Read The Return (Enigma of Modern Science & Philosophy) Page 5
Sometimes wet drizzly weather can be exciting. I was well covered up in waterproofs and cap. The constant drip of water from my nose was satisfying. I was battling benign elements as I walked along the empty road. There was going to be no sunrise this morning. The gray sky in the east was unchanging, little different from that of the west that stretched out endlessly over the now calm ocean. I felt a slight elation in myself. There was no worry shadowing my existence. I felt lucky to be alive and thinking. I had had a hearty breakfast and was determined now to walk it off. I upped my pace and breathed deeply. This was life.
It’s strange that birds seem to act with diffidence when the rain falls. They dart about in the undergrowth or seek shelter in the dense hawthorns. They never sing or take up the top-most branches that are their norm when the sun shines. The landscape was eerily quiet in the mist. There was no sign of nature in the green peaty slopes of the mountains that were the backbone of the island. My eyes followed the crooked lines of the gray stone walls as they streaked up the mountainside. Here and there the walls turned in on themselves and enclosed a small pointless reedy patch of green; some poor islander’s pride and joy; a symbol of the futile hope of the poor.
I was starting to think negatively. I checked myself not wanting to descend into the national pastime of being pessimistic. Rather, I now tried to see the small patch of land as a triumph of man against random nature. It was evidence of the hope that each person must have in their heart to get through this life. I saw the toil of creating this small worthless plot as a priceless affront to the poverty of the times.
My pace quickened leaving behind the sight of the mountain and facing towards the sea. The rain became heavier. The gray clouds had opened up their reservoir of tears. Keeping my face downward I plodded onward towards where I did not know.
There was no direction in life that was appealing. The present was where I was happiest. The past with all its memories was like a giant ghost that followed me relentlessly. I was unable to shrug off its burdens. When I looked into the future I only saw consequences arising from my prior life. No it was best to stay blinkered in the here and now.
The rain, like a flood of tears, streamed down my face in a cleansing torrent. It washed away the memories as I struggled on. I was happy that the wet weather clothing was withstanding the worst that could be thrown at it. I was snug and dry and protected.
It was strange to think that all the events of my life had led to this moment of enjoying an early-morning walk on a rain sodden island. Had I toiled to attain my various degrees, gotten married and divorced, fathered children and walked away, developed an academic career and retired - all to lead to this point. Life cannot be the summation of its parts - it is not a simple issue of integration. It is more a superposition of the various selves at differing times. Each instant is a different superposition. Sometimes I feel like crying when I recall the terrible moment Louise told me she was leaving. The memory still causes my chest to tighten with a pain that remarkably strikes my heart. Yet there are contrary times when I give gratitude to an unseen deity that I had many years of happiness with her where we each teased out our young lives together. Can the summation of the good times be made counter the bad? If life were a summation they could but it is not. Both must exist and both can individually inhabit a present. I am not the sum of my parts but each part adds to my present sum yet not in any consistent manner. It is because I seem to be able to regress in time back to those moments of pain or bliss.
The more stable people in life are those who can forget or at least disregard the past. But there is something dead in such people. Their stoic regard saps a life force that drives the sensuous. How we deal with our past shapes us as present individuals. Those that are mired in the past become ineffectual depressives constantly seeking to relive or undo that which is forever locked away. There must be a happy mean whereby people can cherish the life gone before them and yet constrain to live in the optimism of the present. Those who are less imprisoned by the past have a more flexible future.
I saw my past strung out before me endlessly. Its ganglions reached out to tug at my memories. The recurrent themes keep emerging and I try to repulse them. The pain and hurt, the jealousy and despair, the envy and shame, all rose like monsters from the deep. There was no sight of the angels or saints echoing the brief joys or celebrations. Depression, that greatest of monsters, lurked in the shadows.
How easy it is to descend from happiness. The benign contentment of a full belly and soft rain had been displaced by the downpour of negative emotions from the past. There was nothing in this present to make me feel bad. I shook my head vigorously, trying to knock some sense into my thoughts. I was angry at myself for allowing the past to intrude once again. I shunted the negativity into a bye-road of my memory. A sense of calm returned. Miraculously the rain too eased and the mist was once again a gentle balm to the senses.
I had reached the shore and as the road curved around to the west, the vast expanse of a tidally deserted beach stretched before me. The white sand glowed in the gray backdrop of sky and sea. The sea massaged the shore in gentle wavelets and the thought that this vast body of water could be so violently turbulent as it was on the boat-crossing was inconceivable. Time had sculpted this calm beauty from the frenzied elements of yesterday’s turmoil. I stepped onto the sand and put my first imprints onto this small recording patch of space-time. The imprints quickly filled with seeping water forming sequential pools zigzagging behind me. I loved how my weight was gently taken by the soft wet sand. There was no violence here, just quiet acquiescence that gravity pulls my body onto the soft mantle of the earth. I stopped after a few paces and regarded the track left behind. Already it was filling in as the plastic sand regained its former level. Soon all the evidence will be gone. Had I stepped on that spot at all? No-one will know or be able to tell. Nothing exists without record and the only record is in my personal universe. When I expire the imprints will finally be lost to time. Time is only my personal invention to record the data of my experiences.
My steps fading in the sand mark my movement through space and time. The spacing of each step clarifies separation in space and the relative clarity of impression matches my march through time. The environment acknowledges my presence but does not keep a permanent ledger. The time auditor must be very prompt to catch my presence and preserve it. What will be left behind by my time on this planet? Of all the simple imprints of my presence in time the only ones that truly can survive will be my books. Those scribbles will be there on paper or on disc to tell the world that I existed as a thinking person and reveal the thoughts that occupied my brief existence. It was this that compelled me onward into the future, away from the troubled past. It was a simple goal to record and set down my thoughts almost as an anthropological record.
Each life deserves its monument. No life should pass unnoticed because each is a separate universe of living. Imagine if we could visit different worlds in the cosmos. How excited we’d be discovering new life. Yet the same capacity is there for each human existence. Each has a unique universe that he may reveal to us by his life. The world of Mozart must be truly more inspiring that the most exotic extra-terrestrial life form yet to be discovered. We know that by the majesty of his life work - music that across the centuries continues to inspire humanity. Each of us in our own way can reveal an existence whose triumph of survival alone can be a similar inspiration.
By now the far off tracks had disappeared. The beach was long and curved. The tide had turned and the wavelets lapped forward in their daily dance. Once more the sea regained its bite of the shore. I walked along the edge of the advancing water. The rain had once more become heavier. The world was full of repetition - endlessly reliving the inane. Time was mapping out its colorless norm. True events were in fact rare. The cataclysm rarely occurs. The norm is endless repetition of regularity. That is why time sometimes stands still. If nothing happens there is in effect no marker to time’s progr
ession. If I were locked up in a dark soundless room I would quickly lose counts of seconds, minutes and hours. Days would become eternities without beginning or end. Nothing would begin, nothing would end. Only if I were able to hear my heart beat, or experience the pangs of hunger, would time knock on the blank space. The ultimate time is biological. The body is the border of time. Birth is the beginning, death the end.
A morbid thought once again strangles me. The emptiness of death had long been presenting its fearful image before my aging body. Soon I would no longer be. These steps are limited in number. Each step is a step closer to extinction and oblivion. The cold dampness of the grave is the vista of the future towards which I inexorably march. My marching companion is not the bearer of hope that the saints espouse. My companion can offer no life beyond death. My companion is not a saint but a rational modern man honed from the Enlightenment and the modern revolution of scientific thinking. He is not even a philosopher who like a naive Socrates welcomes death for similar reasons to the saint. Even Socrates saw death as a stepping stone to another world where with luck he would be among the company of similarly wise men.
If the truth be told there is never a case where death is welcomed. Even latter day Islamic martyrs must shiver as they face the transition point of their supposed entry into the land of endless virgins. No matter how trivially splendid the afterlife, death is never greeted with open arms. Even Christ despaired of death begging that the cup of sacrifice be removed from his lips. It is human to be afraid of death. Spinoza said that a free man thinks of nothing less than of death. He hoped that that by facing the ultimate fear man could focus on life, liberating himself from the tyranny of death.
The tyrant takes no prisoners. We all succumb. It is curious that even though death is our constant companion we rarely acknowledge its presence. Literature and drama deal with it only on the peripheral level of its effect on the living survivors. The specter of death on the individual is shunned by our culture. There are no courses in preparing for death.
The funny thing is that science does not accept death. When a particle and an anti-particle self annihilate they do not die but give birth to an energetic photon. When a photon gives up its energy a new particle pair is created. In science death is a continual creation. It is one of the mysteries of science that at the quantum level time is symmetric - there are no one-way junctions with no return. Symmetrical time means the death of death. Life and death are circular - one leads continuously to the other. It is only at the macro level that time becomes asymmetrical and death raises its ugly head.
While having a hazy view of death, science is quite precise on issues of birth. The Big Bang theory asserts that the cosmos had its beginning some fourteen billions of years back in time. In fact time as we conjecture it began with the primal explosion that created our universe. Since then the very fabric of our world has been expanding. This expansion should not be viewed as traveling outwards into previously empty space. Rather space-time itself is expanding, the density of matter constantly reducing from its initial incredibly dense beginning. Just as a gas when expanding gets cooler so too the universe cools and today it is a cold empty place, just less than three degrees above absolute zero and with a single lonely particle on average for every cubic meter of space. The heat generated by our sun and all the billions and billions of suns throughout the cosmos is negligible compared to the coldness of the space around them.
It is this expansion of the space-time bubble that gives us our sense of time and ultimately leads to our death. The increase in the size and the reduction of the average density of the universe is what we call an increase in entropy. Entropy always increases when viewed from without. There can be local decreases that temporarily buck the trend but they have to be sustained by an input of energy - in our case the energy comes from radiation from the sun. The earth receives low entropy sunshine and traps it in plants and fossil fuels and we humans and other living organisms make use of it to sustain our biological life. What ultimately leads to death is the entropy breakdown of the mechanisms we utilize for transforming this stored low entropy energy. The cosmic law of entropy increase means that eventually all organized systems eventually breakdown and die. Death is a high entropy state where order is replaced by fragmentation and where the components become more spread out in space and time.
This creates a seeming paradox in that science at the macro scale of the cosmos entails an inescapable death while at the micro scale there is no death. Yet there is no paradox if we listen to what nature is really saying. Death occurs for large organized objects. Even the stars and galaxies will eventually over the eons of time dissipate into almost empty space. What will be left will be the void populated by the microscopic scale particle world where there is no death only a constant recycling of matter and anti-matter over vanishing small times. Out of this chaos of creation emerges the possibility of new universes, in fact untold numbers of universes. One of these may be right for the form of life, of existence that we presently experience, to emerge. Out of chaos comes eternal life.
Eternal life does not alas apply to the individual as most religions maintain. It applies to life itself. Life is something that can emerge from the chaos albeit very infrequently. The precise nature of the basic constants that define our existence means that life must be very rare indeed. Yet it does exist, of that we are certain - we humans are obviously proof of life existing. Yet this life is totally solipsistic, the lonely existential state of humanity. How wonderful if we could share our experience of life at the personal level. Maybe the future will bring technology and science to bring about a unification of minds and human existence. The concept already works for computers and may, ultimately, lead to all computers on the planet being linked and forming a massive supercomputing organism.
In a certain way this is happening already. The individual life is embedded in a culture. This culture seeps into the very thinking of the individual and the individual in turn contributes to the development and change of the culture. Culture transcends the individual and time. It exists in the ether between vast composite minds united by social norms, art, music, religion and politics. Culture is more powerful than the individual and can unite dissimilar minds. Culture reflects the need for the isolated existential mind to communicate with fellow thinkers. Modern technology has revolutionized how this can be achieved more effectively. We now carry personal communication devices with us, permanently ready to engage with others. These devices can now link us continuously to the internet where our virtual worlds expose some of our private worlds. We subscribe to vast cultural movements based on art, theatre, literature and music. Association with these movements exposes our need to belong to a greater being. Our modern world has given us the capability to create this greater being. Future advances of science and technology may allow entering that greater being in a more substantive physiological and psychological reality. This may be our only hope of ever defying death of the individual. Life prolonging discoveries only deal in the marginal lengthening of lifetime. Sharing of our individuality may mean that we can survive, if humanity survives.
Yet entropy will have the final say. The low entropy source of our beautiful star will eventually disappear. The sun will no longer shine and death will come knocking at humanity's door. The huge struggle for life will have been for naught. All will die.
But life does struggle heroically for survival at all levels. What is it that drives it to combat the forces of nature that insouciantly determine to make it extinct? Life even struggles against itself. The various life forms all are engaged in the struggle for survival. There is no privileged life form despite what many religions assert about humanity. Humanity has been around for a relatively short time in terms of the existence of life. There is no special indication that its reign will prevail - it has a long way to go to match the presence of the ill-fated dinosaurs. Insects have shown themselves much more adapted to survival on a planet such as ours. Bacteria are even better
able to cope with what planet Earth can throw at them in terms of catastrophe. No one life form is wholly dependent on another. They can exist independently as long as they can get a proper energy source. Nature has no favorites and no design. Humans are special because they alone are aware of their existence in an existential way but this does not confer any special survival privilege.
Where does this will to survive come from? Descartes' comment - ‘I think, therefore I am’, could be expanded by saying - ‘I am, therefore I must survive’. Everything living tries to survive. Suicide is not a natural association with existence. Death is not-surviving making in effect survival a definition of what life is. There is no life but survival. Survival is ‘being’ and ‘being’ underlies all science theory. Therefore scientific theory should have the origins of survival written into it. Survival means remaining in time. To remain in time you must travel at less than the speed of light. Because nothing travels faster than light there can be no measure of distance in a world traveling at that speed. Hence there can be no time as time is ultimately a measure of distance. So science implies that for survival to remain in time an entity must travel at less than the speed of light. This effectively means that an entity must have a rest mass. Mass is the being of life. Mass is the transformation of energy into time. Yet while there is a universal law for the conservation or survival of energy there is none for mass. What is conserved for mass is the quantity called momentum which is a mix of the mass and its motion through space-time. Motion of mass through space-time is what underlies being and therefore being must be conserved. Survival is indeed pre-coded into all entities. This model sees death as a transformation from one state to another. The ordered low entropy state of our human bodies transforms to the high entropy state of decay and release of all our atoms back to the cosmos.
This is an unhappy resolution to the analysis. We all know our bodies decay after death. This is not new. What may add enlightenment is to see our existence as ordered low entropy state in an otherwise high entropy universe. We are privileged matter created from energy and to energy we will eventually return. We are not dust which by definition is high entropy matter. We are highly ordered atoms arranged in very special arrangements the sum of which create our solipsistic world. We are returned to the dust of our planet earth and ultimately to the energy of the cosmos.