The Anaesthetic of Familiarity

To live at all is miracle enough
Mervyn Peake
The Glassblower (1950)

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the snad grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

Moralists and theologians place great weight upon the moment of conception, seeing it as the instant at which the soul comes into existence. If, like me, you are unmoved by such talk, you still must regard a particular instant, nine months before your birth, as the most decisive event in your personal fortunes. It is the moment at which your consciousness suddenly became trillions of times more foreseeable than it was a split second before. To be sure, the embryonic you that came into existence still had plenty of hurdles to leap. Most conceptuses end in early abortion before their mother even knew they were there, and we are all lucky not to have done so. Also, there is more to personal identity than genes, as identical twins (who separate after the moment of fertilization) show us.

Nevertheless, the instant at which a particular spermatozoon penetrated a particular egg was, in your private hindsight, a moment of dizzying singularity. It was then that the odds against your becoming a person dropped from astronomical to single figures.

The lottery starts before we are conceived. Your parents had to meet, and the conception of each was as improbable as your own. And so on back, thourhg your four grandparents and eight great grandparents, back to where it doesn't bear thinking about. Desmond Morris opens his autobiography, Animal Days (1979), in characteristically arresting vein:

Napoleon started it all. If it weren't for him, I might not be sitting here now writing these words... for it was one of his cannonballs fired in the Peninsular War, that shot off the arm of my great-great-grandfather, James Morris, and altered the whole course of my family history.

Morris tells how his ancertor's enforced change of career had various knock-on effects culminating in his own interest in natural history. But he really needn't have bothered. There's no 'might' about it. Of course he owes his very existence to Napoleon. So do I and so do you. Napoleon didn't have to shoot off James Morris's arm in order to seal young Desmond's fate, and yours and mine, too. Not just Napoleon but the humblest mideval peasant had only to sneeze in order to affect something which changed something else whcih, after a long chain reaction, led to the consequence that one of your would-be ancestors failed to be your ancestor and became somebody else's instead. I'm not talking about 'chaos theory', or the equally trendy 'complexity theory', but just about the ordinary statistics of causation. The thread of historical events by which our existence hangs is wincingly tenuous.

When compared with the stretch of time unknown to us, O king, the present life of men on earth is like the flight of a single sparrow through the hall where, in winter, you sit with your captains and ministers. Entering at one door and leaving by another, while it is inside it is untouched by the wintry storm; but this brief interval of calm is over in a moement, and it returns to the winter whence it came, vanishing froum your sight. Man's life is similar; and of what follow it, or what went before, we are utterly ignorant.
The Venerable Bede,
A History of the English Church and People (731)

This is another respect in which we are lucky. The universe is older that a hundred million centuries. Within a comparable time the sun will swell to a red giant and engulf the earth. Every century of hundreds of millions has been in its time, or will be when its time comes, ' the present century'. Interestingly, some physicists don't like the idea of a 'moving present', regarding it as a subjective phenomenon for which they find no house room in their equations. But it is a subjective argument I am making. How it feels to me, and I guess to you as well, is that the present moves from the past to the future, like a tiny spotlight, inching its way along a gigantic ruler of time. Everything behind the spotlight is in darkness, the darkness of the dead past. Everything ahead of the spotlight is in the darkness of the unknown future. The odds of your century being the one in the spotlight are the same as the odds that a penny, tossed down at random, will land on a particular ant crawling somewhere along the road from New York to San Francisco. In other words, it is overwhelmingly probable that you are dead.

In spite of these odds, you will notice that you are, as a matter of fact, alive. People whom the spotlight has already passed over, and people whom the spotlight has not reached, are in no position to read a book. I am equally lucky to be in a position to write one, although I may not be when you aread these words. Indeed, I rather hope that I shall be dead when you do. Don't misunderstand me. I love life and hope to go on for a long time yet, but any author wants his works to reach the largest possible readership. Since the total future population is likely to outnumber my contemporaries by a large margin, I cannot but aspire to be dead when you see these words. Facetiously seen, it turns out to be no more than a hope that my book will not soon go out of print. But what I see as I write is that I am lucky to be alive and so are you.

We live on a planet that is all but perfect for our kind of life: not too warm and not too cold, basking in kindly sunshine, softly watered; a gently spinning, green and gold harvest festival of a planet. Yes, and alas, there are are deserts and slums; there is starvation and racking misery to be found. But take a look at the competition. Compared with most planets this is paradise, and parts of earth are still paradise by any standards. What are the odds that a planet picked at random would have these complaisant properties? Even the most optimistic calculation would put it at less than one in a million.

Imagine a spaceship full of sleeping explorers, deep-frozen would-be colonists of some distant world. Perhaps the ship is on a forlorn mission to save the species before an unstoppable comet, like the one that killed the dinosaurs, hits the home planet. The voyagers go into the deep-freeze soberly reckoning the odds against their spaceship's ever chancing upon a planet friendly to life. If one from each star to the next, the spaceship is pathetically unlikely to find a tolerable, let alone safe, haven for its sleeping cargo.

But imagine that the ship's robot pilot turns out to be unthinkably lucky. After millions of years the ship does find a planet capable of sustaining life: a planet of equable temperature, bathed in warm starshine, refreshed by oxygen and water. The passengers, Rip van Winkles, wake stumbling into the light. After a million years of sleep, here is a whole new fertile globe, a lush planet of warm pastures, sparkling streams and waterfalls, a world bountiful with creatures, darting through alien green felicity. Our travellers walk entranced, stupefied, unable to believe their unaccustomed senses or their luck.

As I said, the story asks for too much luck; it would never happen. And yet, isn't that what has happened to each one of us? We have woken after hundreds of millions of years asleep, defying astronomical odds. Admittedly we didn't arrive by spaceship, we arrived by being born, and we didn't burst conscious into the world but accumulated awareness gradually through babyhood. The fact that we slowly apprehend our world, rather than suddenly discover it, should not substract from its wonder.

Of course I am playing tricks with the idea of luck, putting the cart before the horse. It is no accident that our kind of life finds itself on a planet whose temperature, rainfall and everything else are exactly right. If the planet were suitable for another kind of life, it is that other kind of life that wouild have evolved here. But we as individuals are still hugely blessed. Privileged, and not just priveleged to enjoy our planet. More, we are granted the opportunity to understand why our eyes are open, and why they see what they do, in the short time before they close for ever.

Here, it seems to me, lies the best answer to those petty-minded scrooges who are always asking what is the use of science. In one of those mythic remarks of uncertain authorship, Michael Faraday is alleged to have been asked what was the use of science. 'Sir,' Faraday replied. 'Of what use is a new-born child?' The obvious thing for Faraday (or Benjamin Franklin, or whoever it was) to have meant was that a baby might be no use for anything at present, but it has great potential for the future. I now like to think that he meant something else, too: What is the use of bringing a baby into the world if the only thing it does with its life is just work to go on living? If everything is judged by how 'useful' it is - useful for staying alive, that is - we are left facing a futile circulartiy. there must be some added value. At least a part of life should be devoted to living that lie, not just working to stop it ending. This is how we rightly justify spending taxpayers' money on the arts. It is one of the justifications properly offered for conserving rare species and beautiful buildings. It is how we answer those barbarians who think that wild elephants and historic houses should be preserved only if they 'pay their way'. And science is the same. Of course sciene pays its way; of course it is useful. But that is not all it is.

After sleping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked - as I am surprisingly often - why I bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?

The poet Kathleen Raine, who read Natural Sciences at Cambridge, specialising in Biology, found related solace as a young woman unhappy in love and desperate for relief from heartbreak:

Then the sky spoke to me in language clear,
familiar as the heart, than love more near.
The skysaid to my soul, 'You have what you desire!

'Know now that you are born along with these
clouds, winds, and stars, and ever-moving seas
and forest dwellers. This your nature is.

'Lift up your heart again without fear,
sleep in the tomb, or breathe the living air,
this world you with the flowr and with the tiger share.'

'Passion' (1943)

There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness, which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence. For those of us not gifted in poetry, it is at least worth while from time to time making an effort to shake off the anaesthetic. What is the best way of countering the sluggish habituation brought about by our gradual crawl from babyhood? We can't actually fly to another planet. But we can recapture that sense of having just tumbled out to life on a new world by looking at our own world in unfamiliar ways. It's tempting ot use an easy example like a rose or a butterfuly, but let's go straight for the alien deep end. I remember attending a lecture, years ago, by a biologist working on octopuses, and their relatives the squids and cuttlefish. He began by explaining his facination with these animals. 'You see,' he said, 'they are the Martians.' Have you ever watched a squid change colour?

Television images are sometimes displayed on giant LED (Light Emitting Diode) hoardings. Instead of a fluorescent screen with anelectron beam scanning side to side over it, the LED screen is a large array of tiny glowing lights, independently controllabel. The lights are individually brightened or dimmed so that, from a distance, the whole matrix shimmers with moving pictures. The skin of a squid behaves like an LED screen. Instead of lights, squid skin is packed with thousands of tiny bags filled with ink. Each of these ink bags has miniature private muscles to squeeze it. With a puppet string leading to each one of these separate muscles, the squid's nervous system can control the shape, and hence the visibility, of each ink sac.

In theory, if you wire-tapped the nerves leading to the separate ink ixels and stimulated them electrically via a computer, you could play out Charlie Chaplin movies on the squid's skin. The squid doesn't do that, but its brains does control the wires with precision and speed, and the skinflicks that it shows in a speeded-up film; ripples and eddies race over the living screen. The animal signals its changing emotions in quick time: dark brown one second, blanching ghostly white the next, rapidly modulating interwoven patters of stipples and stripes. When it comes to changing colour, by comparison chamaleons are amateurs at the game.

The American neurobiologist William Calvin is one of those thinking hard today about what thinking itself really is. He emphasizes, as others have done before, the idea that thoughts do not reside in particular places in the brain but are shifting patterns of activity over its surface, units which recruit neighbouring units into populations becoming the same thought, competing in Darwinian fashion with rival populations thinking alternative thoughts. We don’t see these shifting patterns, but presumably thinking alternative thoughts. We don’t see these shifting patterns, but presumably we would if neurons lit up when active. The cortex of the brain, I realize, might then look like a squid’s body surface. Does a squid think with its skin? When a squid suddenly changes its colour pattern we suppose it to be a manifestation of mood change, for signalling to another squid. A shift in colour announces that the squid has switched from an aggressive mood, say, to a fearful one. It is natural to presume that the change in mood took place in the brain, and caused the change in colour as a visible manifestation of internal thoughts, rendered external for purposes of communication. The fancy I am adding is that the squid’s thoughts themselves may reside nowhere but in the skin. If squids think with their skins they are even more ‘Martian’ than my colleague realized. Even if that is too far-fetched a speculation (it is), the spectacle of their rippling colour changes is quite alien enough to jolt us out our anaesthetic of familiarity.

Squids are not the only ‘Martians’ on our own doorstep. Think of the grotesque faces of deep-sea fish, think of dust mites, even more fearsome were they not so tiny; think of basking sharks, just fearsome. Think indeed, of chameleons with their catapult-launched tongues, swivelling eye turrets and cold, slow gait. Or we can capture that ‘strange other world’ feeling just as effectively by looking inside ourselves, at the cells that make up our own bodies. A cell is not just a bag of juice. It is packed with solid structures, mazes of intricate folded membranes. There are about 100 million million cells in a human body, and the total area of membranous structure inside one of us works out at more than 200 acres. That’s a respectable farm.

What are all these membranes doing? They seem to stuff the cell as wadding, but that isn’t all they do. Much of the folded acreage is given over to chemical production lines, with moving conveyor belts, hundreds of stages in cascade, each leading to the next in precisely crafted sequences, the whole driven by fast-turning chemical cogwheels. The Krebs cycle, the 9-toothed cogwheel that is largely responsible for making energy available to us, turns over at up to 100 revolutions per second, duplicated thousands of times in every cell. Chemical cogwheels of this particular marquee are housed inside mitochondria, tiny bodies that reproduce independently inside our cells like bacteria. As we shall see, it is now widely accepted that the mitochondria, along with other vitally necessary structures within cells, not only resemble bacteria but are directly descended from ancestral bacteria who, a billion years ago, gave up their freedom. Each one of us is a city of cells, and each cell is a town of bacteria. You are a gigantic megalopolis of bacteria. Doesn’t that life the anaesthetic’s pall?

As a microscope helps our minds to burrow thought alien galleries of cell membranes, and as a telescope lifts us to far galaxies, another way of coming out of the anaesthetic is to return, in our imaginations, through geological time. It is the inhuman age of fossils that knocks us back on our heels. We pick up a trilobite and the books tell us it is 500 million years old. But we fail to comprehend such an age, and there is a yearning pleasure in the attempt. Our brains have evolved to grasp the time-scales of our own lifetimes. Seconds, minutes, hours, days and years are easy for us. We can cope with centuries. When we come to millennia – thousands of years – our spines begin to tingle Epic myths of Homer; deeds of the Greek gods Zeus, Apollo and Artemis; of the Jewish heroes Abraham, Moses and David, and their terrifying god Yahweh; of the ancient Egyptians and the Sun God Ra: these inspire poets and give us that frission of immense age. We seem to be peering back through eerie mists into the echoing strangeness of antiquity. Yet, on the time-scale of our trilobite, those vaunted antiquities are scarcely yesterday.

Many dramatizations have been offered, and I shall essay another. Let us write the history of one year on a single sheet of paer. That doesn’t leave much room for detail. It is roughly equivalent to the lightning ‘Round-up of the Year’ that newspapers trot out on 31 December. Each month gets a few sentences. Now on another sheet of paper write the history of the previous year. Carry on back throough the years, sketching, at a rate of a year per sheet, the outline of what happened in each yar. Bing the pages into a book and number them. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88) spans some 13 centuries in six volumes of about 500 pages each, so it is covering the ground at approximately the rate we are talking about.

That splendid volume The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (1992), is itself a damned thick, square doorstop of a book, and about the right size to take us back to the time of Queen Elizabeth I. We have an approximate yardstick of time: 4 inches or 10 cm of book thickness to record the history of one millennium. Having established our yardstick, let’s work back to the alien world of geological deep time. We place the book of the most recent past flat on the ground, and then stack books of earlier centuries on top of it. We now stand beside the pile of books as a living yardstick. If we want to read about Jesus, say, we must select a volume 20 cm from the ground or just above the ankle.

A famous archaeologist dug up a bronze-age warrior with a beautifully preserved face mask and exulted: I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon.'He was being poetically awed at his penetration of fabled antiquity. To find Agamemnon in our pile of books, you'd have to sttop to a level about halfway up your shins. Somewhere in the vicinity you'd find Petra (Á rose-red city, half as old as time'), Ozymandias, king of kings ('Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair) and that enigmatic wonder of the ancient world of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Ur of the Chaldeers, and Uruk the city of the legendary hero Gilgamesh had their day slightly earlier and you'd find tales of their foundation a little higher up your legs. Around here is the oldest date of all, according to the seventeenth-century archbishop James Ussher, who calculated 4004 BC as the date of the creation of Adam and Eve.

The taming of fire was climacteric in our history; from it stems most of technology. How high in our stack of books is the page on which this epic discovery is recorded? The answer is quite a surprise when you recall hat you could comfortably sit down on the pile of books encompassing the whole of recorded history. Archaeological traces suggest that fire was discovered by our Homo erectus ancestors, though whether they made fire, or just carried it about and used it we don't know. They had fire by half a million years ago, so to consult the volume in our analogy recording the discovery you’d have to climb up to a level somewhat higher than the Statue of Liberty. A dizzy height, especially given that Prometheus, the legendary bringer of fire, gets his first mention a little below your knee in our pile of books. To read about Lucy and our australopithecine ancestors in Africa, you’d need to climb higher than any building in Chicago. The biography of the common ancestor we share with chimpanzees would be a sentence in a book stacked twice as high again.

But we’ve only just begun our journey back to the trilobite. How high would the stack of books have to be in order to accommodate the page where the life and death of this trilobite, in its shallow Cambrian sea, is perfunctorily celebrated? The answer is about 56 kilometres, or 35 miles. We aren’t used to dealing with heights like this. The summit of mount Everest is less than 9 km above sea level. We can get some idea of the age of the trilobite if we topple the stack through 90 degrees. Picture a bookshelf three times the length of Manhattan island, packed with volumes the size of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. To read your way back to the trilobite, with only one page allotted to each year, would be more laborious than spelling through all 14 million volumes in the Library of Congress. But even the trilobite is young compared with the age of life itself. The first living creatures, the shared ancestors of the trilobite, of bacteria and of ourselves, have their ancient chemical lives recorded in volume 1 of our saga. Volume 1 is at the far end of the marathon bookshelf. The entire shelf would stretch from London to the Scottish borders. Or right across Greece from the Adriatic to the Aegean.

Perhaps these distances are still unreal. The art in thinking of analogies for large numbers is not to go off the scale of what people can comprehend. If we do that, we are no better off with an analogy that with the real thing. Reading your way through a work of history, whose shelved volumes stretch from Rome to Venice, is an incomprehensible task, just about as incomprehensible as the bald figure 4,000 million years.

Here is another analogy, one that has been used before. Fling your arms wide in an expansive gesture to span all of evolution from its origin at your left fingertip to today at your right fingertip. All the way across your midline to well past your right shoulder, life consists of nothing but bacteria. Many-celled, invertebrate life flowers somewhere around your right elbow. The dinosaurs originate in the middle of your right palm, and go extinct around your last finger joint. The whole story of Homo sapiens and our predecessor Homo erectus is contained in the thickness of one nail-clipping. As for recorded history; as for the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Jewish patriarchs, the dynasties of Pharaohs, the legions of Rome, the Christian Fathers, the Laws of the Medes and Persians which never change; as for Troy and the Greeks, Helen and Achilles and Agamemnon dead; as for Napoleon and Hitler the Beatles and Bill Clinton, they and everyone that knew them are blown away in the dust from one light stoke of a nail-file.

The poor are fast forgotten
They outnumber the living, but where are all their bones?
For every man alive there are a million dead,
Has their dust gone into earth that it is never seen?
There should be no air to breathe, with it so thick,
No space for wind to blow, nor rain to fall;
Earth should be a cloud of dust, a soil of bones,
With no room even, for our skeletons.

Sacheverell Sitwell, ‘Ágamemnon’s Tomb’ (1933)

Not that it matters, Sitwell’s third line is inaccurate. It has been estimated that the people alive today make up a substantial proportion of the humans that have ever lived. But this just reflects the power of exponential growth. If we count generations instead of bodies, and especially if we go back beyond humankind to life’s beginning, Sacheverell Sitwell’s sentiment has a new force. Let us suppose that each individual in our direct female ancestry, from the first flowering of many-celled life a little over half a billion years ago, lay down and died on the grave of her mother, eventually to be fossilized. As in the successive layers of the buried city of Troy, there would be much compression and shaking down, so let us assume that each fossil in the series was flattened to the thickness of a 1 cm pancake. What depth of rock should we need, if we are to accommodate our continuous fossil record? The answer is that the rock would have to be about 1,000 km or 600 miles thick. This is about ten times the thickness of the earth’s crust.

The Grand Canyon, whose rocks, from deepest to shallowest, span most of the period we are now talking about, is only around one mile deep. If the strata of the Grand Canyon were stuffed with fossils and no intervening rock, there would be room within its depth to accommodate only about one 600th of the generations that have successively died. This calculation helps us to keep in proportion fundamentalist demands for a ‘continuous’ series of gradually changing fossils before they will accept the fact of evolution. The rocks of the earth simply don’t have room for such a luxury – not by many orders of magnitude. Whichever way you look at it, only an extremely small proportions of creatures has the good fortune to be fossilized. As I have said before, I should consider it an honour.

The number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live. The night of time far surpasseth the day, and who knows when was the Aequinox? Every houre addes unto that current Arithmetique, which scarce stands one moment… Who knows whether the best of men be known or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot than any that stand remembred in the known account of time?

Sir Thomas Browne, Urne Buriall (1658)

Of Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow

Is the Universe a Computer?

Either because the laws of nature are couched in mathematical symbolism, or because science cannot progress safely in the presence of ambiguity and imprecision, scientists tend to express natural laws as mathematical statements. It would be wrong, however, to read too much into this. Consider a stone tumbling down a hillside, bouncing off rocks and molehills, until it reaches its final resting place at the bottom of the slope. If the stone really is implementing mathematical laws, then in a few seconds it will have performed a series of calculations beyond the capabilities of the fastest supercomputer. But is that really what the rock is doing? Measuring its own positing to the hundreds of decimal places that we know are needed to guarantee the “correct answer”? Computing its way from collision to collision in an orgy of dynamical equations? Some physicists and philosophers think so; in their view, information, rather than matter, is the basic material of the universe. The universe itself then becomes a supercomputer of unprecedented speed and power, busily pursuing the consequences of its “program,” its program being the laws of nature.

Alternatively, the simple laws that we consider fundamental may not be fundamental at all, but just approximations of how nature behaves, or consequences of that behavior. We now know that Newton’s laws are not rigid rules that nature just obeys; they are excellent but sometimes inaccurate descriptions of what nature does. They are not nature’s laws but human laws, and like all human laws they can be broken. Indeed, according to another human law, Murphy’s, they always will be – an interesting case of self-reference. If nature breaks our laws, then our calculations will bear no relation to the way in which nature actually works. We may use the laws of dynamics to calculate where the stone will fall; but that’s not how the stone does it. It certainly can’t if we’ve got the wrong laws. The Newtonian stone has no choice; it is forced to fall wherever it does. In this view the universe is a machine rather than a computer; it is composed of matter, and it is in the nature of matter to behave in ways that happen, coincidentally, to mimic certain computations that appeal to humans.

That was a classical picture of a moving stone. The quantum picture is more subtle, and far stranger to human intuition. In a quantum view, the subatomic particles that make up the stone actually follow all possible paths, consistent with the laws of quantum mechanics. According to the quantum paradigm, what we see is the superposition of all of those potentialities. It just happens that the result of this strange process looks like a lump of rock moving under Newtonian laws. In this picture the Newtonian laws are viewed as mathematical consequences of the real quantum laws, valid for modest but bulky quantities of matter moving at moderate speeds.

In other areas of science, especially those where really accurate measurements or repeatable experiments aren’t possible, people nowadays tend to speak of “models” rather than “laws”. They look for underlying rules and regularities that explain a limited range of phenomena in simple, graspable terms. From that point of view, “laws” may be just spectacularly successful, very simple, models. The important thing is that, even though we can’t be certain that what we think of as laws of nature are actually true, we do see a lot of patterns and regularities in the world, and we can use these patterns and regularities in the world, and we can use these patterns very effectively to bring certain aspects of the world under our control. For instance, the laws of aerodynamics work sufficiently well that airplanes designed using those laws stay up. The vast bulk of evidence, while not quite so conclusive points to the flight of birds as a consequence of those same laws. However, we can’t yet start with aerodynamics and end with a proof that a bird, too, will stay up; but despite such admitted uncertainties, there still seem to be simple laws at work. It’s just that some operate further behind the scenes than others. Indeed, the further behind the scenes the laws are, the more we tend to think of them as being “fundamental”.

God of Time

In discussing the big bang, we see that space and time are much more like each other than we might at first have suspected. The view we get from Einstein is of a four-dimensional space-time rather than a three dimensional space that evolves in time. It is a rather strange picture of reality. Nothing changes in four-dimensional space-time. In order for there to be change, it must take place in time. But time is part of the four-dimensional reality we are talking about; there is no other. For this reason, many physicists talk of a “block universe,” one that contains all of space and time on an equal footing. So, for example, just as all of space exists at each point in time, so all of time exists at each point in space. Physical time is essentially static.

This is not to say that space and time are indistinguishable. They clearly are very different, as we noted in the ways in which we measure the two: a ruler in the one case, a clock in the other. Not only that, whereas one can travel no distance in a finite time (just stay still), one cannot travel a finite distance in no time. To do the latter, it would have to be feasible to travel at infinite speed.

This possibility is ruled out by another consequence of relativity theory; namely, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light (300,000 kilometers per second). This constrain means that if one represents the motion of an object through space and time by tracing out its path in four-dimensional space-time, it can lie as close as it likes to the time axis (by remaining stationary, it would lie exactly along this axis). But there is a limit to how closely it can align itself with any of the spatial axes (the closest alignment being that of a light beam). So, a study of these paths in space time would single out the time axis as different from the other three.

In addition, we have the second law of thermodynamics: Disorder increases as time increases. If we have, for example, a photograph of an intact cup and another showing the same cup smashed, we immediately know that the latter relates to a set of circumstances found at a later time; in other words, nearer to the positive end of the time axis. The spatial axes do not exhibit any such asymmetry.

So far we have talked purely in physical terms: the motions of objects and light, measurements recorded by physical rulers and clocks orderly and disorderly states. When we add to this our experience of space and time as conscious human beings, then further differences arise. In particular, as regards time, we become aware of a distinction among past, present, and future. We seem to inhabit the instant known as “now”; the past no longer existing; the future yet to exist. Moreover, we are aware of the “flow” of time. We move toward the future; we do not move toward the past (outside the realms of science fiction, that is).

Whereas we noted that according to the second law of thermodynamics there was more disorder toward one end of the time axis than toward the other, this conscious experience of time takes us in the direction that leads to more and more disorder. This inexorable movement is a feature only of time; there is nothing equivalent to compel us to travel in only one spatial direction.

We are thus confronted with two entirely different understandings of time. On the one hand, we have conscious experience presenting us with a flowing time in which the constantly moving special instant called “now” separates the totally different domains of past and future. ON the other hand, physics presents us with a static time in which no instant is singled out as in any way special, all instants of time being on an equal footing, just like all points in space. How are we to reconcile the two? How are we to see God in relation to time?

There is no easy answer. The view of time that is most readily grasped is, of course, that of conscious experience. The static idea of time is so alien and counterintuitive that even some professional scientists are inclined to dismiss it as being somehow wrong. In contrast, there are others who would claim that the scientific picture has to be correct, and it is our conscious experience of time that is illusory. But it seems to me that rejecting, or downplaying, one of these approaches to the understanding of time in favor of the other is not the right course of action.

Instead, we have to come to terms with a mystery that defies our normal categories of thought and our usual ways of organizing information. The dilemma over the two kinds of time points us toward different type of understanding, one in which we have simultaneously to hold in the mind seemingly contradictory, paradoxical conceptions, each of which embodies some of the truth but not the whole.

To get the complete picture of reality, one needs both conceptions. One has to learn to accept that this conjunction of seemingly paradoxical ideas is the explanation. It might not be the type of explanation one had been expecting, but no matter. One must allow the nature of reality to dictate not just the answer to our question but also the very form of the question we ask and the form of its answer. Constraining the outcome to fit in with our conventional notions as to what constitutes a satisfactory “explanation” can only distort the truth and leave us with an impoverished understanding.

But, for now, we note that our findings about time seem to point us in two directions at once. This in turn affects the way we ought to see God in relation to time:
God is to be found in time. He is the God to whom we pray. For prayer to be effective it must bring about change. We must, therefore, live our lives on the assumption that God does react to us; not only do we change what time but to some extent, and in some sense, he, too, changes – in answering our prayers.

But he is not just the God of mental life with its experience of flowing time and change. He is also the God of the physical world – the four-dimensional integration of all space and all time. As such, all of time is present to him; he sees it all; he knows it all. This is the aspect of God’s relationship to time that goes against the grain. It is difficult not to incorporate into our picture of God an extension of our own human limitations on knowing the future. But if we are to reach out to a more sophisticated understanding of God’s nature, this is a temptation that has to be resisted. We must allow whatever are the currently accepted best interpretations of science to be the arbiter and guide. And the fact that those interpretations appear to include a time such that, in some sense or other, all of it exists on an equal footing, surely makes it easier to accept that God has knowledge of the future.

Not, of course, that there is anything new about the idea of God knowing the future. What modern science does is to lend an added measure of credibility to this ancient insight.

The acceptance of God’s foreknowledge as something that arises from God’s ability to encompass the whole of physical time from a vantage point lying beyond such time itself, feeds back into our own personal relationship with God occurring within the type of time that is relevant to conscious experience. The God to whom we pray in that context is the God who knows what the outcome will be and who ensures that all will be well. In the same way, the God who built into the evolutionary process a measure of random chance goes beyond a God who has simply stacked the odds so that it is overwhelmingly likely intelligent life of some form will appear somewhere; he knows exactly what form that intelligent life will take.

The idea of a God holding the somewhat paradoxical engagement with time that is both within the changing, open-ended time of conscious experience and also beyond the unchanging completeness of physical time is not easy to grasp. Indeed, let us be frank: It cannot be done. It cannot be grasped in the same sense as one might be able logically to prove a geometrical theorem. It is a truth, an understanding, of God that is to be accepted rather than mastered. It is a paradox that points to the truth, rather than encompasses it. This paradoxical approach affords a way of further deepening our appreciation of the nature of God beyond that which can be achieved by the straightforward use of any single metaphor drawn from everyday human life.

God of Evolution

Earth formed some 4,600 million years ago, and it has taken that long for evolution by natural selection to transform inanimate chemicals into human beings. In fact, it has taken a total of 12,000 million years since the big bang to produce us. A long, long, time. From the vantage of this modern understanding, we have a far better appreciation of the patience and far-sightedness of God than was possible in earlier times. From God’s perspective how petty our own restive, anxious demands for immediate results and instant gratification must seem.

Second, we learn from evolution that God is willing to incorporate into the achievement of his purpose an element of chance. The mutations on which natural selection works occur randomly. There is no conscious, detailed “design” built into all the minutiae. There is a world to be itself. And yet he knows that the whole system has been set up in such a way that his broad aims eventually will be achieved. Intelligent life of one form or another will in due course emerge.

On other planets, the random events giving rise to life will be different, so humans as such will not evolve. But some form of intelligent life eventually will appear – a form of life that will at some stage begin to ask the ultimate questions concerning the purpose of life and whether relationship with God is established, which is why the world is here in the first place. In these ways, our conception of God has to broaden.

One particularly difficult problem inherent in evolutionary theory has to be mentioned. Evolution by natural selection has been characterized by phrase “survival of the fittest.” It is a crude description but has some truth to it. It is all about survival, as is plain to see from the constant engagement between predator and prey. Although it is impossible to be sure what any other animal actually feels, it seems only reasonable to conclude that evolution involves suffering on a massive scale.

Now, of course, there is nothing new about suffering. The problems of evil and suffering have been with us since time immemorial. Evil can be accounted for in terms of our own disobedience against the wholly good God, and some suffering arises directly out of evil acts or from wanton unwillingness to help those in need. But not all suffering arises in this way; even in the absence of human wickedness, there is suffering through natural causes such as earthquakes, flood, and failure of crops.

A partial explanation might lie in the need for rigid laws of nature to hold sway so that we can exercise free will in an environment in which we know what the outcome of our actions will be. Inevitably, one will sometimes fall foul of those laws working out their inexorable course. One also has to accept that in a hypothetical world where there was no suffering, it would be difficult if not impossible, to demonstrate one’s love for another (in the way one attends to his or her needs and is prepared to make sacrifices on that person’s behalf). Having said that, the sheer degree of suffering in the world has always appeared to be excessive. Now, on top of that, we have to come to terms with the fact that the very process by which intelligent beings evolve incorporates by its very nature an unavoidable degree of intense suffering. Why did God choose evolution by natural selection? Was there no other way? Clearly, we still have much to learn about the mind of God in this matter.

P.S. I will announce with pomp when I finally construct my alternative take on society. It is still in its embryonic stage.

On the Pursuit of Being

The following is an excerpt from the introduction to Sartre’s classic, Being and Nothingness. Despite the extract deviating well from my previous posts on the purpose of being, I believe it is necessary to examine one’s method of perception of appearance and its transcendence to the essence of the absolute reality before I begin proposing alternative forms of society.

Modern thought has realized considerable progress by reducing the existent to the series of appearances which manifest it. Its aim was to overcome a certain number of dualisms which have embarrassed philosophy and to replace them by the monism of the phenomenon. Has the attempt been successful?

In the fist place we certainly thus get rid of that dualisms which in the existent opposes interior to exterior. There is no longer an exterior for the existent if one means by that a superficial covering which hides from sight the true nature of the object. And this true nature in turn, if it is to be the secret reality of the thing, which one can have a presentiment of or which one can suppose but can never reach because it is the “interior” of the object under consideration – this nature no longer exists. The appearances which manifest the existent are neither interior nor exterior; they are all equal, they all refer to other appearances, and none of them is privileged. Force, for example, is not a metaphysical conatus of an unknown kind which hides behind its effects (acceleration, deviations, etc.); it is the totality of these effects. Similarly an electric current does not have a secret reverse side; it is nothing but the totality of the physical-chemical actions which manifest it (electrolysis, the incandescence of a carbon filament, the displacement of the needle of a galvanometer etc.) No one of these actions alone is sufficient to reveal it. But no action indicates anything which is behind itself; it indicates only itself and the total series.

The obvious conclusion is that the dualism of being and appearance is no longer entitled to any legal status within philosophy. The appearance refers to the total series of appearances and not to a hidden reality which would drain to itself all the being of the existent. And the appearance for its part is not an inconsistent manifestation of this being. To the extent that men had believed in noumenal (an object of human inquiry - it is a posited object or event as it is in itself independent of the senses) realities, they have presented appearance as a pure negative. It was “that which is not being”; it had no other being than that of illusion and error. But even this being was borrowed, it was itself a pretence, and philosophers met with the greatest difficulty in maintaining cohesion and existence in the appearance so that it should not itself be reabsorbed in the depth called “illusion of worlds-behind-the-scene,” and if we no longer believe in the being-behind-the-appearance, the then the appearance becomes full positivity; its essence is an “appearing” which is no longer opposed to being but on the contrary is the measure of it. For the being of an existent is exactly what it appears. Thus we arrive at the idea of the phenomenon such as we can find, for example in the “phenomenology” of Husserl or of Heidegger – the phenomenon or the relative-absolute. Relative the phenomenon remains, for “to appear” supposes in essence somebody to whom to appear. But it does not have the double relativity of Kant’s Erscheinung. It does not point over its shoulder to a true being which would be, for it, absolute. What it is, it is absolutely, for it reveals itself as it is. The phenomenon can be studied and described as such, for it is absolutely indicative of itself.

On the Reason of Purpose

The society is our ruler. We abide by it without question and often strive to adapt to its demand. I believe that this conformity has destroyed our instinct towards what nature had intended for us. We deviate from our purpose because of this conformity and find it difficult to reason the purpose of our birth.

Rudimentarily, the purpose of a species would be to survive. The very direct tool of Darwinian natural selection is evidence enough to show that the features of our body and that of other animals are such that they lengthen their lifespan and ensure their sustainability. Even from a Creationist perspective, the perpetuation of animals is based primarily on survival.

Intelligence and our ability to reason and act accordingly have made us what we are today. Humans are, after all, a species of ape that only recently climbed down from the trees. We are still learning after the process of our inception and definitely our society is far from perfect. From the structure of the economy, the judiciary systems, the nature of human behavioral patterns and a list of everything else that has been derived from the intelligence of modern humans is an aspect of our society. And much, if not all of it encompasses a great deal of imbalance in relation to the natural method of our existence or to what might one call the purpose of our being.

For the sake of this discussion, I wish to bring one such feature of our society, the circular flow of income, or more simply the circular flow, to question. Those who are not economically inclined might understand best of the circular flow as it being a simple economic model which describes the reciprocal circulation of income between producers and consumers. In the circular flow model, the inter-dependent entities of producer and consumer are referred to as "firms" and "households" respectively and provide each other with factors in order to facilitate the flow of income. Each group has two roles. Firms are producers of goods and services; they are also the employers of labor and other factors of production. Households are the consumers of goods and services; they are also the suppliers of labor and various other factors of production. There exists an inner flow and various outer flows of incomes between these two groups. The inner flow can be explained by which firms pay money to households in the form of wages and salaries, dividends on shares, interest and rent. These payments are in return for the services of the factors of production – labor, capital and land – that are supplied by households. Households, in turn, pay money to domestic firms when they consume domestically produced goods and services. There is thus a circular flow of payments from firms to households to firms and so on.

To explain further, if households spend all their incomes on buying domestic goods and services, and if firms pay out all this income they receive as factor payments to domestic households, and if the velocity of circulation does not change, the flow will continue at the same level indefinitely. I would like to leave out the complication of injections and withdrawals, the outer flow (since its addition is unnecessary for the clarity of this assertion).

It is important to note that this model of circular flow is the principle of the monetary flow in our economy and thus makes up the backbone of our society. Such a circular flow, however, has a paradox which becomes apparent when we consider the question of the purpose of society and assume the circular flow to be a tool that runs the world that we see around us. The society that I have described is the one that we live in because without the jobs that we hold or the money that we spend on the goods and services, the world would, without a doubt come to a stand still. All the forces that direct human behavior can be reasoned by the circular flow, with the exception of true human emotions that are independent of money and other monetary factors. Thus we, with only a few exceptions, are controlled by the community around us and we tend to err unknowingly when the society demands of it.

We must understand that the circular flow is not a device necessary for survival. However, I do not equate survival to the purpose of being. Even then, the circular flow does not satisfy a higher purpose. It succeeds in entertaining us; keeping us occupied and inhibits the thought of escaping this system. The paradox lies in the fact that people often don’t realize that their expenditure returns back to them as their income (although this may not be equal). Collectively, what the human community spends is what they earn; only that is distributed in an unequal fashion. In the process, resources are spent and energy is depleted. This cycle demands resources and serves the purpose of keeping us occupied and entertaining us. This is the paradox. The contradiction is that the resources that we use to run this cycle are actually wasted and actually masks us from the true purpose of our being. The validity of this claim cannot be challenged because; accumulating wealth cannot be seen as a true purpose of our being in all domains. Affluence after a certain point will result in the desire of satisfaction which could have been attained more easily at a point of lesser wealth. Satisfaction derived from a certain activity seems more remote only after one is deeply involved in this system and tries to accumulate wealth.

It is only in later discussions that I will propose an alternative form of governance and behavior system of society and discuss the true purpose of our being. Nevertheless, it is most essential to realize that our society does not derive satisfaction for individuals nor does it fulfill the true purpose of our being. That is the first step that we can take to justify our creation. When we realize what we do, we are better informed towards where we are going and where we should be.

In an intricate process of evolution; societies tend to change. It can be easily identified that this method of being is not sustainable. The depletion of our planet, a precious life supporting system, is reason enough to not only changing our actions but also to change our ideology itself. This might be time to change the structure of our society. To be an error and to be cast out is a part of God’s design. We have to evolve before we are cast out.