Space Time, Free Will and my Pet Dog
Ludo and I took the train out to a park in the suburbs of Paris, bought calzones, quiche and, for dessert, macarons stuffed with raspberries and cream. We sat on a blanket with the dog on a wide lawn in front of a stone-lined canal, in the shade of a towering cypress, one of many in a row. The sun gave a luminous green fringe to each tree, and when the wind stirred each tree waved gently, each leaf reflected and then blocked the light, over and over, so the trees swarmed and shimmered with light.
Timeo's tongue hung out and he panted from the heat. This city dog was thrilled by exotic smells of warm pine, cypress and oak, meadow grasses, flowers, and traces of rodents and birds. He kept his snout close to the ground as we walked. His white fur was dazzling in the sun. When we got to a water fountain, I worked the handpump to send up a spout of cool water, and he stuck his snout under the faucet to drink.
All through this walking, lying on the grass, staring at the sky, eating our picnic, drinking little plastic demitasses of coffee we bought from a wooden kiosque to accompany our dessert-- All through this time, my mind was elsewhere.
I was climbing an inner Everest, trying to puzzle out space and time, attempting to attain the summit from which Schopenhauer reported such a commanding view. This has been going on for days. I've been walking in forests, walking along the Seine, lying in my bed, sitting in front of the computer, cleaning my flat, spending time with friends, and all along mulling over space and time.
Most people I know have no metaphysical urge. They get by just fine in life without ever asking "but what is space time exactly?"
Why do people risk their lives climbing Everest? When it's already been done, when there's nothing to obtain at the summit except a splendid mountainous view? It couldn't be for fame and glory, because there are so many other ways to get fame and glory; ones that don't involve the risk of hypothermia, altitude sickness, falling off cliffs and amputated frostbitten limbs.
You could try to deter an Alpinist by saying, "That's so cliche, Everest has been climbed so many times now..."
"Yes, but not by me." would be his or her answer.
Here's what I think drives Alpinists on: no experience compares in intensity to that of being on a rockface where the only existential options available are "go left", "go right", "go up", or "go down".
This existential simplicity plus the threat of losing one's life plunges climbers into a hyper-mindful state where past and future fade away to make place for a vast Now.
In practice, the shape of the rockface determines which of the four options (left, right, up, down) a climber takes.
So we could say the thrill of rockclimbing comes from the fact that it puts us into a naked, direct experience of the deterministic aspect of the universe.
While I am going through the motions of life, and life goes on around me, I am simultaneously doing some inner mountain-climbing, though it just as often feels like a vertiginously unending plunge.
And although I'm no closer to piercing the mystery of space and time, at least I have come to identify certain faulty aspects of my prior reasoning.
For example: space, time, consciousness and form are all necessary aspects of experience. To try to unbraid them into independent strands for "semantic clarity" is to commit a category error.
Students learning to draw are encouraged to observe the negative space around an object as well as the object itself-- if we draw the shape of the empty space that surrounds a marble statue, which comes up flush against the external contours of the statue, we'll find that end result is in effect a drawing of the contours of the statue itself.
But if we try to study the figure-ground relationship by taking away the figure and observing what's left behind, we'd be left studying... nothing.
So I was asking myself, misleadingly it turns out: "what is space and time independent of experience?" I was saying: if I take consciousness and matter out of experience, what's left behind would presumably be space time which I could contemplate in its pure form. But what I was ignoring was that conceptualization is impossible without experience, and experience necessarily entails space, time, subject and object, consciousness and matter.
This is the same error in reasoning as saying, I'll just take that statue out of the way, to better study the negative space left behind.
I have a similar problem with trying to observe consciousness independent of experience. When I turn my attention to my consciousness, it is filled with whatever I'm conscious of-- this keyboard and screen, this cup of coffee, the cushioned chair under my butt. If I close my eyes, I still get the sound of objects. I could half-submerge myself in a flotation tank and neutralize even kinesthetic and touch sensations, but my memories and thinking would still be populated with objects.
Would it be possible to do a mental Spring Cleaning, toss out all objects and forms so that only pure consciousness is left behind to be observed? I don't think so.
I could attempt to study consciousness from the outside, by observing my friends, for instance, who possess consciousness, but I can only observe their actions and speech, never their consciousness directly. Consciousness is a black box.
Yes, there is a superposition of states when someone offers me a cigarette. There is a live cat in a box, and the same cat dead. One part of me is already enjoying the lazy dance of smoke, the hot rush of blood to the head. The other part is wary of addiction and already seeing my future self tired, drained and sickened by tobacco. Only when I take action, when I actually come out and say "Yes, thanks" or "No, thanks." will there be a collapse of this uncertainty. This points to the non-deterministic aspect of the universe, the margin of play in which free will operates.
This is why I can't define consciousness and why I avoid trying to argue whether consciousness emerged from matter or vice versa. The verdict really is out on this, and we choose one or the other position by faith. My faith has me believe that it is matter that emerged from something analogous to consciousness. But to argue this point would be inconclusive and a waste of our precious time. Indeed, a just as satisfying formulation for me would be: they co-emerged and are mutually inextricable from each other. A metaphorical way to state this might be: Free Will created the material universe so it could have Space Time to play in.
We distinguish technology from science, to show that the fact of being able to control or use something doesn't mean that we understand it. The fact of being able to predict the weather with some degree of success doesn't mean that we understand the weather. We can build models of the weather, which take into account causes as diverse as sunspots, the ozone layer, ocean currents and geographical features, but we'll never be able to account for all the causes and all their interrelated effects.
Building a model of the Eiffel tower doesn't mean we understand the Eiffel tower any better. Similarly, there are competing models of space time proposed by quantum physicists, relativity theorists, string theorists and Wave-Matter theorists.
But just because one model has predictive power doesn't mean we understand the object of our study any better. It is plausible that we will only have succeeded in transferring our non-understanding of reality to a non-understanding of a smaller, more manageable model of reality.
Problems can be solved, but consciousness is not a "problem"; it might be modeled and simulated, but not solved.
In reading on space time, I realize that it would take years of study just for me to be able to understand the mathematics behind competing space time models. Because I have other goals in life than math study, I'll probably never really grasp what insights specialist thinkers might have.
I thought I could get insights into space time through contemplation based on my sensory experience, but now I believe this dream was a folly, as I was using a badly formed question-- something along the lines of "what was I before I was born?" or "what is the sound of one hand clapping."
But then again, these types of questions are used all the time in Zen training.
It might occur to you that all these thoughts have been thought before, all these metaphysical challenges encountered and worked through.
Like the mountain climber, I can only answer, "yes, but not by me."
Timeo's tongue hung out and he panted from the heat. This city dog was thrilled by exotic smells of warm pine, cypress and oak, meadow grasses, flowers, and traces of rodents and birds. He kept his snout close to the ground as we walked. His white fur was dazzling in the sun. When we got to a water fountain, I worked the handpump to send up a spout of cool water, and he stuck his snout under the faucet to drink.
All through this walking, lying on the grass, staring at the sky, eating our picnic, drinking little plastic demitasses of coffee we bought from a wooden kiosque to accompany our dessert-- All through this time, my mind was elsewhere.
I was climbing an inner Everest, trying to puzzle out space and time, attempting to attain the summit from which Schopenhauer reported such a commanding view. This has been going on for days. I've been walking in forests, walking along the Seine, lying in my bed, sitting in front of the computer, cleaning my flat, spending time with friends, and all along mulling over space and time.
Most people I know have no metaphysical urge. They get by just fine in life without ever asking "but what is space time exactly?"
Why do people risk their lives climbing Everest? When it's already been done, when there's nothing to obtain at the summit except a splendid mountainous view? It couldn't be for fame and glory, because there are so many other ways to get fame and glory; ones that don't involve the risk of hypothermia, altitude sickness, falling off cliffs and amputated frostbitten limbs.
You could try to deter an Alpinist by saying, "That's so cliche, Everest has been climbed so many times now..."
"Yes, but not by me." would be his or her answer.
Here's what I think drives Alpinists on: no experience compares in intensity to that of being on a rockface where the only existential options available are "go left", "go right", "go up", or "go down".
This existential simplicity plus the threat of losing one's life plunges climbers into a hyper-mindful state where past and future fade away to make place for a vast Now.
In practice, the shape of the rockface determines which of the four options (left, right, up, down) a climber takes.
So we could say the thrill of rockclimbing comes from the fact that it puts us into a naked, direct experience of the deterministic aspect of the universe.
While I am going through the motions of life, and life goes on around me, I am simultaneously doing some inner mountain-climbing, though it just as often feels like a vertiginously unending plunge.
And although I'm no closer to piercing the mystery of space and time, at least I have come to identify certain faulty aspects of my prior reasoning.
For example: space, time, consciousness and form are all necessary aspects of experience. To try to unbraid them into independent strands for "semantic clarity" is to commit a category error.
Students learning to draw are encouraged to observe the negative space around an object as well as the object itself-- if we draw the shape of the empty space that surrounds a marble statue, which comes up flush against the external contours of the statue, we'll find that end result is in effect a drawing of the contours of the statue itself.
But if we try to study the figure-ground relationship by taking away the figure and observing what's left behind, we'd be left studying... nothing.
So I was asking myself, misleadingly it turns out: "what is space and time independent of experience?" I was saying: if I take consciousness and matter out of experience, what's left behind would presumably be space time which I could contemplate in its pure form. But what I was ignoring was that conceptualization is impossible without experience, and experience necessarily entails space, time, subject and object, consciousness and matter.
This is the same error in reasoning as saying, I'll just take that statue out of the way, to better study the negative space left behind.
I have a similar problem with trying to observe consciousness independent of experience. When I turn my attention to my consciousness, it is filled with whatever I'm conscious of-- this keyboard and screen, this cup of coffee, the cushioned chair under my butt. If I close my eyes, I still get the sound of objects. I could half-submerge myself in a flotation tank and neutralize even kinesthetic and touch sensations, but my memories and thinking would still be populated with objects.
Would it be possible to do a mental Spring Cleaning, toss out all objects and forms so that only pure consciousness is left behind to be observed? I don't think so.
I could attempt to study consciousness from the outside, by observing my friends, for instance, who possess consciousness, but I can only observe their actions and speech, never their consciousness directly. Consciousness is a black box.
Yes, there is a superposition of states when someone offers me a cigarette. There is a live cat in a box, and the same cat dead. One part of me is already enjoying the lazy dance of smoke, the hot rush of blood to the head. The other part is wary of addiction and already seeing my future self tired, drained and sickened by tobacco. Only when I take action, when I actually come out and say "Yes, thanks" or "No, thanks." will there be a collapse of this uncertainty. This points to the non-deterministic aspect of the universe, the margin of play in which free will operates.
This is why I can't define consciousness and why I avoid trying to argue whether consciousness emerged from matter or vice versa. The verdict really is out on this, and we choose one or the other position by faith. My faith has me believe that it is matter that emerged from something analogous to consciousness. But to argue this point would be inconclusive and a waste of our precious time. Indeed, a just as satisfying formulation for me would be: they co-emerged and are mutually inextricable from each other. A metaphorical way to state this might be: Free Will created the material universe so it could have Space Time to play in.
We distinguish technology from science, to show that the fact of being able to control or use something doesn't mean that we understand it. The fact of being able to predict the weather with some degree of success doesn't mean that we understand the weather. We can build models of the weather, which take into account causes as diverse as sunspots, the ozone layer, ocean currents and geographical features, but we'll never be able to account for all the causes and all their interrelated effects.
Building a model of the Eiffel tower doesn't mean we understand the Eiffel tower any better. Similarly, there are competing models of space time proposed by quantum physicists, relativity theorists, string theorists and Wave-Matter theorists.
But just because one model has predictive power doesn't mean we understand the object of our study any better. It is plausible that we will only have succeeded in transferring our non-understanding of reality to a non-understanding of a smaller, more manageable model of reality.
Problems can be solved, but consciousness is not a "problem"; it might be modeled and simulated, but not solved.
In reading on space time, I realize that it would take years of study just for me to be able to understand the mathematics behind competing space time models. Because I have other goals in life than math study, I'll probably never really grasp what insights specialist thinkers might have.
I thought I could get insights into space time through contemplation based on my sensory experience, but now I believe this dream was a folly, as I was using a badly formed question-- something along the lines of "what was I before I was born?" or "what is the sound of one hand clapping."
But then again, these types of questions are used all the time in Zen training.
It might occur to you that all these thoughts have been thought before, all these metaphysical challenges encountered and worked through.
Like the mountain climber, I can only answer, "yes, but not by me."