religious the American, the more likely he or she is to choose the creationist viewpoint.

...Two-thirds of Americans who attend religious services weekly choose the creationist alternative, compared with 25% of those who say they seldom or never attend church. The views of Americans who attend almost every week or monthly fall in between those of the other two groups. Still, those who seldom or never attend church are more likely to believe that God guided the evolutionary process than to believe that humans evolved with no input from God.

Time to tell you what God thinks about this. Here's what God told me, verbatim.

You fucking religious idiots! You're going to hell. Count on it! Sins I can forgive; willful idiocy, no way. And the disrespect... outrageous. I went to a goddamn lot of trouble to leave you with enough smarts to figure out what the cosmos is all about. 

And now a freaking two-thirds of the bozos who attend religious services weekly say, to hell with the knowledge God has given us, we believe in a made-up story book. Unbelievable. The Bible is chock full of bullshit, which you assholes suck like candy, while you ignore the obvious evidence I left for you.

Hello! Heaven to Earth... is anybody religious listening? Are only my dearly beloved scientists paying attention to my reality?

The Big Bang. Galaxy formation. Supernovas. Life arising on Earth. Evolution. For fourteen billion years I've been waiting for intelligent beings to pop up in your universe who could get a glimpse into how their popping-up happened.

I was looking forward to listening in on more expressions of wonder than I'm getting from religious Americans. Instead of Wow, so that's how God's cosmos is put together! I'm hearing I believe in the Bible, so God created humans just as they are today in the past 10,000 years.

Wrong, wrong, wrong! Super fucking wrong!

So wrong, I'm going to enjoy putting every idiot who chooses the fantasy of creationism over the facts of the cosmos into Scientific Hell after they die. Maybe listening to the same lecture about evolution over and over non-stop for a couple of billion years will drive some sense into their God-empty religious consciousnesses.

And don't get me started about other head-in-the-sand stuff that makes me just as mad. Global warming and species extinctions for example. Hey, humans, you're supposed to take care of the Earth you're on, not trash it!

I'm glad I decided to have a cosmos with a multiverse, which the scientifically savvy among you are starting to see some clues about. There's plenty of other places where intelligence has evolved to understand facts clearly. 

Hopefully those deeply religious asswipes on your planet will see God's light eventually. Thanks for listening to my rant, Brian. I've chosen you to pass on my words through your blog. Appreciate it.

The churchless are my favorite humans. They aren't blinded by religious crap which smears up their vision of my cosmos.

So there you are. A message from God. Believe it. Along with unguided evolution over hundreds of millions of years.

If the Gallup poll creationist trendline doesn't start changing in a more scientific direction soon, God is going to get even more pissed off.

Implications

Despite the many changes that have taken place in American society and culture over the past 30 years, including new discoveries in biological and social science, there has been virtually no sustained change in Americans' views of the origin of the human species since 1982. The 46% of Americans who today believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years is little changed from the 44% who believed this 30 years ago, when Gallup first asked the question.

More broadly, some 78% of Americans today believe that God had a hand in the development of humans in some way, just slightly less than the percentage who felt this way 30 years ago.

All in all, there is no evidence in this trend of a substantial movement toward a secular viewpoint on human origins.

Most Americans are not scientists, of course, and cannot be expected to understand all of the latest evidence and competing viewpoints on the development of the human species. Still, it would be hard to dispute that most scientists who study humans agree that the species evolved over millions of years, and that relatively few scientists believe that humans began in their current form only 10,000 years ago without the benefit of evolution. Thus, almost half of Americans today hold a belief, at least as measured by this question wording, that is at odds with the preponderance of the scientific literature.

Physics knows more about "nothing" than theology or philosophy

It's amazing, how much can be said about nothing.

Nothing always has been a favorite topic of theologians and philosophers. Now physicists are getting into the Nothing Game, big time (see here and here).

There's a basic dispute between fact-focused scientists on one side, and concept-obsessed thinkers on the other: is "nothing" a something that can be investigated, or an absolute absence of anything? (including "absence")

I've read a bunch of books and articles that argue both sides of this question, which is central to the classic Why is there something rather than nothing? question. More and more I favor how physicists such as Lawrence Krauss look upon nothing.

"Intelligent design" is simply a unifying umbrella for opposing evolution. Similarly, some philosophers and many theologians define and redefine "nothing" as not being any of the versions of nothing that scientists currently describe.

But therein, in my opinion, lies the intellectual bankruptcy of much of theology and some of modern philosophy. For surely "nothing" is every bit as physical as "something." It then behooves us to understand precisely the physical nature of both these quantities. And without science, any definition is just words.

A century ago, had one described "nothing" as referring to purely empty space, possessing no real material entity, this might have received little argument. But the results of the past century have taught us that empty space is in fact far from the inviolate nothingness that we presupposed before we learned more about how nature works.

Now, I am told by religious critics that I cannot refer to empty space as "nothing," but rather as a "quantum vacuum," to distinguish it from the philosopher's or theologian's idealized "nothing." ... And we're told that the escape from the "real" nothing requires divinity, with "nothing" thus defined by fiat to be "that from which only God can create something."

In the New York Times, philosopher Gary Gutting asks "Can Physics and Philosophy Get Along?" He doesn't like how Krauss disparages the usefulness of philosophy in understanding the ultimate nature of the universe.

Well, get real, Professor Gutting. That's what science is all about: reality.

If there isn't a way to study the nature of something, either directly or through systematic theoretical models (often mathematical), science isn't interested in it. This doesn't mean that science knows about everything that exists in the cosmos.

Far from it. Science embraces not-knowing. (See "Ignorance: How it Drives Science." Fascinating book.)

However, if there's no sign of something, no way to sense anything about it, no ability to come up with any evidence concerning it, that "something" is a conceptual abstraction which only exists for us humans within the brains that conjured up the notion of it.

This is why most scientists, along with me, reject the astounding statement Gutting makes at the end of his essay.

Precisely because science deals with only what can be known, direct or indirectly, by sense experience, it cannot answer the question of whether there is anything — for example, consciousness, morality, beauty or God — that is not entirely knowable by sense experience. To show that there is nothing beyond sense experience, we would need philosophical arguments, not scientific experiments.

Krauss may well be right that philosophers should leave questions about the nature of the world to scientists. But, without philosophy, his claim can only be a matter of faith, not knowledge.

Huh?

How could philosophical arguments show there is nothing beyond sense experience? And what makes Gutting think that scientists are interested in proving the absence of anything beyond sense experience through experimentation?

The results of experiments must be sensed by an experimenter. This holds true whether one is talking about "external" science or "internal" science. Meditation could be (and often is) viewed as a means of investigating realms of reality beyond the physical. But any sign of these realms would have to be sensed by the meditator.

So there's no way to get around the need for sensory experience in knowing reality. I have no idea how philosophy or theology can claim to possess knowledge of what lies beyond sensation, such as an ultimate "nothing" about which nothing can be said or experienced because it's, duh..., nothing.

Krauss updates his views about philosophy in a recent Scientific American article, "The Consolation of Philosophy."

It's well worth reading. Krauss is courteous to those he disagrees with about the nature of nothing, yet firm in his conviction: if there's no way to discern nothing, it's a human abstraction, not really real reality.

What I tried to do in my writing on this subject is carefully attempt to define precisely what scientists operationally mean by nothing, and to differentiate between what we know, and what is merely plausible, and what we might be able to probe in the future, and what we cannot.  The rest is, to me, just noise.

So, to those philosophers I may have unjustly offended by seemingly blanket statements about the field, I apologize.  I value your intelligent conversation and the insights of anyone who thinks carefully about our universe and who is willing to guide their thinking based on the evidence of reality.  

To those who wish to impose their definition of reality abstractly, independent of emerging empirical knowledge and the changing questions that go with it, and call that either philosophy or theology, I would say this:  Please go on talking to each other, and let the rest of us get on with the goal of learning more about nature.

"Nothing" replaces "God" in modern cosmology

Nothing is a big deal in physics nowadays. As noted in a previous post, scientists have found that even seemingly empty space actually is seething with energetic activity. 

So much so, as cosmologist Lawrence Krauss describes in his new book, "A Universe from Nothing," nothing can reasonably be viewed as the creative principle which brought the universe into being -- a job most religions give to God.

We have discovered that we live in a universe in which empty space -- what formerly could have passed for nothing -- has a new dynamic that dominates the current evolution of the cosmos.

We have discovered that all signs suggest a universe that could and plausibly did arise from a deeper nothing -- involving the absence of space itself -- and which may one day return to nothing via processes that may not only be comprehensible but also processes that do not require any external control or direction.

In this sense, science, as physicist Steven Weinberg has emphasized, does not make it impossible to believe in God, but rather makes it possible to not believe in God. Without science, everything is a miracle. With science, there remains the possibility that nothing is. Religious belief in this case becomes less and less necessary, and also less and less relevant.

Absolutely true.

I've finished reading Krauss' book. Now I better understand why this statement by Richard Dawkins in his afterword to "A Universe from Nothing" isn't as overblown as it will seem to many.

Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages. If On the Origin of Species was biology's deadliest blow to supernaturalism, we may come to see A Universe from Nothing as the equivalent from cosmology. The title means exactly what it says. And what it says is devastating.

Devastating to religiosity. Devastating to a belief in a creator God. But for me, the message is wonderfully inspiring. 

The Beatles sang, "All you need is love." I'll agree, so long as what is loved is real. Love minus reality is fantasy. Like John Lennon, I'm also a lyricist, albeit a crappy one. As shared before, here's an original song that I like to sing in the shower.

I love my dog.
I love my cat.
Only problem is, 
I don't have a cat.
It's hard to love
What you don't have.

(If the song seems stupid when you just read the lyrics, believe me, it sounds way stupider when I sing it off key.)

I used to love God. Now I realize that I never did. I loved my idea of God, my fantasy of God. The real universe, nature, is so much more lovable that any imagined divinity. As Krauss says, "We need to live our experience as it is and with our eyes open. The universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not."

Speaking of "is"...

The mystery of is-ness remains even after science has discovered how a quantum vacuum of nothingness could produce not only all the stuff that exists within the vastness of space, but even space itself. So when Dawkins speaks of science coming to grips with the Big Question of "Why is there something rather than nothing?", this doesn't mean that science knows why existence itself exists.

Nor does religion. The existence of is-ness, of anything at all, is a primal mystery which almost certainly will remain an enigma to the human mind.

Why? My theory is that the question itself is meaningless from a cosmic perspective. We humans are used to everything having a cause, so we extrapolate from everyday experience to the cosmos as a whole.

Thus religions are created, to explain a creation that doesn't need explaining. The cosmos is. End of story. God doesn't add anything to the tale, because unless God also is viewed as a simple "is" (always has been, always will be), there's a need to ask what created God.

Science and religion both end up staring at the unfathomable blank wall of the mystery, is. However, most religions unnecessarily multiply the mystery with an imagined unseen God who is believed to have existed prior to the creation of the cosmos.

As Krauss describes in his book, modern science has learned enough about how "nothing" behaves to know that it's entirely possible for entire universes to emerge from nothing. 

Sure, this isn't the "nothing" of religion. But nothing is that "nothing." Meaning, no religion starts with absolute nothing with lacks the capacity for "something." The Christian God supposedly created the universe out of nothing, but this isn't true. Isn't God considered to be something?

So cosmology indeed is rendering God increasingly irrelevant. Once there is the bare something of "nothing" (basically, the laws of quantum mechanics, to my understanding), universes bubble up into being without any other creative force.

As to the mystery of is-ness, let it be (another wise bit of advice from the Beatles). Krauss says:

The response to why there is something rather than nothing becomes almost trite: there is something simply because if there were nothing, we wouldn't find ourselves living there!

Science's "nothing" different from religion's "nothing"

You'd think that if secular scientists and religious true believers could agree on anything, it'd be the nature of nothing. After all, isn't nothing, well, nothing?

Zero. Zilch. Nada. Absence. Void. 

But, no, here too science and religion are butting heads. Scientific nothing is quite different from religious nothing.

And while I used to be more on religion's side when I thought about what nothing meant in the Big Question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?", now I strongly lean toward the headbutt (or to the faithful, butthead) of science.

Physicist/cosmologist Lawrence Krauss does a great job laying out the debate in his new book, "A Universe from Nothing." Subtitle is the aforementioned Big Question. If you don't want to read his engrossing 191 pages, Krauss talks on You Tube for about an hour on this subject.

(The video has gotten over 1,140,000 views. Good to know that a talking dog and Kate Upton aren't the only ones getting lots of hits on You Tube.)

Here's how Krauss lays out the controversy in the preface to his book.

Before going further, I want to devote a few words to the notion of "nothing" -- a topic that I will return to at some length later. For I have learned that, when discussing this question in public forums, nothing upsets the philosophers and theologians who disagree with me more than the notion that I, as a scientist, do not truly understand "nothing." (I am tempted to retort here that theologians are experts at nothing.)

"Nothing," they insist, is not any of the things I discuss. Nothing is "nonbeing," in some vague and ill-defined sense. This reminds me of my own efforts to define "intelligent design" when I first began debating with creationists, of which, it became clear, there is no clear definition, except to say what it isn't. 

"Intelligent design" is simply a unifying umbrella for opposing evolution. Similarly, some philosophers and many theologians define and redefine "nothing" as not being any of the versions of nothing that scientists currently describe.

But therein, in my opinion, lies the intellectual bankruptcy of much of theology and some of modern philosophy. For surely "nothing" is every bit as physical as "something." It then behooves us to understand precisely the physical nature of both these quantities. And without science, any definition is just words.

A century ago, had one described "nothing" as referring to purely empty space, possessing no real material entity, this might have received little argument. But the results of the past century have taught us that empty space is in fact far from the inviolate nothingness that we presupposed before we learned more about how nature works.

Now, I am told by religious critics that I cannot refer to empty space as "nothing," but rather as a "quantum vacuum," to distinguish it from the philosopher's or theologian's idealized "nothing." ... And we're told that the escape from the "real" nothing requires divinity, with "nothing" thus defined by fiat to be "that from which only God can create something."

Brilliant and cogent analysis.

Krauss has nailed the Big Question about the Big Question: When we ask, why is there something rather than nothing?, it's important to make clear what the "nothing" is we're contrasting "something" with.

For many years prior to my churchless conversion, a.k.a. enlightenment, I thought of "nothing" in the idealized way Krauss criticizes above. Meaning, my "nothing" was an abstract quasi-philosophical, quasi-theological conception that didn't relate to anything observable or experienceable.

After all, how could it? My "nothing" was the absence of "something." So much so, there wasn't even the potential for any existence in my notion of non-existence. Yet strangely (looking back), my "nothing" had some sort of presence to it. Otherwise, how could I conceive of it?

It was like I was some sort of Godlike being looking upon existence from a transcendent realm, contemplating two cosmic possibilities: one where "nothing" prevailed eternally; another where the "something" we are aware of is existent.

I'd wonder why there's something rather than nothing. It just seemed so mysterious, so awesome, so marvelous, that instead of nothing, there was something, and I'm a part of it! 

My mistake, as Lawrence Krauss points out, was in assuming that nothing and something are both realistic possibilities. Actually, there's no such thing as nothing, in the sense of nonbeing. Material existence is what there is. The opposite of reality isn't nothing, nonbeing, or nonexistence. Such is a theological or philosophical idea, an abstraction, present only in the human brain/imagination.

Religions, particularly of the Western monotheisitic variety, adore the idea of creatio ex nihilo, "creation out of nothing."

But that's all it is: an idea. There's no evidence of the absolute "nothing" so loved by the religionists who take issue with Krauss's scientific view of a quantum nothing that creates universes instead of God. The quantum nothingness of empty space is filled with energy, potential, possibility.

So the everlasting God of religion, which is nowhere to be observed, is replaced by the everlasting quantum nothing which has been proven to exist even in seemingly absolutely empty spacetime.

As Krauss says, religious true believers argue with this scientific godless understanding of the cosmos. "But the quantum vacuum isn't really nothing," they say. "It is governed by the laws of nature." Well, who says that reality has to conform with how God-crazy humans want things to be?

Reality is what it is. Nothing isn't really nothing. Deal with it, religionists.

Universe may not be eternal, but existence is

Believers in God who follow modern science will be heartened by a recent article in New Scientist, "Why physicists can't avoid a creation event." 

While many of us may be OK with the idea of the big bang simply starting everything, physicists, including Hawking, tend to shy away from cosmic genesis. "A point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God," Hawking told the meeting, at the University of Cambridge, in a pre-recorded speech.

For a while it looked like it might be possible to dodge this problem, by relying on models such as an eternally inflating or cyclic universe, both of which seemed to continue infinitely in the past as well as the future. Perhaps surprisingly, these were also both compatible with the big bang, the idea that the universe most likely burst forth from an extremely dense, hot state about 13.7 billion years ago.

However, as cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University in Boston explained last week, that hope has been gradually fading and may now be dead. He showed that all these theories still demand a beginning.

To me, though, I don't see why a beginning to the universe implies anything about the "hand of God" being the cause of creation.

If we didn't know that our galaxy is part of the vastly larger universe, it'd be easy to think that the formation of our solar system can be traced back to the mysterious formation of the Milky Way Galaxy, before which time and space supposedly couldn't exist.

Several decades into the twentieth century, there wasn't any firm evidence of other galaxies. Now, we know there are at least a hundred billion galaxies. So religious believers and unbelievers alike should be extremely cautious about assuming that what we now know about reality is anywhere close to the ultimate truth.

The big bang banged. Our universe came into being. How? From where? Why? When? Nobody knows. It's a mystery.

According to the article, some theories of modern physicists -- eternal inflation, cyclic universe, static cosmic egg -- seem to be on the ropes, inconsistent with mathematical models. What's surprising about that? What I find surprising is that we humans have been able to make as much progress as we have toward understanding the origin of the universe, and how it has evolved during its post-big bang history of 14 billion years.

Sure, us Homo sapiens are the most intelligent great apes.

We've come a long way over the past few million years, far surpassing what other primates are able to achieve, knowledge-wise. Yet it's important to keep in mind that in comparison with cosmic time, monkeys and humans shared a common ancestor just a blink of an eye ago.

I doubt we'll ever be able to comprehend what the cosmos as a whole is like, which probably includes much more than just the universe in which we find ourselves. I doubt even more that we'll ever be able to know, really know, how the origin of everything in existence came to be. 

When I say "we," I mean humans. Almost certainly, our species will die out one day. Perhaps more advanced earthly species will evolve capabilities of consciousness which will enable them to grok stuff we're utterly incapable of understanding. 

Let's suppose some conscious being, somewhere, some time, somehow, grasps (or is) the ultimate truth of the cosmos. This being knows. It groks. It's so attuned to the Absolute Truth of Existence there's not even a Planck length of distance between the being and that truth. This being does its best to communicate what it knows to us humans. And I wonder...

Would we have any chance of understanding? Of knowing what that being knows? Of fitting our repository of limited human truths into whatever lies at the heart of the entire cosmos, our unimaginably vast universe plus all that lies beyond what we know now?

I doubt that we could. I doubt that our great ape consciousness, no matter how evolved it is compared to our primate cousins, would be able to take in the Absolute Truth of Existence and make much sense of it. 

Reminds me of Douglas Adam's Total Perspective Vortex.

The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.

To explain — since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation — every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.

The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.
Trin Tragula — for that was his name — was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.

And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.

"Have some sense of proportion!" she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.

And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex — just to show her.

And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.

To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion. 

Exactly.

I'd like to know what the cosmos is all about. But not at the cost of having my brain annihilated. I don't want to end up in a mental hospital muttering to anyone who'll listen, "The universe is... is... is..." Heck, that's akin to what I was up to back in the sixties. Been there, done that.

So I'm pretty much content to accept that I'll never know how or why our universe was created in the big bang. Nor will scientists, at least not in the foreseeable future. I can picture the big bang banging, yet what it banged from or what it is banging into... that's beyond my mind's pay grade.

Back when I wrote "Existence exists. Amazing!" I was more open to the possibility that somehow human consciousness could be the missing piece that completes the jigsaw puzzle of reality. Well, it's still a possibility. 

Now I enjoy contemplating the beauty of boundless existence without feeling that I'll ever understand it. Something always has been, even if the universe hasn't. Wow. Beautiful. 

"Empty" space really isn't -- but don't jump to spiritual conclusions

Wow! That's my one-word review of the first episode, "What is Space?," in NOVA's The Fabric of the Cosmos series. (You can watch it online.)

I already knew many of the facts presented by physicist Brian Greene. Such as:

-- Matter is mostly empty space. Take out the space, and Greene said that the mass of the Empire State Building would condense to the size of a super-heavy grain of rice. 

-- Space isn't really empty. It is seething with activity at the quantum level. Particles are continually flashing in and out of existence.

-- TIme and space are intimately intertwined, so much so we can call them space-time. This is shown by the speed of light, which always is constant no matter how a source of light is moving. Meaning, time and space adjust so the speed of light remains unaltered.

-- While Newton considered space to be the solid stage on which events in the universe play out, Einstein showed that space is an ever-changing "rubbery" fabric. 

-- In relativity theory, gravity is distended space. The moon orbits the Earth because it is trapped in a "bowl" of warped space-time, kind of like a ball in a roulette wheel spinning around.

-- Space is filled with dark energy that is causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate (the more it expands, the more space there is, and thus more dark energy). No one knows what dark energy is, but whatever it is, 70% of the universe is it.

One fact, among many, that I didn't know was that a lengthy expensive satellite experiment, Gravity Probe B, recently confirmed Einstein's contention that space-time not only is stretched, but also twisted.  

I also wasn't aware that the search for a theorized Higgs boson (which gives mass to particles) involves knocking a tiny chunk out of space-time with a high-energy particle accelerator. Somehow that seemed way cool to me, the way Brian Greene described it.

Watching a recording of "What is Space?" with my wife last night, I was awestruck at how the underpinnings of the universe are so unlike our everyday understanding of reality. The show stretched my imagination in somewhat the same way as a massive object stretches space: mind-bendingly.

You want mystery? Science has it. You want wonder? Science has it. You want infinity? Science has it. You want an ultimate reality far beyond current human understanding? Science has it.

You want definite answers to what the cosmos is all about? Well, science doesn't have it.

For that, embrace religious dogma. It won't be true, almost certainly, but you'll get the illusion of certainty -- which is what most people are after.

I suspect that the talk about an unseen, unknown all-pervading dark energy on "What is Space?" will cause quite a few New Age'y types to proclaim that science has discovered spirit. Not exactly. In fact, not even close. 

Physicist Lisa Randall offers up a general explanation of why this is so in her new book, "Knocking on Heaven's Door." Here's some excerpts:

Some critics [of science] go even further, asserting that although scientists can predict a great deal, the reliability of those predictions is invariably suspect. Skeptics insist, notwithstanding scientific evidence, that there could always be a catch or a loophole. Perhaps people could come back from the dead or at the very least enter a portal into the Middle Ages or into Middle earth. These doubters simply don't trust the claims of science that a thing is definitely impossible.

However, despite the wisdom of keeping an open mind and recognizing that new discoveries await, a deep fallacy is buried in this logic. The problem becomes clear when we dissect the meaning of such statements as those above and, in particular, apply the notion of scale. These questions ignore the fact that although there will always exist unexplored distance or energy ranges where the laws of physics might change, we know the laws of physics on human scales extremely well. We have had ample opportunity to test these laws over the centuries.

...When scientists say we know something we mean only that we have certain ideas and theories whose predictions have been well tested over a certain range of distances or energies. These ideas and theories are not necessarily the eternal laws for the ages or the most fundamental of physical laws...Weird things are possible, but the ones non-physicists are understandably most interested in are the ones we can observe.

...Despite this neat separation by distances, people too often take shortcuts when trying to understand difficult science and the world. And that can easily lead to an overzealous application of theories... Today such misguided extrapolations are more likely to be made about quantum mechanics -- as people try to apply it on macroscopic scales where its consequences usually average away and leave no measurable signatures.

...Quantum mechanics has nothing to do with many of the tantalizing ideas people often attribute to it. I cannot affect an experiment by staring at it, quantum mechanics does not mean there are no reliable predictions, and most measurements are constrained by practical limitations and not by the uncertainty principle. 

No need for God with "Wonders of the Universe"

I felt awe, inspiration, reverence, humility. Not from a religious ritual, holy book, or spiritual sage -- from the first episode I've watched of a BBC science program, "Wonders of the Universe."

Youthful-looking physicist Brian Cox explained in Children of the Stars how the same 92 naturally occurring elements are found everywhere in the universe. So what we are, the universe is.

I've heard this before, many times.

But the way Cox put it seemed new and fresh. In the clip below he says that the building blocks of the universe -- protons and neutrons -- formed within the first few seconds after the big bang (which banged away 13.7 billion years ago).

Everything that's happened since has been a rearranging of those building blocks into increasingly complex structures, one of which is the human brain that now has achieved a good understanding of how it came to be able to understand.

Wow. Think about it. Marvel about it.

You, me, everything and everybody on Earth, the entirety of 100 billion galaxies each containing hundreds of billions of stars -- all of this came into being some 14 billion years ago.

The protons and neutrons in the nucleus of the atoms we're made of have been around that long. The atoms themselves are less old. The heavy elements (heavier than hydrogen and helium) are younger still, since they couldn't be formed until stars collapsed in upon themselves, forming additional elements through nuclear fusion.

BIgger the star, the more dramatic is the fusion process. The heaviest elements, like gold, are formed in super nova explosions where the temperature briefly reaches 100 billion degrees before the star dies in an amazingly powerful fashion.

Have a look at how Cox explains this.

I don't like the idea of dying. Yet as I watched Children of the Stars I felt more at peace about the notion of death. I saw that if stars hadn't died, Earth never would have formed. Nor would we humans exist.

Death and life are inseparable. Religions offer the promise of everlasting life, but this isn't the reality of the universe. Science can't disprove the hypothesis of eternal existence in some heavenly realm, yet neither is there any demonstrable evidence of this.

What we know, with near scientific certainty, are the truths presented by Brian Cox. We are made of stardust, heavy elements formed by exploding stars over the 14 billion year old age of the universe.

If there is a God, this is how God created us: as free-floating protons and neutrons which evolved over an immense span of time via the laws of nature into us Homo sapiens.

In a review of "Wonders of the Universe" I learned about what Cox says in another episode:

"Life as we know it," Professor Cox explained at one point, "is only possible for one thousandth of a billion billion billionth, billion billion billionth, billion billion billionth of a percent" of the lifespan of the universe. And of that barely conceivable fraction, a human life occupies only a tiny space.

Well, here we are. Amazingly. Yet also, utterly predictably.

The universe is what it is. We can't say about the universe as a whole, "what are the chances..." The chance is 100% that human beings came to occupy the planet we call Earth during the astoundingly small percentage of the lifespan of the universe that Cox says is suitable for life as we know it.

Gratitude.

This was perhaps the strongest emotion I felt after watching Children of the Stars. I wasn't grateful to a personal (or even impersonal) god, because I don't believe in the existence of such an entity.

Rather, I was filled with gratitude that out of all of the countless heavy element atoms in the cosmos, a bunch had come together into a form I call "me" that possessed the ability to be conscious.

Religions offer up unreasonable expectations, albeit appealing. Sure, I'd like to live forever. If the essence of my being was "eternal soul," "cosmic consciousness," or such, supposedly this could happen.

But reality teaches otherwise. As Cox explained, it's much more likely that the atoms which comprise my body will become part of other entities in the universe after I die. My consciousness will end when my brain does.

Bob, my brother-in-law, was a practical, mechanical, scientifically-minded person. We didn't talk philosophy a lot. Once though, he shared what he thought would happen after he died.

"I think that my atoms will go back into the universe," he told me. Pretty damn simple.

At the time, I was heavy into my true believing phase. I wanted to believe that my soul would survive my bodily death, that my consciousness not only would persist into an afterlife but expand.

Now, I've come to better appreciate the wisdom of Bob's reality-based view of life and death. It's better to see things as they are, not as we would wish them to be. And what we are is the universe. There's no difference between us and the cosmos. We are stardust; stardust is us.

If it turns out that I'm more than this, my post-death experience will be a lot more interesting than I expect (after all, anything is more than zero). If not, I'm grateful that I live in an era when modern science can be explained so wonderfully by people like Brian Cox.

There are many wonders of the universe. Foremost, perhaps, is our ability to wonder at the wonders.

Mystery of existence eludes both religion and science

"Why is there something rather than nothing?" This is the ultimate question. So ultimate'y, it shouldn't be viewed as a question, because questions imply answers.

I prefer, "There is something rather than nothing."

Leave out the "why." Embrace the stark, unarguable reality of existence. Forget God. Something must exist or God couldn't exist. So my awe is directed toward existence, not God.

Existence is everlasting, eternal, omnipresent, unfathomable. Wild! If I want to feel a tingle up my psyche's spine before I fall into sleep, I ponder there is something rather than nothing as I doze off.

(Some reflections of my ponderings are here, here, here, here, and here.)

Last week a fresh New Scientist issue arrived in the mail. Glancing at the cover I was excited to read:

The Existential Issue
The staggering mysteries of being
(and how to cope with them)

Appropriately, the first mystery tackled in the existential issue was "Why is there something rather than nothing?" After all, without something, there'd be no other mysteries.

I liked the mixture of science and philosophy in the article by Amanda Gefter. In less than three minutes you can get the gist of how modern cosmology looks upon this question in the following New Scientist video.

(My favorite part: "something and nothing may well be the same thing." The universe is just a form of nothing. Ooh! So Zen!

Still, this doesn't really answer the question of why anything exists at all. Gefter acknowledges the untouched mystery of existence in her final paragraph.

None of this really gets us off the hook, however. Our understanding of creation relies on the validity of the laws of physics, particularly quantum uncertainty.

But that implies that the laws of physics were somehow encoded into the fabric of our universe before it existed. How can physical laws exist outside of space and time and without a cause of their own?

Or, to put it another way, why is there something rather than nothing?

Religious believers will seize upon this admission of science's inability to peek behind the curtain of why existence exists and exclaim, "God is the only answer!" To which I reply, "Wrong!"

God, whether viewed as a personal or impersonal power, fills precisely the same role in theology as do the laws of physics in science.

That is, a given. Something for which no cause is offered. A brute fact, wihout which no other facts are possible.

OK. To me, it's a tie. Both religion and science are clueless about the ultimate question: why is there something rather than nothing? Each offers up an answer that doesn't satisfy.

"God created the universe." Fine. So tell me, what created God?

"The universe was created by a quantum fluctuation." Fine. So tell me, what created the quantum fluctuation?

What is simply is. There is something rather than nothing. I find this eminently satisfying. More than that, actually, much more. It's awesome. Mindblowing. Astoundingly meaningful.

Why? LIke existence itself, there's no why.

Embrace uncertainty, shun dogma -- be a possibilian!

Dichotomies are limiting. Also, unrealistic. Theist/atheist. Believer/skeptic. Conservative/liberal. Follower/leader. Human/animal. Matter/energy.

The world comes in a lot more flavors than just vanilla and chocolate. There's all sorts of shades of gray between black and white. Reality doesn't completely conform to how we Homo sapiens' conceptualize it.

This is one reason I like David Eagleman's "possibilian" philosophy so much. (I've blogged about it before here and here.)

Eagleman is a scientist. He recognizes that the scientific method is more than passively open-minded; science also actively seeks out new possibilities, creatively wondering "what if... ."

Yet this doesn't mean giving credence to every crazy notion that comes along. Possibilities are hypotheses. If a possibility can't be confirmed by solid evidence, it remains what it is.

I just watched a twenty-two minute You Tube video of Eagleman giving an entertaining talk at a TEDx, meaningTED-like, conference. (Thanks, Dogribb, for sharing this link in a blog comment.)

The guy is lively, sharp, humorous, and youthful-appearing. He's one of those doctors that I encounter more and more frequently now that I'm over sixty: looking like they're not out of high school yet.

 

I was inspired by David Eagleman's presentation.

His basic attitude toward life, reality, and the cosmos is pretty much the same as mine. Explore possibilities, but know the difference between what's only a product of human imagination and what's truly "out there."

Out there needed to put between quotation marks because everything we know and experience is in here -- within our brains. Eagleman, a neuroscientist, says that consciousness is one of the many mysteries which science hasn't yet been able to unravel.

And may never do so. Uncertainty almost certainly always will be part of the human condition.

We may never understand how our universe came to be or how our brains are able to experience it. As Eagleman says in the video, the human brain is the most complex entity we know about.

Maybe, he observes, one day we could put together a model of the brain akin to assembling a trillion piece Lego set. Yet at what point could we conclude that what we've constructed knows what it is like to taste some mint-flavored hummus?

(Not the example he gave, but I just tried some that my wife experimented with making. We both agreed that the experiment never should be repeated, as minty hummus turned out to elicit an ugh from us.)

This world is amazing.

Every day we should look upon life with wide-open possibility-seeking eyes, embracing both what we know and what we don't -- the latter being a much vaster portion of the cosmic ocean that we're floating in.

I liked how Eagleman ends his video:

Try to lead a life that's free from dogma, full of awe and wonder, and to celebrate possibility, and to praise uncertainty.

Religion, he says, can't be embraced because there's no evidence of a supernatural being or the many other sorts of divinities hypothesized by the world's religions. Yet a rigid form of atheism also isn't defensible, because we simply don't know what lies beyond the horizon of current scientific knowledge.

So that leaves us with possibilities, a great place to be. You can explore Eagleman's notion of possibility space via various links on his web site.

If the universe is infinite, we're immortal (sort of)

Wow, I got some great news after reading only two chapters in physicist Brian Greene's new book, "The Hidden Reality." I'm immortal!

Only catch is, the "me" who exists forever isn't really the same me who is typing out these words. Though maybe it is.

Just depends on how I look upon myself: (1) as a being with a unique essence peculiar to myself (I don't mean a smell, but a non-physical identity), or (2) as a configuration of atoms which could be almost exactly duplicated in another corner of the cosmos.

I've read Greene's previous books, enjoying them, but finding them a bit overly technical. He's used a different style in "The Hidden Reality," jumping directly into the scientific good stuff without feeling like he needs to go over the basics of quantum theory, cosmology, and such.

So, bingo, by pages 4-5 Greene has introduced the mind-boggling premise of his book: reality could well be a hell of a lot bigger and stranger than it appears from our earthly vantage point.

A striking fact (it's in part what propelled me to write this book) is that many of the major developments in fundamental theoretical physics -- relativistic physics, quantum physics, cosmological physics, unified physics, computational physics -- have led us to consider one or another variety of parallel universe.

Indeed, the chapters that follow trace a narrative through nine variations on the multiverse theme. Each envisions our universe as part of an unexpectedly larger whole, but the complexion of that whole and the nature of the member universes differ sharply among them.

In some, the parallel universes are separated from us by enormous stretches of space or time; in others, they're hovering millimeters away; in others still, the very notion of their location proves parochial, devoid of meaning. A similar range of possibility is manifest in the laws governing the parallel universes.

In some, the laws are the same as ours; in others, they appear different but have a shared heritage; in others still, the laws are of a form and structure unlike anything we've ever encountered. It's at once humbling and stirring to imagine just how expansive reality may be.

There's no better indication of how my current churchlessness differs from my prior true-believing self than what I read before my morning meditation (a habit for over forty years).

I still read some philosophy, usually of the Taoist/Buddhist mindfulness sort, but science books -- mostly neuroscience and physics -- are an equally common target for my yellow highlighter. Often I feel more inspired and energetic after learning a new scientific fact, than being exposed to some fresh philosophical wisdom.

Greene's discussion of infinity in his Endless Doppelgängers chapter had that sort of Wow! So cool! effect on me.

I had a sensation of being released from my usual preoccupation with myself and what is right around me -- which, of course, is a big reason why people are attracted to religions. Science, though, is even more effective at taking us out of ourselves, of putting our ego in its place, because it is real, while religiosity is fantasy.

Also, science is humble. Greene makes clear what modern science is confident about, and what is merely a hypothesis.

Our universe could be finite, like a spherical ball (except in this case, there is nothing the ball is resting in or on, so it is almost impossible to visualize the shape of the universe, as we have no familiarity with anything that isn't a separate "thing").

However, more likely the universe is infinite, for reasons I won't go into, but which have to do with the average amount of matter/energy in each cubic meter of the universe.

If this is true, infinity, not surprisingly, leads to some vastly interesting conclusions. One is that the big bang didn't result in the universe starting off in a teeny-tiny state, as I've visualized. Rather:

If space is truly infinite in size, then it always has been and always will be. When it shrinks, its contents are squeezed ever closer together, making the density of matter ever larger. But its overall extent remains infinite. After all, shrink an infinite tabletop by a factor of 2 and what do you get? Half of infinity, which is still infinite.

Religions speak of God as being infinitely this and that. Powerful. Knowing. Present. Loving. Yet there's no need to posit an other-worldly infinity; science finds evidence for infinity much closer to home. Right here, the universe where we live and breathe.

Which brings me to the most intriguing aha! in Greene's Endless Doppelgängers chapter. If the universe is infinite, then there are countless (maybe infinite) numbers of universes just like ours. Since that last sentence may sound weird, here's why a single universe could contain an infinite number of universes.

What we call the "universe" isn't all that there is.

Our knowledge of the universe is bounded by the speed of light, since information can't travel faster than this. Thus the maximum distance we can see is 41 billion light years -- more than the 13.7 billion year age of the universe, because space has been expanding since the big bang at faster than the speed of light. So distant galaxies are now much farther away than they were when light first left them.

Thus what we call the "universe" likely is just one patch of an infinite universe. Even though a patch with a radius of 41 billion light years is unimaginably huge, in an infinite universe there will be an infinite number of patches that size.

I won't go through all the arguments that Greene uses to reach his next conclusion. But trust me, they make good scientific sense. His most mind-boggling hypothesis is that in an infinite universe, each arrangement of particles in a particular "patch" of it will be repeated many times.

Since you and I are a particular arrangement of particles, this means that exact copies of us abound in other parts of the universe.

This means that if the universe is infinite in extent, you are not alone in whatever reaction you are now having to this view of reality. There are many perfect copies of you out there in the cosmos, feeling exactly the same way. And there's no way to say which is really you. All versions are physically and hence mentally identical.

Far out. In more ways than one. I'm blown away by this notion of countless me's existing elsewhere in the cosmos. And not just precise copies, but also variations on the Theme of Me.

Because not only will there be arrangements of particles that exactly mirror everything that's happened in my life, but there also will be universes where I did other things -- typed "stuff" rather than "things," for example. So it seems that in an infinite universe, everything that can happen, does happen.

Which can be interpreted to mean, "I'm immortal," since the arrangement of particles that I call "me" will be repeated countless times. However, note that Greene said "there's no way to say which is really you." Thus the whole idea of "me" as a unique individual falls away.

I find this possibility both disconcerting and appealing.

It's sort of like worrying that you've lost your car keys, then realizing that you don't have a car. Yes, it'd be nice to possess a car, but it's also pleasant to be relieved of the worries that come with having one.

Likewise, sometime I think that it'd be great if I had an immortal soul. However, if I had one, I'd worry about what was going to become of it after I die. No soul, no worries.

Brian Greene, sharp guy that he is, recognizes that his whole doppelgängers thing is founded on the assumption that we humans are arrangements of physical matter/energy, nothing more. If there is some unique something else (soul, spirit) that makes us who we are, then exact copies of you or me couldn't exist.

In interpreting the implications of this statement [that arrangements of particles in patches of the universe must be duplicated an infinite number of times], I should declare my bias. I believe that a physical system is completely determined by the arrangement of its particles.

Tell me how the particles making up the earth, the sun, the galaxy, and everything else are arranged, and you've fully articulated reality. This reductionist view is common among physicists, but there are certainly people who think otherwise.

Especially when it comes to life, some believe that an essential nonphysical aspect (spirit, soul, life force, chi, and so on) is required to animate the physical. Although I remain open to the possibility, I've never encountered any evidence to support it.

The position that makes the most sense to me is that one's physical and mental characteristics are nothing but a manifestation of how the particles in one's body are arranged. Specify the particle arrangement and you've specified everything.

Hard to disagree with. Bad news: we aren't special. Good news: we aren't special, so in an infinite universe the arrangement of particles I call "me' lives on... and on... and on.

 

Finding our place in a factual cosmos

There's only one thing wrong with religious cosmologies: they aren't true. And that's a pretty damn serious thing. Which is why we shouldn't take erroneous views of the universe seriously.

Yet we humans are meaning-creatures. Bare facts aren't enough for us.

Our highly evolved minds love to construct stories about what life is all about, what's most important for us to do, and other value-laden layerings that provide a increased depth to our existence.

The choice each of us faces is how realistic our "myths" are.

Now, that word, myth, doesn't need to refer to something untrue. There's another way of regarding that term, as described by physicist Joel Primack and philosopher of science Nancy Abrams in their book, "The View From the Center of the Universe: Discovering our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos."

Myth is a way human beings relate to their universe. What exactly is a myth? In his last book, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, mythologist Joseph Campbell made the passionate argument that what our society most desperately needs is a new story of reality for all of us -- not just some chosen group. The story must demonstrate humanity's connection to all there is, yet be consistent with what we know scientifically.

...Unlike Campbell, many people use the word myth to mean "the opposite of reality" -- that is, a notion held by other people who are delusional or at best quaint, but this is a very unfortunate understanding of myth that limits our ability to draw on its power and its importance to the human mind. Myths don't just represent a reality people already know about: myths present reality. They define it.

In this book, when we use the word "myth," we mean what Campbell meant: the highest-order explanations, the stories that people of any culture, at any time including today, communally believe and use to explain the larger reality, including their own place in it.

Here's the exciting thing about living in the 21st century: for the first time in human history, we have the ability to construct myths about our place in the universe that are actually true. 

Primack and Abrams demolish an erroneous myth: that science keeps overturning ways of understanding the cosmos, so seemingly valid current scientific theories are just as flimsy as the pre-Copernican concept that the Earth was the center of the universe.

Actually, they correctly point out, what has been happening since the time of Newton is that new theories encompass old theories.

There have been several revolutions in physics since Newton, but none of these has overthrown the previous theory. Revolutionary scientific theories do not have to overthrow their predecessors except at the earliest stage of a science when a scientific theory is replacing earlier ideas that were not well supported by evidence.

Once a field of science undergoes the revolution that creates for it a solid intellectual foundation -- like the one Newtonian mechanics gave physics, or Darwinian evolution gave biology -- that foundational theory can stand forever. Science then progresses by encompassing the foundational theory in a new and larger theory that explains things beyond the ken of the older theory.

So we can have a lot of confidence in what is currently known about the cosmos.

That knowledge is incomplete. It has lots of holes and contradictions (such as the differing perspectives of relativity theory and quantum mechanics). But basically it is almost certainly true. 

Which is why both our personal and collective meaning-myths need to be founded on scientific facts. This still leaves a lot of room for creativity, imagination, and hypothesizing about what lies out there beyond the horizon of our current Knowledge Ocean.

For example, this morning I read the "What is the Universe Made Of?" chapter in The View From the Center of the Universe. Here's a marvelous visual summary that appeared in the chapter of a whole lot of scientific research, and was thankfully shared on the book's web site.

This is a marvelous factual "myth," an easy to understand -- but not easy to genuinely comprehend -- visualization of what reality is composed of.

Visible matter is only 0.5% of the total. The black part of the pyramid represents the invisible: that is, what we do not see but know is there. The top and smallest layer of invisibility is simply non-shining and unlit atomic matter -- matter that is invisible in fact, but not in principle. It is about 4 percent of the total.

Below it lies the far more massive layer of dark matter, which is invisible in principle. It represents about 25 percent of the total. And below that lies the energy that is accelerating the expansion of the universe, dark energy. It is 70 percent of the total density of the universe now.

Wow.

Religious people often talk about the mystery of God, which attracts them. Yet there is so much mystery to be found within the bounds of science. Who needs God? Mysterious reality is much more appealing than mysterious fantasy. 

True believers in some faith also enjoy the feeling of being special that their religion offers them. Here again, though, facts of science trump the illusions of dogma. 

Primack and Abrams speak of how rare is that .01% of all matter and energy in the universe comprised of heavier elements than hydrogen and helium. That's us! We conscious beings are literally made of "stardust," since those elements are the result of exploding stars.

Here's a modern myth shared in the early part of the book, which the authors elaborate on in succeeding chapters:

Imagine you have suddenly lost your memory. You see yourself in a mirror, but there is only this moment. You are unaware of any past, even the very moment before this one. You are solid, your cells are real, your heart is pumping, but how you got to the spot on which you stand, you have no idea.

Who are you? There is no answer.

You are not your family background, your personal history, the work you've done, your hopes for the future. These don't exist. You have no family, no associations. You're like a computer with hormones. You have lost your soul. You are listening to the latest music, buying the latest improved products, and believing the latest media interpretations of the world outside your room. This is all you know.

Now instead imagine yourself as a branching history and send your consciousness backward through the branches at lightning speed. Down past your parents and grandparents, down the countless generations before them, through your ancestors roaming from continent to continent, your primate ancestors, down through all the animals that preceded them, back through the earliest life, into a single cell, down into the complex chemicals that made it possible, down into the molten planet and the forming solar system, the birth of your carbon and oxygen and iron in exploding stars far across the galaxy, back through the universal expansion to the creation of your elementary particles in the Big Bang.

This is not fantasy. This is science: you are all this. Who you are is the sum total of your history. How far back you take that history -- how much of your own identity you claim -- is up to you.

The universe is expanding into nothing

For a long time I've been fascinated by the fact that our universe is expanding because of the Big Bang that brought it into existence. I've visualized an edge to the universe, where a incomprehensibly vast tidal wave of raw existence cascades onward, into...

What?

This is the question that always stymied me. What is the universe expanding into, if the universe is all that exists? Or at least, all that we know to exist. Even if we say the universe is expanding into nothing, doesn't "nothing" thereby become a something?

The marvelous mind-blowing nature of these cogitations is one reason why I've become so non-religious. I don't feel much of a need for supernatural speculating when the natural world is so mysterious and awe-inspiring.

In the July 2010 issue of Scientific American I read an article by Tamara Davis about the expansion of space that, fittingly, stretched my mind even further. It's title was a question: "Is the Universe Leaking Energy?"

Answer: no, even though the expansion of space causes photons to have a longer wavelength ("redshift"), which have less energy than shorter wavelength photons. The article ended with:

Thus, the universe does not violate the conservation of energy; rather, it lies outside that law's jurisdiction.

Meaning, if I grasped the author's point correctly, that laws of nature which apply to things within the universe don't necessarily apply to the universe as a whole. After all, the universe isn't a "thing," since there is nothing (no thing) outside of it.

This wasn't my favorite quotation in the article, though. That honor goes to:

The point is that our metaphor of the expanding rubber balloon, though useful to visualize the expansion, should be taken with a grain of salt: empty space does not have a physical reality.

Wow.

I read those words, empty space does not have a physical reality, just before I went to bed. Falling asleep last night, I tried to visualize how the universe could be expanding if this were true -- if additional empty space wasn't physically real.

Today I fired up Google and did some research into the question of what, if anything, the universe is expanding into, since this bears on the notion of empty space not having a physical reality.

As is increasingly common these videocentric days, You Tube had a clear and concise presentation of both the question and the likely answers.

Basically, one possibility is that the universe is infinite. Adding more space-time to infinity doesn't change anything. Infinity plus any amount is still infinity.

Another possibility is that the universe is finite. It has an edge. But since the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light, we can never know what, if anything, if beyond the edge.

So the question of what the universe is expanding into is unanswerable. However, my admittedly brief foray into the science of the expanding universe led me to feel that the title of this post, "The universe is expanding into nothing," is defensible.

As noted above, our everyday intuitions and visualizations don't serve us very well when it comes to cosmic questions regarding the universe as a whole. As Wikipedia explains:

The metric expansion of space is the averaged increase of metric (i.e. measured) distance between distant objects in the universe with time.

It is an intrinsic expansion—that is, it is defined by the relative separation of parts of the universe and not by motion "outward" into preexisting space. (In other words, the universe is not expanding "into" anything outside of itself).

A Cornell astronomer offers up a similar explanation:

If the universe is infinitely big, then the answer is simply that it isn't expanding into anything; instead, what is happening is that every region of the universe, every distance between every pair of galaxies, is being "stretched", but the overall size of the universe was infinitely big to begin with and continues to remain infinitely big as time goes on, so the universe's size doesn't change, and therefore it doesn't expand into anything.

If, on the other hand, the universe has a finite size, then it may be legitimate to claim that there is something "outside of the universe" that the universe is expanding into. However, because we are, by definition, stuck within the space that makes up our universe and have no way to observe anything outside of it, this ceases to be a question that can be answered scientifically. So the answer in that case is that we really don't know what, if anything, the universe is expanding into.

If this doesn't make much sense to you, join the club. I don't claim to grasp the cosmic implications of Einstein's Theory of Relativity and other tenets of modern science either.

What entrances me about the expanding universe isn't what I know about it, but what I don't. And that lack of knowledge extends even to the world's most competent physicists and cosmologists.

To everybody, in fact. We simply don't know what the universe is all about.

We don't know now; we won't know tomorrow; we will never know, so far as we know. The ultimate secrets of the universe are far beyond our comprehension, for reasons that, not surprisingly, can't be fully comprehended.

Many people are attracted to religiosity because they love mystery. Well, there's plenty of mysteriousness in science, in the natural world, in what lies at the farthest reaches of physical reality.

The expanding universe can expand our consciousness.

We just need to allow the majesty of the unknowable some room in our psyches, rather than wrongly believing that our all-too-human notions about ultimate reality have succeeded in placing bounds around the boundless.

Finding meaning in an accidental universe

Looking around, the universe seems to be flowingly interconnected, a seamless web of smoothly functioning laws of nature.

Sure, there are lots of nasty things we humans find distasteful -- earthquakes, diseases, tornadoes, and such -- but even these have causes. They're just often extremely difficult to discern or predict, given our lack of knowledge about the details of how things operate in the world.

But there's another way of looking at the cosmos. Here's an excerpt from the jacket on Marcelo Gleiser's "A Tear at the Edge of Creation," a book that I blogged about before. (Subtitle: a radical new vision for life in an imperfect universe.)

For millenia, shamans and philosophers, believers and nonbelievers, artists and scientists have tried to make sense of our existence by suggesting that everything is connected, that a mysterious Oneness binds us to everything else.

People go to temples, churches, mosques, and synagogues to pray to their divine incarnation of Oneness. Following a surprisingly similar notion, scientists have long asserted that under Nature's apparent complexity there is a simpler underlying Reality.

...Overturning more than twenty-five centuries of scientific thought, award-winning physicist Marcelo Gleiser argues that this quest for a Theory of Everything is fundamentally misguided, and he explains the volcanic implications this ideological shift has for humankind.

All the evidence points to a scenario in which everything emerges from fundamental imperfections, primordial asymmetries in matter and time, cataclysmic accidents in Earth's early life, and duplication errors in the genetic code.

Imbalance spurs creation. Without asymmetries and imperfections, the universe would be filled with nothing but smooth radiation.

I used to find the notion of Oneness deeply compelling. But like Gleiser says, there's something fundamentally off-kilter about the appeal of unity.

After all, that longing for the One takes place in the psyche of beings who are, obviously, separate entities -- since we don't yearn for something that we already possess, or are.

Modern science swings both ways on the lawful/accidental front. For example, relativity theory is all smooth and connected; the space-time continuum is just that: continuous. 

Then we have the herky-jerky realm of quantum mechanics, where particles pop in and out of existence unpredictably, manifesting here from there without any apparent connection between those states of existence.

Reading the final chapters of Gleiser's book this morning, I learned the lessons for our living that he draws from the strong evidence for an accidental universe. The book jacket sums up his thesis:

All life, but intelligent life in particular, is a rare and precious accident. Our presence here has no meaning outside of itself, but it does have meaning. The unplanned complexity of humankind is all the more beautiful for its improbability.

Makes sense.

What if life here on Earth truly is as rare, precious, and unlikely as Gleiser argues? What if we Homo sapiens are the only self-aware conscious beings in the galaxy, or even the universe?

True, with 200 billion or so stars in our galaxy, and 100 billion or so galaxies in the universe, it certainly seems like we must have sentient company in the cosmos. However, there is no evidence of this. So until there is, we can't say "We are not alone."

Which means...

Life on Earth is astoundingly precious. Both for each of us as individual humans, and for the planet as a whole.

Yet all too often we take life for granted. In part, because religions promise that there will be an afterlife (much better than this one!), and God has a plan for our planet, so why worry? (about extinctions, pollution, resource depletion, disastrous climate change).

Gleiser's thesis -- which I mostly agree with -- is that when we understand where we stand in a incomprehensibly vast and uncaring cosmos, we should recognize the imperative of finding meaning in our lives by caring for what has been improbably bestowed on us. 

We are soulful creatures in a harsh cosmos. This, to me, is the essence of the human predicament. The gravest mistake we can make is to think that the cosmos has plans for us, that we are somehow special from a cosmic perspective.

We are indeed special, but not because the cosmos has plans for us, or somehow is just right for life. The cosmos couldn't care less for us. Think of the billions, probably  trillions, of barren worlds in our galaxy alone. I can't read the message "just right" for life written in so many dead worlds.

...If the constants of Nature are so fit for life, why is life so difficult to find? We are special for being rare, for being alive and conscious of it. The communion we must establish is much more immediate and urgent: it is with our planet and its rapidly dwindling life forms and resources.

Our mission is filled with the epic spirit of the chosen, but this is not because we are mythically connected with a purposeful cosmos. Rather, it is because we are dramatically and irreversibly connected with our planet, the only harbor for life that we know.

Best reason why God doesn't exist

Does God exist?

People have been trying to answer this question for thousands of years. As I wrote about in this post, a philosophical novel sets out 36 arguments for the existence of God (listed here; scroll down to read them).

Arguments for the non-existence of God aren't as common. It's tough to prove that something doesn't exist, especially when that entity is supposed to be metaphysical, mysterious, and not particularly eager to reveal itself in an obvious fashion.

I usually argue that it isn't possible to prove that God is non-existent.

Instead, we agnostics and atheists are justified in asking for demonstrable proof that God does exist, since the burden of proof is on someone making a truth claim, not on the skeptic. 

But during my evening dog walk today -- when I often ponder deep questions about the nature of the cosmos, not to mention puzzling canine behavior -- I intuited a possible foolproof reason for why God can't exist.

At least not as the entity most people consider "God" to be: the creator of everything (Western monotheism) or the all-pervading essence of everything (Eastern monism).

I say this because Sartre and other existentialists got it right.

Existence precedes essence, though this usually is discussed in a human rather than cosmic sense. Sartre said: "Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards."

Makes sense.

Along the same line, how could God create or pervade if existence didn't exist? For God to be, there had to be being. Religious believers imagine God existing in some fashion. They usually don't try to imagine existence itself, which is a hell of a lot more mysterious, inexplicable and intriguing than a God with comprehensible qualities.

When I try to project my consciousness into the mystery of existence, a mind-blowing chill of not-knowing sends tingles up my psyche's spine. See here, here, and here.

My head hurts when I think too much about existence. But I get an enjoyable chill up my spiritual spine when I simply try to wrap my psyche around existence. Not in a wordy way. In, well, an existential way. This happens when I try to let the stark reality of existence blow the roof off all my notions about what exists, when I try to strip away thoughts about all that is until the skeleton of a bare is remains.

For the sake of argument, let's say that God exists. In other words, God exists within existence, just like you and I do. This means that God isn't the creator or essence of everything, because something -- existence -- is more fundamental than God.

A religious believer might respond, "No, you don't understand. God is everything in existence, including existence itself. There is nothing other than God, never has been, never will be."

And I'd reply, "Great. You agree with me. There's no such thing as God. Only existence. What people call God is an anthropomorphic misconception. They should be worshiping the unfathomable mystery of existence."

All we know is that something's happening here: existence. Those who are comfortable with leaving mystery mysterious remain churchless. Others need the warm blanket of religion, because not-knowing gives them a chill.

Something which isn't a thing must have always existed: existence. Otherwise, there would be no place for things to be. How things came to be is an interesting question, one which science is well-suited to explore.

Religions offer up nonsensical answers to this question, such as "God made all things to be, including you and me." Not only is there no demonstrable evidence of this, but using God as an explanation for how things came into existence ignores the Really Big Question:

Where, how, or why did existence itself come to exist, so there could be an existent God?

There's no answer. Never was, never will be. It's impossible to get outside of existence and study it. No one can ever know what might have been if nothing ever came to be. Existence simply is a given.

It is. End of story. Which also brings an end to fantasies about God being ultimate reality. Nope. Existence is.

Our notions about "God" fall to pieces before the concept-shattering mystery of existence. I enjoy this befuddlement. Having my mind blown is a lot more pleasurable and honest than clinging to dogmatic thoughts.

God doesn't exist. Existence exists. That reality is good enough for me.

The cosmos doesn't have a cause

Often it's said that the biggest, grandest, most profound philosophical question of all time is... (drum roll, please) Why is there something rather than nothing?

I used to be entranced by this question. Now, I'm not. It doesn't make any sense to me. I've got some pretty impressive philosophical company in this regard: Bertrand Russell.

Here's what this agnostic philosopher said in his 1948 debate with Father Frederick C. Copleston (Jesuit Catholic priest).

I should say that the universe is just there, and that's all... I can illustrate what seems to me your fallacy. Every man who exists has a mother, and it seems to me your argument is that therefore the human race must have a mother, but obviously the human race hasn't a mother -- that's a different logical sphere.

Copleston and Russell discuss this issue for a while, until...

Copleston: But your general point then, Lord Russell, is that it's illegitimate even to ask the question of the cause of the world?

Russell: Yes, that's my position.

Copleston:  Well, if it's a question that for you has no meaning, it's of course very difficult to discuss it, isn't it?

Russell: Yes, it is very difficult. What do you say -- shall we pass on to some other issue?

In the comments on a recent post I had a similar sort of interesting interchange, where I believe my arguments were stronger (of course, I had some inspiration from Bertrand Russell). John said:

Brian,

An attractive force between two bodies exists.

Gravity is the attractive force between two bodies.

Gravity exists.

A cause of the universe existing exists.

God is the cause of the universe existing.

God exists.

Gravity and God are just the names we give to the respective phenomena (a) the attractive force between two bodies and (b) the cause of the universe existing. So, if we agree on what the names denote, then wouldn't the "demonstrable evidence in support of it (our claim)," be the phenomena (a) & (b)?

My response was:

John, what makes you think there is a cause for the universe existing? There is no evidence for this. We need to define our terms.

Do you take "universe" to mean everything in physical existence? If so, "cosmos" is the preferred term used by many/most scientists, since the multi-universe theory has a lot going for it. That is, the "universe" we are a part of may very well not be the only universe in existence.

So let's make your statement "A cause of the cosmos existing exists." Again, why? Couldn't the cosmos simply be, a given? There is a big logical (and reality) problem in assuming that the totality of existence has to behave like things in existence. This is the basic flaw in your argument.

We see that there are causes of things within the cosmos. So our human minds jump to the conclusion, "The cosmos must have a cause." But the cosmos isn't a thing. It is everything. You presume a vantage point from which you can look at the cosmos and say "It had a beginning; there was a cause of it."

Where is that vantage point?

Religious believers say that God is uncaused, eternal, always has been and always will be. But God is unseen and unknown. Why not posit the same qualities of the cosmos? It is uncaused, eternal, always has been and always will be.

If everything has to have a cause, then God also has to have a cause, so invoking God as the cause of the cosmos just shifts the question back up a level. I prefer to keep things as simple as possible. Let's call the cosmos uncaused.

John came back with:

Brian,

I don't know if there need be a cause for everything (and sorry for the loose usage of existence), but I don't believe that lack of knowledge in that regard gives one the grounds to assert an antithesis. That 'something is uncaused' is every bit the affirmative as 'everything has a cause.' Consequently, I could just as easily apply…

"if no such evidence exists, or if you do not yet know what is the proper conclusion which may logically be drawn from that evidence, then the agnostic principle demands that you refrain from adopting any conclusion as being the expression of ultimate truth."

… to: "Let's call the cosmos uncaused."

To which I channeled my inner Bertrand Russell and said:

John, my point was that a cosmic chain of causality has to end somewhere. Theologians like to end it at God, with divinity being the eternal entity that has been, is now, and always will be. A naturalistic scientific perspective ends the chain with what is observable: the cosmos.

So I'll stick with my assertion that the cosmos (defined as "everything in existence") must be uncaused. Otherwise we have to posit a cause of that "everything," which obviously is still part of "everything" since that cause exists.

If that cause had a cause, both causes are still part of "everything." So pretty obviously everything doesn't have a cause. Only things within everything do. This is marvelously clear to me; perhaps it isn't to you. That's fine.

Dan Barker, an evangelical preacher turned atheist, makes a similar point in his book "Godless" (also referring to the debate between Russell and Copleston).

If we even suggest that the universe (cosmos) is a discrete "thing" (not just a concept), we are implying a realm above and beyond the universe within which it is contained, limited and defined. This amounts to assuming transcendence.

Theistic philosophers hope no one will notice that the language they are using effortlessly conjures the existence of a realm beyond nature, portraying "the universe" from a distance as if "it" had an environment. It is easier for nontheists, who are not equipped to mix logical spheres to avoid such question begging.

Copleston, responding to Russell, asked: "But are you going to say that we can't, or we shouldn't, even raise the question of the existence of the whole of this sorry scheme of things -- of the whole universe?"

"Yes," Russell replied. "I don't think there's any meaning in it at all. I think the word 'universe' is a handy word in some connections, but I don't think it stands for anything that has a meaning." (Today, cosmologists would substitute the word "cosmos" for "universe," which is what Russell was talking about: the entirety of existence.)

There's an intriguing parallel between the notions of cosmos and us. Each word refers to an entity that isn't a separable thing, but we usually talk as if it is.

I mean, everything in existence is the cosmos. There's no vantage point where we can sit on high and make pronouncements about how the cosmos appears. We're part and parcel of it.

Likewise, everything that exists within (or as) our mind/brain/psyche is us. There's no vantage point where we can see ourselves from the outside. We are ourselves.

So the answers to "What is the cause of the cosmos?" and "Who am I?" turn out to be essentially identical:

That's a stupid question.

Let's give thanks to the big bang, plus...

It's Thanksgiving Day here in the United States. Almost everybody is into thankfulness, whether sincere or feigned.

Myself, I'm thankful that I was able to get a HP wireless printer working with my wife's new iMac this afternoon. It was touch and go for a while but I finally figured it out.

My philosophical problem, though, is who or what I should offer my thanks to.

This quandary is common to every exclamation of gratitude, including religious ones such as  "Thank you, Jesus" or "Thank you, God." Where the heck do you stop?

I read some reviews of the Photosmart C4780 that pointed me toward the need to download Snow Leopard compatible software from the HP web site. I'm thankful to the people who took the time to share their experience with getting the printer to play nicely with a Mac.

They wouldn't have been able to do this if they hadn't been born.

So I also need to thank their parents. Along with every relative, human, animal, or whatever, along the several billion-year timeline of life's evolution on Earth.

Which wouldn't have been possible if the universe didn't exist, of course. Fourteen billion or so years ago the big bang started everything off. About ten billion years later the Earth formed.

And here we are.

Now, scientifically minded religious believers don't want to stop with thanking the big bang for making everything exist. They assume that God or some other supernatural entity was responsible for the big bang.

(Fundamentalists, of course, don't accept that the big bang and evolution even happened, but that's so crazy I'll ignore them in my thankfulness analysis.)

I get blog comments on this subject fairly frequently. Someone will say, "There had to be something before the big bang, because something can't come from nothing." Well, who says?

The human mind is doing that saying, using human cognition based on human perceptions. Why, though, should we believe that the cosmos operates in accord with the limitations of the human mind?

We're certain about all kinds of things that we shouldn't be. Including who to thank for existence. Such is the central message of Robert Burton's "On Being Certain," a book I like a lot (and blogged about here and here).

Burton is a neurologist. He points out that reason can't be separated from bodily sensations, since "any notion of space -- no matter how abstract -- must be filtered through our bodily perceptions of space. In our mind's eye, emptiness occupies space."

So our notions about the big bang get confused by our perceptual conditioning.

Close your eyes and try envisioning a face. You will see it against some kind of contrasting background, whether it is a neutral color or a vague grayness or blackness. Now try to visualize a perfect vacuum.

Even if I know that a vacuum contains nothing, there is still an "it," a nothingness that must exist within some type of space. My mind serves up a dim empty darkness as it simultaneously tells me that this can't be so. Empty space is a visual non sequitur; there is no visual counterpart of nothingness.

Let's move on to cosmology. Try to visualize the big bang -- a single infinitely dense point that suddenly explodes. To see this object in our mind's eye, we place this dot against some contrasting background.

Most people, when questioned, will offer that they see a dim darkness against which the initial singularity is framed. This problem of borders isn't confined to spatial considerations; time is equally impossible to visualize as either always existing or suddenly beginning.

We see a beginning in contrast to what was present just before the beginning. The cruel irony is that a mind's eye representation of no surrounding space or time occupies some space and suggests a prior time.

To relieve the resulting tensions, we feel compelled to ask a key question shared by science and religion -- what, if anything, was present before the beginning?

However, Burton says, we have no way of knowing whether this question is even meaningful. It could just be a product of our all-too-human way of perceiving things.

So in the end I'm thankful to...mystery.

Because nobody knows what, if anything, is at the end (or beginning) of existence. Our thanks directed toward ultimacy echo into the seeming infinity of time and space, landing nowhere.

Yet maybe also, everywhere.

Whichever or whatever, I'm thankful for being alive and able to ponder the wonder of being able to wonder.

The universe is unity

Look around. Outside of yourself. Inside of yourself. Do you find any sharp divisions between utterly distinct aspects of reality?

I can confidently predict, "No, you don't." (If I'm wrong, enlighten me.) There's a reason the word universe starts with "uni." It's a whole.

Most religions, maybe all, are founded on a duality of some sort.

Heaven and earth. Soul and body. Spirit and matter. God and creation. Salvation and sin. Liberation and karma. Truth and maya.

Yet these supposedly separate spheres of existence aren't evident.

They're concepts, belief structures that have to be taken on faith. So religious believers necessarily defend these notions without recourse to everyday experience, whether personal or scientific.

Where is the person with a soul but no body? Where is a God absent any creation? Where is a heaven detached from any earthly connection? Where is a pure Platonic truth unsoiled by material existence?

Nowhere. Yet true believers act as if the universe where we live out our entire lives is a cosmic afterthought, or a deception, or a pale image of some more radiant realm.

I don't get it.

Yes, I had strong dualistic leanings myself for a while, but I tempered them with an appreciation of the unified reality that science has found to exist -- and which non-dualistic philosophical teachings such as Buddhism and Taoism also posit.

It amazes me when fundamentalists are so adamant that what is scientifically known about our universe is worthless, mistaken, false, dangerous to one's spiritual health.

Even if one assumes for the sake of argument that God created the universe, wouldn't it be more likely that creation reflects divinity rather than being utterly opposed to God's nature?

This is the attitude of many religious scientists with a non-fundamentalist bent. They consider that understanding the nature of the universe provides a peek into the nature of God, because reality isn't divided into separate and distinct realms of existence.

Somewhat similarly, but in a fashion I much prefer, Taoists say that whatever is happening at this very moment, here and now -- that's the working of Tao, the Way. Look for it outside of everyday experience and you'll miss it.

Evolution is a prime example of how fundamentalist religion rejects knowledge of this world because it supposedly conflicts with what a holy book or person says about the next world.

Yet here we are...here. Not there. Why elevate a concept of an alternative reality above the actual experience of this reality?

I was encouraged to learn about the Clergy Letter Project. 

For too long, the misperception that science and religion are inevitably in conflict has created unnecessary division and confusion, especially concerning the teaching of evolution. I wanted to let the public know that numerous clergy from most denominations have tremendous respect for evolutionary theory and have embraced it as a core component of human knowledge, fully harmonious with religious faith.

Amen. The Clergy Letter Project has a long list of science-friendly sermons. I looked at one from Eugene, Oregon and found a lot to like. Such as these images.

 

Right on.

What?! The universe isn’t all about me?!

Warning: if you're comfortable feeling that the cosmos is designed around you, or humanity in general, what you're about to read runs the risk of putting some leaks in your belief bubble.

I'm not only speaking to the religious, even though theology and metaphysics is where you'll find the most egregious examples of Homo sapiens centeredness. The churchless also are prone to self-centered grandiosity.

I know, because I am one.

For me, faithlessness came down the track of my psyche long before humility. Understand, I'm not claiming any sort of ego-loss now. I'm still as full of myself as ever.

The difference is that I'm increasingly able to recognize how much I want to believe that the universe has a special concern for me, or is fashioned in a way that makes its ultimate reality potentially comprehensible to my consciousness.

Here's a seeming paradox: the less religious I become, the more I feel like I'm approaching the central goals of religiosity – and without the nasty side effects of ingesting dogmatism.

Namely, I'm coming to see myself as a humble part of a marvelously grand whole. I bow down before this imaginably vast cosmos, recognizing that little me can do nothing other than accept the oft-heard adage, Man proposes, God disposes (except I like to substitute Nature for "God"). I do my best to embrace what comes to me as the result of forces far beyond my control – which will include whatever happens after I die.

So the aforementioned paradox really isn't one at all.

What religion seeks, union with a greater reality beyond that known to our limited mind and senses, is contradicted by the privileged position almost every faith claims for its followers.

I've had a lot of experience with this, since for over thirty years I was a member of an organization that held out the goal of a soul "drop" merging with God's "ocean," while simultaneously proclaiming that believers were chosen people on a unique path that couldn't be traveled by others less fortunate (such as my wife).

Eventually this disconnect – how could I be on the road to losing my ego while continually being told how special I was? – led me to recognize that if I wanted what led me to sign on the religious dotted line, I'd have to tear up the contract.

I want to be in harmony with the universe and other people. I'd like to be content with what I have, not desiring something always beyond my grasp. I yearn to live happily and die content, not worrying about what will happen in the next moment.

For a long time I thought that expanding my consciousness until it was co-equal with the cosmos was the way to achieve this. Now, this strikes me as both an exceedingly unlikely eventuality and also disturbingly focused on me, me, me.

What's the matter with the cosmos doing what it wants, and me adjusting myself to it the best I can? The universe is a lot bigger and more powerful than I am, so I don't have any choice in the matter anyway.

I've got a lot more faith now that I'm churchless – faith that everything has been fashioned just fine, without any existential blunders.

In this regard I've got more trust in the rightness of creation than John McCain, who said today that life isn't fair (because Obama is rising in the polls after McCain put his campaign on hold to supposedly work on the financial bailout plan).

Last year I explained why life is fair, saying:

By "fair," I mean there's a reason for things. They don't pop out of nowhere, miraculously or randomly. Even the laws of quantum physics, where randomness is an integral aspect of the subatomic world, have a foundation in well-formed mathematics.

When people say, "life isn't fair," they're speaking anthropomorphically or personally. What they usually mean is that stuff happens that shouldn't, in their opinion. Babies are born blind. Tsunamis strike villages without warning. Bad things happen to good people.

But unfairness doesn't exist without a privileged position, either human or divine.

Religion demands a privileged position: a special relationship with God, a favored understanding of metaphysical reality, a unique method of merging with the divine.

This presupposes that human beings in general, and people belonging to a certain faith in particular, are centrally located in the cosmic sphere of things. Naturally this is a comforting feeling, which goes a long way toward explaining why religions are so popular.

In "Wanted: Intelligent Aliens for a Research Project," Olivia Judson points out how biased toward us is our view of the cosmos.

On the overestimation side, we only need to look at history to see that humans tend to have any number of self-aggrandizing beliefs — we have a long tradition of believing ourselves to be the center of the universe, for example, or to think the planet was created especially for us. We often forget that for the first two billion years of its existence, the planet was home only to bacteria, and that bacteria make all other lifeforms possible: we are as dependent on the bacteria in our guts as a termite or cow.

She finds a bright spot in our increasing recognition of how un-special we are. Still, it's likely that we'll never be able to fully illuminate the blind areas of human consciousness. If you can be comfortable with this, you won't mind giving up the illusory enlightenment of religion.

As we continue to learn about the inherent human tendencies towards bias, and the flattering illusions we like to maintain, it may get easier to guard against the problem, and to assess ourselves more clearly. Yet perhaps — probably — there are some biases that our brains have that we simply can't see at all, blind spots that we, as a species, can never discover we have.

Brains vs. the universe

So who would come out on top in this contest? Might as well put it on pay per view, for more dramatic effect. Brains vs. the Universe – ultimate smackdown!

My bet is on the universe. It's a lot bigger.

And, when you think about it, smarter than brains. Because brains are part of the universe, and the universe is the whole deal (that's why it's called a universe).

I got to pondering this in the course of leafing through a book I'd already read, "Creation Revisited" by Peter Atkins.

Atkins is a chemistry professor at Oxford University. So his take on a scientific explanation of the universe is pleasingly different from that of physicists who write Big Picture books like this one.

But that really isn't my point here.

I was inserting post-it notes by passages that I might summarize in a future blog post, when I came across a thought that stood out so much for its stimulating provocativeness, I honored the page's post-it with an asterisk.

Previous to that page, Atkins was pondering why mathematics is so successful in describing physical reality. Does mathematics merely mirror physical reality? Or are they actually the same?

By weak deep structuralism I shall mean that mathematics and physical reality merely share the same logical structure and mathematics is a mirror that can be held up to nature. By strong deep structuralism I shall mean that mathematics and physical reality do not merely share the same logical structure but are actually the same. In other words, according to the hypothesis of strong deep structuralism, physical reality is mathematics and mathematics is physical reality.

Now, readers who are deep into spirituality should keep in mind that Atkins keeps referring to "physical reality." True, his overall thesis is that God or any other supernatural force isn't necessary to explain the universe.

I just want us to focus on an evident reality: you and I are physical beings in a physical world. We may be something more than that also. Maybe.

What isn't to be doubted is that, crudely speaking, brains are made of meat. And brains are what we think with – about God, spirituality, the universe, what brains are made of, and lots of other stuff.

Including, mathematics.

Getting to my asterisked, post-it noted page, Atkins observes that we (meaning mathematicians, not me) "can write down the Pythagoras theorem for a space of 1000 spatial dimensions."

But as we do not appear to live in a space of 1000 spatial dimensions, this expression does not seem to have a counterpart in reality…So at first sight it looks as though strong deep structuralism cannot work.

Here's where things got most interesting for me.

Because just as people can envision mathematical propositions that make some sense, but have no apparent counterpart in really real reality, so can they envision religious or spiritual beliefs of the same sort.

Ideas that are self-consistent. Just not consistent with how the universe seems to be.

Atkins suggests one way of reviving deep structuralism: by weakening it.

We could resort to weak deep structuralism, assume that mathematics can throw up a froth of many classes of object, and then accept that only some of those objects have their physical counterparts. That is weak-weak deep structuralism.

He presses on, coming up with another alternative that produced an intuitive oh yeah! in me. Not because I totally understand what Atkins is saying, or what he's saying is right.

Just that it merits an oh yeah! since it's got a ring of rightness to me.

We may have to distinguish between the universe, which must presumably be self-consistent globally, and a local entity, a brain, which can generate mathematical structures free of the constraint that they need to be consistent with the structure of every electron and the motion of every planet.

The mathematical structure we call the universe may have to be simultaneously, globally, and perhaps nonlocally self-consistent. Our mathematics, the statements we make on paper, need in some sense be only locally self-consistent.

Yeah, I know. This sounds so scientist'ish, so intellectual. But really, what Atkins is saying is deeply mystical and Taoist.

What you can say about the universe, that isn't It. The universe has its Way, and then there's our way. The two are linked, obviously, because we're part and parcel of the universe.

However, all of our theorizing, our hypothesizing, our speaking to ourselves and others, our theologies, our metaphysical systems, our mathematics – all that only has to be consistent with our limited view of the universe to win a stamp of approval.

Meanwhile, I picture the Universe As A Whole sitting in its corner (not that it has a corner, because it's everything, including my imaginary smackdown), smiling.

Sort of how, when I go to the dog park, I see a Mastiff looking at a big bad Chihuahua when it runs up to the much larger animal with a Woof, Woof, I can kick your butt!

Yeah, right.

Brains aren't the universe. We've got to reminding ourselves of that. That way lies humility. And a reverence for mystery, rather than premature explanation.