Posts

Posted on

An Existential Disconnect

In  Franz Kafka’s (very) short 1908  story “The Passenger” he writes:

 I am standing on the platform of the tram and I am entirely uncertain as to my place in this world, in this town, in my family. Not even approximately could I state what claims I might justifiably advance in any direction. I am quite unable to defend the fact that I am standing on this platform, holding this strap, letting myself be carried along by this tram, and that people are getting out of the tram’s way or walking along quietly or pausing in front of the shop windows. Not that anyone asks me to, but that is immaterial.

Kafka is experiencing an existential disconnect,  the acute realization that you are partaking in an event of which you don’t why or where it originated or where it is going in terms of its purpose or destination as well as your own role in all of this. My take on this is that we might encounter such a disconnect when we take a step back from the immediacy of our daily lives and try to place them within the larger reality of the world we live in.

What is the distinction, and how do we run into it? I think the distinction is a function of contrasting the comings and goings of our daily lives as defined by  our  present and our past against the cosmic spectacle we appear to be immersed in – given that we are an intricate part of it – but unable to articulate the significance of this in any meaningful way.

More specifically, when you look at all of  human history and the types of activities that have preoccupied our species since the beginning of time – including the trail of war and other forms of mindless savagery that has been left behind as we have proved and continue to prove to be our own worst enemy – you have to wonder what this human saga is all about, as when you think about this for a minute the entire human effort as a whole makes absolutely no sense at all.

Now something started all this, and our sciences have told us as much:  the cosmos exploded, the earth cooled, the slimy bottom spawned, life evolved and here we are. But, to what avail?  I think that is a reasonable question, and it should be staring us in the face all the time, yet we seem to go on as if  none of this is of any consequence even if we did know the answer.

I think that way down deep this is an issue for all of us, and is subsumed in the human psyche, but that only some of us are  willing to confront, or – for that matter – are able to experience as an existential issue at some level or another and that, yes, continues to stare us directly in the face all the time.

Posted on

Is There a Point to the Universe?

 

“The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless. … “So says   renowned physicist and Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg  in his 1977 book “The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe)”

In general, we humans like to think that things happen for a reason, either accidentally or on purpose – whatever the case may be. At least, that is the way we usually think about the world based on our very experience of it.  Seeing the world in this manner allows us to understand the interaction between things and events while enabling us to manage our lives around them with some degree of predictability.

So what about the universe? Would it not be reasonable to expect there was some reason for it to be here as well? I’m kind of two minds about that.

First of all, it is quite a conceptual leap to jump from considering the status of some event or another in the world to considering the status of world itself. Is the world  just another event in the sense that we should be able to look at it from either end, i.e., consider the likely cause of it and the effect that it has on other things in the world? Can the world be seen as an event beyond all the things that take place in it? (look up: Gilbert Ryle’s category mistake)

Since the world is both logically and physically necessary for anything to take place, I don’t believe you can put it in the same category of events that take place in the world. As such it occupies a class or category all its own. (I think I’m running into a version of Russell’s set paradox here, but let’s not go there … )

For anything to happen, the world must have happened – that much seems clear. But – as far as we know – the world appears to have happened on its own account, i.e., it is simply here – full stop. It is the container that contains everything else, but itself it is not contained other than by itself.  Such is the mystery of the world.

Now one  could argue that we just don’t know that the world isn’t part or the result of another event that brought it about, i.e., the world is a transitory event that came into being as a result of “the big bang”  – which is the prevailing view at the moment, and so on, and end up in an infinite regress of events preceding events, and then only because we cannot accept that events can appear out of thin air or materialize from within a material empty vacuum for that matter,

Our language is the limiting factor here because it is the language of the living and breathing  mortals that we are.  We cannot get beyond the logic derived from our species’ experiential involvement  with the world and make sense of events that seem to go beyond that.

But what if the point of the universe being here is simply just that: to be here for what it is, i.e., to exist for its own sake?  That we may be able to make sense of this might depend on  what sense or meaning we are able to attach to  our lives, as by extension we would  then be valuing the point of universe being here as well.

If we think about our place in the world this way, well-known  20th century existentialists such as Sartre and Camus would be wrong  classifying life as essentially meaningless and  – among other things –  attributing the absurdity of our predicament to a cold and indifferent universe that remains silent on such things, given that only human beings are able to attach meaning or value to something.  The conclusion has to be that meaning comes from within life, from experiencing life as meaningful, and not from having it  derived from a source external to it.

It would follow that no feature of the universe will likely make sense unless it is viewed in the context of providing the ground for some aspect of meaningful human activity that could otherwise not have taken place.  The logic may sound counter-intuitive but I believe that this is the only way out of the absurdity paradox that Albert Camus entertained when considering the fact that human beings inevitably seek to understand life’s purpose:

“Camus takes the skeptical position that the natural world, the universe, and the human enterprise remain silent about any such purpose. Since existence itself has no meaning, we must learn to bear an irresolvable emptiness. This paradoxical situation, then, between our impulse to ask ultimate questions and the impossibility of achieving any adequate answer, is what Camus calls the absurd. Camus’ philosophy of the absurd explores the consequences arising from this basic paradox. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)”

The question remains then how the seemingly puny human could conceivably value the existence of the mighty universe simply by finding meaning in their everyday lives.  I think it boils down to the distinction between  quantity and quality, and between form and function in the context of an evolving universe.

As such it wouldn’t matter how old or how large and complex  the world is, given that the significance of that could only be expressed by how well we would be able to experience the quality and depth of  being at the receiving end of this  spectacularly creative effort,  and then solely with the sensibility and reasoning  that has been given to us as a result of merely being a part of it. Everything beyond it is more or less irrelevant, in the sense that -as spectacular as that may be – it is at most a set decoration, the backdrop against which we play out the destiny of our species and of which we have for the moment absolutely no clue.

Posted on

An Uncertain Future

Given what we think we know about the age of the universe,  planet earth and the myriad of creatures that have and are continuing  to inhabit it since  life first appeared,  we have arrived only recently  as a species uniquely capable of reflective thought and reasoning. With it – I suggest – came the potential to make something of ourselves beyond being just another species for which  the need to survive  and ensure the continuation of its genus appear to be its main objectives..

On that premise we find  ourselves at the receiving end of the implicit obligation to go beyond  these basic needs, and  not only because we can envisage ourselves of being capable of accomplishing much more than that, but also, surely,  because we would not want to see ourselves being limited by them.

But given the state of the world today, for many the potential to distinguish ourselves beyond being just another creature on this planet appears to have been reduced to some self-aggrandizing exercise in unlimited exploitation, boundless consumption and mindless procreation, and that at great cost to ourselves and our future.  As a matter of fact, we seem to have taken the first steps towards our own extinction by continuing to undermine the very environment that spawned and nurtured us and allowed us to thrive as a species.

Alternatively – and yes, there is always an alternative, in particular to just being unimaginably shortsighted! – we  could use our collective brain-trust to decide what kinds of uniquely human qualities we ought to prioritize in order to truly benefit us all  and start acting accordingly.

I can think of a few: Imagine a world-wide society built on mutual trust and respect, featuring such things as a sustainable waste-free economy, free education, healthcare, equal opportunity regardless of race , age or gender, the pursuit of arts and sciences, and being free from famine, disease and crime. In other words, not much we are familiar with today, but something worth pursuing, don’t you think?

Easier said than done, without question;  in fact some will say that such an utopian state of affairs will be impossible to achieve given what history has shown us to date  about human nature.  True, is difficult to see any such potential reflected in the daily course of our lives. Not only  does  it seems near impossible to quantify them beyond being either mundane  – and  at any rate less than  profound – or positively evil, and that would include much of human kind’s murderous, bloodstained past and all of our  self-destructive activities such as our relentless attacks on the earth’s critical life-sustaining biosphere.

The problem of course is that we seem to be lost and absolutely hapless when it comes to understanding our place in the world. In the mid  1600’s the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza wrote that people find themselves with needs and desires without understanding the reasons why they want and act as they do.  Lacking this knowledge about themselves and their place in the world creates the illusion that they can do as they please, and which is a source of much grief when they act against their own interest because they  don’t seem know any better.

Nevertheless, it is the implicit promise of our cosmic DNA, our origins,  that will continue to urge us along this uncertain path towards a future we might one day be able to imagine what that would look like if we develop the ambition, courage and intellectual wherewithal to  conceive the realization of it.  And why shouldn’t  we be able to: are we not the descendants of a  magnificent  cosmic event and all the spectacular creative energy that lies within and  is necessarily  represented within every particle of our being?

I say “necessarily” because how could it not be? We aren’t some accidental and aberrant event over and above the phenomenon of the universe: we ARE the universe, nothing more and nothing less. Now, if we only knew what that meant, but that is what life is all about, isn’t it? And clearly, this is the larger context we should be taking our cues from when we plan our future – as little as we are able to grasp of it at the moment.

For this we need to be able to turn ourselves inside out, by  prioritizing  the spiritual over the physical and embracing those values that are clearly larger than the largely material ones we appear to be pursuing today. Instead we ought to be pursuing empathy, compassion, trust and a respect for life in recognition of the incredible accomplishment that life represents as a cosmic effort to redefine itself for whatever purpose it has in mind – as much as we cannot even begin to think what that purpose may be although I suspect it might have something to do with establishing order over entropy and light over darkness  in pursuit of total harmony.

However – and as much as I hate to admit this – my greatest fear is that this kind of enlightened future is in fact not available to us as, when  we may not have moved  far enough up the evolutionary ladder to be able to visualize it – or event want it ! – and  to start changing our ways collectively to make it a reality.

As such, life is likely to continue to be the absolute tragedy it is, for our life-giving planet and for so many of our species today.

Posted on

On the Nature of Reality

Simply put, reality is experiencing the world in real-time,  the here and now and “the place” where we interact with it.  It is the state of things as they are when we encounter them, as opposed to how they may appear or can be imagined. Reality is the basis for everything that we believe to be true about the world. (Well, at least, it ought to be!)

Determination and acceptance of what is real is derived from our interaction with the world and in the first instance a product of our minds in consideration of the information delivered to it by our sensory experiences. This makes our understanding of what is real very much a function of what we have brought to the fore in terms of our sensory organs and the intellectual ability to interpret the information they have gathered for us via our sensory experiences.

It goes without saying that if we had been different creatures we would have likely experienced a different world and have interacted with it differently, although I would hold that the difference in interaction would be a matter of degree and not of kind.  As a result our conclusions about the nature of the reality might very well be the same in the sense that we can interact and share a common environment despite qualitatively substantially different experiences.

It follows that  all knowledge  is subjective, and a product of our experiential perception of it, i.e., the only reality we know is entirely of our own making  and that would include any theories we have developed around its nature or origin.

It also follows that reality isn’t limited to what we know about it; instead,  it is limited by what we don’t know about it on the assumption that there is likely so much more to it but just not available to  us us because of what we are in terms of being able to perceive and understand it …

For example, we have developed notions of space and time which work perfectly well in helping us navigate and manage our immediate environment, but these concepts begin to break down – and no longer make any sense – when we apply them to the larger whole and  their logical consequences. They become nonsensical, as we will have to assume such things as the beginning and end of time  and the possibilities of the infinitely large and infinitely small.

As a result the reality of the world we know becomes less and less intelligible the further we move away from the centre – which lies necessarily within ourselves – where the very concept of it came into being when we first opened our eyes and found ourselves immersed in it.

Posted on

On The Nature of Consciousness

Somehow, our consciousness is the reason the universe is here. (Sir Roger Penrose)

So, what is consciousness?  Consciousness is a way of being in the world that appears to go beyond any known physical properties in the material universe, in the sense that it manifests itself as an enduring phenomenon that cannot be reduced or accounted for by  any physical law or properties other than through association.

While we might use the term  frequently and on a casual basis –  suggesting an implicit understanding of what consciousness is all  about – when we are pushed to elaborate exactly what it is that we are referring to,  we will likely run out of vocabulary when it comes to describing  its defining features.

Nevertheless, we keep trying to come up with some kind of explanatory account for it that goes beyond association  and accommodates it solidly within the  known laws of physics.

The philosopher David Chalmers has speculated that consciousness may be a fundamental property of nature existing outside the known laws of physics, and one might be led to agree with that as to date science has not be able to account for it in any way as a function of a material law of the universe.

But while philosophers and scientists continue to  struggle to make sense of consciousness  and eminent physicists such as Sir Roger Penrose and Archibald Wheeler have begun linking it to the intricacies of Quantum Mechanics, and a concept I have been trying to get my head around in another post that can be found here.

What we can say about consciousness is that, in the first instance, it provides us with the realm or opportunity that we might refer to as sentience and awareness where we are able to  acknowledge the reality our own existence in the here and now, in the sense  that without it we would simply not be here – or anywhere else for that matter.  That is no more than saying ” I think, therefore I am”,  as the philosopher René Descartes once proclaimed  in his 1637 Discourse on Method.

As well, and a presumption no doubt implicit in the previous paragraph, one must be in the realm of the living as a necessary condition for consciousness to be present, as to date consciousness as a phenomenon has only been observed in association with life and the living, be it in man or beast or other forms of life that appear to be capable of exhibiting this phenomenon.

At least, this is how we understand consciousness to be present when making a determination whether someone  or something is conscious  and basing this  on the  ability to respond to  a stimulus of sorts. We should allow for the possibility that some creature, be it man or beast that is presumed to be conscious might be  entirely unable to respond to whatever stimulus because of some form of paralysis or other condition that prevents it from doing so.

What we do not know however is  that being a life form of sorts is also a sufficient condition for consciousness to occur or be present, as minimally as that might be the case.  For instance, trees and plants are alive, but we would typically not attribute  consciousness to them, if only because we have no way of detecting the presence of it. As well,  we do not know what exactly we would be  looking for when we try to detect the presence of it at the level of trees and plants.

Clearly, the absence or presence of consciousness cannot be a function of our ability to detect it, and for that reason it would be more reasonable to give it the benefit of the doubt and  assume that  consciousness is an intrinsic property of life regardless of the kind of life-form we might want to consider for this. I believe it is simpler to hold this view than to postulate  further conditions  that must be met by a  living entity before it can be said to have  consciousness, or to have at least  the capacity for it, e.g., that it must at least have a central nervous system to  be capable of it.

But  my task here is  less concerned about determining at what point living things such as  plants or more advanced organisms might be capable of  consciousness – or when we  might be able to detect it – and more about being able to determine what the nature of consciousness is beyond merely tagging it as an intrinsic function or attribute of life.

In this context  – and given a basic definition of life such as  “the condition that allows a given arrangement of organic matter to utilize its environment to sustain itself, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change until death” –  it would be reasonable to assume that, for any living organism,  none of these capacities would be particularly useful unless there was also an innate capacity to monitor, coordinate and maximize these functions successfully and in the interest of its sense of self-preservation as a living organism.

This leads me to say that  the nature or essence of consciousness is in fact life’s interest in self-preservation, and what I want to refer to as “the will to live”. It is an emergent property of organic matter  that  eventually manifest itself as what we have come to refer to as “consciousness” as it goes up the evolutionary ladder towards  ever more sophisticated ways of being in the world.

The  property’s main function might be to acquire  a growing awareness of itself and its environment, to the point of being able to interact and manipulate the latter directly in relation to itself and presumably in the interest of self-preservation but not necessarily limited to that. Here I like to think that life – as an emergent property of the material universe and by way of its evolutionary nature – has  further goals and objectives in mind (so to speak) that go beyond the need for mere survival and address what I see as the larger question about life: survival for what purpose, i.e., what are we here for, or – for that matter -why should there be any life at all?

As to the question how consciousness resides in life-forms is as much a mystery as to how life resides in matter, but in either case they appear to be emergent properties and – as I suggested earlier –  a function of the degree of organizational complexity of its material  constituents,  when they allow for the emergence of these  properties to the extent that they are able to exhibit them.

All this being said,  it would  perhaps be simpler to hold the view that – rather than seeing consciousness as an emergent property of matter – it is in fact the true nature of reality, i.e., there are no other realities,  and that what we refer to as the physical attributes of the world are merely a manifestation of its complexity and a means to evolve beyond its current status towards a future state the purpose of which we are clearly not able to apprehend.

Posted on

Going Up In Smoke

I must admit, I am somewhat dumbfounded by this cannabis thing. As an erstwhile Dutchman watching the popularity of pot work its way up from Paris into Amsterdam in the late 50s, I readily admit I had a few joints then but couldn’t decide what the fuss was all about and so that was that.

Cannabis continues to be an illegal drug in the Netherlands. While tolerated – meaning the authorities will turn a blind eye to those in possession of 5g or less – since April of this year, several cities have taken steps to limit the public use of cannabis because of the stench produced by smoking it (one is reminded of a well-seasoned dog turd on fire) as well as the noise generated by its users. The Hague became the first Dutch city to ban it in the city center, the central train station, and major shopping areas.

With this in mind, I am bemused by the anticipatory euphoria towards the imminent legalization of pot in Canada. This includes the gushing enthusiasm displayed by the various media – including the Globe and Mail (Pursuits, August 4th) – in attempting to provide this drug with the sheen of sophistication, by featuring it in a boutique environment, and in the context of stylish cannabis accoutrements and haute dining experiences that have their  dishes spiked (sorry “infused”) with it.

Finally – given all this brouhaha around the matter – as well as the billions being invested in it, I can’t get this picture out of my mind: the possibility of massive clouds of pot smoke billowing over this country once this drug is legal here.  Probably not, but whatever smoke there will be, it will likely also include folks seeing their financial interest in cannabis going that way.

Posted on

A Play Without A Script

Shakespeare once wrote:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;

Sometimes I think that we humans behave like actors in a self-directed  play that seemed to have lost track of its script,  and that we  make it up as we go along since that seems to be the only option.

In doing so we  appear to be driven to act and do as we want, but essentially without much of a clue to justify why we are going into the direction we appear to be heading.

For instance, being even a cursory student of human history will show that not acting in the best interest of our species appears to be the hallmark of human interaction over the centuries. The slaughter of millions of our own kinds features prominently in the matter settling disputes among ourselves that could have been resolved peacefully with a modicum of rationality and goodwill and to the benefit of everyone involved.

Moreover, it  has become especially clear that we are most definitely not acting in our own best interest when much of what we do today has had a detrimental effect on the very environment that sustains us as we continue to  rape and pillage the earth’s biosphere, including dumping our garbage in its oceans and poisoning its atmosphere.  Indications are that if we continue the way we are acting now we might well be heading towards our own extinction.

I would like to think that we’re not headed in that direction, but it could be argued that being confronted with one’s own extinction is a necessary step in our development as a species that must know its limitations before it will be able to employ its full potential as a force of creative energy in the universe.

In the meantime this question remains: does the world – and all that it encompasses – have to be about something beyond the mere act of experiencing it?  Couldn’t the world simply exist for its  own sake – and that the very matter of experiencing it through our interactions with it is all that it is capable of delivering – suggesting that to search for a meaning beyond it would be an exercise in futility.

I find that difficult to accept, and not so much for the experience of positive events  that make us happy and  seem to provide the justification for it,  but more because there appears to be  so much more tragedy and despair in this world, through hunger, natural disasters and senseless wars and affecting mainly those who are least able to defend themselves from these misfortunes.  Where is the justification for that?  That doesn’t seem right to me – and where does that sense of right and wrong originate from, if not from the very reason why we are here in the first place? That suggest there is more to life  beyond merely living it, i.e., that there is in fact a script in play and it is up to us to uncover it. This as opposed to merely accepting the status quo and the soul-destroying  inevitability of it.

Posted on

The Night of Broken Glass

Kristallnacht - 1938
Kristallnacht – 1938

This November it will be exactly 80 years ago that a wave of anti-Jewish savagery and destruction broke out across Nazi occupied Europe on November 9 and 10 in 1938.  Known as  the Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, after the shards of shattered glass that lined German streets in the wake of the pogrom – broken glass from the windows of synagogues, Jewish-owned homes and businesses were ransacked, plundered or destroyed during the violence,  often by neighbors and acquaintances of the victims. These November pogroms marked the start of the Holocaust.

Hateful, riotous and violent events such as these raise the chilling question how people can be made to turn on their fellow citizens en masse, to the point of destroying their properties and livelihoods, or even by killing them.

Such events do not occur in isolation, of course, and are often years in the making, and typically the outcome of a climate of division, misinformation, mistrust, intimidation, hate-mongering and fear.  At bottom lies the vulnerability of the human race to being manipulated by folks who claim that they have the answers to all their problems, and who are able to convince others of their creed by appealing to the most basic instincts of our species, amongst which greed and fear are the more susceptible  ones.

In addition, their appeal feeds on another intrinsic feature of the human race, namely the need to belong to the herd.  Described by Nietzsche as the obedience of the individual to the mass, blindly and without reflection, and perhaps best characterized by his near-contemporary existentialist writer Kierkegaard, when he said that … we men are constantly in need of “the others,” the herd; we die, or despair, if we are not reassured by being in the herd, of the same opinion as the herd.  And,  as Simone Weil once remarked,  people find comfort in the absence of the necessity to think.

Clearly, such basic human tendencies work directly against the willingness and ability to think about the morality of our actions for ourselves – as individuals – as well as the courage to act accordingly, regardless of diverging mass opinions. This as opposed to being purely driven by instinct,  something that would have urged our animal ancestors to prefer the safety of numbers by remaining within the herd,  for no other reason than being a member of the same species with the need to conform.

That the latter can be a contributing factor in the occurrence of mass violence – including  state sponsored genocide, as in the case of Nazi Germany – can be seen in the context of the herd instinct being alive and well and continuing to thrive amongst the more vulnerable-minded of our species, particularly in the religious and political spheres.  And if our history has shown us anything it is the fact that such outbreaks of mass violence can be initiated by those who have a purpose for it, or,  if they are afflicted with a pathological need to dominate others and the obsession with the exercise of power.

Not easily understood if you are not affected by it – and essentially a delusion about one’s own power or importance – Adolf Hitler rise to power resulting in WWII is perhaps history’s most deadly example of how millions of people can be murdered for no reason other than that someone believing in their own divine purpose and invincibility is able to motivate others to blindly act out their deadly manic or paranoid disorder for them.

This couldn’t happen in our day and age you say? But you only have to watch the large adoring crowds at various Trump rallies and their absolute delight in chanting “Lock Her Up” to understand how the masses can be manipulated and potentially motivated to commit a heinous act.

With the oratory skills of a pulpit bully and employing a 5th-grade  vocabulary largely limited to hollow phraseology such as “it’s gonna be great, it’s gonna be fantastic!”, a large and primarily anti-intellectual crowd for whom truth is a function of what they want to believe as opposed to what is actually the case  – after being told what they want to hear, e.g., how deserving they are, or how wonderful they are  – can be made to focus on an illusionary enemy who is made out to be standing in the way of their entitlements, a promised utopia, and conceivably set afoot from there, and never mind the consequences.

Posted on

Can Something Come From Nothing?

For some folks the question whether something can come from nothing might appear meaningful in discussions around the creation of the world. For instance,  how did the world come into being, and what was there before it came into being: something else, or was there nothing.

In trying to make sense of such questions  it is easy to get caught up in language games. Words pushing  words – without actually being able to assert anything either concrete or definitive. For instance, if something is not nothing, and nothing is not something – then, presumably, these terms are mutually exclusive, and it would be difficult to use either term, “something” or “nothing”, in some kind of meaningful relationship beyond stating that the one excludes the other on purely logical grounds.

One question that appears meaningful to me in this context is the one that asks: is the concept of non-existence even available to us?  I guess that all depends on how existence is defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions or properties – e.g., physical objects require spatial extension – a size and a shape  that allows them to be detectable  as  physical objects – be they solid or in wave form, and if they don’t have these properties we can say that they don’t exist. So – in that sense -the “non-existence”of physical objects would be available to us,

Then there are all sorts of other things that can be said to exists that clearly aren’t physical objects. I’m thinking of things such as mental objects. Unlike objects having spatial extension, they can nevertheless be said to exist in our minds, when we refer to them in terms of thoughts and ideas, or feelings and emotions. While encountering them is different from dealing with physical objects, they are in many ways just as real as physical objects, and accepting their reality is an integral part of our ability to function within the everyday world of our experiences.

Leaving the reality of mental objects off the table for a moment – we are here to consider the possibility or concept of absolutely nothing existing before the world as we know it came in to being.  Clearly, this is a completely nonsensical notion, and either postulating a God-like creator or Mr. Hawking’s singularity as a source of creation will not save the day as both are equally lacking in support  unless – for the latter – you want to suspend the logic of the space-time continuum as a theoretical concept that accounts for everything that can be found in it, space, time, energy and matter except for it being there in the first place.  This is the problem of being a closed system – you cannot get outside of it, to consider it either existing or not.

It seems to me that the answer is no. Nothing – nothing existing – is not available to us as a concept except, perhaps, in some abstract sense, e.g., in terms of the the absence of existence,  as if existence can be reduced to one of more properties that must be present for something to exist, eg., spatial extension,  and having a size and shape where we can approach the concept of non-existence, which – of course – is really a contradiction of terms, and by pointing this out, we have come as close to it as appears feasible, given the rules of language that are there to keep things intelligible to the extent that some kind of discussion it about appears possible. And that should not be a function of the fact that – when we say something like “in the beginning there was nothing” – we have actually implied the existence of nothing at some time or another, as that would clearly be a function of grammar as opposed to making an ontological statement. Clearly, our language is misleading us here.

Posted on

Why The World Is At War

A recent March 2018 Guardian article by Jason Burke titled “Why Is the World at War” makes the point that “The harsh reality may be that we should not be wondering why wars seem so intractable today, but why our time on this planet creates such intractable wars”.

Burke outlines a number of seemingly never ending regional conflicts, causing no end of misery and death among local populations: Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, the Ukraine, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, to name the more frequently profiled ones. Often these conflicts follow boundaries that divide clans or castes, not necessarily countries. They lie along frontiers between ethnic or sectarian communities:

In fact, if we look around the world at all its many conflicts, and if we define these wars more broadly, then we see front lines everywhere, each with its own no man’s land strewn with casualties. In Mexico, Brazil, South Africa or the Philippines, there is huge violence associated with criminality and the efforts (by states) to stamp it out .

And so the article goes on to analyze a number of these protracted conflicts in order to get a sense of what lies at the heart of them, in particular as to their history and the seeming inability to get them resolved.

The reasons are clearly many and varied – and to say that they are complex is perhaps an understatement. But as to any kind of overall “why”, the only common element appears to be the persistent inability of our species to get out from underneath the quagmire of basic instincts and desires that appear to feed  the negative human characteristic  we are all too familiar with, such as greed, selfishness,  bullying  and the exploitation and oppression of others,  to name just a few, and all them typically leading to conflict. This as opposed to being guided by more enlightened qualities of human endeavor such as being able to compromise, mediate, cooperate  and share with the realization that all human interests are best served by them.

In the meantime there remains the question of how to address the current states of affairs as outlined in the Guardian article. Essentially, though, they appear unsolvable, except by more of the same, and unless the conflicting parties agree to sit down to discuss a solution beyond trying to kill each other, there is not much left on the table but to continue the mutual bloodshed.

If these conflicts are evidence of something, it is that evolutionary pressures are operation at all levels of existence, and that includes the competition between ideas about what kind of societies we should structure for ourselves, and the principles that underpin them, i.e., social-economically, politically, morally. At the bottom of this struggle we find the Might is Right conundrum, and essentially the Law of the Jungle, bequeathed to us courtesy of our animal past in our participation in the Survival of the Fittest contest and obviously still very much a part of our way of dealing with the world.

When reason – that feature of the human cortex most recently required as a result of an evolutionary upgrade – is subjugated to instinct, the Law of the Jungle continues to prevail and becomes even more destructive, if not to the point of self-destruction, as in the case of potentially trying to annihilate ourselves by throwing nuclear bombs at each other.

The issue here of course is why we would allow reason to be overruled by instinct and  in particular when there are clear reason to believe that in a particular case this would not be in our interest. But the first response here would be to say that these are not matters of black and white, and that we might well confuse the one for the other.

As well, the ability to apply reason is a skill that must be learned – and just because you have the capacity for it in the cerebral  hardware department, all that means is that you have the prerequisites  for being able to act rationally.

However, it should be clear that even after minimal observation of human behavior and the current state of the world that the application of reason  requires training, as well as the insight into what benefits our species in the long term, and I like to think that this would be about more than the fact of our mere  survival. To act instinctively, however, is something we are born with, and built into the biology of our species,  from the very first phases of existence as a distinct organism that needed to be able to look after itself  to ensure its survival.

And so not much is likely to change in the world with respect to these kinds of conflicts until such time that we change our ways and wake up to the fact that we are not the creature that we think we are, i.e., that we must be the creature as defined by our past, and our bloodstained, war-torn history.

Instead we need to respond to the call of what it means to be a rational human being, or at least have the imagination and courage to try to find out what that might be all about without the need to kill each other. And this would mean redefining ourselves in terms of our future, and what we may be able to accomplish as a species motivated by the more enlightened principles of empathy and compassion, as well as the spirit of mutual cooperation  between nations with the realization that the shared stewardship of the earth resources is the only way to guarantee our peaceful coexistence  on this planet.

How we will get to that point is anyone’s guess – and if our species  is actually capable of that much common sense  I don’t know.  Given the state of the world today – and the quality of the leadership that appears to be in charge of the world’s most powerful nations – I am not hopeful that any of this will happen anytime soon.

“Until it begins, war is a matter of choice. After that, it’s shaped by forces and realities which dwarf the individuals who participate.”  (Joshua Rothman writes in the New Yorker in December of 2017 , reviewing Victor Davis Hanson’s “The Second World Wars”)