Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

Humanity has long been obsessed with establishing man's significance in the universe.

In spite of a complete absence of supporting evidence, man has at times managed to convinced himself that the continued functioning of cosmic forces far beyond his understanding let alone control, were directly dependent on his will and participation. At various times man has wanted to believe that the weather, the rising of the sun in the morning, and the regular cycle of seasons, were all dependent on the intervention of humans endowed with special powers and/or knowledge.

The common thread running through all these self-delusions has been the desire for significance beyond the all too obvious limitations of man's brief temporal existence. It can be argued that the significance that man so desires is itself a phantasm that exists only within his own imagination, and that the universe itself is incapable of persistent significance.

One popular theory is that we live in an ever expanding universe that started with the "big bang", and which will continue to expand until it runs out of energy. Within this scenario, entropy will ultimately result in the heat-death of the universe, where no energy differentials remain to drive change. Within the human conception of the universe, time is the chronology of change. With no further potential for entropy to give it direction and purpose, time itself would arguably grind to a halt in the heat-dead universe.

Can there be any persistent significance in a universe doomed to ultimate heat-death and static time?

An oscillating universe would provide a solution to the conundrum of the source of the "big bang". An oscillating universe collapsing back into a singularity would also provide the mechanism for reversing the accumulated entropy of the expansion phase, since by definition all matter and energy in our universe would be recombined in the resulting disassociated plasma.

One intriguing aspect of this oscillation is that within the definition of time as a function of entropy, the reversal/elimination of the accumulated effects of entropy would also eliminate the accumulation of time - time would reset back to zero with each oscillation. This would explain the difficulties of detecting the state of our universe before the "big bang" since from the "inside" there wouldn't be a "before" in the time active/effective within our universe. There may be a "time" existing outside of our universe that would allow an observer to see "before" the big bang, but that observer would first have to figure out how to get outside of the only universe known to exist.

Can there be any persistent significance in a universe where all trace of previous existence will be destroyed in the next singularity?

Hydrogen condensed out of the plasma of the "big bang". However, those elements that combine with hydrogen to make the organic chemistry we call life possible, must all have been the products of unimaginable violence. The nuclear fusion in stars like our sun can only "burn" hydrogen up the periodic table to iron. All heavier matter had to be created within the final explosion of a much larger star - a nova or super nova.

What matter is scattered through the largely empty space of the universe is still largely hydrogen, with small amounts of other elements mixed in to make things interesting. Since we are mostly water, and water is mostly hydrogen, much of the star-stuff of which our corporeal substance is composed might have lingered relatively peacefully until becoming involved in our life-force. This is statistically unlikely, but at least remotely possible.

The process that created the star-stuff of which we are composed is in essence the same process that drives the organic life-force that animates the star-stuff in our bodies - entropy. In classical thermodynamics, entropy is energy lost out of the cycle/system - leakage if you will. In steam engine technology, entropy was lost efficiency due to the limitations of insulation, thermal conductivity of metal parts, etc. The objective was to limit entropy as much as possible since it was energy from which no useful work could be extracted inside the steam cycle.

Entropy is also described as the dissipation of energy since it is the reason why even a "closed loop" system will eventually run down due to entropy losses out of the closed loop. (ie: no system can be a truly closed loop.) It's the primary reason why perpetual motion machines are physically impossible - there isn't any known way to eliminate all entropy. It's this lost energy that makes it impossible to reverse any action in which energy is involved. The output never exactly equals the input, resulting in an energy deficit that ensures that any process involving energy only works in one direction.

Where entropy becomes the driving force behind life is the natural disposition toward complexity that results from the entropy of molecular change from simple to complex structures.

Since time is an abstract measurement of change, it then follows that entropy is the factor that makes time at least appear unidirectional - time can't be reversed because the energy state after a change doesn't equal the state before the change since some energy will have been lost to entropy.

Nuclear fusion combines simpler elements into more complex elements with a lower energy density, dissipating the extracted energy as star light. Entropy creates life through the formation of complex molecules and organic structures with a lower energy density, dissipating the extracted energy as the animating life force suffusing those organic structures. Life is essentially the same process as the nuclear fusion of a star, only operating at the molecular level and with orders of magnitude lower energy flows.

Consider that man, composed of the products of the universe's most violent events, born in pain and trauma, evolving within a natural order where bloody fangs and claws are the norm, seeks peace and tranquility. Man is either an effort by the universe to rise above the fundamental violence of its basic processes - to become more than the sum of its parts - or a black comedy of cosmic proportions. Perhaps the supreme irony is that the same consciousness that can imagine this conundrum, is also capable of realizing that it can never possess sufficient understanding of the universe to figure out the ultimate answer.

Then again, there is no indication that the ultimate question itself exists outside of human consciousness, or that any other component of the universe cares whether there is an ultimate answer or not.

There is a common human desire for a persistence of existence. We want to believe that the temporary assemblage of recycled star-stuff that provides our corporeal existence, which is in turn energized by the thermodynamics of entropy to create our individual temporary lives and resulting consciousness, has some meaningful significance in the universe. Since we each by definition must view the world from the inside looking out, we become the heroes of our own movies. Ultimately each individual must at some level be the most significant entity in his own world-view since without that entity, his world-view couldn't exist. It then becomes a natural predisposition to want to extend our own self-importance to the world around us.

The idea that the puny efforts of man can rival the power of the universe would be laughable if we were able to escape the ego driven traps of our own perspective long enough to appreciate the absurdities of our delusions. We strut about in self-important splendor, telling ourselves that since we are the center of our own thoughts and perceptions of the universe, we must also be the cause of the changes we see around us.

Man has long suffered from his ego driven need to see himself as the source and purpose of the world around him. In the primitive world we sought power and confirmation of our importance through mysticism and misinterpreting coincidences. Our desire to believe that at least some among us could be capable of controlling the important aspects of our world - from outbreaks of disease, to the weather, to even ensuring that the sun would rise the next morning - drove our ancestors to weave incredibly contorted belief systems, spinning tortured webs of justifications and conjectures around coincidences and misinterpretations of events.

The glimmerings of enlightenment that accompanied the industrial revolution and the fragile ascendancy of science dispelled some of the old beliefs, but not our human-centric perspective. The products of our industry now dominate the superficial aspects of our lives, and as an extension of our self- important egos we seek even the most tenuous evidence that our activities might be similarly affecting our planet.

The one area where we are as powerful as we want to believe we are is in the way we interpret our perceptions of the world around us.

The ultimate expression of our desire for significance is the desire to believe that some aspect of the self persists after and beyond the undeniable reality of death. The myth of the soul provides the emotionally attractive illusion of an immortal aspect of the self that can transcend and survive the limitations of our mortal physical bodies. The concept of a persistent soul that is separate from our all too temporary bodies, is necessary to support the illusion of a cosmic significance that transcends the emotionally uncomfortable reality of the manifest insignificance of our physical existence.

Another factor that has encouraged the myth of the soul is the ethereal nature of thought. One of the favorite topics of philosophers is the relationship between the brain and thought. The physical realities of the brain can be identified (studied, monitored, measured, sliced, diced) easily enough, but no one has actually found a "thought" anywhere in the physical brain. And yet, it can be persuasively argued to anyone who has actually experienced "thinking", that thoughts do in fact exist. Unfortunately, the vast majority of self-proclaimed human experts have never experienced "thinking" themselves, and have flooded the information channels with huge volumes of absurd speculations and misinformation. With willful and flagrant disregard for political correctness, I define thought as the ethereal essence created out of the interactions of countless individual neurons in the physical brain.

The fact that thought transcends the tangible dimensions of our physical existence appears on one level to suggest that other aspects of life might also exist outside of physical existence. However, a thought is a transient phenomenon - it exists only as long as its physical source continues to think it. It can be recorded on physical media in ways that encourage other individuals to generate similar thoughts, but while the essence of the thought may "live on" after its original thinker is gone, subsequent imitations of the original thought are not the original. They will be different in subtle or even profound ways, inevitably influenced, distorted, and/or interpreted by the limitations of symbolic communication, and the self-centered world-view of each individual thinker.

While I may emotionally want to believe that the thoughts I've attempted to express in this essay possess an immortal essence, intellectually I know that they are only the most ephemeral of phenomena. The thoughts that have been created in my brain while thinking about this question will cease to exist as soon as I stop thinking them. Even I will be incapable of rethinking exactly the same thoughts in the future. I may be able to recreate much of the essence of what I had originally been thinking while writing the above paragraphs, but what I think now while reading my previous prose will be influenced by the changes in my brain and thought processes that have occurred due to my continued accumulation of experiences in the physical world. My brain is no longer exactly the same brain that generated those original thoughts, and so is no longer capable of thinking exactly the same thoughts. I may be able to recreate nearly identical thoughts, but they won't be exactly the same thoughts.

In the same way, while I may want to believe that the essence of the "self" that is by definition so important to my own existence and world-view possesses an immortal essence, intellectually I know that my "self" can only exist as long as the physical manifestations of my existence exist to continually create the ephemeral existence of that self.

Our conscious minds only receive a heavily filtered amount of the total information available in "reality". Our reptilian and mammalian brain layers evolved in large measure in response to the nonverbal needs of survival in the natural world. As such it seems entirely reasonable to me that they are sensitive and aware of aspects of the world around us that are outside of their ability to directly communicate to the abstract/symbolic oriented "intelligent" brain layer in which our conscious awareness is generated.

I submit that much of what is attributed to intuition, extra sensory perception, spiritual enlightenment, messages from aliens, etc., is actually the results of our lower brain layers trying to send information to our conscious "thinking" layer. Our minds seek to interpret this information - especially when it proves useful - within the cultural rejection of the reality that the human species is largely composed of the accumulated residue of earlier more primitive forms.

Since we culturally/intellectually refuse to accept that our brains contain layers that lack the more advanced means of abstract reasoning and symbolic communication by which we define our difference from the rest of the animals, we attempt to attribute this information to less culturally unacceptable sources. Better to imagine gods, aliens, or metaphysical extensions of the human mind than to admit that we harbor within the same brain that we believe sets us apart from the "lower" animals, the evidence that we were once "lower" animals ourselves - and in many ways still are.

We are star-stuff obsessively seeking cosmic significance outside of ourselves while vainly trying to deny who we really are inside.