Everything Is Happening On All Possible Levels At All Possible Times

I realise now that the type of Reality I have been trying to describe is nothing more than a collection of fluffy, amorphous blobs - clouds of vagueness which trap us and make us forget their form, like the field of poppies in the Wizard of Oz. 


I have spent a lot of time blithering on about the grandiose things - the very fashionable cosmological discoveries which lend themselves well to those romantically, philosophically and magniloquently predisposed - in order to reveal some Big Important Headlines about who we are and what we are doing here.  (Have a look at my Everything Really Is Waves blog for a link to the beautiful chromoscope, which shows most elegantly how many levels of Reality are manifest in the skies.)

Yet we can get equally lost in the clouds of the very small.  The kindest British doctor on television without a moustache, Michael Mosley's new series Inside the Human Body is an incredible and intrepid Innerspace-type journey through the human body.  Using cutting-edge (ha! funny because there is also a lot of graphic imagery of surgical procedures!) CGI imaging based on what we have actually observed happening inside us, the programme paints us as planets - enormous colonies for autonomous, exquisitely alien cells.  It becomes very quickly apparent in watching this show that we have little to no control over the vast majority of what we do.  Our breathing, our immune system, our digestion, our emotions, our blood supply - in fact, everything which keeps us alive - is nothing to do with at all, much as we have colonised our city, our country, our planet, without it having any say at all.  

And it is miraculous.  

There seems to be a current trend at the moment in the media- every generation has had an apocalypse to face, but ours is shown in high definition, backed up by data, and all the more terrifying as a result - to find the unity between humankind, to try to remind us of all we have in common and therefore how much we all have to lose.  Humility based on facts - how I wish that this could be what defines us as an era, rather than the looming tsunami of disaster which seems ever-present (although it may well be that the distinctly apocalyptic tip the weather seems to be on at the moment may not strictly be climate change just yet - much of the most recent catastrophes - in Pakistan, in Australia, in the US, in South Asia - have been attributed to La Niña).


But sharing a common genetic heritage and corpus operandi is not nearly all.  


Beyond the cellular level, we are atomic.  Each cell is made up of incredible strings of proteins, made from amino acids, each made from tiny ornamentations of elements, bound inextricably together.  Each atom is a combination of protons and electrons, separated by comparatively enormous distances of nothingness.  Beyond that, we are at the quantum level, which (as I most recently blogged about) is tantamount to a different reality altogether.  In fact, each layer of existence is in itself a different Reality, as separate as it is inter-connected, each organism both a universe unto itself and part of many other universes, like messing with the zoom on a camera, microscope and telescope all at once.

I argued last time that it is possible to argue anything, to believe anything, if you thought about it for long enough.  When you consider how ENORMOUS Reality is, everything really is everything.


As Einstein said: "A human being is part of the whole called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive. (Albert Einstein, 1954)"

Of course, it isn't as easy as all that, Einstein.  We have evolved to perceive the world the way we do because it is the most useful for us to survive.  Contemplating Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle doesn't make running for the bus easier (may even render the whole thing futile and cause us all to lie down like in the video for Radiohead's Just).  It is perhaps just as difficult to understand that we are part of a human collective, part of a mutually upheld present, part of a generation, part of a planet, part of anything.  It is perhaps merely enough to contemplate, every now and again, perhaps while letting the entire planet of your bowels do its unbidden work, this fact.  


We are just as much sketches as paintings:

And it is little wonder that we find so much wonder in all of this, how a "God"-creature can be the only way our mind can cope with the the fluke of its birth - we have accidentally developed to be able to appreciate the vastness, we are fleetingly unbound from our most primal urges to be able to stare, blinking, at what is happening all around us.  It is perhaps redundant to name this feeling, to worship it - this is, however, an impulse which has existed exactly as long as we have had the brains to deal with the Looking Around - but it is important to be grateful for it.  Even the mighty Marcus Aurelius (121-180) was humbled thus:
"All things are woven together and the common bond is sacred, and scarcely one thing is foreign to another, for they have been arranged together in their places and together make the same ordered Universe. For there is one Universe out of all, one God through all, one substance and one law, one common Reason of all intelligent creatures and one Truth.
Frequently consider the connection of all things in the universe.
We should not say ‘I am an Athenian’ or ‘I am a Roman’ but ‘I am a citizen of the Universe'.
(Marcus Aurelius, Meditations)"

We are, within and without, made of Universes.  

Close-up image of a tumorous pancreatic mass

Simulation of the current most accurate model for the structure of the entire Universe as we understand it

Go On, Be Fickle. Well, You Can If You Want, It's Up To You. Unless....

As is often the case, I recently got embroiled in a conversation which ended up turning into a rather spiky argument (I think it was about the question of porn on the internet). I became over-involved, took everything personally and ended up shouting loudly in the pub, much to the sympathetic disdain of other people in the vicinity (I might add that despite often shouting and gesticulating like a drunkard, I had only had one pint, it's just my way).


Why am I telling you this?  What do you care about my porn views?


I am telling you because I realised, after the intensity of the conversation reached a level of awkwardness that even I could perceive, and piped down a bit, that the line of argument I had taken bore almost no resemblance to my true views.  Yet I had been arguing for them with such ferocity that I had, for that moment at least, truly believed that that was my reality.

I realised that I am a Pathological Devil's Advocate.

I wrote recently that the truest form of love that I could describe was where you and your partner attempted to carve out a worldview together.  I reasoned that it was perhaps easier to have a bounceback boy - someone to check and iron out your responses to the world, in order to better understand it.  This is typically expressed (particularly in my house) in the form of outrageously overwordy arguments.  When we emerge, blinking, from the Argument Tunnel, I often become aware of how far I have strayed from the bounds of my own perceived opinion.  Having berated myself for a long time for my lack of commitment, my slutty morals if you will, I have come to realise that complete fluidity of opinion is much truer to the nature of Reality than we give it credit for.

Welcome to Diesel Island - Land of the Stupid and Home of the Brave

Our society is geared to the individual, to the self.  We are our lifework.  We are our greatest achievements.  (Luckily there is a whole panoply of consumer durables available Right Now at Half Price with a Red Sticker On to aid us in our odyssey, but this isn't a blog about the hypocrisy of capitalism, however this article in Bloomsberg Businessweek both supports and posits a fantastic alternative use for this profit-driven selfishness.)  We are all to strive to better ourselves, and we do this by whittling a personality out of the lumpen mass of our childhood.  How could you possible engage as a socialised, educated, worldly individual unless you have an arsenal of Opinions at your disposal?  Why don't you care about Issues?  Come on, look at them - we will Clockwork Orange you in front of Newsnight if you don't Form Some Opinions About Current Events Right Now!

I believe that we are entirely mistaken in this.

If you have paid attention to the world for anything up to one minute, it becomes very clear that nothing is certain at all.  (Yes, yes, uncertainty and death, fine, you can have those.)

Famous old hag/hot lady picture to demonstrate visual paradoxes

Everything which is true is almost always feasibly untrue at the same time.  The colossal ball-ache of politics is that it tries to separate and create distinction in the infinite gloopy cloud of our reality.  You can literally pick an arbitrary startpoint on any Big Topic - immigration, healthcare, education, foreign policy, warfare - the list is endless - and immediately the opposite is also conceivably true.  Perhaps the opposite view feels uncomfortable, wrong, even, but someone out there thinks that, there will be reasoning behind that view, and therefore the concept can legitimately stand.  (This is where Kantian ethics, in particular his Categorical Imperative - Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law - i.e. if you cannot justify murder as a universal law for all, then you must not murder in any circumstances - sounds reasonable, but the current brouhaha surrounding the death of Osama bin Laden, for example, shows clearly that this kind of dichotomy falls away pretty rapidly in the face of Reality.  There are very few Universals.)


Hold on! you cry, that can't be right! The Nazis had a well-argued manifesto but we have universally condemned them as wrong!  What are you talking about?  Why aren't I entitled to my opinions?


Well, hush your beak, for a start, I haven't finished.  The trick of living as a Devil's Advocate is that, if you truly embody a point of view, any point of view, outside of judgement, even for ten minutes, then you have a sense of the other side, a frame of reference from which to sketch out something which feels relevant for you.  Opinion-forming is a personal and malleable thing - what is true for me today is not necessarily going to be true for me tomorrow, but that doesn't make me a shallow, unprincipled person.  Indeed, as Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) said:

Each man calls barbarism what is not his own practice, for indeed it seems we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in. 

It is infinitely easier to condemn what is unknown rather than try to understand.  Even "evil" has a rationale.  

Perhaps it isn't so strange that it is so difficult to form views, to cement opinions.  If, as I have said before, the value and clout of science often comes from its being upheld consensually by many, then the closest form of "Truth" we can admit is one which has been proven, calculated and agreed upon by many separate experts, each in their turn having tried to disprove it before acquiescing.  One of the most controversial but niggling "truths" that the 20th century coughed up was Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, explained here by Professor Jim Al-Khalili (whose Everything and Nothing you should watch to see quantum mechanics explained with the flair and cinematography of a Darren Aronofsky film).

If, at the very heart of existence there exists an infinity of uncertainty, then it seems somewhat naive to doggedly be chasing certainty throughout our lives, because it doesn't exist.

The Zen Buddhists' famous paradoxes or koans (the tree falling in the forest guys) thought that the acceptance of the inherent unknowableness of the Universe was the quickest, truest and most profound way to Enlightenment - these simple and enigmatic statements cannot be understood by using conventional logic or the part of the brain that seeks certainty - it can only come about through letting go of our reliance on certainty, a deep questioning of all that we take to be real.  


This, ultimately, is at the heart of all scientific enquiry - we cannot rest on our laurels (as the religious do, because it is written) of our description of reality, we have to keep imagining what might be, what is not, what is unlikely, what is not yet proven, in order to keep pushing forward what we know about the Universe.  Here is the almighty Richard Feynman speaking in 1983 about the need for a creative imagination in order to test the limits of theory (which in some cases have subsequently been proven - for example his speculation on the origins of quasars, which we have now discovered and proven) - this is the first part of two on Youtube, but for a clearer and more comprehensive archive of his most inspirational lectures please visit: http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/feynman/10704.shtml.

So, by playing Devil's Advocate, by loosening your attachments to your opinions and choosing to stand on the other side from what you take to be true, even just for the duration of an argument, is most important indeed, both in terms of reflecting the true nature of the world, and also in terms of its future, for unless we make wild imaginative leaps from time to time, criss-crossing from Right to Left and everywhere in between, we may never grow and we will never learn to tolerate those who differ from us.  As Feynman says: "You can sort of stand in the middle and enjoy everything both ways."


That sounds like much more fun, after all...

What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly - that is the first law of nature.
Voltaire 1694 - 1778