Unanswerables

"The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is."

Wittgenstein


Marcelo Gleiser at NPR's 13.7 blog speculates about the ultimate inability of science to explain the first cause of the universe. The fact that there is something rather than nothing may not be a demonstrably empirical matter. I suppose the three great and still unsolved questions are: the origin of the universe, the inception of life, and the development of consciousness. Many have suggested that our minds may not be structured to solve some puzzles, ever.

Of the three, it seems to me that in the long run biology itself, the coming into being from the lifeless muck of self-replicating and eventually self-assembling organic systems, will be the "easiest" to account for. And I think that over time, even if it takes centuries, we will arrive at a decent understanding of how neural networks generate subjectivity, although the specifics of individual subjectivity will always retain some obscurity inasmuch as a particular consciousness is epistemologically a self-enclosed system (i.e. no outside agent could fully understand what it is to be me without in fact becoming me and in the process ceasing to be himself).

But the source of reality itself is a totally different kind of question, and one that may not in fact be scientific at all. For me the strangeness of the matter is that I can't even imagine what an explanation for the universe would look like or how it could possibly be satisfactory. One possibility is that the universe (or rather some grand multiverse from which our universe sprang) has always existed. But somehow I find this kind of infinite regress distasteful. In fact, infinity itself is distasteful except in the abstract.

However, neither am I happy with the notion that the universe had a specific origin, before which or outside of which there was truly nothing (such that "before which" or "outside of which" have no meaning inasmuch as time and space do not exist outside of the universe). The human brain evolved with assumption of limits and of agents. Theistic accounts of creation, while intellectually unsatisfactory in all sorts of ways, nonetheless are easier to relate to. It is somehow emotionally easier to imagine that a stipulated God has simply always been than that a neutral multiverse has always been. I'm not sure why this would be so.

I have the same problem, actually, with space. That is, it is equally disturbing to imagine the universe as spatially infinite as it is to imagine that it would be even theoretically possible to arrive at a physical point beyond which there is non-being. That suggests that time and space are simply limiting frameworks of my contingent mind. So speculating about why the Big Bang happened or where it came from may be like aspiring to stare directly (without mirrors, etc.) at the back of my head.

No, I haven't been getting high or reading Heidegger. But philosophy is a kind of willful stupidity, the refusal to accept the obvious as obvious. To ask why reality not only follows abstract physical laws, but also exists at all (which is not required by those laws) is something like asking how one knows reality is "out there" at all rather than a mere dream or illusion of consciousness; both questions vainly seek for something within experience to justify the basic condition of experience at all. And with that one leaves the desert of philosophy for an oasis of common sense, and the weekend.

In/Out

"All my daydreams are disasters

She's the one I think I love

Rivers burn and then run backwards

For her, that's enough"

Uncle Tupelo, "New Madrid"

I read Michael Benson's Far Out a while back, a compendium of the latest stunning images from the Hubble telescope, ranging from relatively nearby nebulas (a mere few thousand light years away) to the dimmest specks of galaxies whose light, 13 billion years old, streams oh-so-faintly to us from the dawn of the universe.

The images are truly spectacular, nature writ very large and very distant. But as Benson notes, they are images that, while reflective of reality, are not those that could be captured by that very imperfect instrument, the human eye. He even quotes Blake's immortal line, "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is, infinite."

Science fact defeats science fiction. Of the universe beyond, say, Mars (or according to President Obama's recent decree, beyond perhaps the International Space Station), you just can't get there from here. The distances defy belief, and the glorious pictures merely tempt. Either we are alone amid unimaginable vastness, or there are likely myriad other intelligences whom we can never contact or perceive across the gulfs of space and time. Either possibility seems absurd. Someone said (was it Wittgenstein?) that if a question has no good answers, that means it wasn't a good question. We are at the limits of human cognition.

The books drove home for me the utter distinction between Godly and Godless universes. In the times and places when I have been able to hold the concept of God seriously in view, the universe seemed very small: just God and us (or me), in a metaphysically tiny room. But subtract God, and the the universe is dumbfoundingly vast, and unimaginably empty. Is there a happy medium between claustrophobia and agoraphobia? The tightrope of sanity maybe.

(What does Uncle Tupelo have to do with astronomy? A mystery).

God By Committee

From Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City:

"Simulated worlds theory says that computing power is inevitably going to rise to a level where it's possible to create a simulation of an entire universe, in every detail, and populated with little simulated beings, something like Biller's avatars, who sincerely believe they're truly alive. If you were in one of these simulated universes you'd never know it. Every sensory detail would be as complete as the world around us, the world as we find it."
"Sure," said Perkus. "Everybody knows that." He tried to dismiss or encompass Oona's description before she could complete it. "It's common knowledge we could be living in a gigantic computer simulation unawares. I think science established that decades ago, for crying out loud. Your Junrow was--huh!--behind the curve on that one."
"Right, right," said Oona slyly. "But here's the point. If we agree that the odds are overwhelming that it's already happened, then we're just one of innumerable universes living in parallel, a series of experiments just to see how things will develop. You know, whether we'll end up destroying ourselves with nuclear weapons, or become a giant hippie commune, or whatever. There might be trillions of these simulations going on at once."
"Why couldn't we be the original?" I asked.
"We could be," said Oona. "But the odds aren't good. You wouldn't want to bet on it."

This is an old philosophical musing, akin to life as a dream and vice versa, but why is it at once so compelling and so idle? It shows both the potentially maddening limits of our knowledge and the total lack of practical implications for these limits. If it could somehow be shown that our universe is in fact a virtual simulation, this would not, and should not, change anything about what we do. This thought experiment also undermines our now millenia-old assumption that God is singular...