Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Existence Revisited

Existence Revisited
But Existence Wasn’t Home

I think that it is remarkable that we live in the middle of an incredibly deep, insoluble puzzle. The puzzle I have in mind is the puzzle of existence. If we consider the universe we perceive around us, we don’t how it began and we don’t know how it will end. We don’t know why we’re here and we don’t know where “here” is.
I suppose it isn’t so remarkable when you think of it. In size, humans are somewhere between the universe and atoms, too small on the one hand, too big on the other. Being a poorly sized human, who am I to give meaning to existence?
None the less

“Existence” reared its ugly head in my investigation of numbers. I considered two worlds, the Real World where things that exist, like my hat, are, and the Ideal World, where things that don’t exist, like an ideal square, are.
Some symbols represent things in the Real World, things that exist. The symbol “3" is such a symbol.
Some symbols represent things in the Ideal World, things that don’t exist. The symbol √2 is such a symbol.
1/3 is an example of a symbol that represents both something real and something imaginary.
The first use of 1/3 is to be a written symbol for the real operation of separating my pile of rocks into *** piles, where each pile is equipotent with the others, and taking * of them.
By *** piles I mean that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the stars and the piles.
(I conjecture that “number” began when our species began to distinguish bigger piles of nuts from smaller piles of nuts. From this point on it was just a matter of refining the concept and developing grunts, hand signals and symbols that can be physically engraved on rocks, clay tablets and paper to express the forms of this concept.)
A “counting number” is a symbol that stands for a concept that originated in a brain, that concept being how to describe how many sheep were in the pasture.
”Counting number” arises from the desire of brains to communicate a commonly shared concept in the world around them. The concept that brains are trying to describe is about something, say, piles of nuts.
The second task of 1/3 is to be a written symbol that can be used in lieu of the symbol 0.333… to stand for an Ideal World concept. The symbol 0.333… stands for a concept that isn’t about anything. It doesn’t stand for a Real process, you can’t measure 0.333… inches.
So in the first use, 1/3 stands for a process that exists and in the second use it stands for a game piece that doesn’t exist.

But I’m throwing existence around as if I knew what it meant. What do I mean by “exists” and “doesn’t exist”?

I seem to be taking existence to be material existence. This is the “kicking Dr. Johnson’s rock” kind of existence.
There are things that I don’t think exist on Earth, or any place else, like dragons and unicorns but that is just my opinion. The things that people seem to truly believe in seem almost all-inclusive. But there are things that most people, indeed most living beings, believe exist; food, for example, and themselves.
As far as I can determine, the word “existence” is a property that people assign to nouns. As is the case with all words, they only have meaning with respect to people. People invented a word to express a commonly shared experience and this word was “existence”.
I remember reading a book by Alfred North Whitehead where he talked about “the unthinkable night” where all the stars were blazing away but there was no one to look at them. What did it mean for Orion to be there if there wasn’t anyone to observe it?
At the time Whitehead wrote the book he claimed to believe that the only life in the universe was on Earth and that eventually Earth wouldn’t be here. There would be no life in the universe. How would existence be defined in a universe that, perhaps, didn’t question existence because there was no non-existence?
What about the first seconds of the Big Bang? Surely there was no life in those first few seconds. In this primeval state there was no concept “existence”, because there was no “non-existence”. But who knows if there wasn’t any life at the being? As my mother would say, “Was you dar, Charlie?”
The description of The Big Bang that I read was a description of how it would appear to humans if humans had been there? But humans weren’t there. (You know, that’s too bad. It would have been cool being there from the beginning and seeing what went on. It would have been like being at Woodstock.)

Words are imperfect attempts to communicate concepts. A collection of words, no matter how cleverly arranged, is never equivalent to the concept in the brain. (Music and art are also attempts to communicate concepts between brains.)
The common experience of self-awareness is expressed by the words, “I exist.” We extend the concept to, “We exist.” and “That exists.”
Descartes was right in the sense that thinking implies self-awareness and if you weren’t self-aware, your existence would be moot.
While this idea is intriguing, it is too centered on life as we know it.

Suppose I base existence on observation. I will say that B observes A if B is altered in some way by A. In this case I will say that A exists for B.
This definition is pretty broad. It says that one electron observes another because the force on it has changed and so electrons exist for each other.
Some people feel that God has altered them, so God exists for these people. Since B observing A does not imply that A observes B, it is an open question as to whether God observes the person who observes God.

If an object is not observed by either itself or anything else, the question of the object’s existence is otiose.
Existence occurs in pairs, the observed and the observer, and an object may or may not observe itself. An object may be sui generis and exists only as a singularity.
An object A exists for B if and only if an object B observes A. (And B may be A.)

A exists for B because B observes A; B knows that A is there. But A may not know that B exists, A may not observe B.


If I were so moved I could formally define God using this definition of existence. God is the universal observer whose observation makes the universe “exist” for God. God by definition observes everything in the universe and God “observes” everything means that God is altered in some way by everything.
This wouldn’t necessarily imply that God exists because the definition doesn’t imply that God is observed.
If God is part of the universe then by definition God observes God and God is self-aware.
But it seems to me that to be self-ware you have to recognize that you are something as opposed to nothing. But if you are everything, where is “nothing”? There is no “nothing”. “Nothing” doesn’t exist. “Nothing” doesn’t alter anything and so isn’t observed. Everything is something. I’m not sure how self awareness would work in this case or even if it does.
But if God is not part of the universe, where is God? Where ever God is, is God observed? What does it mean to not be part of everything?
God only knows.

I’ve looked at “real” from both sides now
From yes and no but still somehow,
It’s just illusions I recall
I really don’t know “real” at all.

(a la Joni Mitchell)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, so what?
It doesn’t make any day to day difference to me whether √2 represents something that exists or not, although I might remark in passing that I don’t think that the object represented by √2 is observed by anything and hence doesn’t exist. The existence I observe is the amount of propane in the tank, the temperature inside my cabin, and the dent in my truck.

What about God? Does God’s existence make a difference in my life if God exists?
First off, I understand that for reasons known only to God, God may require faith. It is less clear to me why God would require faith for physics. I don’t see anything contradictory to God in a straight forward physics that people have minds capable of understanding.
What’s wrong with a person being able to say, “Well, that wraps up the way the physical world works. I’m glad we’ve finally got that done and we can get to something important.”
I don’t think that will ever happen. I suppose there are scientists who think that it will but they are wrong. I don’t think that it is possible to have a universe that can be understood by a necessarily finite “brain” in it. I conjecture this as a theorem.

If I think God makes a difference in my life, that God alters me, then I am observing God and God exists for me. If I think that I’m not altered by God, then I’m not observing God and God doesn’t exist for me.
So I have come to the end of existence, lost in a Sargasso Sea of ifs and contradictions and no conclusions in sight. This is the way I always end my search for existence, open ended. I am awash with questions for which I find no answers, answers for which I find no questions. I begin a search for “meaning” thinking that this time I’ll find it, but all I find is a torrent of mysteries, some of which I haven’t thought of yet.
So I stop at the bottom of the hill and take a rest before I start pushing the boulder up again.
Pushing this boulder up a hill isn’t so bad; there are much heavier boulders that I could be dealing with. It’s kind of fun actually. I look for new approaches to and ways up the hill. Sometimes find level areas where the boulder will sit without rolling back down the hill and I can stop and look at the view. And the weather’s usually pretty nice. And pushing the boulder up the hill keeps me off the streets and out of the pool halls.
Surely I must exist because I wrote this, unless I’m just imagining it. Nah.

No comments:

Post a Comment