runaway glaciation; the other way and we have runaway heating due to a greenhouse effect. At the present time we are very concerned about the greenhouse effect and with reason. It is a perfect feedback system: increase emission of carbon dioxide into the thin atmosphere and it's like closing windows in a glasshouse. You lock in the heat and it becomes hotter. The hotter it becomes the more carbon is released from the huge store of limestone rock and vegetation. This in turn further increases the heat. Once started it becomes unstoppable. We are at the crisis point right now. Obviously this issue has far more import for us than such esoteric points as to whether the universe is expanding forever or not. If we do not deal with it quickly we will not be around to ask such questions in the first place.
Could intelligent life die out? Surely the whole cosmos has led to the development of life and intelligence. The search for purpose and meaning leads us to assume such vain conclusions. Just as the earth can in a relative instant wipe us from the record, so too with much more facility can the galaxy and the wider universe wipe us out of existence, either past or present - nothing would remain. We have only to look at the demise of the age of the dinosaurs who trundled across the very same ground as us for over fifty million years. What little evidence remains of them can be stored in one big museum and even that will disappear along with us. In time nothing will remain. Increasing entropy, in line with the second law of thermodynamics, will create dust of them all.
I am not special. I am here. I am thinking. I can do things to affect others. I can affect the environment that sustains me. I can affect the futures of my children and of my children's children if they are lucky enough to survive. Survival is the central question facing humanity. Will man and woman survive on this planet? Part of that question is a given, already. They cannot survive on the planet forever because we know that the planet's existence is finite. When the sun exhausts its nuclear fuel and leaves the so-called main sequence of stars, the energy output will increase, the outer atmosphere of the sun will expand to engulf the earth and life on earth will end as the oceans boil away. This will happen in about ten billion years. So that's our limit - unless we can develop space travel into the galaxy and beyond. But the limitations of the speed of light make that look very unlikely. So life will most likely die out in this corner of the cosmos. Its emergence will have had no impact on the cosmos. Are we doomed to cosmic insignificance? All our earthly struggles, our loves, dramas, tragedies, achievements, cultures, arts, music, religions and science, will count for nought. This borders on total nihilism and despair. But is it? Every human being knows it's going to die. But this sense of definite fatalism does not prevent us from living life and the opportunities it gives us to the full. We live in local space and time. We do not focus on death but instead train our thoughts to decipher the puzzles of our daily existence. The greater puzzle of life and its meaning, we give to greater authority - usually religious dogma. The proforma answers fill the vacuum and allow us to get on with our concerns in the very real here and now. In this sense religion can be a form of liberation and an ally in the daily struggle of survival. It is the traditional defence of religion in that it avoids nihilism - it gives a meaning to death, to the end.
So what is the meaning of life? We generally avoid this question by trying to deconstruct life into its myriad components. This brings us into the territory first of biology and then microbiology and finally neuroscience. We meet the biological wall and can go no further. Then we try and deconstruct our thought. This brings us first to philosophy and then to psychology, but again we meet a wall. Then we try and deconstruct matter. This leads us to science and mathematics and to finally the infinite. The infinite is an unbreachable wall. In all this we have done the same thing - we have deconstructed. We seem to want to take things apart and piece them together in a synthesis that hopefully will give us answers regarding ontology and teleology. This has been our western approach. It works very well for the analytical approach and has given huge advancements in technology but the end game of the holy grail of meaning is still elusive.
All the while humans have been seeking something totally different - wholeness; mental, physical, social, individual. That is what I am seeking on this island. It has driven me from the world of materialism, politics, social intrigue, and self advancement. The wholeness I am seeking must come from within but must not be personal. It should be a glimpse of the wholeness of human existence and objective existence if it exists.
The problem with our world experience is that most things exist in a fragmentary state. This conditions us to expect our analysis to be of this nature. Because of this familiarity of defragmentation of things, we tend to give more psychological value to deconstruction. It becomes our paradigm for understanding. We have to struggle to see wholeness in our environment. The second law of thermodynamics with its increasing complexity compels us to further dissect. Our limited intelligence forces us to cut up complexity into bite size chunks and deconstruct to develop our understanding. All our knowledge comes from minute examination of ever decreasing areas of existence. We develop models to explain how these increasingly small regions of spacetime operate. They give us good answers locally but are at best a meagre local map. They are of no use in the bigger picture. They give us no guidance in the greater world. The paradigm dooms us to failure in trying to understand the whole.
Does this concept of wholeness actually exist in reality? It does but its rarity is what constrains us from adopting it as our norm of analysis. The peoples of the east are better at applying the principles of wholeness to their analysis. Chinese medicine has always seen the whole body as one organism that must be treated and not just the localised symptoms. This paradigm could be applied to all knowledge not just medicine. There is already a unification of mathematics and physics in quantum theory. Quantum theory has overlaps with psychology and neuroscience with the elevated role of the observer in the evolution of the state wave. We see physical examples of wholeness in the physical reality of the hologram where each point of a two dimensional surface contains a full three dimensional world. Each point contains the whole.
Quantum theory postulates that empty space is whole. There is no vacuum. It says that empty space contains an infinite number of waves at an infinitesimally small wavelength - ten to the power of minus thirty five metres. Our physical experience, based on best current technology, can only see down to ten to the power of minus nineteen metres. So it's no wonder we have no physical conception of this wholeness of space. If you could calculate the amount of energy in a cubic centimetre of space at this infinitesimal wavelength it would amount to more than the known matter in the entire universe. Empty space is not empty but an immense background of energy in which our existence is a small quantised wavelike excitation rippling, almost imperceptibly, on top. Space is full rather than empty. Our existence, the Big Bang spacetime, is just an enlarged ripple on this huge infinite ocean of energy. It is to this background ocean that we must seek our wholeness. From this ocean our world and our consciousness emanated.
Does this paradigm of wholeness increase our understanding of life? It concentrates on the how but has no answers for the why. Why has space got such energy. The what question must also be posed. What is energy? What is space? These questions seem to be fundamental to science and indeed to philosophy. To answer them the concept of time must be introduced and with time the concept of life or consciousness must be introduced also. So the shopping basket of ingredients for meaning to life contains energy, space, time and consciousness. These must be looked from the perspective of wholeness and juggled about to give the recipe for meaning of life.
One word that has not arisen in my thoughts is the word "reason". I have avoided it because in many ways that is what I am seeking. I have no pet hypotheses outside the realms of religion for the reason for life. Worse still I can't even think of a valid teleological end for existence, with or without humanity therein. It is for this that I have isolated myself on this island. I need
time to contemplate. Now is a time for synthesis.
To synthesise you need raw materials from which to build. In terms of knowledge from where does this store of raw material emanate? I need to understand what is the source of knowledge. If I were a blank slate and dropped from the vacuum into this world how would I acquire knowledge? Knowledge flows and needs a conduit - it cannot seep onto the blank slate by osmosis or other strange manner. The blank slate needs receptors to take inputs from the environment. These receptors must be matched to what the environment throws at the blank slate. There is no point in developing eyes that can see x-rays when the sun's light comes in a totally different wavelength spectrum. The blank slate must have receptors that match the environment. Evolution has ensured this. We are the way we are because of our environment - we fit into the environment. Our eyes are designed to see what we call visible light but it is only visible because our receptors are tuned to it. We hear the frequencies of sound that are normal to our environment. Our ears evolved at the