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

A Level RE, Television and Thermodynamics Combine Forces to Reveal Meaning of Life

I'm really sorry to do this, but you best stop what you are doing.  Please, just put that down, put it...there you go...listen to this.  Don't pick it up again when you think I'm not looking, just cross your arms and concentrate.

It appears, without too much of a fanfare, that the meaning of life has been revealed.

I'm going to walk you through it, but take your shoes off.

I'm sure you've all seen the work of Professor Brian Cox, his enigmatic billion year stare and his uncanny knack of making extraordinarily diffuse astrophysical topics seem as easy as pie (I myself got caught up in the Stargazing Live zeitgeist at New Year and went to a lecture by the Manchester Astronomical Society about the birth, life and death of stars.  There was a distinct cooling in the room when everyone realised that these topics are much more difficult to understand than watching three TV shows would have us believe, and that it isn't in fact possible to somehow absorb a PHd thesis while eating pickled onions on the sofa.  They do sterling work, though: http://www.manastro.co.uk/).  His new series, Wonders of the Universe, commenced apocalyptically with the nature of time itself.  (And you should watch it: http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/zf9dh/)

In this dimension at least, it seems the entirety of creation is bound in a Sisyphean work - to move forward, to change, to live and then to die.  From the tiniest bubble of the quantum foam to the vastest nebulous juggernaut of deep space, on every level, there is only change.  Time is a real thing, it exists (although no-one really knows in what form, see Cox's documentary "What Time Is It?" for a clearer introduction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VgzCMmaVLM&NR=1), and it compels us more than any other force of nature.

entropy at the core of a galaxy

But, inasmuch as we can understand it, this Universe is flinging itself headfirst into the future, and only that.  We are moving from a state of low entropy (complex, structured objects like galaxies, planets and skyscrapers) or order to states of high entropy or disorder, where line and form and shape and definition is sacrificed to the uniformity of chaos (no outlines, just an amorphous ooze of sameness).  This logic, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (that the Universe aches for balance everything out, so eventually all concentrations or lumps of stuff - matter, heat, etc. - will be dissembled and spread out, ashes to ashes) is applied by Cox to explain that this will also happen to everything within the Universe.  Its death is when all is balanced out, all is obliterated, all is smoothed out.

What strikes me as most glorious about this idea is that it is very similar to what many human civilisations have concluded about the meaning of life throughout history.  It seems that our constant exposure to death has led to an innate understanding of this "permanent change" of existence, from the Great Nothing at the beginning, leading us inexorably to the Great Nothing at the end.  The earliest gods were the sun and the moon, and these are extinguished every day, to be reborn.  I mentioned a while ago that it is as if we carry the most ancient memory of our existence before, and very occasionally we manage to communicate it.

The Maori explain it thus:

Tane raising the sky with his feet in the Maori creation myth

From the conception the increase,
From the increase the thought,
From the thought the remembrance,
From the remembrance the consciousness, 
From the consciousness the desire. 


The word became fruitful,
It dwelt with the feeble glimmering;
It brought forth night:
The great night, the long night, 
The lowest night, the loftiest night, 
The thick night, to be felt, 
The night to be touched, 
The night not to be seen, 
The night ending in death. 


From the nothing the begetting, 
From the nothing the increase, 
From the nothing the abundance, 
The power of increasing, 
The living breath.  

The Three Marks of Existence at
everydayink.blogspot.com

The most profoundly succinct of all these understandings of this now scientifically proven reality, was that of the Buddha.  His Three Marks of Existence are as follows, and they managed, 2000 years before, to express the same beautifully bleak reality:

1. All things are impermanent, always changing (anicca)
2. All existence is suffering, caused by attachment to impermanent things (dukkha)
3. There is nothing everlasting, no essence, no soul, no self (anatma)


So there, the meaning of life seems to be nothing more than an acceptance of this impermanence, a realisation that all will change and die, and the realisation that life is infused with the special, most tragic beauty of a rainbow, most elegant because it is fleeting, but we are part of it.