Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Getting cleared up in the mind

Wow! Such confusion, ideas, beliefs, there's at least a two millennia worth collection of ideas around here in my head. From Plato and Aristotle to Kant, Descartes, Bob Dylan, Regina Spektor, Einstein, Bohr, Schlick and Wittgenstein, Osho, Huxley, judaism, buddhism, and many other stuff is hanging around in my head. Not only specific ideas but also states of mind, attitudes, like what one gets when one hears Chopin or Mozart, or Bach or Beethoven, or one sees a film by Kubrick, or The Perfume (either in book or film form), or The Fountain, etc. It's really difficult to make sense of so many ideas. So, let's try to get things at least a bit clearer then they are now.

First of all there is the mystery. We, as human animals, have been able to gather a gigantic amount of information over the millennia (at least compared with the technology of other animals, we have given a gigantic step in just a few thousands years, just like plants colonized the planet in a couple of hundred thousand years so "intelligent" species will probably do the same). But all this "knowledge" (more like patches of hypothesis meticulously seamed over and over again by countless generations) has merely emphasized how clueless we are regarding the nature and details of what surrounds us. Fundamental theories of matter, time and space, the more they are developed, the more they seem eloigned from the traditional concepts that still guide us in our daily tasks and for which there seems to be no clear intuitive replacement (multi dimensional space for instance is only graspable as an abstract entity, mathematically treatable but an incognitus from the point of view of the imagination - we cannot imagine anything with more than three spatial dimensions, hypercubes or tesseracts are only understandable through mathematical analysis). On the other hand the best pictures we have managed to draw over generations, have showed us why we don't understand the Cosmos around us: we are the first intelligent species on our planet! And we are just in the beginning. For thousands of millions of years life has been evolving on our planet (and uncountable others although we are still missing an empirical evidence of that), we are just the first sprout that was able to use technology and a complex symbolic language. It is very easy to imagine how different things will look like in a million years or so of intelligent life. Today, we have no idea for the amount of time in which mankind will carry the torch of "the most intelligent species on the planet". We cannot even be sure that we will be the species that will give rise to a proliferation of other species. We are like one of the first plants to have photosynthesis. Yes, it is a great thing, a great invention, that allows us to colonize the entire planet, but how far will we get? How many millions of years will it take until other species take the lead, or will we kill ourselves in just a few decades, opening the space for a new kind of life up ahead?

All these questions have far from clear answers. Mankind has grappled with its own fears and related dogmas and superstitions. We usually say that man is its worst enemy. and in a certain way it is true. We have the monopoly of many regions of earth, we dominate in large cities, over large areas where animals, either big or invisible, cannot attack us (specially in the north hemisphere) and yet we live with our houses closed, sometimes behind iron (reinforced steel) doors, with highly complex keys, and we are frightened (with good reason) of many of our fellow mates. In almost all regions of the world wealth is not fairly shared, and it is not hard to find, some meters apart, people that live with every luxury and people who have little to eat. The same happens with knowledge, most of humanity is incredible stupid, does not care for the incredible science, technology and philosophy that provides the pleasant life we have. Even politics are selected not according to their wisdom or technical knowledge but by their appearance. It's not difficult to understand, given this state of affairs, that the most intelligent men on the planet are put hidden away in Universities and research institutes, away from positions of power, and the leaders are those that give the masses what they want to hear, even if it is the most ludicrous lies. Therefore we are given religion, consumerism, obedience to roles and tradition, premiums for not asking, not questioning, etc. In sum, we are rewarded by our society to simply be stupid, have stupid lifes by being fun and beautiful without really trying to understand what this is all about.

Most modern wars can be traced back to this cultivation of stupidity. For instance, the first world war could only happened due to the delusional quests for power by the German-Austrian nobility, all enriched by their suits and fancy way of talking and looking at others, believing and living in the make belief world of superiority given by birth, social position, whatever. These naked monkeys in fancy clothes were all over Europe, deciding the fate of nations, also in england and France, and, 20 years later, Churchill and Hitler, once again repeated the fancy play of naked monkeys playing to "I want to be like God - all admired, fancy dressed, fancy speaking, I want to be this illusion, that I am different from you, that I am somehow better than these organs full of blood, bile, sperm and urine, I have surpassed my human condition, I am immortal, larger than life". These Churchils and Hitlers and Stalins, and Mussolinis were backed up by millions who were also trying to believe in the truth of these ridiculous roles. We are all naked monkey playing the game of "culture". But our culture is severely limited, it does not encompass what we've gathered from the world, what we have painstakingly learned over countless generations, it does not address the fact that we are just a minuscle part of a fantastic, gigantic, nature, with myriads of variations, almost infinite diversity, and we are just a spot, we should be lookiing at the world, we should be grateful and joyous to be able to learn from it, to observe its amazing and indescribable beauty that encompasses every artist, scientist, animal, rock, lack, geometrical form, mathematical relation, etc, that there is.

The fact that, instead of this thirst for knowledge and discussion and contemplation of the beautiful cosmos that surround us, we are just cultivating the stupidity of following the norm and trying to fit in in this mediocrity, seems to be a signal of nature that there is much more than man to the world of intelligence. Some men, some members of our species, have observed the stars and the atoms and beyond. they have tried to pear in the hidden folds of the human mind, they have tried to unravel beauty, to understand the need of a "God", they have thought about ethics, metaphysics, art and the creative impulse and where it comes from. But these are not typical men. Most men just want to look at smaller pictures. Not the great picture of a mysterious, seemingly infinite Cosmos, but the small pictures of getting a promotion, getting laid, having a wife, having kids... all these great things, but, wouldn't they be much more beautiful if they were integrated in what we can see of the immense Cosmic tapestry?

For me this as an undeniable and unmistakable YES for an answer. But for most people the infinite tapestry of the World, the big world, including stars and galaxies and joyful dolphins and courageous wolfs, and curious elephants, and molecules, and mountains, and ... all this, unmistakable important, as important as us, important even before we were born, continuing to be important and full of meaning even long after we have died and all the memory of our existence, and of our friends, has been lost for ever, this Universe, this magnificent Cosmos (to which Carl Sagan (with the help of science and Vangelis among others) has masterfully given a human voice), may seem like a sad thing. It takes out our importance, our special character. If everything is soooo beautiful, than what am I doing here, what may I contribute to the world.

The answer is amazingly simple: you are part of this amazing beautifulness, you are part of this infinite world, you are part of this mystery that no human mind seems to have been able to understand. You have the infinite in you in every one of your cells, just like everything else. This would be releasing, but the scorn of what we do not see as beauty preclude us from having this kind of response. We look at a worm, a spore, we don't see it's intricate beauty, it's myriads of complex cells and molecules. We just see something distasteful, and we might even ask, why were these beings created, if they're so ugly and purposeless, at least compared to us. Many of us look at nature as bellow man. This incredible idea (it's like a son looking at its parents and scorn them as if they were of lower kind then he, their creation!!) is so spread out that we use every field and ocean and "animal" (we even exclude ourselves from this epithet - yes! we are not animals, imagine, we must be minerals or vegetables, phew!) as if it were a property, ready to be consumed in the manner most pleasing to us.

All this blindness reminds me of the Churchills and Hitlers of other times who only have eyes and ears for their own selves and their delusional world, and their fabricated illusions of power, importance, fame, right and good, and bad and scornfully, etc. We have eloigned ourselves so much from reality, from nature, from the world that surrounds. Sometimes it is a marvel how we were able to came this far, to create this technological advanced society. We are able to go to the moon, we have blissful artistic creations, we are capable of visions of immense beauty... But, there it is really not difficult to understand: our strenghth is in the numbers and in the particular history of the Western Civilization that rightly concluded that: to have power, one must have knowledge, science, technology - the ability to manipulate. Our urge, I mean from a political and social point of view, is not so much directed at the understanding of a magical and mysterious world, it is directed at overpowering it, and everyone else on it which does not play along in our particular political game. The second World War has given politicians around the world the graphic depiction that technology makes might. Atomic weapons, jet warplanes, atomic submarines and air carriers, computers to decrypt the enemy's information, radars, etc. Politicians and military experts brilliantly realized that whoever has the most efficient economy, the most productive factories, whoever invest more and most proficiently in R&D will be the winning power. If one invest long and hard enough, one may achieve the absolute dominance (as the US almost had, or appeared to have, in the beginning of this millennium). So, all this talk about consumerism is in fact well justified by a more primordial instinct: the instinct to fight and to prevail and to dominate. An instinct which probably is not very important in many human beings, but, unfortunately for our expectations of a center role in the planetary history, guides most of our politicians. We do clearly need much better education, much more attention to the educational role on tv, much more emphasis on values other than "having", we would need a lot of things. But this is the humanity that has passed on. A fighting, cohesive society, bloody and greedy, able to reproduce in large numbers and to kill all opposition. These were our fathers, our ancestors, the ones that had most wifes and more kids, kids that passed on these genes. This is what we have. To have a better hope of playing a more significant role in our planet's history we would have to apply our understanding to genetics too. Robert Kark Graham filled a void in our present voluntary and ostentatious disregard for any kind of eugenic consideration (following the atrocities of Nazis and others).

In any case, why play a larger role in our planet's history? Did individual Smilodons live less full or happier or meaningful lifes just because in the distant future, long after they were dead, no descendants of their species could be found? It would be like telling someone that his/her life could not be full because they had no sons or daughters! What the heck! That's ridiculous, many people know that it is how you live the moment that makes it fully full and meaningfully and rewarding and fulfilling and so on... What happens afterwards, well, it is a all different thing. For a particular Smilodon, what matter is what he was doing with his life at that moment. That was important to him, the way he dealt with hiding and hunting and with the suffering he imposed on his prey (did he noticed it?), the way he dealt with hardships, with pain and sickness and hunger and disease and peril and death! All these things were very important to the quality of life of each particular Smilodon. But the fact that their children would survive was something that weighted on their children's back. It did not affect them at all in their self-fulfillment. It had nothing to do with their happiness. Besides, history was not written yet, it was not yet made, who knows if things could have been different?

So, perhaps it's not so important if one is bright or dumb, or if mankind will self-destruct in the next centuries. Perhaps it will, perhaps it won't, we don't know, we can imagine it, we can draw some probabilities in our mind, but the fact is: it's all way above our heads, our abilities. We simply do not know.

So this is the first fact: the mystery. The mystery of where we came from (what was there before the Big Bang, what created it? if it was not created and existed from the beginning of time, why does it exist? Why is there something instead of nothing? Wouldn't nothing be easier to explain? or, as Einstein as said: "The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible."). The mystery of what we are (what is my consciousness, is it a by product of the body - perhaps the brain? Or is the body just a vehicle for the expression of an independent soul which, through consciousness, inspiration, free will, artistic design, wisdom, manifests itself, sometimes in better ways than others, in this world?). The mystery of the world (what is the density of intelligent life throughout the Universe, is it common on our galaxy? How come we don't see big artificial structures build by more advanced civilizations? Can we achieve physical immortality, through genetic mutations or perhaps cybernetic organisms? What will mankind create, will we have descendants in 2 million years from now, and how different will they be from us? When will we be able to talk to an extra-planetary civilization, how will that affect us? Was there ever a religion made by man who actually (perhaps by chance) was true?). What is the nature of the world? (is there really a good and bad, valid to everyone, or is it just a creation of each individual's mind? Is there a goal we should be achieving? Is there life after death? Is there something I should be doing to assure it?).

The size of the Mystery is simply awesome and the more we understand who we are and where we came from (as a species and as society) the more we understand the very small size of what we know, how immersed we are in ignorance, how incredible long seems the way to even a very partial understanding of the basic aspects of this World. To me, this mystery is part of the beautifulness of the Cosmos, it means that it is not small as our minds and petty concepts and mythic cosmologies and petty gods would make it appear. It's much larger than the life of man. Contemplating the Ocean of wonderment, of mystery, of beyond, is the most beautiful and magical experience I had ever had and it encompasses reading, seeing films, listening to music, witting, making love, etc. I give high value to the mystery, it's a fact that we do not understand the vast majority of things that surrounds us (even our own body with its trillions of cells, we cannot even simulate the folding of a single protein!!). But it is also a beautiful and, to me, very meaningful fact. Gorgias is quoted as having said: "nothing exists, if something existed it could not be known, if it could be known it could not be communicated." Gorgias' sentence seems incomprehensible if we look at objects, at parts of the universe. But if we tried to grasp the all universe we would certainly feel that it cannot be known, and if it can be, it is only though this music of mystery that surrounds it when seen from the eyes of a deep lover. He cannot communicate that wisdom, that vision of the whole. And, in a sense that cannot be communicated, the lover understands that, in some mysterious way, the universe does not exist, it is just a cover, a "matrix", a facade, an aspect, a visible face of something that cannot be fully showed through a face. I know I cannot even begin to explain these things, it would be more difficult than to explain the beauty of Beethoven's music, how it can change you, what you can learn from it! It would be like explaining what yellow is like. You just know, you don't need to prove that yellow is like this or that. The same with the beauty of the Universe, you listen to it, just like you listen to a music, you understand it, just like you understand Beethoven's ninth, you learn from it, you absorb it, you bring it into your life, you mixed it with everything around you, you don't explain it, you can't, even to yourself, at least in our state of evolution, but you really grow from it.

The importance I give to the mystery finds resonance in some Einstein quotes I discovered in Wikiquote, here:
"Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in point of fact, religious."

"It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating itself through all eternity, to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe which we dimly perceive, and to try humbly to comprehend an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in nature."

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed."
The fact that there are few who share this mysterian view is explained by the history of our societies and the current make up of man. There is no mystery about that, and it is important to be clear on what one can be clear about. Mystery is not confusion, even less the abdication of reason or the mind. By the contrary, only by pursuing knowledge in every area we are capable of, will we be able to distinguish, among all these clear-cut concepts, facts and relations, the mystery that lies beyond them. Just like in music, we must be able to know well both the instrument and the medium, only then will we be able to see the magic. Confusion, obscurantism, superstition are precisely the opposite of the vision I am pursuing.

Ok! This is a good first part, let's see when we will build the second...

No comments: