Galaxies in the Milky Way

Given what we think we know about the age of the universe,  planet earth and the myriad of creatures that have and are continuing  to inhabit it since  life first appeared,  we have arrived only recently  as a species uniquely capable of reflective thought and reasoning. With it – I suggest – came the potential to make something of ourselves beyond being just another species for which  the need to survive  and ensure the continuation of its genus appear to be its main objectives..

On that premise we find  ourselves at the receiving end of the implicit obligation to go beyond  these basic needs, and  not only because we can envisage ourselves of being capable of accomplishing much more than that, but also, surely,  because we would not want to see ourselves being limited by them.

But given the state of the world today, for many the potential to distinguish ourselves beyond being just another creature on this planet appears to have been reduced to some self-aggrandizing exercise in unlimited exploitation, boundless consumption and mindless procreation, and that at great cost to ourselves and our future.  As a matter of fact, we seem to have taken the first steps towards our own extinction by continuing to undermine the very environment that spawned and nurtured us and allowed us to thrive as a species.

Alternatively – and yes, there is always an alternative, in particular to just being unimaginably shortsighted! – we  could use our collective brain-trust to decide what kinds of uniquely human qualities we ought to prioritize in order to truly benefit us all  and start acting accordingly.

I can think of a few: Imagine a world-wide society built on mutual trust and respect, featuring such things as a sustainable waste-free economy, free education, healthcare, equal opportunity regardless of race , age or gender, the pursuit of arts and sciences, and being free from famine, disease and crime. In other words, not much we are familiar with today, but something worth pursuing, don’t you think?

Easier said than done, without question;  in fact some will say that such an utopian state of affairs will be impossible to achieve given what history has shown us to date  about human nature.  True, is difficult to see any such potential reflected in the daily course of our lives. Not only  does  it seems near impossible to quantify them beyond being either mundane  – and  at any rate less than  profound – or positively evil, and that would include much of human kind’s murderous, bloodstained past and all of our  self-destructive activities such as our relentless attacks on the earth’s critical life-sustaining biosphere.

The problem of course is that we seem to be lost and absolutely hapless when it comes to understanding our place in the world. In the mid  1600’s the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza wrote that people find themselves with needs and desires without understanding the reasons why they want and act as they do.  Lacking this knowledge about themselves and their place in the world creates the illusion that they can do as they please, and which is a source of much grief when they act against their own interest because they  don’t seem know any better.

Nevertheless, it is the implicit promise of our cosmic DNA, our origins,  that will continue to urge us along this uncertain path towards a future we might one day be able to imagine what that would look like if we develop the ambition, courage and intellectual wherewithal to  conceive the realization of it.  And why shouldn’t  we be able to: are we not the descendants of a  magnificent  cosmic event and all the spectacular creative energy that lies within and  is necessarily  represented within every particle of our being?

I say “necessarily” because how could it not be? We aren’t some accidental and aberrant event over and above the phenomenon of the universe: we ARE the universe, nothing more and nothing less. Now, if we only knew what that meant, but that is what life is all about, isn’t it? And clearly, this is the larger context we should be taking our cues from when we plan our future – as little as we are able to grasp of it at the moment.

For this we need to be able to turn ourselves inside out, by  prioritizing  the spiritual over the physical and embracing those values that are clearly larger than the largely material ones we appear to be pursuing today. Instead we ought to be pursuing empathy, compassion, trust and a respect for life in recognition of the incredible accomplishment that life represents as a cosmic effort to redefine itself for whatever purpose it has in mind – as much as we cannot even begin to think what that purpose may be although I suspect it might have something to do with establishing order over entropy and light over darkness  in pursuit of total harmony.

However – and as much as I hate to admit this – my greatest fear is that this kind of enlightened future is in fact not available to us as, when  we may not have moved  far enough up the evolutionary ladder to be able to visualize it – or event want it ! – and  to start changing our ways collectively to make it a reality.

As such, life is likely to continue to be the absolute tragedy it is, for our life-giving planet and for so many of our species today.

Determination and acceptance of what is real is derived from our interaction with the world and in the first instance a product of our minds in consideration of the information delivered to it by our sensory experiences. This makes our understanding of what is real very much a function of what we have brought to the fore in terms of our sensory organs and the intellectual ability to interpret the information they have gathered for us via our sensory experiences.

It goes without saying that if we had been different creatures we would have likely experienced a different world and have interacted with it differently, although I would hold that the difference in interaction would be a matter of degree and not of kind.  As a result our conclusions about the nature of the reality might very well be the same in the sense that we can interact and share a common environment despite qualitatively substantially different experiences.

It follows that  all knowledge  is subjective, and a product of our experiential perception of it, i.e., the only reality we know is entirely of our own making  and that would include any theories we have developed around its nature or origin.

It also follows that reality isn’t limited to what we know about it; instead,  it is limited by what we don’t know about it on the assumption that there is likely so much more to it but just not available to  us us because of what we are in terms of being able to perceive and understand it …

For example, we have developed notions of space and time which work perfectly well in helping us navigate and manage our immediate environment, but these concepts begin to break down – and no longer make any sense – when we apply them to the larger whole and  their logical consequences. They become nonsensical, as we will have to assume such things as the beginning and end of time  and the possibilities of the infinitely large and infinitely small.

As a result the reality of the world we know becomes less and less intelligible the further we move away from the centre – which lies necessarily within ourselves – where the very concept of it came into being when we first opened our eyes and found ourselves immersed in it.

Somehow, our consciousness is the reason the universe is here. (Sir Roger Penrose)

So, what is consciousness?  Consciousness is a way of being in the world that appears to go beyond any known physical properties in the material universe, in the sense that it manifests itself as an enduring phenomenon that cannot be reduced or accounted for by  any physical law or properties other than through association.

While we might use the term  frequently and on a casual basis –  suggesting an implicit understanding of what consciousness is all  about – when we are pushed to elaborate exactly what it is that we are referring to,  we will likely run out of vocabulary when it comes to describing  its defining features.

Nevertheless, we keep trying to come up with some kind of explanatory account for it that goes beyond association  and accommodates it solidly within the  known laws of physics.

The philosopher David Chalmers has speculated that consciousness may be a fundamental property of nature existing outside the known laws of physics, and one might be led to agree with that as to date science has not be able to account for it in any way as a function of a material law of the universe.

But while philosophers and scientists continue to  struggle to make sense of consciousness  and eminent physicists such as Sir Roger Penrose and Archibald Wheeler have begun linking it to the intricacies of Quantum Mechanics, and a concept I have been trying to get my head around in another post that can be found here.

What we can say about consciousness is that, in the first instance, it provides us with the realm or opportunity that we might refer to as sentience and awareness where we are able to  acknowledge the reality our own existence in the here and now, in the sense  that without it we would simply not be here – or anywhere else for that matter.  That is no more than saying ” I think, therefore I am”,  as the philosopher René Descartes once proclaimed  in his 1637 Discourse on Method.

As well, and a presumption no doubt implicit in the previous paragraph, one must be in the realm of the living as a necessary condition for consciousness to be present, as to date consciousness as a phenomenon has only been observed in association with life and the living, be it in man or beast or other forms of life that appear to be capable of exhibiting this phenomenon.

At least, this is how we understand consciousness to be present when making a determination whether someone  or something is conscious  and basing this  on the  ability to respond to  a stimulus of sorts. We should allow for the possibility that some creature, be it man or beast that is presumed to be conscious might be  entirely unable to respond to whatever stimulus because of some form of paralysis or other condition that prevents it from doing so.

What we do not know however is  that being a life form of sorts is also a sufficient condition for consciousness to occur or be present, as minimally as that might be the case.  For instance, trees and plants are alive, but we would typically not attribute  consciousness to them, if only because we have no way of detecting the presence of it. As well,  we do not know what exactly we would be  looking for when we try to detect the presence of it at the level of trees and plants.

Clearly, the absence or presence of consciousness cannot be a function of our ability to detect it, and for that reason it would be more reasonable to give it the benefit of the doubt and  assume that  consciousness is an intrinsic property of life regardless of the kind of life-form we might want to consider for this. I believe it is simpler to hold this view than to postulate  further conditions  that must be met by a  living entity before it can be said to have  consciousness, or to have at least  the capacity for it, e.g., that it must at least have a central nervous system to  be capable of it.

But  my task here is  less concerned about determining at what point living things such as  plants or more advanced organisms might be capable of  consciousness – or when we  might be able to detect it – and more about being able to determine what the nature of consciousness is beyond merely tagging it as an intrinsic function or attribute of life.

In this context  – and given a basic definition of life such as  “the condition that allows a given arrangement of organic matter to utilize its environment to sustain itself, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change until death” –  it would be reasonable to assume that, for any living organism,  none of these capacities would be particularly useful unless there was also an innate capacity to monitor, coordinate and maximize these functions successfully and in the interest of its sense of self-preservation as a living organism.

This leads me to say that  the nature or essence of consciousness is in fact life’s interest in self-preservation, and what I want to refer to as “the will to live”. It is an emergent property of organic matter  that  eventually manifest itself as what we have come to refer to as “consciousness” as it goes up the evolutionary ladder towards  ever more sophisticated ways of being in the world.

The  property’s main function might be to acquire  a growing awareness of itself and its environment, to the point of being able to interact and manipulate the latter directly in relation to itself and presumably in the interest of self-preservation but not necessarily limited to that. Here I like to think that life – as an emergent property of the material universe and by way of its evolutionary nature – has  further goals and objectives in mind (so to speak) that go beyond the need for mere survival and address what I see as the larger question about life: survival for what purpose, i.e., what are we here for, or – for that matter -why should there be any life at all?

As to the question how consciousness resides in life-forms is as much a mystery as to how life resides in matter, but in either case they appear to be emergent properties and – as I suggested earlier –  a function of the degree of organizational complexity of its material  constituents,  when they allow for the emergence of these  properties to the extent that they are able to exhibit them.

All this being said,  it would  perhaps be simpler to hold the view that – rather than seeing consciousness as an emergent property of matter – it is in fact the true nature of reality, i.e., there are no other realities,  and that what we refer to as the physical attributes of the world are merely a manifestation of its complexity and a means to evolve beyond its current status towards a future state the purpose of which we are clearly not able to apprehend.

When Spinoza writes about God, it is not in the anthropomorphic sense of a God as usually portrayed by the Christian-Judaeo or Muslim varieties of religious scripture, i.e., very much like a person with human-like traits,  an authoritarian or father figure perhaps.  Someone who seems to take an active and personal interest in what the creatures he created here on earth are up to.

(And, it should be noted, demonstrating a personality  featuring some of the more regrettable human traits I can think of, such as being  narrow minded, vain, jealous, as well as being vindictive and vengeful! Anyone familiar with the Old Testament will know exactly what I am referring to!)

Does this mean that Spinoza was an atheist?  Not really, since he holds that God is the one and only unique and indivisible substance that the universe is made of. There are no other substances. The view is a bit more complex than that, and involves perceiving this substance through a variety of distinct attributes – such as Thought and Extension – but not its basic premise.

It is interesting to note that Albert Einstein – also once accused of being an atheist – followed Spinoza in rejecting the  anthropological concept of God,  saying,  instead,  that he believed in “… Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of the world”.

So the point would be that, if God is everything, and everything is God,  this will render the concept of a distinct metaphysical entity over and above the world – the great creator –  logically and semantically empty (i.e., meaningless) since it doesn’t signify anything over and above the totality of the cosmos, and the name “God” ends up being just another label for it.

Today I am revisiting the views held by Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Idea (1818), and his rejection of naïve realism, or what has been called scientific materialism, that the things we observe in the world are what they appear to be, absolutely, and forever, and not in anyway all or part a function of human perception and experience in the sense that they can be modified based by the very act of perceiving or experiencing them

Thus,  scientific materialism would reject the distinction between how things are independently from human observation versus how they are perceived by our perceptual and conceptual processes.  At the same time,  a scientific materialist would have to accept the the distinction between subject and object, i.e., the distinction between the observer and the thing being observed.

But if we  have no other means of accessing the world other than perceiving or experiencing,  is it in fact a meaningful exercise to even refer to it as a matter of some significance? To all intents and purposes, if we never refer to it again, what would be lost in our discussions about the nature of the world?

To deal with this alleged problem the German philosopher Immanuel Kant  (1724-1804)  introduced the “thing-in-itself”, or “ding ansich” in German – to suggest that the true nature of  the world is fundamentally unknowable as we can only grasp the nature of things indirectly through perceiving them as objects in relation to ourselves – how we have experienced them.  I believe Prof. Kant may have gone too far, in the sense that is is contradictory to say that something is fundamentally unknowable as to make such an assertion implies some knowledge about  it. Existence is not an attribute that can be asserted independently of the qualities through which it is instantiated.   In other words, the distinction serves no useful purpose, when at most the existence of the “ding ansich” might be implied as an essential element in a theory of perception. And maybe that is all what Kant had in mind.

Moving on,  it is one thing to experience the world through one’s senses – it is another thing to experience it logically, e.g., to experience such things as cause and effect, time, space and the various ways in which objects relate to us and each other. If these relationships are permanent features of the physical universe, it wouldn’t matter in what form you encountered them in your experiences, your conclusions about them would be same. But in the end, it would be less important what the world looks like versus what can be abstracted from it simply from interacting with it. And this would lead me to say that the nature of the world is about function (a method that relates an objective to its instantiation) –  and not form (the manifestation of matter and energy), the latter being  incidental to the process, and a means to an end in terms of being the medium that allows the function to be enabled or expressed.

This is an important view for me and consistent with my argument that we should perhaps be less preoccupied with the makeup of the material  universe, by poking into the furthest and oldest region of the universe, looking for clues of sorts and so on. Instead, we should look look more closely at what the logical or functional nature of the various cosmic events appear to be about,  such as the manifestation of a directional and seemingly intrinsic teleological process leading to ever higher degrees of material complexity and organization and where this particular process would seem to want to take us to.

And so the question should be: What has been accomplished to date by the process of material evolution?  As such, the cosmos appears to be a  work in progress, and that is at least some concrete information we have about the nature of the world as we have encountered it.

… But Trailing Clouds Of Glory Do We Come, From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy!”  (William Wordsworth)

Apart from the obligatory nod to the prevailing local deity at the time that this was written, that is exactly where we came from – and, of course – where we still are! The  cosmic womb that spawned us,  and that continues to nurture us! And so let’s focus for a moment on the ongoing scientific effort to probe the heavens – our heavenly home – with the hope of finding out more about its origin and scope – such as how all of this might have come about.

And as we continue to do so – by reaching out further and further into the depths of the physical universe with VLTs (Very Large Telescopes) – whatever we want to conclude about our cosmic environment becomes less and less intelligible the further we move away from earth. And here I couldn’t agree more with what was once said  by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit paleontologist, in 1923  in Letters from a Traveler “The more remote in time and space is the world we confront, the less it exists, and hence the more barren and poorer it is for our thoughts”.

Ask yourself this: how meaningful is the recent discovery of the oldest galaxy ever observed by the Hubble telescope: “It is thought the galaxy is more than 13 billion years old and existed 480 million years after the Big Bang.”

Or: “Astronomers have spotted the most distant object yet confirmed in the universe – a self-destructing star that exploded 13.1 billion light years from Earth. It detonated just 630 million years after the big bang, around the end of the cosmic “dark ages”, when the first stars and galaxies were lighting up space”.

Apart from the “wow!” factor, this kind of information says more about the technology that made these discoveries possible than the actual objects themselves. While we may be able to express these observations in a manner that suggests that we actually know what we are talking about, we have clearly no concept of what this  means beyond building a theoretical model of our universe in which we appear to be just another speck of dust.

At most we can conclude is that an event is being played out here of cosmic dimensions, but also that – as unlikely as this may seem – this incredible spectacle is  directly relevant to us, as it pertains to both our origin, and our destiny. Yes, gentle reader, all this cosmic commotion is about you, regardless of whether you want to accept that or not.

I want to suggest that we can talk about the cosmos in a more meaningful fashion, by accepting all of it as another dimension of ourselves.  And here I am not talking  about some  esoteric physical and (above all) theoretical dimension requiring a succession of half-a-dozen blackboards to get spelled out, and meaningful only to some other theoretical physicist working within the same Kuhnian paradigm. With due respect, no.  I want to suggest an aspect of the cosmos that connects every particle internally regardless of where it is located – or how it is configured – and constitutes its integrity as an phenomenon in all its perplexing detail.

And while we do not know or understand much or any of it, it is an intrinsic part of our own existence, meaning that the key to all its magical and mysterious secrets lies not out there in some distant and abstract corner of outer space, but within ourselves. We embody all of this within the entity that we are: its origin, its history, its present scope, and its destiny.

Much of our scientific probing of outer space reminds me of a cat that got itself locked in a closet, scratching around in the dark trying to find a way out.  But we’re not trapped here, in the sense of being an isolated event in the cosmos: we are an event of the cosmos, and so  we don’t need to find a way out, we’re home safe and sound!

And so I am suggesting the possibility that, on the evolutionary front, we are its leading event – with the history of all that preceded us behind us, and a future in front of us to decide and create!  With the arrival  of our species  – Homo Faber –  the spectacular creativity power inherent in the evolutionary process that brought us about is now able to work directly through us for whatever goals we set for ourselves now or in the future!

I have been led to conclude that, if the cosmos is about anything at all, its agenda is about reinventing itself as a new entity, by turning itself inside out – so to speak – through the process of evolution, and reconstituting  itself as the sum of all the power and creativity that it is capable of.  You could say that it is a question of “rising to the occasion”, and as participants in this process this is something that we are all challenged with on a daily basis: we all have the same agenda, namely to make something of ourselves that captures our true potential.

And so we, the simple creatures of the earth, are finding ourselves at the top of creation as defined by our emerging consciousness, to be challenged to look deeper within ourselves to enable our own advancement as a species, to be more creative, more empowered, and to be more enlightened to take on our fate as an agent of evolution.

Presumably, all this to bring about a better world while seemingly still  preoccupied by the instincts of the  predatory animal that once preceded us – but in many way is still within us –  as evidenced by the dystopia we’re stumbling around in today and which appears to be entirely of our own making.

What I want to take from the above episode is the fact that something with an incredible creative ability  was destroyed – either wilfully or by accident – is able to reconstitute itself; that it has this inherent ability.

So – taking this recovery model into an analogy – what if the origin of the cosmos was also a calamity (the “Big Bang” scenario), in which something was destroyed that has the ability recover, and which is now trying to reconstitute itself. This scenario would offer the picture that within each particle in the universe resides the capacity to assemble itself back into ever increasing levels of organizational complexity so that it can become whole once again and regain control of its being. In this process, it is able to morph into whatever shape it has access to given its current environment in order to regain its desired integrity. This would account for all the creativity, drive and determination that evolution continues to demonstrate.

Pure speculation, I’m sure.