“Last week I had the strangest dream, where everything was exactly how it seemed”
-The Postal Service
When a hurricane hit, our ancestors tended to conflate the forces of nature with Gods punishing them for their misdeeds. And while, literally, this might be confined to the occasional TV pastor these days, general personification continues to be pervasive. Even outspoken atheist and prominent biologist Richard Dawkins is not immune. The title of his book ‘The Selfish Gene’ is a clear example. Granted, he might argue it’s just a metaphor and everyone understands it as such, I still think it represents a potential block to true understanding. To show why I’d like to ask a simple question: Why are brown eyes more common than blue?
If you’re not a biologist or probably even if you are, your answer is likely that “brown eyes are the dominant trait, blue recessive.” In addition to being borderline personification, this answer gives almost no understanding of the actual phenomena. I’m sure it’s useful to classify traits in this way, but it doesn’t actually answer the question, considering the only reason they’re described as such is because of their frequency relative to each other. As Mendel described, you inherit the trait from each parent, and dominant traits take precedent over recessive, so you only end up with the recessive trait if you get that allele from both parents. This was no doubt a significant observation in 1865, but with a modern understanding of DNA, I can’t help but ask the further question of what makes a trait dominant or recessive. What is it about the interaction of specific strands of DNA that makes one show and not the other?
I’m sure biologists have answered these questions, but my point is, there’s always a deeper question of why to ask, that personification has a tendency of coaxing our minds not to ask. I’m guessing the problem is less evident in say Physics over Biology. Where, in attempting to understand life, we relate it to the life we’re most familiar with. But then the problem is even worse in attempting to understand ourselves. Sure, it might seem absurd to bemoan the personification of people, but ultimately we’re all much closer to hurricanes then gods. So, I don’t see any reason to think that consciousness represents some sort of singularity in the chain of causality, or to think that making a choice should be considered a cause unto itself, independent of the universe. The history of science has been to show that there’s nothing special. Not our place in the universe, not life, not consciousness.
This, you might imagine has implications on the greater meaning of life or the lack there of. Personally, I don’t know. But I do know that everything I’m discussing here is independent of any potential greater meaning. The universe exists and this is how it works, the why and how of what’s beyond the knowable is not my concern. If you’ve found meaning in life, I’m happy for you, but don’t let the importance of meaning stop you from actually understanding it. Everyone knows a disinterested party has the freedom to see things clearer. So however important something may seem, you’re always better served, by letting go as much as you can.
To that end, it’s been a long time since I thought any of this made much of a difference to the universe. But… if we’re going to go on living, I suppose we might as well do it right. If you want something you might as well go about obtaining it properly, being ignorant on the details of your goals isn’t likely to help you obtain them. If you want to go to the moon, you have to figure out how first, there’s simply no way around it. Then to be sure, you have to actually go there. Everything is just a search for knowledge. A race to obtain enough detail before a choice needs to be made. Thus I have to start properly with the question, what can we know?
Metaphysics
Well, science has certainly given us a level of practical truth on objective reality. You probably use a hundred different products in a day that simply wouldn’t exist without a vast range of scientific disciplines. The reliable predictions of science give us the actual power of prophecy. We predict the future state of planets and atoms with relative ease. But how do we rectify this with our subjective experience of the world? This is the fundamental question philosophers and mystics have been asking for millennia. Sometimes it’s framed as masculine vs feminine. In ancient Greece they framed it as the Cult of Apollo vs the Cult of Dionysius. Moreover, the history of our general worldview through the ages is mostly just a study in the prevailing winds on the objective and subjective.
But likely just as ancient is the call for some type of synthesis between the two. In fact, the word I prefer to describe this unification is quite old, Non-dualism. So what is Non-dualism? In modern spiritual terms, the word speaks to the connection between subject and object. But that doesn’t seem quite right to me. That is something you can experience, and it’s a powerful experience at that, to feel connected to the whole universe. But, it doesn’t make any objective sense. The basic nature of objective thinking is to break everything into smaller and smaller pieces, to find the nature of a thing “ceteris paribus”.
However, the original meaning of the word non-dualism, was referring to the objective and subjective types of thinking, and that is much closer to the way in which I use the word now. Why call it non-dualism? Because they’re not two separate things, but they’re also not exactly the same thing, as would be implied by the word monism. In the extremes, we can see the difference, we break a thing down, or we build it up with connections to everything else. But we don’t really live our lives in the extreme. We can study the smallest details of the universe, or we can have profound spiritual experiences, but that’s not what most of our lives are. The majority of our time is spent on the utterly mundane. Simply appeasing one desire after another, and wondering what to do with our day/week/year/life. We can only get some sense of answer to the mundane questions of life through non-dualism. In fact, this is how our minds already work, but if we understand it better we can mold our thoughts to get better answers.
So to better explain the how and why of it, first I need to point out, that relativity alone doesn’t account for subjectivity. This is of course true in the general relativity of physics, but let’s just look at a mundane example, buying shoes. I buy size 12 shoes, and you probably buy some other size. We have different needs but obviously those correspond to objective facts about us individually. And in theory we can describe a great deal in this manner, down to even matters of taste, which correspond to facts about our biology and upbringing. So if this were the only thing going on, we would eventually have a complete objective understanding on human action, morality and everything else, but we can’t for reasons that are intrinsic to the universe.
Furthermore, lest you think that non-dualism is simply a product of human consciousness, consider this. Around a hundred years ago, we achieved the pinnacle of objective science by isolating matter to its smallest point, in quantum particles. A hundred years of technological advancements and in particular whatever device you’re reading this on, absolutely depends on the knowledge we’ve gained from quantum physics. And yet, the results it gives are so incomprehensible to objective thinking that there still isn’t a strong consensus on how to interpret a broader understanding of it all. Is this the ultimate nature of non-dualism? It’s definitely closer, put this way one might say, a thing has its own nature, and a nature relative to everything else, and these are fundamentally the same thing. In the extreme if you try to understand what a particle does on its own, not at all effected by the universe, it essentially becomes meaningless, because you’re a part of the universe and the only way information about the particle can be obtained is by interacting with it.
On the other end you might consider a deep state of mediation where you dissolve the subject-object distinction to be the pinnacle of subjective thinking, and here too the result is essentially meaningless. Not that the practice isn’t worth doing for other reasons, but in my experience and from most accounts of it I’ve read, it doesn’t really give you any deeper understanding of the universe. Like, ok great we’re all connected, everything is exactly as it should be, well now what? The moment you start to think again a hundred questions pop into your head that can’t be answered by “the universe is all connected”. That being said, quantum physics has never been shown to be working at the scale our brains work on, and there’s no good reason to think it does, despite what quantum consciousness mystics might have you believe. I think we want to believe in such things because its fantastical, but ultimately reality is mundane, you can’t escape it.
Regardless, quantum physics wasn’t the last significant advance of the 20th century. Additionally, we got information theory, and chaos theory, and while all three are connected, I think it’s these latter two that give the best inroads to understanding the human sphere of knowledge.
Chaos
I’m not sure I’ve ever really understood what people were talking about with the term “free-will”. The whole argument is just another expression of non-dualism, or of failing to comprehend it anyway. But one thing in particular that is often attributed to free-will, is the inherent unpredictability of human action. Despite how little we know about consciousness, I’m pretty confident on a couple things. One being, that it’s a dynamic non-linear process. In that sense, not unlike a hurricane, only more complicated. But we can’t even predict the exact path of a hurricane, because of sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Popularly known as the butterfly effect, due to feedback loops, a small difference in the starting state of two otherwise identical phenomena, leads to big differences over time. But it’s not just a practical problem, even with the most powerful computers in the world, the information needed to predict further out in time increases exponentially, such that fairly quickly you would need all the information in the universe just to predict another day. Unpredictability is an essential aspect of a vast range of the things we’re concerned with in our day to day lives. So what use is free-will in explaining anything?
There’s more to chaos though. Importantly, to describe chaotic systems, there’s a concept called an attractor. Simply put, it’s just the center in which all the points of a system are oriented towards. For example, water going down a drain, we can’t predict exactly where a given particle will end up, but we know it’s not going to be Mars. Specifically, it’ll just be going around the attractor till it ends up down the drain or left behind. Additionally, it’s a “strange attractor” if it produces a fractal. As in a repeating pattern on every scale. Fractals themselves are pretty important to life because you wouldn’t otherwise be able to encode the requisite information in DNA. Trees for example, the exact state of a specific tree is potentially a lot of information, but the basic shape of any given tree is just certain type of fractal described by a small equation. It literally “branches” at a set interval. Chaos and quantum mechanics, are themselves both just aspects of the more fundamental information theory though. And with that, what chaos takes in one hand, it gives in the other.
Non-dualism is the fundamental strange attractor of the universe. It’s the process of information becoming ordered or random and back again. It exists on every scale. In quantum mechanics, you see it notably in the uncertainty principle. It’s also already the exact same equations used in thermodynamics, and I could go on with the hard sciences. The most important thing though, is that information theory completely sheds the possibility of uncertainty being merely a practical concern. It’s inherent in the math and logic used.
If I were to state this as part of a formal scientific paper, my postulates would simply be
- The universe and everything therein is causally deterministic
A) Dynamic non-linear processes necessitate uncertainty
Or, if you prefer you could say that the universe is fundamentally non-deterministic and that predictably emerges from that. But to make a distinction of one over the other misses the point I’m making, the primacy of both. Ultimately, this doesn’t tell you much about the world, but it has to always be the starting point, a first law of the universe. If you try to explain anything with only one of those postulates, you’ll run into situations you can’t explain. Or if you try to explain the universe as a function of something outside of the non-dualism in three dimensional space that we have access to, you won’t be able to make meaningful predictions from that at all. Everything could be a holographic projection from two dimensions. We could all be in some sort of matrix scenario. There could be a divine intelligence at work. So what? Nothing outside of the universe we experience invalidates the laws of which we have to actually live with. In the here and now, we have real problems and they’re not particularly mysterious but they are complex. So if you’re stuck on a problem, throw everything out. Start with non-dualism and go from there.
Consciousness isn’t particularly mysterious either. It might be the most complex thing in the universe, but the fundamental ontology of it is the same as everything else. Our experience of objectivity and subjectivity is merely the brains means of processing the non-dualism of information. We are non-dualists because the universe is, most definitely not the other way around. The more ordered the information is the more we can just brute force it with objective means, but if there’s uncertainty involved, we have to use a subjects relation to everything else to give our best guess. Based on our biology or upbringing, any given person may tend towards one or the other, but the brain is capable of, and generally always is doing both on some level.
You may have noted the conspicuous absence of math in this paper and there are a couple reasons for that, but in theory it must exist. Everything can be explained by math, so I’ve given the baseline explanation for consciousness, the basic math for which is already understood. And it could be the case that more complicated things are happening as well, but if it can’t in principle at least, be explained by math, there’s absolutely no reason to think it exists and a fairly thorough understanding of the universe to suggest it definitely doesn’t exist. That’s not to say that everything can be completely proven mathematically though. The further away you get from baseline physics and math to more complex systems the more you need to rely on a things relation to other things we know, to understand it. And that is the ultimate strength of science, not as a purely objective means of discovery but as a vast connection of facts together to give greater insights. It’s the process of the mind writ large through society. One that’s never actually been solely objective. Scientists might glorify reductionist logic, but its ultimately the relational thinking of the peer review process that secures an ideas place in the world.
Now, with a few exceptions, every system of philosophy explicitly or not, is based on the universe generally being in a state of orderliness or randomness. One notable exception is The Tao Te Ching, which I’m pretty confident was intended to convey the same general message as the one I have tried to convey here. Although, the word non-dualism is never actually used. The word “tao” means “the way”, or as I would put it, the process. You can’t ever know the exact state of things, but you can understand the process. It’s the process of life, the universe and everything that matters.
I also find it interesting that in the Tao Te Ching, the author makes reference to ancient masters of the same tradition. It’s hard to say what their concept of ancient was, but in a work that is itself 2 – 3 thousand years old, if true it could imply non-dualism is one of the oldest ideas of human civilization. I’ve had a serious advantage in writing this though, I have the internet. If I see further now it’s not on the shoulders of giants but rather on the great human pyramid of knowledge. Where poetry failed, the entirety of science can succeed. And while we may get to a point where we can’t predict the direction of society any further due to our lack of knowledge on its finer structure, as Edward Lorenz put it in regards to the weather…
“Meanwhile, today’s errors in weather forecasting cannot be blamed entirely nor even primarily upon the finer structure of weather patterns. They arise mainly from our failure to observe even the coarser structure with near completeness.”
-Ed Lorenz, 1972
…so it goes for human action, where we have not yet begun to understand even the coarser structure.
Originally posted at http://www.consilience.us.com/a-simple-process/