The other fellas.

One of the most interesting things about the universe, apart from what’s in it, is that goes on for ever. We know from observation of the stars and galaxies they appear to be expanding, moving away from one another as if in some vast slow motion explosion. The question is what is it expanding into? And whatever that is, is it bounded, and if so by what? And so on, and so on.

If we could travel out far enough out, would we eventually come to a metaphorical barbed wire fence and a notice saying “no trespassing”? It’s an absurdity to think we will, if things are truly infinite. But on the other hand can it really go on for ever? Well it must, because if it doesn’t, whatever is bounded by some finite limit, has to be contained in something else. And this is before we get really weird and start talking of extra dimensions of space and time and the possibility that there may be an infinite number of universes, each of infinite size as well.

Infinity is a serious business.

But then we turn from studying the vastness of the universe, and we peer down our microscopes into the innerverse of the very small, the quantum universe, and we discover a similar situation, only the other way round, another infinite regression, this one into smallness. What makes an atom? What makes what makes an atom? And what makes that? What is the fundamental building block of matter? Can there even be such a thing, for if it were detected byt the building block blasters at CERN, and held up as the Ultimate building block”, we would inevitably want to know that was made of as well.

Another curiosity of the quantum world is the theoretical possibility that every event brings about the birth of universes in which all possible outcomes of that event are realised, that in any system of uncertainty there can be no outcomes left unexplored. So, my own life yields a separate self to cover all eventualities, all the possible choices I have ever made and will ever make. Preposterous? Well, as someone said once, I forget who, it’s heavy on universes, but since the universe is infinite, it will have plenty of room to for each of them. Because infinity is like that. It’s even bigger than itself.

Which brings me to ask the question: Which version of my selves am I this evening? Which version of me are you reading? And in all the possible versions of this blog, are you reading the one I think I’m writing? And what are you doing in my universe anyway? Or do our probable lives cross here. Do the tides of my universe wash by chance upon the shores of yours tonight? And in the morning we go our separate ways.

Thinking like this makes me giddy. We understand so little of true nature of reality, but the world turns anyway and the only uncertainty that means anything really is the price of tomorrow’s bread. Is that not also strange? Human beings are remarkable in being so rooted in the material world, yet being also capable of exploring, mentally at least, its outermost metaphysical reaches. And the fact that so much of the universe is unknowable in all its infinite multiples, inevitably gives rise to speculation, both scientific and spiritual, about how it really works. And what it all might mean?

Science is the long road to knowing, and it cannot give us all the answers, since the universe is infinite after all, and that kind of certainty would take an infinite amount of time to achieve, but Science also has a method that enables questions to be answered with a fair degree of certainty, and to build on previous knowledge, at least so long as there are humans around to go on asking the questions.

Spirituality, meanwhile, provides a short cut to a kind of knowing, and so helps us in the day to day dealing with the unsettling mystery of things. Depending on our cultural background we ascribe things we do not understand to the workings of the faery, or to gods, or to God. True, it may be a short cut to nowhere, for spiritual thinking – especially when it becomes formalised and rule based, as in Religious Spirituality – is a journey beset by paradox, and intellectual absurdity.

Zarathustra’s famously perplexed holy-man asks of the people: Where is God? But the science of determinism, leads us to the logical conclusion that God is dead, if only by virtue of the fact there is no longer any need for a deity in explaining the workings of the world. Science, it says, has all the answers, or if it doesn’t have them right now, the scientific method will reveal them eventually. But not all scientists are of such a deterministic bent, and the study of the paradoxical quantum world – of the things that make up matter – leads its proponents to agree that while, the first sip of the sciences will make you an atheist, God is still waiting for you at the bottom of that glass.

News of God’s demise it seems is somewhat exaggerated.

There is in fact something deeply mysterious underlying matter, and we cannot know it, just as we are told we cannot truly know God, because to observe it, alters the very thing we are looking at. But even for an unknowable God to exist, God must exist in something and therefore be bounded by a thing that is greater than God, and therin lies the paradox of God. And all of that comes long before we start wondering about the origin of our own selves.

Some religions will personify God to a degree, with the prophets and more profound adepts being promoted to the status of demi-gods on their passing. Other religions take a looser interpretation, ascribing to God the boundless state of the Universe itself. And God’s awareness becomes our own awareness, so the awareness I have of myself, at least when I reach a state where I can transcend the run of my own egoic thoughts, is the same awareness you have of yourself – again once you emerge from the fog of you own ego. We are essentially different versions of the same thing, we have a dual nature – one egoic, individual, born of the world and riddled with the usual imperfections, the other collective, and perfect, and born of God, at least psychically.

But the psyche is another story and taps right back into the unknowable root of the Universe and becomes at its deeper stratums independent of the physical realm, part bedded in the quantum levels of reality instead. Take it further and we can say all that exists is consciousness. In other words: nothing exists, at least physically. What we believe to be the physical nature of reality is just something we have imagined into being. That it all works and appears to be logically consistent is purely on account of the fact that we subliminally agree what the rules are going to be in the first place. Nature’s laws could be laws we are making up as we go along. This is the Idealism of Bishop Berkley, and a hard one to shoot down.

Maybe.

Nothing exists. Think of that! But even just to say it, to define “nothing” immediately suggests its existence, if only in juxtaposition to its antithesis: “something”. Therefore it’s a logical impossibility for “nothing” to exist at all, and the whole of creation is, after all, an inevitability, whether it be physical or purely psychical in nature, or a curious mixture of the two. That’s the miracle, the wonder, the rapture of creation.

It’s wonderful to cut loose for a while as I have been doing here this evening, but I wonder too what this is going to read like in the morning. And I wonder if I can truly be imagining myself into being and further, creating multiple versions of myself as I go along, pausing to consider my words, if what I read in the morning will actually be what I am about to post right now, and if what you read in your universe, is the same as I am writing in mine.

But if you find all this a little hard to take, remember it makes no difference to the price of bread and is mostly idle speculation. Also, be sure you complain to the right version of me as I can take no responsibility for the outpourings of other versions of myself. And in my uniquely human way I shall be sure to take all the credit where credit may not be entirely due, and blame the nonsense on the wormholes riddling the brain of that other fellas, who also call themselves,…

Michael Graeme.