Brahman and Idea

We can equate God with the sum collection of all self-awareness.

The trouble with imagining God as a personality working with physical reality is that in anthropomorphizing Him in that way, we trivialize Him. I have wondered about arguing that we are made in God’s image, and so we must resemble Him, but the resemblance must not be so strong as to include our weakness. No, we resemble God in our self-reflective consciousness.

God, therefore, looks out at us through every pair of human eyes we encounter. The owner of those eyes may or may not be aware of her own God consciousness, but she is conscious and she does have the capability to self-reflect, and so she carries God consciousness.

Sufis say that humanity is the lens through which God observes the world, a beautiful way to put it.

 For a long time I have been wondering, why would God need a lens? Why would God need the eyes of people?

The secret is that there is no reality. Reality is not real. We cannot prove that anything exists outside of our senses and so for all intents and purposes there is nothing outside our sensory sphere. Sure, physicists and mathematicians have proved that there are ten dimensions to reality, but those dimensions exist only as idea to them. And so, since we have no outside-of-senses reality to back them up, our sensory experiences are just as transparent, just as flimsy, convincing only because that is part of the construct.  

Would it be fair to say, then, that reality exists because God wishes it to exist? Yes, sort of, and yes, duh. An infinite consciousness is capable of conceiving infinitely many ideas, many of which (infinitely many) are capable of self-reflection and self-reference. Here, then, we have our multi-verse, hypothesized by quantum physics. I need to think about this more, but it seems right to suggest that a self-referent idea or program needs something to refer back to, something complicated enough to support self-reflection. Since to be truly self-reflective requires the capability of an infinite regress, that complicated structure must needs be very complicated. For such an idea to be so capable, it must appear to have some durability, and, hence we have reality with people in it. 

Note that this is all in the realm of idea. We think we are living a hard life, but we and everything "around" us is idea.

The Word was in the Beginning because self-reference has something of a linguistic nature, even if it is in the form of some sort of symbol.

As this is just the beginning of a train of thought that began for me today, I need time to flesh out some of the assumptions contained in my argument.

Surely others have thought the same thoughts as I express here, and the scriptures of many spiritual disciplines treat of the same concept. I just need to figure out the correlations. I am putting together some pieces I have not seen put together before.

For what it's worth, I picture idea springing from Brahman like plumes of snow blow from a great mountain, like the whorls of tiny cyclones spin away from a whistle. Not creating the snow, not making the sound, but its nature and their nature somehow the same.

I know, I know! I thought I was going to be posting my art on this blog and all I am posting is this dang philosophy!

So now you know. This is my internal world, all I really care about.

The Photo Essay That Doesn't Belong

Here is a little photo essay presenting my daughter Angela and me.

It is important in a photograph to depict something about the deeper feelings of the subject. Here you can see that Angela and I are serious contemplators of Universal Truth.

But it is important also to be lighthearted. In this next photo Angela smiles to think of our fortunate position at the intersection of quantum inspired multi-verses.

Angela says, “C’mon Dad, look into the many versions of your future. Look deep, deep.”

“Yeah, Dad,” she says. “Work it!”

 “Now you get it, Dad. You can come back now!”

We showed these to my wife Ann, Angela’s mom, and she said that they were not appropriate for this blog. I am very grateful for that comment, because it gives me the perfect excuse to say:

Yes they are!

If this blog is going to be authentic, it must treat of more than philosophical ruminations, more than the thought behind the production of art, more than all that high falutin’ serious stuff. This blog is a bit of my art, a performance piece if you will.

To exemplify its own theme, this blog must include what is real to this consciousness—even emotion, as in the post “Betrayal;” or silliness; or odd subjects that don’t seem to belong. If it is perceptible to this witness, it belongs.

This post is another example of the self-reflective, thanks to Ann’s remark and my opportunity to respond. And this paragraph is self-reflective on its self-reflection. As such, it epitomizes the very ascending spiral of self-awareness that I have been saying underlies everything meaningful that I do.

A computer could not do this and mean it. If a computer could do this, still it could not talk about being able to do this. Or else about doing that which just preceded this sentence.

A human composed this essay. And, though these words are pretty good evidence that a self-aware creature is experiencing himself in their production, there can be no proof for the reader. A computer can be programmed to mimic anything. A person, not self-aware, can say anything she is taught to say. But there is no need to present proof. I am observing the proof. I am the proof.

As such, I am inaccessible to you, who are your own proof, because just now you remembered to be self-aware.

Angela asks, “Are you going to tell what really happened when we took those pictures?’

No.

Electrons!

I’ve taken this post from a memoir I hope to finish soon of a canoe trip my daughter Angela and I took on the first 340 miles of the Mississippi River. It provides a good introduction to the material I want to talk about in the post to follow:

So much water!  I try to get my head around the notion that all this water is made up of molecules, two little hydrogen atoms clinging to a large oxygen atom like a miniature cartoon mouse head, all tumbling over each other.  Of course the molecules are not really solid, nor are the atoms, nor are the parts of the atoms.  It’s all about forces and big ideas. 

The molecules are so tiny and there are so many of them.  I wondered how many there were in this bit of river.  According to the Avogadro constant, there are 6.02 × 10²³ molecules in a mole.  The atomic mass of oxygen is 16, I remember that from high school chemistry, and the mass of hydrogen is a shade over one, so the atomic mass of water is almost exactly 16 + 2 = 18.  A mole of water is that number of grams, eighteen.  Since a gram of water has a volume of one cubic centimeter, thanks to the French, who set these units that way on purpose, a mole of water takes up about eighteen cubic centimeters.  This little section in the river was about 30 meters wide by a hundred meters long, and I guessed two meters deep.  That made 6000 cubic meters of water right there.  Since there are 100 centimeters in a meter, a cubic meter is 100 × 100 × 100 = 1,000,000, a million cubic centimeters.  Every eighteen of these is a mole, so there are a million divided by 18 moles in a cubic meter—about.   Ten over 18 reduces to 5/9, and I know the decimals for ninths just repeat the top, so that makes 55555.5… moles in each cubic meter.  We’ll call it 60,000, rounded to the nearest ten thousand, because I just wanted to know how many zeroes my number has. 

I did not share my thoughts with Angela.  It would annoy her, but this is just arithmetic and high school science, and I was curious.  So many people would run from a calculation like that, but it’s interesting.  It gives me perspective about life and the world and the universe when I think about that, and to never ponder such things is to lead a life I would have to call impoverished.

Okay, 60,000 moles in a cubic meter and 6000 cubic meters in this bit of river gives me 60,000 × 6000 = 360,000,000 moles in this section of river, or so.  Close enough.  In scientific notation we have 3.6 × 10⁸, and that makes multiplying by the Avogadro constant easier.  But I needed pencil and paper for this. 

Later I figured 3.6 × 10⁸ moles times 6.02 × 10²³ molecules per mole makes about 2.16 × 10³² molecules of water just right there, give or take an enormous number.  In standard notation, that’s 216,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.  I wonder how many there would be in the whole river.  You’d probably only have to tack on 5 or 6 zeroes but I’m not going to do it.

Electrons are more general; every substance has a specific pattern of electrons, so I turn my attention to them. Each oxygen atom has eight electrons, each hydrogen atom one. So every water molecule sports ten electrons, and in this patch of river there were 2.16 × 10³³.

How did all those electrons come to be?  And each one indistinguishable from the next!  John Wheeler’s suggestion that maybe all electrons are just one electron showing up all over has an odd plausibility when you think about it.

But it is astounding to think, as many electrons as there are in a drop of water, as many electrons as there are in a world, in the sun and all the planets, that for light years and light years across empty space are other clusters of identical electrons, that the universe is full of all of these identical particles.  What an absolutely astounding thought!  If all of those electrons are identical in all of their properties, including their mass and their charge, and all the protons and neutrons as well, what are we to make of that?  Could they have been different?  How do we know they are not different here from some other galaxy far across the other side of the universe?  The thought that electrons and protons have no such physical properties at all, but are dependent on some kind of pure idea, some kind of logical necessity springing from mathematical/digital properties makes it possible to imagine that our universe is necessarily as it is, and does not vary from one region to another.

Or what if there is something implausible and arbitrary about the universe in which we live?  I can buy quantum theory and the arbitrary nature of subatomic matter, but I have a lot more trouble conceiving of a variegated universe.  A variegated universe is even more inconceivable to me than the notion that every one of its approximately 10⁸⁰ electrons is identical to the next.

We talk about particles but an atom is not like a tiny solar system.  It has layers of fog that hold different discrete levels of energy that are necessarily digitized in some way.  An electron, like a photon, can be viewed either as a wave or as a particle, but there is something necessary about the amount of energy in an electron or in a photon.  An atom, being comprised of layers of fog or energy which repel the layers of fog of other atoms, is categorized just by those spheres or spheres of influence or layers of fog energy, all the way out to the full periodic table of the elements, and it is those layers of fog, those necessary digital layers or spheres of energy that for mathematical reasons determine the properties of the elements, the way they look, the way they behave, the way they like to link to each other, and these are determined by something necessarily mathematical and not just because they “want” eight electrons in their outer orbit, as we were taught in high school chemistry. 

That’s all they are, atoms; just patches of energy-fog that we like to imagine as systems of particles because we know peas and marbles and sand particles, and because that energy fog will not allow itself to be divided or quantified differently without a huge protest.

I find myself contemplating very seriously the notion that all reality, each sub-atomic particle has existence only as idea.  Perhaps at some level religion and science will find common ground, but far deeper and far stranger than any of us has ever imagined.