keywords: metaphysics, Huxley, genes, emergence, chaos theory, religion, gods, simulation theory, the universe, the self, Being, Kant, Camus, Heidegger, Descartes, explanations, science
Science is (and maybe just “humans are”) in the business of providing explanations for the seen by invoking the unseen, but it does a terrible job at explaining the sensation of “the self.”
One of the most peculiar and astonishing things about existence is that we are something rather than nothing. This feeling strikes some more clearly when looking at the stars, or staring in the mirror, wondering “why am I this one?” But other times it might grab you at the strangest moment, in the middle of a conversation with friends, or looking at your hands in the shower. It is the mystery of Being (see: Heidegger) that haunts us and blesses us at all times, and which lies beneath the horizon of all understanding. It is also completely wrapped up in the mystery of the “self,” namely, why should I get to exist at all? I understand that from this brain of a billion neuro-processes, after chaos theory takes hold there emerges a higher subjective experience known as “consciousness” that seemingly hovers around that body, independent from its causal basis. A separate tier of existence, past the infinite opaque horizon, so to speak (‘constructive emergence’)***. But still, why do I specifically get to have THIS consciousness, in THIS body, at this time? What did I do to deserve to exist? Are there souls in limbo that pay money for the chance to inhabit a consciousness in our universe? Perhaps a lottery? How many don’t get to exist? Is there possibly just one soul that inhabits every consciousness, being born again as a new human at a random time period every time death ends its current body? When you really try to confront the absurdity of why we are something rather than nothing, it makes sense that this universe is some sort of creation, or simulation.
From where this creation comes, does not necessarily have any traits, values, or beliefs that we can recognize. Our minds are only capable of understanding phenomena inside this universe, with our flesh brains, bound by things like cause-and-effect, space, and time for both operation and understanding. So almost by definition, we cannot truly grasp what is outside this universe, or what caused it. The terms themselves, ‘outside’ and ‘cause’ are again part of the boundaries of this universe, so they might not apply to what is beyond it (Kant makes this argument for his proposal of agnosticism over theism when he destroys Descartes…the most rational stance with respect to atheism vs theism is simply that ‘we cannot know’). How supremely boring would it be, if the afterlife (as in some of the Abrahamic religions) contained sensations and values familiar to this world? To find out that this is all there was, that causality and space and time weren’t just specific to this world but to all realities, and that the gods actually cared about whether we followed our secular values, which are somewhat driven by the contingent animal instincts we are born with. It would make way more sense if the reality outside of this one was something radically incomprehensible relative to this universe, and the tools we have for understanding it (space/time/causality).
In addition to constructive emergence***, subtractive emergence is an appealing way to explain consciousness. That whatever this other reality (or non-reality) is, it is somehow blocking my universality, or ‘mind at large,’ which leads to this quaint, inexplicable sensation of ‘self’ inside a specific body without any other explanation/information. Huxley himself noted that the mind-at-large is some sort of omnipresent/omniscient awareness, and the point of the nervous system is to filter down your mind-at-large to a specific body and locality, for survival purposes. If you were able to perceive your complete mind at large, you would never strive to preserve your body. It is for your own good to filter it down. What appeals to me about this idea is it starts to capture the surreal-ness of existence discussed above. And it runs opposite to constructive emergence. It treats the nervous system as subtractive rather than generative of experience. But it serves the same purpose, and captures the same mood.
It is this mood—of astonishment at the absurdity of the self, of why there is something rather than nothing—that motivates the story concepts below.
*** (constructive emergence) These concepts—how the mystery of Being lies BENEATH this opaque, seemingly infinite horizon of understanding, and how consciousness emerges from the chaos of neuro-processes as a separate tier of existence, warrant a bit of explanation, and are tied into each other. To get more familiar with this, we will pivot to the pilot-wave explanation of quantum mechanics (specifically the double-split experiment which shows that the electron behaves as both a wave and particle, and sort of changes its story based on how you measure it). The current Copenhagen interpretation kind of sucks because it states that an electron is both a wave and a particle, and that by measuring it, it ‘becomes’ one or the other. It does not identify the point of mystery, and simply ASSERTS something completely absurd and untenable. Pilot-wave and chaos theory do a much better job in my opinion—it starts very deterministic and tenable, and then with chaos theory we identify a sort of infinite and opaque horizon BEYOND which the weird behavior of the electron emerges. Similar to consciousness, and probably Being. Basically, think of the electron as a pebble hopping along in a pond. We are deterministic, simple, and clear at this point. Each time it hops, it creates ripples, and those ripples will influence its future trajectory. It’s future trajectory also creates more ripples which interact with the previous ripples, causing this feedback loop that gets very complex very fast. After enough hops—and this is where chaos theory comes in—it becomes MATHEMATICALLY intractable to know exactly where the electron/pebble will be anymore, because of the insane amount of recursive influence that is going on between the hops and ripples. Now, we are no longer simple and clear, things have gotten intractable. This electron/pebble emerges on the other side of this point as “not having a specific position,” but more a probability of positions, from a mathematical perspective. It contains properties of a particle—because it is one—but also waves, because of all the ripples. And based on how we look at it, it can be either. Isn’t this beautiful? We don’t just STATE that it’s a superposition of particle and wave, of various states. We start with a clear situation that gets muddled and intractable after a while, and the electron EMERGES past that point as a trippy superposition. In between these points (clear vs trippy) is the “infinite, opaque horizon.” And I think it’s instructive to consider that consciousness, Being, the self, the emergebnce of life from matter, and other inexplicable mysteries of experience also emerge past the infinite opaque horizon in a similar way. It allows room for things like “having free will in a deterministic universe.” The universe is deterministic, but YOU emerge on the other side of that infinite opaque horizon, and have free will. There’s even a mathematical proof somewhere that asserts that even accepting a deterministic universe, there is no way one could completely predict the outcomes of the universe from within this universe, due to the complexity. Potentially you could from “outside” this universe, whatever that could mean. And here we’ve come full circle to the absurdity of the self and its implication of some greater metaphysical reality.
Stories: “It makes way more sense that way”
Story 1—The universe makes more sense backwards
You must have heard that “hydrogen is a colorless gas that, given enough time, becomes aware of itself.” Trippy, right? Its a clever quote which captures the mind-boggling nature of life and consciousness, that life merely emerged from matter, because “rules.” First of all you have atoms that physically interact based on specific rules. If you shine light (provide energy) on these atoms, specifically carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, they will jiggle with each other and eventually pair up to create amino acids. These amino acids, with more energy, will jiggle to make proteins, and this jiggling dance of proteins and atoms and amino acids in the presence of water and light starts to traverse our patented “infinite and opaque horizon.” On the other side of this horizon you have the creation of this thing called the “cell wall,” where some proteins/organelles literally wall themselves off from others and say “we are separate from the rest, we are an automata, a unique agency!!” Once you have cells, you have life. It’s insanely absurd to think about, even as you have all the pieces in front of you. The rules of physics already existed, and just HAPPENED to be so that MY BEING came out of these atoms + rules? Fat chance. It makes way more sense to think that some greater being STARTED with life, this gorgeous self-replicating construct, and started deconstructing it into cells, proteins etc, and naming the rules of physics as they did this deconstruction. Once they got all the way to the end—bare atoms/energy and laws of physics—they decided to press the “rewind” button. Our universe, as we know and experience it, is that rewind. And we’ve now passed the point of cells, the point that was already designed beforehand, and crazy undesigned things have now emerged from that rewind, things like HUMANS and CONSCIOUSNESS. THATS why it’s so absurd. THATS why none of this makes any sense. No one knows what lies ahead, not even the gods. We’ve passed the infinite opaque horizon. A good question after this story is written might be: Why did some dude make this universe and play it backwards? Well, that warrants a second story.
Story 2—We are the TIME-DEATH universe here to make genes
I think—and this is completely wrong because I’m personifying gods with my own values and beliefs—there could be gods somewhere who are using this universe as a way to get something they want. And I think that thing is genes. In the same way one cannot predict the final state of three bodies orbiting each other, but must simulate them, we are a simulation to get the gods something that they were unable to get analytically. They wanted some kind of algorithm that would be very valuable, that would serve as the optimal formulation of what I can only describe as “survival.” But they couldn’t solve it mathematically. So they created a universe with two major concepts—TIME and LIFE/DEATH. There would be beings in this universe (organisms) that experienced something called death, which would be the demise of the beings. But the beings could also reproduce new offspring and keep dying over and over again, and in each iteration they would refine their mini-codes (genes) in response to death. These iterations are called TIME, and the self-reproducing ability of the beings is what we know as LIFE. Once the simulation had life, death, and time, the gods had everything they needed to run it. The beings would eventually start refining genes over and over again, making them better, more elegant, and perfectly attuned to this thing called survival each time they died. Our universe is that simulation. It makes way more sense to me that our universe is that simulation than saying that this just “appeared” from a “bang” (thanks science). At the end of TIME, the gods will pluck the best genes from this universe and move on.
In conclusion, genes are not here to enhance us, we are here to refine them. It makes way more sense that way.
Story 3—The gods were bored watching the gene simulation, and decided to INHABIT it.
Now the gods, watching this simulation from above, outside of time and space, were bored as heck. And they thought of something interesting—wouldn’t it be cool if we inhabited this TIME-DEATH universe for a bit? We could just sort of hover over the brains of the beings, experiencing their emotions and physicalities, and they wouldn’t know what the hell was going on, they would just call it “consciousness” and be unable to explain it (Descartes noted that he knew God existed because consciousness had some strange element of perfection in it that could only be from God). The rules are that we cannot have any knowledge of the fact that we are timeless gods, that gets filtered out by the nervous system (Huxley!). This way, we’ll get to authentically experience time and death, and for once, NOT feel bored. We’ll also equip consciousness with this insatiable need for purpose and explanation, in a world without purpose or explanation. This would provide the necessary tension to attempt the impossible and transcend ourselves. We would be terrified of death, and would live poetic lives in a desperate attempt to rebel against the futility of it (Camus). We would create beautiful things like love, which could only emerge from a timeless god inhabiting an animal doomed toward death without any knowledge that it was a timeless god. Once we approached this terrible thing called death, and passed it, we would wake back up as the gods we were, exiting the simulation, while the other gods would be laughing at us for being “so scared of death lol I can’t believe you thought there was no explanation and everything just ended in void LOL!!”
I hope these stories help capture the insane, absurd nature of experiencing a “self” in this unexplained world. Maybe someone will write them. Then we can bury it in the ground and people in a few centuries will find it and start a religion or whatever.
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