Authors note : This is a work in progress.

June 2021;

 

Row Row Row

 

Preface:

An Existential Manifesto on The Cosmos, The Meaning of Life, Epistemology, And Everything Else

 

That sounds like a tall order. The smartest and most well qualified minds down through history have held beliefs about the nature of our existence. Scientists, spiritualists, intellectuals, philosophers, poets, have all tried to provide a universal outline that explains who and what we are, what we feel, and why or even if we are here, if indeed there is a reason, and what exactly the nature of the awareness is that we all seem to have. The solution to “The Hard Problem of Consciousness” remains elusive. But notice I used the word beliefs. Not a single source in the known universe has imparted unequivocal answers. Nor can they. While what has been said and written may be well considered and researched, at the end of the day they are conclusions, none of which can we know to be a fact. They are a best opinion based upon reasoning as is this very document. Furthermore, the concept of facts or even our own existence falls into the same cavernous category: Belief.

So is there nothing which we can truly know?

Is there no hope for knowing if life has meaning or why we are here or if we even exist?

Does this mean that we are doomed to wander in the darkness and anxiety of ignorance about the most monumental questions we can ask?

If what we seek is unequivocal fact, the answer is, there is no hope.

But I bring you some wonderful news dear reader.

It doesn’t matter.

It’s really a null question.

There is one thing which we can know.

The one thing we can know is what we as individuals feel.

Say it.

Out loud.

The one thing we can know is what we as individuals feel.

Everything else is simply belief.

I hope to make a case in this publication for an understanding. One which we can agree is satisfyingly plausible and is in agreement with that which we have experienced first hand. It’s even possible that the scientific and / or philosophical community may find interest and hopefully come to embrace what I offer simply as possible. That’s more than  good enough for me.

 

Chapter One:

A Few Words About Words / The Bifurcation of Awareness

 

The concept of that which may be known vs. that which is belief  is central to this work. 

Belief is what we personally conclude based on our analysis of “reality” the way we view it as projected through the imperfect lens of our worldview. We commonly use words to discuss our beliefs.

But we turn to metaphor to convey what we know, all we feel, in a voice we recognize but can’t describe well. A voice that comes to us from eternity and goes to forever.

But I have to use words to discuss both, this is, after all, a book.

In writing this in words, I am often forced to create circular references: Using words to discuss information for which no words exist or providing some context for words which are particularly inadequate or in need of special clarification.

I will attempt to identify these in this work as we go by selecting printing emphasis, the use of italics, bold print, punctuation, and even color.

In the pages which follow I will use these techniques as conventions:

Commonly used words or phrases which are meant to convey information but are in need of defining or lack contextual understanding will be italicized .

Commonly used words or phrases which are meant to convey information but whose accuracy is questionable will be set in “quotation marks”.

Words or phrases which are meant to convey information which carry extra significance or need to be emphasized will be in bold print.

Words or phrases which are meant to convey information which requires special discussion will appear in various colors as required.

 

Using language (words) to discuss many of the ideas in this book is like painting a portrait with a hammer. The former sentence is a good example of the problem. We rely on words to express our beliefs and communicate ideas but “think” in terms of metaphor

But unless you are an artist of some sort, the language of metaphor is foreign. It is capable of expressing to some degree otherwise indescribable ideas such as [enter “noun” here for that which can not be described in words]. If I resort to metaphor, we might at lease glimpse the fleeting shadow of these topics and ideas. Unfortunately, I have no characters on my keyboard for this.

This is all a very Zen / Quantum outlook: One can only hope to gain enlightenment by non intuitive reasoning. Direct observation is counter productive. Less is more. By peeling potatoes we glimpse all that has ever been or could ever be or could never be or anything else or noting at all.

Can it be said that feelings are synonymous with emotions? Not really. Feelings can be physical reports of phenomena as well. Or maybe suffering? I use the word suffering here in the Buddhist sense. Buddhism has much to say about the relationship between enlightenment and suffering. But suffering has so many other meanings as well. Words are like that. They can do a fair job at describing what one believes. But feelings come from a different place. They are the notes, sung in our own personal voice, of the symphony of life which is The Prime Commandment. Without resorting to metaphor, any hope of conveying meaning about feelings is futile. It is more than a little coincidental that this is much like Zen.

No surprise here. That’s why poets and song writers and for that matter anyone who deals in the arts has a huge head start over science in understanding The Prime Commandment. Words such as love or compassion are demonstrated metaphorically rather than debating their definitions. Qualia can be agreed upon without defining it. It’s not rocket science (terrible pun) that positive and negative feelings can coexist without cancelling one another out.

And while the purveyors of western science may be loathe to admit it, belief is the best tool we have to recognize them. It has long been my belief that while science is a superb tool for answering questions, proposing the right questions is more often what is critical.

So I’m going to ask you to “listen” in an unorthodox way. I want to take you back before we had words when we had only feelings. Today we still have the ability to  understand that language. Indeed it’s always with us powerfully dictating, influencing  our behavior usually without  our conscious awareness. We struggle to believe that’s the case because we don’t recognize the metaphoric nature of The Prime Commandment’s lyrics. We know what we feel we just don’t recognize it as information.

It’s written in the chemical soup that it’s coursing through us every minute of our lives, directed by the “hand” that’s responsible for the prime commandment. What it tells us is not going to be expressed in words nor can it be but this does not in any way invalidate it. Indeed the message is more pure and authentic than any possible belief we may have subsequently formed. In my view it is likely more accurate as well but that’s my belief, your mileage may vary.

 

Chapter Two:

The Prime Commandment

 

We come into being with a single mission: We are here to run in a relay race. We  come into existence already on the starting line with the baton firmly in hand. Or more to the point, the baton is firmly held within us. It was handed to us from our parents. And they got it from their parents. From as far back as we can tell, it’s been carried in the same way. The baton is our DNA. And our sole purpose, our mission, is to propagate, to make a new copy of this DNA encoded message that is responsible for our existence, for the next runner in line, our progeny, to carry forward. And they will hand it in turn to theirs. And on and on following the arrow of time from the unmeasured distance backward over our shoulder to the equally clouded mystery ahead. Every animal, every plant, every insect, every bacteria, all life is running, racing in exquisite synchrony, each one singing their stanza in their own unique voice, combining in a colossal symphony of harmonized DNA voices. But why? What is this cosmic music? In who’s hand was it composed? Set into motion? For whom was its DNA encoded message in time intended? What does it say? What does it mean?

 

The “meaning” of the message is beyond our ability to comprehend. But we are left to conclude life is not random. Every behavior in what we call a life form is doing no more or less than following their instructions to pass some colossal message forward. And we hear the music, sing our part. It’s the only thing we can know. And believe. 

 

 

Chapter Three:

I Submit the Humble Fruit Fly

Belief is a word which makes the science crowd nervous. They like their math. Stuff which can not be explained by virtue of a hypothesis, experiment, conclusion methodology is unceremoniously drummed out of the running for legitimacy. It’s always made me wonder how one can “believe” that there is nothing which can not be proven scientifically, which to me is the same as saying there is nothing which can not be known or even understood (by the oh so arrogant mind of homo sapiens).

 

I submit, the humble Drosophila melanogaster.

 

This fine fellow is a favorite subject because they love to pass their DNA forward in time at an alarming rate (relative to our more glacial chronological pace). That’s nice. But what I’m more interested in is to imagine what it might be like to be a fruit fly. How would it be to have the consciousness of a fruit fly? Is he conscious? Aware of his existence? What does he aspire to be? To do? What does he believe? What does he know? From our perspective, not much. Indeed what can he do? He can certainly reproduce, pass his DNA forward in time. But he does what he does because it’s what he is programmed to do. Well, programmed is a bit harsh. But he seems to be following some sort of instructions, not simply behaving randomly. Drosophila melanogaster would never have propagated through eons without some sort of directions on what to do and how to do it.

But just for now let’s do a quick biographical sketch of a single Drosophila melanogaster. First we need to decide how to start our fruit fly’s biography. I’m not being political here but where does a fruit fly start? Which came first, the Drosophila melanogaster or the egg? If one argues that (he) started life as an egg, one must also consider this egg comes preloaded with directions (I’ll keep away from calling it “programming”) on reproduction. And these directions apparently came before the egg. Why should this be? For what possible purpose? We will have more to say about all this later. For now, the story of our tiny friend starts in an egg on a drop of sap from a banana tree in Honduras (nothing against Honduras, just an example).An enterprising farmer cuts the bunch of bananas along with the stem where the sap and our friend reside and rushes them to the market where they are sold and bought and loaded on a freighter bound for the USA, 1500 miles away. The boat docks in Texas and the fruit is loaded on trucks and continues north another thousand miles where it finally reaches its destination: Chicago, where an ice cream vendor has ordered a case of bananas for banana splits. It’s October. And the Cubs have made it to the World Series of Baseball, a miracle in itself one might say (nothing against the Cubs, just another example).What happened along the way is noteworthy because we have an analog to compare. Our small friend has undergone a change which was directed by his DNA to occur when his egg encountered some rather specific conditions of time and temperature. This is in many ways like what a spacecraft in stasis might be programmed to do upon approaching a planet or other destination. Does the spacecraft “know” it has been directed to “wake up”? Or why? So now, directed by its DNA, and by virtue of time passing and environmental change, our egg has hatched and our fruit fly has emerged and gone through several additional stages of development and has grown to be a mature, completely functional Drosophila melanogaster complete with his fresh new copy of the DNA message to pass on to the next generation of fruit flies.

Does he believe he has been directed to “develop”?

Or why?

Is he aware of The World Series?

Or the Cub’s odds of even being there?

Or that you could be reading about his life story?

Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. And Nope.

What is my point?

He’s just following the chemical instructions in The Prime Commandment. He knows his lyrics just like we know ours.

So how would a curious Drosophila Melanogaster go about imagining us? I doubt he is capable of curiosity or has tools to imagine (no offense to Fruit Flies intended).

If we are both on the same arch, why would the same concept not apply to us? 

And here is where language fails us. What word do I use to describe that which I can not even imagine?

I believe awareness is a continuum of some sort.

And our degree of awareness may not be at the top of the cosmic spreadsheet.

Or even close.

Cosmically indistinguishable from the fruit fly.

A rose is a rose is a fruit fly.

And it’s also worth noting that as God like as we might metaphorically appear to a fruit fly, we have no clue how to create one and direct it to do what they have been directed to do for millions of years here on our little blue green planet. Maybe God isn’t so smart after all. Or maybe we aren’t the smartest God in the neighborhood.

Regardless of the arrogance of science I believe there are “concepts” outside our ability to comprehend, or even imagine, but perhaps not beyond our ability to believe.

“Time” may be a little easier to understand as we shall see but a healthy ability to believe will be required there too.

Chapter Four:

Living In Between

 

Between the future and the past lies a place where we “spend” our lives. It’s something we call now. The present. But it’s also elusive. As soon as we think about it, it is gone. Scurrying into the past.

It’s like the plane we studied in geometry years ago in high school. A page but without any thickness. We can’t seem to stay in the present. Live in the now. Or if we do, we seem unable to realize it.

It’s like the old Zen koan:

Zen Master: What is the repository of the past?

Monk: It is our memory.

Zen Master: Very good. Now what is the repository of the future?

Monk: It is our imagination.

Zen Master: Again correct. And what is the repository of your memory and imagination?

Monk: They are in my mind.

Zen Master: Yes.

Monk: So Master, where is the present?

Zen Master: Peel the potatoes.

And as the Zen Master implies, all that seems to be happening may be only taking place between our ears.

Now this sounds suspiciously like all the quantum stuff that has gotten so much press lately. The observer has an effect upon the nature of things.

“Albert Einstein is reported to have asked his fellow physicist and friend Niels Bohr, one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics, whether he realistically believed that ‘the moon does not exist if nobody is looking at it.’ To this Bohr replied that however hard he (Einstein) may try, he would not be able to prove that it does, thus giving the entire riddle the status of a kind of an infallible conjecture—one that cannot be either proved or disproved.”

-Wikipedia

Is there is no time at all without us observing it by virtue of our peculiar brain? Is all that seems to be, like a rolling movie projected on the inside of our eyelids?

What if we were only able to detect change in the universe? If there were nothing in the universe which was perfectly still, without change, wouldn’t everything in the past and in the future look much as we commonly describe them? As we look back we would see the changes that have taken place in our history (memory). As we look forward we would see the changes we expect to happen (imagination). But in between lies the infinitely “thin” plane of now. A place where everything is still, where there is no change because now has no “thickness”, no time passes.  It’s our inability to sense stillness that makes the present essentially inaccessible?

Sensing the stillness?

“Living in the moment”?

“Living in between”?

Now this all sounds suspiciously like meditation.

Or prayer?

It’s reasonable. What we think of as “time” does seem to have everything to do with change. If there were no change in anything from “now on” it would appear that time has stopped. Everything would be “frozen in time”. It would be the “end of time”. The cosmology crowd seems to agree with this too. Everything as we seem to “know” it, is crumbling. Falling apart. They call it entropy where everything is coming unglued and will eventually result in complete stillness.

But if all we are aware of is change, then what other “behaviors” might there be of which we are unaware? Unable to detect? Or conceive? Is the Fruit Fly aware of the World Series? Can he conceive of it?

What purpose could such an arrangement serve in the context of The Prime Commandment?

This is starting to sound more like a detective novel than an autobiographical manifesto on everything.

 

Chapter Five:

Batonology

 

Mister and Misses  O’Brien
Let me come into their bedroom
To show them a blue jay with a broken wing
That died promptly next morning.

That’s a poem written about 40 years ago about an event that happened when I was about 10 years old.

And now presumably something has been passed to whomever it is that finds themselves reading these words. I find this whole idea fascinating and ripe for further speculation useless though it maybe. This propagation of some unknown quantity through the poorly understood medium of time is the cornerstone of “The Prime Commandment” Because this topic seems related to epistemology I feel certain someone must have covered this ground before and that what I have to say is spurious and irrelevant. Lucky for you dear reader that’s never stopped me before.

As the self coined name implies the best metaphor for this commodity might be the Baton which is routinely passed forward in a relay race. It may also be useful to consider it analogous to a time capsule. It differs from that which is physically observable, only residing in the realm of our intangible awareness. And our best guess about our awareness is it resides in our brain in the form of countless neurons firing in synchronicity in a way we do not understand. Is it doing so with it some purpose or objective? If we consider how singular in purpose The Prime Commandment is, it’s difficult to believe there is no objective to this frenetic dance?

Chapter Six:

Junkies

 

Would you believe me if I told you that we are all junkies? And if we were not we would not be here to believe anything at all?

Believe it.

But first. 

It’s probably a good time to review and refocus the bifurcation concept.

We are sent from a place we can not imagine, simply to pass a message in time. We exist to live our lives, to sing our written notes, to add our tiny voice to the harmony, the chorus of life (The Prime Commandment), to pass the genetic instructions we have been passed as feelings in our bloodstream forward by procreation.

Like the fruit fly no awareness is required. His actions are also guided solely by the chemical instructions written in his DNA. What if anything a fruit fly is aware of is open to speculation. It has apparently not proven to be much of a problem for them.

But from our awareness emergent beliefs have developed like a murmuration of starlings dancing in the late summer dusk. We no longer sing the tune exactly as written. We add improvisation to the chorus. Is this by design? How smart is our God? Perhaps the message has gone off the rails by the corruption we have added from our awareness, our personal beliefs.

How smart is our god?

Return message to sender?

No such address? 

Does it matter?