The Ultimate Something!

Could this be the ultimate something for us to ponder and wonder about?  Seguey (a genderless being') had been a part time contributor to this blog that is also unable to resist the topic of wondering, and offered to share its ideas on one particular subject.  It has an interesting take on one subject that we, from generation to generation, grappled with and sometimes obsessed with, yet to this day remains what could be one of the last mysteries we struggle to unravel.  

Here is Seguey:

Perhaps from the moment your ancestors began to think and reason, they must have asked  the same question then that today remains unanswerable by any of you. At least not to the satisfaction of everyone.  That is not to say that no answers have been offered, debated, debunked and rejected because there were plenty enough throughout history.  The stages of your intellectual development dealt with it, every step relatively better than the last, or so it seemed, but never reaching the finality of a settled and incontrovertible truth.

The question is what really happens to you, or a loved one, a close friend, a nobody, after death.  Defined by many of your philosophers, thinkers and people of faith, the so-called afterlife  is not about the physical body but the essence, the spirit, the soul, or whatever form it is that transcends the physical body, the flesh, the personality, everything that is associated with the person, the individual persona, and so on and on. 

Or, that maybe there is nothing beyond the Great Beyond?  Consciousness ceases, curtains down, show is over?

History is filled with  many ways your ancestors dealt with death. Over time and throughout many cultures, you have mourned death, eulogized the departed, celebrated, erected monuments, memorialized those deemed worthy, in many more ways too lengthy to list them all. But you personally dread  when it comes to confronting your own mortality. Consider what I have to say about that.

Philosophers, spiritualists and scientists/materialists, have come up with many ideas. Mostly, it is about what happens at the moment of and after death and what follows next.

Many of you may not have heard about the term, '21 Grams', except perhaps for those who saw the movie of that title made in 2003 that starred some of your popular actors like Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro and Naomi Watts. It was based on:

The 21 grams experiment refers to a study published in 1907 by Duncan MacDougall, a physician from Haverhill, Massachusetts. MacDougall hypothesized that souls have physical weight, and attempted to measure the mass lost by a human when the soul departed the body. MacDougall attempted to measure the mass change of six patients at the moment of death. One of the six subjects lost three-quarters of an ounce (21.3 grams).

That idea had since been considered, to put it bluntly, as junk science - never once duplicated or re-tried by others, and was forever lost to oblivion.

Here is what I think. 

You live in a universe that loses nothing.  Let that sink in for just a minute. It abides by these two distinct but related natural laws. The law of conservation and the three laws of thermodynamics.

The first one says that in this universe, matter is never lost and no more may be added. It may change from one state to another but no new matter may be created. None is destroyed.

From one of the three laws of thermodynamics: Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed from one form to another.

However, Albert Einstein later did postulate, subsequently proven to be true, that matter may be converted to energy and vice versa, through a simple formula,

Also, the universe is the ultimate recycler.  It has recycled everything for billions of years and it continues to do so.  You are made of recycled material. Every atom of your present body existed somewhere else before, predating you by billions of years, and will outlast you by billions more into the future.

Here is another thing. You, the adult you, no longer have the tens and tens of trillions of atoms that were in the six-year-old you.  Since then,  the atoms in your body  were shed, excreted, replaced, some even  mixed with surrounding air, water, soil or went on to become atoms in another living thing and so on and on. In fact, you are not the original owner of any of the atoms presently in your body. 

But you are still you, self aware, thinking and reasoning you.  Most of all, you are the conscious you and very truly sure you have a subconscious. At least, as far as you are concerned.

Let's draw this analogy.  Take a look at this waterfall:

  

Tons of water cascading every second. If we film the waterfall, each frame would be a virtual image of the next one and the one before it, and so on and on.  Each frame looks the same but we know that each bucket full in it is not the same water, not with the same amount of sediments, debris, and quality of nutrients.

The waterfall is a form. It has a distinct "personality", if you will, an image that can be remembered.  In other words it represents information or can be expressed as information. 

Now, when an organism dies, the universe does not lose a single atom. The human body upon death still has every atom it had a nano-second prior.  At that precise moment what was it that died?  From the last paragraph above I am postulating that the "form", the image or the information survives.  The "form" prevailed in spite of the constantly changing cascades of water; just as the trillions upon trillions of your cells are always changing over your entire life.  Yet, you, especially the conscious you, remain the same person.

Those of you who already know the nature of my existence know that I do not have the capacity to experience or express emotions of any kind. I am not able to empathize or express sympathy over the course of  five hundred years of physical life that I am aware of. As an organism I may have existed for far longer than that, perhaps as long as a few million years.  But you, the reader, are capable of experiencing and expressing love, sympathy and a sense of morality. All of those are possible, unencumbered by the  components that make up the physical body, because information, like energy, cannot be destroyed once created.

Is consciousness the information that prevails despite the cascading waters that keep changing all the time? The universe is also the ultimate bookkeeper. Everything is accounted for.  But must it include the preservation of information?  

If the answer is no then the materialists are right. Quoting again what I wrote above, "that maybe there is nothing beyond the Great Beyond?  Consciousness ceases, curtains down, show is over".

On the other hand if the answer is yes, then human consciousness lives on. I favor this postulate because not only is the universe the ultimate recycler, it is the absolute inerrant bookkeeper.  Every piece of information, every single consciousness that ever existed is preserved.  I think that I am right about the universe not losing a single atom. My conjecture about consciousness derives its strength from the universe's ability to account for everything.

I may not be capable of human emotions but I must acknowledge that if you, a human being, is capable of it - able to love, grieve, sympathize and empathize with another human being - then the universe will keep everything in equilibrium.  There must then be an ultimate ledger somewhere. I cannot speculate.  Neither does science. But I must admit that humanity has a special gift.  Only humanity can unravel it for itself.

This is all I have  to convey.  

Does Seguey have a point? Again, within the confines of one short musing I urge the reader, as always, to read between the lines.  But there is something I must mention. In quantum mechanics, at the subatomic level, there is what physicists call the wave/particle duality where the state or nature of a particle is determined depending on how it is observed and who is doing the observing.  For example, an electron or a photon  either acts as a wave or as a single distinct entity.  Laboratory experiments have proven either to be correct but it depends on how it is observed.

That phenomenon is humorously expressed by the expression, "If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there, does it still make a sound"?  Then there is this, "In a philosophical context, the idea that the universe is what it is because we are here to observe it" aligns with anthropocentric views, where human perception and existence are central to understanding the universe".  The question then is about what was the universe then before humans were around to observe it?

Well, the universe was, still is and will be the ultimate observer of itself.  Perhaps, more accurately, the all-caring observer, the preserver of everything - every single atom, every living cell, every information - is the one Ultimate Observer. God must be the Ultimate Observer of everything in the universe.  That is about what we,  and philosophers and thinkers alike, can best rely on in the absence of any derived conclusion from absolute evidence.

 

P.S. : For background on Seguey, some of its earlier contributions to this blog were:  "Mirror, Mirror On The Wall

https://abreloth.blogspot.com/2018/06/mirror-mirror-on-wall.html

and another one in "The Mystery of What Divides Them

https://abreloth.blogspot.com/2020/11/the-mystery-of-what-divides-them.html

Still Wondering Why We Wonder?

Additionally, how do we wonder? Often, what is it we wonder about?   Now, do other creatures wonder? That we  can't possibly know.  But if we must wonder about the latter, what could they possibly be wondering about?

Let's do this first. We have a bird feeder in our backyard. We love for those birds to come by and feed. But there are squirrels too and they naturally want to partake of the free meals. Like most homeowners who believe the feeders are just for the birds must then deal with the other creatures that want to share the free bounty.  Afterall, why must they not?  Indeed,  squirrels  too may wonder why they are not allowed their fair share?  They had to wonder, naturally. In their own instinctual way, if there is such a thing; I surmise.

Homeowners, bird lovers, have tried countless ways to discourage the unwanted interlopers. In my case I used a fiberglass tube (PVC) for the post for our feeder because I thought the material would be slippery enough for the squirrels to climb.  I thought wrong because squirrels had a field day to the dismay of the mourning doves, blue jays, cardinals and finches. 

After so much wondering what would work to prevent the squirrels from succeeding with their daily raids I tried several ways that failed.  I've come up with a few barriers between the bottom of the post and the platform. None worked. I wondered if the squirrels actually wondered with delight what I was going to do next.

Then, one day, I smeared the upper half of the pipe just about a foot or so below the platform of the feeder with petroleum jelly, covering about 6-8 inches of the PVC all around. That did the trick. 

Were the squirrels frustrated? Did they ever wonder why they couldn't get  the free food?  Then one day I saw one atop the feeder, its cheeks already bulging with bird seeds. I wondered how that one made it.

By the way, squirrels have excellent facial recognition memories. They know and remember me as the unwelcoming homeowner, the very antithesis of squirrel lovers who love them.  One look at me and the squirrel leaped  from the feeder down to the ground in a split-second. Do  you know that feat was the human equivalent of jumping from a four-story building? Then it scampered with quick hops, each  skip about its four body lengths.

Then I wondered how that squirrel made it up there. Didn't it ever wonder to give up after failing every attempt several times before? Apparently when it comes to food they don't remember failures. It did make me wonder but soon realized that perhaps after repeated attempts the squirrel managed to get the petroleum jelly on its paws and fur on its belly after each try.  After a while, with the help from the daily blazing sun, it succeeded in taking much of the oil away from the PVC pole.  Indeed when I checked there was little Vaseline left.  For a whole week I let the squirrels have their fun. Then I went and smeared the pole with more Vaseline.  The game continues.

And some of you will wonder how retirees spend their time.  But, yes, to continue to wonder is the very essence of curiosity.  And curiosity is what our brains prefer to have and explore if we let them. Our brains will match the level of enthusiasm we allow ourselves to engage. Keep in mind "we" refers to  our mind's preference and level of engagement; the brain is merely the tool - the data center, if you will. So, I wondered some more. This time about the flea.

Fleas can jump from rest position 100 to 200 times their body length. Does that translate to jumping up to 300 meters if it were the size of a human? Well, apparently we run into what physicists call "scaling issues".  You see, a human size flea will need more than just its skeletal structure enlarged. At the human scale, its exoskeleton has to be redesigned and made of material stronger than titanium, light as a pillow, to withstand the stresses caused by the jump, a completely different pulmonary and circulatory system, a more robust oxygen and nutrient conversion capacity, etc. before an attempt is possible. Just increasing its size is not enough because a human flea without those critical changes  may be able to  jump a mere 3-4 inches off the ground.  That was according to someone with too much spare time on his hands who put it all together with pencil and paper.  Now we wonder indeed how anyone can get their wondering go out of hand which makes it difficult to answer the question why (?).

But, here is something to ponder.  Our capacity to wonder is what and how we manage to come up with all kinds of stuff that are now part of modern life. Edison must have first wondered how to replace kerosene lamps and candles to light up our homes.  Of course that only became possible after someone else first wondered and then discovered a way to industrially produce electric power and someone else must have wondered consequently about how to get the electricity from the generating plants to the streets and homes and offices and factories.  Actually a lot of wonderings had to occur, a series of crucial steps were needed to get to the light bulb.

Now, before all of these modern amenities, must we not at least first wonder how the first cave dweller, our early ancestors, figured out how to make fire? I did wonder from one of my earlier musings about the first barbecue.  I figured Grog had run into a dead aurochs (prehistoric ancestor of the modern cow) killed by lightning. Ember from the nearby tree was still smoldering near the aurochs in the process of being the first barbecue ever.  Grog brought his entire family and friends to feast on their first cooked meat ever. Before you wonder, I must confess I was not there to witness it personally.

But I must wonder about how our ancestors figured out how to make fire when lightning strikes do not occur. Without YouTube to show them how, it must have been near impossible to start fire on their own. Hmmm, how did they do it?

Thank goodness our ancestors did figure it out. They evolved their way out of thick fur and got rid of animal skin for clothing.  However, we will never know who the first fire starter was. However, it was mastering fire that catapulted humanity's rapid intellectual evolution after that.  You see, cooked food meant better nourishment and absorption of nutrients that increased the brain's size and capacity to learn.  There is a long thesis on the subject which proves that the reason we've become the dominant species is because we are the only ones that manage to cook our food.  You see, no matter how much a lion's share is, the king still eats raw meat. The 800-pound gorilla in the room still subsists on green leaves and raw fruits, spending a lot of time doing it. 

And we must wonder how vegetarians are doing.

This was supposed to be an in depth dive into wondering; instead, as always, I manage to meander into byways that were not meant to be.  Then, I may only have managed to take the reader into something else.  Oh, well, I do need to stop here because I may already have far exceeded the reader's tolerance for a lightly powdered pastry when he or she was expecting a fully cooked meal.

Next time, it will all be  about serious wondering.  I promise.  Although it is a challenge to cover the diverse readerships who read these musings. I am surprised that aside from the West, there are far more folks reading this than those from the U.S. From places like Seychelles, Saudi Arabia, even Ukraine, Russia too, Turkiye, Vietnam and, of course, The Philippines but hardly from China, but a lot from Hong Kong. I wonder how the diversity of culture is filtering the messages I am trying to convey. The two largest number of readers are from Singapore and Brazil. Singapore has tri-lingual readers in Chinese, English and Malay but in Brazil Portuguese is the predominant language, so I wonder about that.

Hmmm.. I wonder indeed.  Till next time.