existence – Random Rationality

This is sub-chapter #7, of Chapter 2, Philosophy, of my ongoing rewrite and open editing process Random Rationality: A Rational Guide to an Irrational World.

Would greatly appreciate any feedback, corrections, criticisms, and comments. If you want the MOBI, ePub, or PDF, then please let me know in the comments—if you provide constructive criticisms in return, and live in the US, UK, or EU, then I’ll ship you a paperback copy of the book free of charge when it’s published.

HEAVEN

For a moment, let’s say the Abrahamic god exists, and that depending upon your earthly actions you will be met with a heavenly eternity. You lead a good life; you help the poor, you follow the 613 commandments, you love thy neighbor, and upon your fortunate death, you are received at the pearly gates.

How will you spend your first year in heaven? Re-connecting with loved ones, perhaps? How about your first decade? Long walks on Cloud Nine, picking the brains of Jesus, Abraham, Mohammed, Elvis, perhaps even the big G himself, exploring the vast sanctum of his infinite knowledge using the heavenly version of our own Big G: Google (God = Gòógle?)

How about the first century? Trying all the experiences you were too scared to do while you were a lowly mortal, only to find the thrill is gone now that Death no longer lingers close by.

What about the next thousand years, and the million thereafter? And then the billion after, and the next trillion? Then what? I guarantee you one day, you’re going to want to not be there. What could possibly make eternity fun?

If you have ever eaten more than five chocolate bars in a row—like I foolishly have—then you probably know what heaven will be like. The first one tastes amazing. By the second, your taste buds are a bit desensitized, but it still tastes good. Ditto with the third and ditto a little more with the fourth. Finally you try a fifth one on for size, and it tastes like nothing. Just a bland paste as your mouth goes through the motions—add a sixth and you’ll want to vomit.

We all had this feeling as kids, and perhaps as teens for the sweeter-toothed among us, and even now for myself. But take that feeling, multiply it by a really, really large number, and you’ll get a taste as to how boring heaven would become. One day, it will be no different from death. Does the eternal darkness seem so scary now?

Many hold up the Near-Death-Experiences (NDE) as proof of an afterlife, but they are anything but. All they are proof of is the funny things that happen when a person’s brain receives faulty sensory information, or, embarks on the road to anoxia (oxygen death), as carbon dioxide creeps upwards, triggering dopamine-induced euphoric hallucinations.

There have also been several recent studies that have shown the rejection of evolution, and likewise, acceptance of Intelligent Design (ID) is closely correlated with existential angst. Namely, the fear of one’s mortality. In four studies, groups of people from all walks of life (including atheists and theists), were reminded of their own mortality and asked questions related to evolutionary theory and ID. After such reminders, all groups (even the most godless heathens) showed a tendency towards ID, and thus an afterlife. It was theorized this occurred due to a desire to find greater meaning and purpose, and evolution at first glance, seemingly provides very little. So belief in an afterlife is not at all correlated with its truth or validity, but rather in the hope it brings. That despair changed once people were told various ways of deriving meaning from what at first glance, appears to be evolutions nihilistic drive. It seems to me that people are only driven to such despair as they move from an edifice of externally derived purpose and hope, toward a self-derived edifice of meaning. Most people naturally pause in the chasm between these two separate cliff-faces, often looking back toward the safety and familiarity of ID instead of advancing into the indifference of evolution, little knowing that meaning would be theres to make as they will.

In another study, by the University of England, it was shown that belief in ID was highly correlated with one’s need of cognitive closure. That is, the need for definitive information no longer amiable to revision, as is ID, where the buck stops at God.

Heaven, at least as we have come to understand it in the West, seems as boring and unimaginative a concept as it is possible to conjure up, and seems to correlate highly with mortality, existential angst, and cognitive closure. I value the eternal darkness that is coming, for it reminds me to do all that I wish to do in this life here and now. (I also may never ever see that eternal darkness, but more on that in Future of Tech.)

“Yet if the transcendental world is vaguely assumed to be ‘timeless’ then we have to ask if we understand the difference between timeless existence and extinction, and I think the answer has to be that there is none.” ~ Simon Blackburn (Philosopher)

This is sub-chapter #5, of Chapter 2, Philosophy, of my ongoing rewrite and open editing process Random Rationality: A Rational Guide to an Irrational World. Sub-chapters #1, #2, #3, and #4 can be found here, here, here, and here.

Brief Synopsis:

The book takes twenty seemingly random subjects, attempting however poorly, to thread them together in the process, attempting to make sense of the world we live in today. It is a very macroscopic worldview as the whole book fits into two-hundred pages, but aims to tickle the intellects of people just enough so they may go on to study more in-depth the subjects of their liking. The narrative attempts to abolish isolatory thinking, i.e., we so often talk, discuss, and debate topics in isolation and assume that the same points prevail in the real world where nothing exists in isolation.

NOTHING

What is nothing, and where did the something that we are and see all around us, come from? These are questions asked since our humble beginnings. Through the magic of modern-science, answers are finally being wrested out of the ether of space and time, and into something approximating language. Let us begin firstly, with a scientific controversy in 2012 relating to this very notion: the reception to the book, A Universe from Nothing, by the theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss.

There was a firestorm in some parts of the philosophic—and most certainly all parts of the theological—community due to Krauss’s book. The crux of the storm rested upon the assertion that Krauss made in regard to the nothing that a Universe can be born from—though as I discussed earlier, the Universe is still regarded as a different kind of nothing—the Quantum Field, derived from Quantum Field Theory. As close to nothing as we have we ever arrived—and maybe ever will. Quantum Field Theory describes how a Universe can arise from absolutely nothing: that is, no matter, no energy, no space or time, or anything of the sort. Just the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle which precludes true nothing from ever taking place, mechanistically popping particles into existence, some of which go on to create conditions that birth Universes. Soon after its publication, the philosopher of science and theoretical physicist David Albert wrote a scathing review of the book in the New York Times alleging that Lawrence was misleading everyone because his book never addressed the basic question of how a Universe was born of nothing, because the Quantum Field is something, even if it isn’t comprised of matter, energy, time, space, or massless particles, and that the book does not mention where the Quantum Field comes from.

But what if the nothing that we demand explanation of, to explain our origins, never actually existed? That is, a region devoid of fields, physical laws, matter, anti-matter, the Higgs boson, and everything else (presumably including God since by this definition He is most certainly something). What if semantics is the only thing being argued?

Maybe ‘nothing’ doesn’t, and never did, exist, and there has always been something, one-way or the other.

The history of modern-science has had come with it, at every step, the uncomfortable notion that we have been wrong about almost everything we’ve had guessed at or intuited, particularly magnitudes bigger or smaller than our middle world (as Richard Dawkins calls it), but also many times, that on our scale. What makes the notion of ‘nothing’ any different? Here are some ancient and modern common-sense world views that have met the cruel fate of greater understanding:

We are intelligently designed
The world is flat
Stars are holes in heaven’s floor
Earth is the center of the Universe and Solar System
The aether permeates space allowing light to travel through it
Time is an absolute function of the universe (relativity did away with this)
The very small, atoms, obey the same laws as the very large, galaxies. Atoms obeys Quantum Mechanics, our Middle World obeys Newtonian Mechanics, and the very massive and fast obey relativity
Matter is solid (there is one thousand times more nothing than something inside an atom)
Space is a vacuum (empty space actually has a mass. That is, it weighs something and virtual particles constantly appear and disappear)

Our notion of nothing, to me at least, seems no different. It has been recently shown in this strange Universe we live in, by such physicists’ as Lawrence et al, in doing a rather ambitious experiment found that the total amount of energy in the Universe is zero. That is, the amount of positive energy (e.g. matter, radiation) is exactly cancelled out by the amount of negative energy (e.g. gravity), and cumulatively add up to zero, which sounds an awful lot like nothing (leading on from the premise in the chapter How, Not Why). This question, seemingly, is no longer philosophical at its core, and as Lawrence himself says, “Nothing is inherently unstable.” Though he refers, to the no-positive, no-negative nothing—or what we might refer to as the absence of all things. Though the mechanism by which that nothing transitions into an equally positive and negative Universe which still amounts to nothing is now beginning to be theorized and understand. Overall, the Universe does add up to nothing, but we are clearly in a localized region of something, exactly cancelled out by some other localized region of anti-something, all without violating the laws of conservation of energy. I find that nothing short of remarkable!

One of the first Greek philosophers, Parmenides wrote in regard to the cosmos or existence, “It is.” And to pre-existence, or nothing as, “It is not.” However, the latter statement is self-contradictory. To say “It is not,” is to say “It is,” for you’ve contradicted that it is not, because you can think it in your mind—and you can’t actually think of nothing—and if nothing exists, it’s not nothing, but something. Put more simply, “Nothing comes from nothing.” From this, he takes the conclusion, one that I ascribe to, that there has always been something in one form or the other: whether that is universes bouncing in and out of time, randomly bursting into existence, or born out of the primordial soup of vacuum energy or black-holes is yet to be finalized. Today our best—though incomplete—theories suggest the Quantum Field is at the bottom of it all. Maybe that’s right, and I’m inclined to agree—not that my preference counts— or maybe it will be something else deeper down or further sideways. But it seems absurd to suggest, or demand, that for a theory to be ontologically relevant, it must explain why there is not nothing. We have only one Universe, which came from a singularity (neither of which is nothing in the philosophical sense), which gives us a sample of one something, and zero nothings. We have no proof of nothing, just a whole lot of something. (And anti-somethings.)

No matter which way, or how deep or far any theory goes, it will always be possible to probe one level deeper and say why this and not that? But just asking that question does not give it validity. This is not to say that it should not be disputed, or challenged, for this is where science thrives, but we must understand that our language muddles the issue here: the very word ‘nothing’ has no intrinsic meaning. There is nowhere in the Universe where there is truly nothing. Maybe by that admission alone, we’ll never know, but there’s even less fun in that. I recall recently on my blog, a theist lambasting Einstein for not accepting the conclusion from the premises of his Theory of General Relativity: that of an expanding or contracting Universe, which was contrary to the accepted Steady State Theory (SST) of the time. So Einstein added in a fudge factor, the cosmological constant, to bring his theory in line with the then-accepted SST. Of course, the intent was to show how Einstein (and by extension science) did not listen, or accept the conclusion of his theory, and therefore, is rooted in irrationalism and faith—little realizing that that proves how effective science is, even Einstein was overridden. Yet today, with our latest theories making predictions of the multiverse and Universe’s from nothing, physicists are vilified and accused of scientism for merely asserting the possibility that those predictions can be true. It seems, either way, the physicist is always wrong.

“Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Our common sense intuitions can be mistaken, our preferences don’t count, we do not live in a privileged reference frame.” ~ Carl Sagan (Astrophysicist)

This will be the last post until after Christmas. Happy Holidays to all my readers and visitors, and a happy new year as well. Thank you for reading. Ciao!

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