Thankful for....

This is not what I am most thankful for at all, but Molly and I were discussing it last night and it means a lot to me. It was fun getting dizzy thinking about it too. After I wrote it down, Molly said I should blog it. Quantity over quality.....

The difference between nothing and something. This is the greatest puzzle that is so intoxicating to ponder. We can all imagine what nothing is and yet there really cannot ever have been a state of nothingness. Or in other words, if you go back 6 billion or a hundred billion years, there was still something. Before big bang, the multiverse always existed. I say ‘always’ because I conclude that there is no conceivable way to get from nothing to something. Physics, philosophy and religion all fail to provide any context for considering the transition from nothing to something because any context would paradoxically imply something! (Religion is of course the most comfortable in accepting eternal existence.) William James said it with nice personification of Philosophy: “Philosophy stares but brings no reasoned solution, for from nothing to being there is no logical bridge.” I love the image of Philosophy blinking, staring and being at a loss for anything to say, comfortably stunned.

Amusingly, as I digest a pure physics view of existence I become, on an intellectual level, completely convinced that existence is absurd. That there is no chance that anything exists. I don’t mean human beings, I mean material, period. It just seems crazy that anything should ever be. A void makes much more sense. I come to this conclusion casually, the same way in which I make normal conclusions: buy a Toyota, torture is bad, taxing consumption is probably better than taxing income. The same mental machinery. What’s amusing then is that after I have found myself nodding in satisfaction at my logical conclusion….‘D’oh, I do exist, I perceive a world around me! I love this moment in which the absurd notion that anything could possibly be is smacked in the face by pure empirical reality.

Unnecessary diatribe follows:
I would like to inoculate these thoughts against a few criticisms. First, postmodernist musings or armchair ‘Matrix’ questions about “whether one really exists” are not entirely relevant to this discussion. First they are missing the point about what I am saying about “existence”. Second, they assume the ‘frame of reference’ can never be defined. Besides that leading to unnecessary logical paradoxes, my argument is much more concrete and dichotomous: is there something or isn’t there. I believe it to be so straightforward a question as to be out of the clutches of even the most soft-minded literary critic. No matter how poorly we may perceive ‘reality’ according to postmodern thinking or how many versions of reality there are, the fact that one perceives anything answers my question. Though Descartes meant it in a different way, cogito ergo sum. And questioning whether ‘asking the question’ was evidence of ‘existing’ is so absurd as to lead to hopelessness in ever thinking about anything—ad absurdum.

I also sympathize with an evolutionary psychological and cognitive neuroscience view of human minds. I am comfortable with the idea that we are hardwired to think certain ways, to impose models and patterns on the crazy world around us and even to construct religio-supernatural versions of everything. Nonetheless, what I am describing above is again, such a simple dichotomy, that I do not believe it is in the realm of these explanations. In other words, there is a level of logic/reason that humans discovered rather than constructed. This is one of those times— void or existence, nothing or something. I would accept that our fixation on simple constructs like black and white dichotomies may have been selected for. But I do not feel that that in any way undermines the reality of the question (I think I just made a pun).