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Big Question #1: How did the universe begin?

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” — attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Subquestions and everyday relevance

  • Where does it all come from? Does the World seem very old?How does Your World begin?
  • Do things in your life begin all the time? Popping out from nowhere?
  • Do things in your life, in the World , as you see it, just circle round and round?
  • The scientists think the new things are “emergent”. Are they really?

Since the beginning of life, we are constructed, the genes and the beliefs, to organize the things around the birth and death, beginning and the end, the days, the seasons, the projects and the cosmos. Every time you breathe deeply, every time you reflect,  automatically you position yourself, according to your gut feeling, somewhere along these beginnings and ends.

In our version of the set of Big Questions, four of them deal with the beginning, the change, and the trend. The three of them explore the beginning of the Universe (#1), the fate of the mankind (#13) and the business of dying (#11) and they are old and primeval as the mankind itself. We always bury and mourn the dead, gaze the stars and worry about the future.  Heraclitus of Ephesus  said famously: “no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man”. After he thought for a while he added: “there is nothing permanent except change”. The fourth one is (surprise!) about the role of evolution.

Jacob Bronowski about the beginnings (a paraphrase) :” The science is a systematic attempt to establish the closed system, one after another. The scientific discovery opens the system again.

Every act of imagination (new connections, new symbolism, new language, new formulae) is the discovery of likeness between two things which were thought unlike- like Newton’s apple and the Moon.”

How to work on the answer to the Question #1

When confronted with the task of answering these Big Questions, I was not sure if I should try to find some deep truth of Universe ( like Heraclitus?) or say something that would be personal, uniquely mine, important to me. One can also answer ”Big Bang” and be done with…(still much better than “how the Hell I would know?”, which is again better than not being here with us at all)

 This is my advice, but as it is your worldview, take it or leave it. If some universal truth feels interesting and helpful, go for it, but if the personal insight sounds more like you to you, that will be more beneficial. As it happens, I believe, that both worlds-  the Big One out there and my personal world are the same, but most people do not. So here you are.

View answers on Philozophy.com

An example: (my answer) “My Universe began with my conception. As I am learning from others and my experiences, my world shifts, gets bigger and more complex.  Where my understanding ends, on that edge, reversing the arrow of time, there and then the Universe begins.”

Psychotherapy

Working with the Question #1 is especially useful for anxiety, depression and procrastination, that include just about all of us. It sounds like the excerpts from the Dr. Bach’s Herbal Remedies :“Mustard- good for the unexplained dark cloud”, but you will be surprised by the effectiveness of the process. Remember, the benefits increase exponentially with the every edit, starting after the third one.

An Essay

For me, the question of the beginning is absolutely associated with my mother. Biologically I obviously grew in her belly according to her and my father’s genetic blueprint. Then, as an infant, I began to build my world, with the identity still merged with my mom. The baby’s initial world is created with the very little activity of the prefrontal lobes, mostly it is sensory combined directly with the emotional and instinctual behaviors. It is wired in the old, mammalian parts of the brain, the humanness present mainly as a capacity, possibility, and preferences. These were the emotional and the personality beginnings that stayed with me until today. Then I learned , mostly from my mother and the family (aunt Mary, the Granny, there was not much of the father) the human ways of the world. I was curious and more curious, and trying to understand, I was cautious, but ambitious explorer, I was selfish, but I was shown how to love and cooperate.

 Now, 72 years old, during the meditation I talk to my Mom often. I asked her about her beginning.

I: “ You bore three sons. Each one was a beginning, wasn’t it?”

Mom: “ Not really. Every beginning is nothing more, than the phase of the process, when the situation requires a switch of the dimension, or as you say in America nowadays “the conversation”, when the old way of seeing just would not do… With my first son Christopher, it was as always – the struggle to extend the relationship with Edwin, your father. He was a strange genius, complex and far away, in his own world, the poet, and the philosopher… and a healer. He was tormented by the generations- long inability to commit and love- I was trying to help him, help us, go deeper into love…

And we succeeded and failed to sustain the success, as always, and with Peter, my second son, it was the beginning… of the end. Then it was the war.  It ruined our lives, the families, and careers. But I would not give up, against all odds, you, Tommy, were conceived and born. When the communication failed, when the raw sense cried “no!”, the biology and, I guess, subconscious commitment did the job. It was the most strange beginning in my life….

I: “the end of beginnings?”

Mom: “Yes, now I see it, as an investment.”

I: “Mom, but we in Poland did know anything about the investments”.

Mom:”No, Tomeczku, this beginning was not an investment in the material things, like in America. I had to invest fiercely in my life principles. It was a terrible choice between reinventing myself to follow the love to the very imperfect man, against  my family and the faith or to throw away the love. I did the later and now it is the ” Dr. Zofia’s Myth of Beginning”.

I: “And you followed Jesus. I remember you in the mornings, up before anybody else, busy in the kitchen, already back from the shop with the fresh bread,  before going to the Clinic and visiting the Church on the way.”

Mom: “yes, I loved these mornings.. and the evenings,  kneeling at the bed  and thanking Jesus for the another day with God.”

I: ” Thank you,  Mom, thank you for the myth, thank you for the lesson, I will talk to you soon.

Same Time, same Space.”

Category:

Evolutionary Reality, Humanism, Meditation, The Worldview Internet Game, Worldview Owner's Manual

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Using Philozophy.com

This post is going to be published as a part of Worldview Owner’s Manual.  It is posted on my blog to invite you to cooperate in this project.                                           

At that moment, this is going to be a very short chapter, the membership is being slowly created, the etiquette is practically in diapers.

We hope to create a community of like-minded, curious explorers of the last frontier- of the self, in the best Socratic tradition of having your life examined. We hope that this group will grow, will enjoy the benefits of working on the worldview and contribute to the progress in the building a prosperous, democratic and free society. I am worrying that this idea’s time has not yet come, but the future of the mankind is in the individuality, education and freedom of expression, all of them are promoted by the Philozophy.com. Conversely, I believe, if we won’t do it ( I mean if we don’t change our wicked ways and do not befriend each other), we all, or most of us, die in about 30-40 years.

Work on your worldview, share, comment on the others’ work, have fun.

If you’re ready to work on your worldview now click here

Category:

Evolutionary Reality, Explicit and implicit worldview, Humanism, The Worldview Internet Game, What will happen to the mankind, Worldview Owner's Manual

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How to Build your Personal Worldview

This post is going to be published as a part of Worldview Owner’s Manual.  It is posted on my blog to invite you to cooperate in this project.                                           

This is the first chapter in which I’ll discuss the process of working on your personal, unique worldview. I promise that this process will be interesting and rewarding and will make you a better person and the world a better place. It might appear that the two distinct parts of the process can be distinguished: the making of your worldview, conceiving it, and writing down the answers into philozophy.com web site. But it is much more complicated, and you will see it as soon as you begin.

First, you are not creating it, you are teasing it out from your subconsciousness, from your past, from your image (or rather images) of yourself. Like going to hell and back.

The writing it down requires some skills and some courage and some freedoms, and one doesn’t know , really can’t know whether one has them. And when you find them you are a different person from the one you have started with… The writing is the creative process and the form can not really be separated from the content.

Secondly, as I mentioned before, one usually goes through the phases of the working on it:

      1 Browsing

  1. Writing “placement” answers (like “I will tell you as soon as I know” or “human cognition is not yet equipped to handle this question” etc.)
  2. The jokes and/or expressing the dislike towards the site, the questions, us, etc.
  3. The answers where you start to see a glimpse of you.

The benefits are visible from the level 1, the first answer you browse through, but naturally they accumulate and accelerate as you are walking the walk.

Thirdly, there are two sites to work on, the present one  and the future one, the one I am hoping for.

We ( Sophia , our friendly developer and I) are planning to remake and uplift the site.

  1. so , how to do it. No hurry , step by step. Remember , you are the human, the Curious One.

The questions will stay there, and that or this way, you will be trying to understand them to the last day of your life.

I suggest these steps:

  1. Read the Manual (or a part of it). This will slow you down, allow for the reflection and the introspection. Enjoy and repeat. Make notes, how exciting you are doing something completely new, this is rare in our secure lives, and the other rare thing , you completely  do not know the end result. It is like going to a sport event and the rules change every 10 minutes. And it is a bit like a mortal combat (unlike “Mortal Combat”), the results will be with you at the deathbed.
  2. Browse, this is again a shifting target: the more people participating , the richer and more interesting will be browsing. See how silly-heroic-insecure and brilliant people are. There is no ”party line”, each answer comes from the real person like you.
  3. Browse the “famous philosophers” collection which is slowly growing. Even these “giants” had a hard time with the succinct answer to the big questions.
  4. Respond, click and note the answer which can be useful for you, wise or just beautiful.
  5. You may find an answer (or answers) which you really like- “reuse” it, make it yours for now. This would be your first, ginger start of the budding personal worldview.
  6. Pick the first question, out of 14, which you are going to work on. I suggest an area which you are familiar with, thought a lot of it, like it a lot. To choose easier, read the beginning of the Part Two chapters. The philosophical questions become more practical, everyday things, may be related to your very personal story.
  7. Write this story, or a joke or an insight. This is your answer. For now, no hurry.

If the story is too long, put it as the “comment” (the future version will have separate “laboratory” space) and it will help you to formulate the  answer condensed to 250 characters. We wanted the answer to be long enough to show unique opinion, but short enough to be read, understood and commented on.

  1. This point is the most important. Return and edit the answers. Like “real” writers, they edit and edit and edit, they have hundreds of pages to edit, you – 3 or 4 lines…

Then, return after several months, knock yourself on the head, does it sound like metal? you are not a robot, you are not dead, you changed. You’ll be surprised unless you are still on the “early answers”, they reflect not who you are, but your “issues”. And those tend to persist…

 

Move slowly, answer more and more questions: notice that later questions, those you did not like, are more difficult. They correspond with your hang ups and figuring them out will bring the most personal benefits.

If you’re ready to work on your worldview now, click here.

 

Category:

Explicit and implicit worldview, Humanism, The Worldview Internet Game, What will happen to the mankind, Worldview Owner's Manual

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Why invest time and effort in working on your Personal Worldview?

This post is going to be published as a part of Worldview Owner’s Manual.  It is posted on my blog to invite you to cooperate in this project.                                           

     “You are a hero!” I repeat this several times a day. It is what I say in my office to a mother who brings her new baby and tell me that she is breastfeeding. Many of them will quit in few days, some will breastfeed for weeks or months. But she is a hero, and in the same way you are a hero. You are attempting to work on your worldview. This statement urgently needs two clarifications( so urgently, that I will proceed at the peril of mistake of not starting with the thesis of the chapter.)

First, I have to remind you that you are not going to reveal any Truth about the Universe. If you are, you are going to get the Nobel Prize, become a prophet or be invited by Oprah. But it is a test, a test of you being unique, individual thinking being. The dogs, cats, the robots, the mob members should not apply. We are going to work on the essence of your experience, of your story. We are going to work on our personal worldview.  

Second, I need to say something about the term “to work on”. And it is more difficult than it looks from the distance. Because you are my hero, you are already working on it. Actually, nolens-volens everybody is working on it. Our every action is an attempt to understand our world and ourselves. And we have been working on it since birth, and our species has been absolutely famous of working on it since we jumped down from the branch. So, our work here is just an “accelerated method” or “advanced course”. We will be transferring our gut feelings and deep instinctual worries and hopes into written, short, crisp thoughts.

 

     In this chapter, I will discuss the dilemma of “why to do it”. And it is a real dilemma. Billions of people never have done it and they go their more or less happy way. Initially, we thought (really!) that the fun of working on it would be so great that no elaborate cajoling would be necessary.

Be advised: this work is arduous and takes longer than expected. Many famous philosophers never did it. If you’ve been to counseling, you know about spilling your guts – and justly so, this metaphor doesn’t sound very inviting.

But it is worth it.

      The most obvious benefit of this work is of course , personal. The personal growth that is.

The term of the personal growth may seem rather vague, but not for a worldview owner. You go from the question to question, you write down your answers and you’re learning about yourself at the every step. Usually, you start with the questions which are most familiar and finding this out very often is  in itself a revelation. Like “am I really worry about the death?” “Is material more important than spiritual?”. You go through several answers and the picture of a human emerges.

Is it you? Or no picture emerges. Oh -oh… You might find yourself in the unfamiliar “territory”. Look, this is great! And you can stop and review and edit.

It is similar to the psychotherapy but more interesting and profound. As you go further and further, you’ll observe that these “late” questions are harder and more revealing. If it is difficult to condense your answer, I suggest that you write a longer version in “comments” and come back other day and finish the job. I have never revisited my worldview without an insight and editing. The most beneficial times to work on it is during the crisis- you’ll be surprised how much it helps to get clarity of the feelings.

There are professional philosophers who would work on big questions with you for a fee, as some sort of therapy. They claim to make you happier and more resilient. I agree, but having it written may be people liking it or commenting on your answers, has for me an additional element of building your own intellectual and emotional castle. You can just hide there if needed, or you can add another tower!

Think also that working on the personal worldview may and should “branch” into the conversations about personal freedoms and personal values. They also deserve to be transferred from implicit to explicit.

Of course, there is always the anxiety that the worldview that emerges from your writing might be incompatible with what you do, who you are. Well, there you are and it is good thing that you got confronted, isn’t it?

     These goodies are all personal, but I believe that this work can have an impact on the society. Does everybody need the personal, unique worldview? In the same way in which everybody needs good education- yes, everybody does. And then people can choose- to be a savage, easterner or westerner , are they any other options? I believe that the people who did the worldview are not only more successful but also easier to talk and negotiate with, they know where they stand. Creating one’s personal worldview can be beneficial for the society, especially if people in charge, people with power will do it and bravely share it with the rest of citizens.

Lastly, participating in the growing community of the worldview owners adds to our knowledge about the society and its values.


     At the end just a hypothesis: The more one works on transferring one’s implicit worldview into the explicit form, the more one become a humanist. And this, by itself, is beneficial for this person and for all humans. Now, I mean the humanist as a person who explores and promotes and holds dear the human values and it includes both religious and non-religious people like Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King, my Mom or Kurt Johnson, a prominent force in the Interspirituality Movement.

Category:

Explicit and implicit worldview, Humanism, The Worldview Internet Game, What will happen to the mankind, Worldview Owner's Manual

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Nietzsche’s call for the explicit worldview

 

What are the consequences of Nietzsche’s idea that God is dead?

Some would say that as long as people believe and worship God, He is alive and well. In this sense, an esoteric nineteenth-century philosopher could never have changed reality and his exclamation “God is dead” was as empty and bombastic as the rest of his writings. Actually, the concept that people’s subjective worlds create reality (maybe all reality?) is very attractive for me personally and consistent with evolutionary thinking about the functions of the central nervous system.

But I think the people who have read Nietzsche over last 150 years have a much more literal concept of God in their minds and souls.

It is why the philosopher’s war cry that “God is dead” sounded very bold and significant.

It was original: nobody before had put it so bluntly through the words of the Madman “”I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers…… Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” It was iconoclastic and adventurous and maybe it is mainly why it reverberates for more than century in the intellectual circles of the world.

According to Adrian Samuel (Nietzsche and God (Part I) Richmond Journal of Philosophy 14 (Spring 2007) page 1, pdf) Nietzsche worries about the world without God as a world without values. “Rather, the madman’s search for God is taken as a bit of a joke – worthy of being mocked and little more. Nietzsche coins this sociological movement towards not taking ‘God’ seriously as the ‘death of God’. That is, the former importance ‘God’ had in structuring our lives has ended.”

My reading of Nietzsche is limited to Twilight of Idols and some scattered excerpts from other books and on the basis of that, I see him as a sociologist, a psychologist and mostly a hellraiser, rather than a philosopher. Except for a precious few people, he vehemently and recklessly criticizes everybody and everything he turns his eyes on. He carelessly contradicts himself, he wants to “relax” and be “affirmative”, and start “the war” at the same time.  This doesn’t spoil his appetite to destroy and “kill “ every establishment and authority known to man.

Talking about the death of God can be understood in many ways, but as for Nietzsche, Christianity is a favorite target of attack, it seems that he means  that the Christian God is no longer a credible source of absolute moral principles” (Google, Wikipedia, “God is dead”) and “one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet” (Twilight of Idols, Expeditions of an Untimely Man, sect.5).

This is the literal way to understand the Madman and Twilight of Idols. But as we read the text, the way he attacks other authorities seems almost too flippant. Socrates is too ugly? German schools are too crowded? The people are too obsessed with their stupid diets? Is it not a Kirkegaard-like case of indirect communication? It seems that pathos is purposely inappropriate, vehemence exaggerated, the mixture of the style of the joke with the content of the vitriolic attack tells us something about the author’s underlying quest.

In “The problems with Socrates”, Nietzsche says ”I recognized Socrates and Plato as symptoms of decay, as agents of the dissolution of Greece… as anti- Greek” (sect. 2). He gets emotional, calls Socrates “a rabble”, “decadent”, complains about his dialectic method and reasoning, He is unconvincing, just mean, and he obviously doesn’t care.

The same frenzy in condemning established values is repeated in “morality as anti-nature”. He calls the church” hostile to life,” (sect1) he criticizes the monks for the renunciation of desire, even worse are those who are too weak to do it! “What alone can our teaching be? – That no one gives a human being his qualities: not God, not society, not his parents or ancestors, not he himself. No one is accountable for existing at all…one belongs to the whole…” (sect. 8) Similar is his rant against the Germans, their organization, their education and all Reich is “decadent and mediocre”. The more he attacks this and that, the more irrelevant the content becomes, making the attack ineffective. Surely he knows this and does it on purpose.  The purpose is to question the values, question the sources of morality, ponder over the world where God is not treated seriously, where people are not treating their lives seriously- the world where geniuses and warriors are treated as Madmen and ignored.

Nietzsche calls for the rule of instinct and nature, calls for the Dionysian Man, where art and sensuality and power are all mixed together. Even this naive and benevolent form of the Ubermensch does feel ominous for a person born in Poland in 1944…

From the perspective of a century and a half, I see Nietzsche’s ideas as not only a “revaluation of values,”  but as a desperate call to make the process of the exploration of one’s values a standard for the modern, new human. To create your own values, to be an individual, to think freely, be yourself, should become your “meaning of life”. Astonishingly, this call of an almost insane, ranting lonely man, with no money and no academic position, was answered.

In the nineteenth century, similar to now, people worried that when “God is dead” there would be a horrible hole in the human soul, no values, no meaning, no hope. It did not happen, people worked, loved and died as before.

Now, in 2015, we call this “hole” the worldview. Everybody has a worldview, but like in Nietzsche’s times, most people do not realize this. This is an implicit worldview, inherited, built during childhood and schooling, containing sometimes mostly subconscious opinions, gut feelings, and the “things which make one tick”.

Nietzsche calls us (as God is dead) to find our values, to explore and find our individual, unique, personal worldview. And to express it, make it explicit, be our own personal warrior.

And the response is tremendous: everybody tries to write a book, to be an artist, to have a rock-and-roll band. The Internet and YouTube and social media are all magical individual creativity boosters. The creativity and individuality of the 21st century Ubermensch are slightly tainted though.

1.His values are very materialistic and boring: all the “renaissance man” activities are really aimed to conform to the modern man success image.

  1. Comparing to Nietzsche’s Dionysian Man this new Ubermensch lost the reckless spontaneity, sensuality, the sense of the instinct, and the will to power means only “more money”.
  2. His worldview is really not explicit enough.

This explicitness of the worldview is what I am most interested in, and I think it has huge importance, not appreciated by Nietzsche, for the different reason than that of our modern people.

Socrates said “An unexamined life is not worth living”, but I think that “lonely life is not worth living”. We are a hyper-social species and our lives have meaning only as a set of relationships, communications, conversations, and observations. All of them are really the same thing. When you see a fierce tiger roaring he relates, he communicates, he expresses his worldview. When you listen to “ pam, bam, bam, baaam” of the Beethoven’s fifth, he relates, he communicates, he expresses his worldview. The same with the Sistine Chapel, Nietzsche’s Ubermensch- all perfections…. and yet.

These guys are oh, so lonely.  We say that art, beauty,  spiritual passion, well, any passion, all bring people together…. and still we are lonely.

Clement Vidal writes about the worldviews, he calls one’s worldview a “position”.

Writing down your personal position is an arduous, difficult task, few philosophers even did it. But it allows you to  1. edit it (actually keep editing until you die!) 2. Show it to the friend and compare your views and  3. most important, show it to an enemy and compare and discuss.

The more I know myself (explicitly- in the language) the better I relate to the other.  Creating friendships should be my laboratory of the relationships with the other (again, explicitly- in the language). The very survival of the humankind may depend on it.

Category:

Explicit and implicit worldview, free will, Humanism

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Humanists and Extrahumanists

 

         Let’s stop dividing people into theists and atheists. By referencing something, we automatically validate it, it is why the term “atheism” is self-destructing, as one describes oneself by the term denoting the absence of god while one does not believe god exists! For me the term “atheist” is meaningless.

        The term humanist is the best- better than naturalist, atheist, freethinker, etc.- it is species-specific, solid and logical. It should be an “umbrella” term, similarly like theists (or extrahumanists)  have their religions, cults, and sects.  Let’s talk about  humanists and extrahumanists.

          Humanists are the people who see the source of the goodness and morality inside the nature of human being. This nature was build for eons by evolution, later modified by culture and endless tapestry of the earth’s civilizations. It includes all the instincts and wisdom of our ancestors, the heroes, the kings and the prophets, down to everybody’s  dad and mom. Everybody contributed and now it is our time to carry on.

 

           Extrahumanists are the people who see the source of the morality and ethics in a message from an intelligence higher than humans, actually infinitely higher.  This source, they believe,  is beyond evolution created human mind, it is all powerful God or gods, or aliens, or Heavens, or just unknown Order or Force permeating all the Universe. By definition and by design, this intelligence, which is the source of scriptures and their moral messages, is beyond the capacity of the human brain to comprehend, so its nature and its reasoning are unknown; they are the subject of faith and speculations. Scriptures tell the faithful what to do, but they give very few details about the origins of the message, say why we should not work on Sunday, or Friday or Saturday (depending on the God). And, again according to the extrahumanists, humans should not even attempt to completely figure all this out, they would not be able to understand it. So the extrahumanists are assured (or assure themselves) that that higher intelligence will take care of them, and maybe even of us poor humanists. They will listen to the message of the Lord, act accordingly, and go to heaven. Naturally, historically and ethnically, different sources or deities suggest different things to do. No surprise. On the mythical and ethnic level, these suggestions may be locally and temporally quite beneficial for the faithful, but may be very unpopular for the rest of humanity. These mythologies and rituals, while often beautiful and sentimental, also tend to become, by and by, pretty ridiculous and embarrassing as the times change.

         It might appear that there is the attitude which do not fit either of the two groups. Some scientists and other materialists just refuse to engage into philosophy. They are out to discover the laws or the things in the world leaving the philosophical quibble to the lowly humanities. If pressed, they usually agree that they assume some order in nature. Obviously, we do not know, will never know everything, but what we know is built by the animal, and then human intelligence, therefore they are humanists by default.

 

          Defining somebody’s worldview by pointing to what he or she does not believe, does not make any sense.  As a humanist, I have plenty of ideas to explore, beliefs and doubts, but it is useless to discuss things which do not exist. So do not call me a-theist, as I am not calling you a-humanist. Like in the restaurant, it would be odd to concentrate discussion on the dishes we will not order, or are not even on the menu. Anyway, the content of the message is the most important, the ethics and the values, while the quibble about the source may be irrelevant. It seems that across all religions and spiritual systems, the more contemplative the training, the deeper the level, the more barriers fall away and all the messages become the same. Perhaps it is  because their origin is the core of the human nature.

           Exploring these messages, including mythology and wisdom of all religions and philosophies, examining the human nature with the human mind not only discovers the unifying goodness and beauty but creates it (ie, goodness & beauty) in the process. Like, searching for the meaning of life makes it meaningful, or, according to modern phenomenologists – “living is making sense”.

Category:

Humanism, nature of reality, What will happen to the mankind

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My Thoughts on Worldview: 2013

People on Beach Doing Tai Chi

What is?

The world around me and me, my body, are made of matter. I experience this real world through the perception produced by my nervous system. When I think about the origins and the mechanisms by which this experience was produced the things become more interesting.

My worldview developed through my infancy,childhood and the adulthood, starting from the moment I was born. Very soon after the birth , the personal experience was augmented by sharing others’ experiences: initially mainly the mother’s, then the family, then many , many others. I think, that this distinction of personal and shared experience is extremely important, even if, except for early infancy, those two are mixed and intertwined. Only mine is real for me, yours is real for you, but yours or anybody else is not real for me. The real universe, my universe is 66 years old and it will die with me, with my body, my mind, my soul, my house, my country and my stars. The same with you and with every life form. Practically I live my life with personal and shared world completely mixed and treat it as more or less real, as  the social animals do. This experience of the reality is produced by our nervous system. To understand this production, this our experience of the universe, we will have to understand the workings of our nervous system. We need to understand how it handles the concept of outside of the body, inside of the body, its dealing with perception data of ourselves and data of others. Also, we need to understand its origins – I am talking about my nervous system- how similar is its structure and function – to yours, to apes, to fish or to bacteria. The instrument I have to do it with…..is the very nervous system , I am trying to understand. And this is boot -strapping par excellence. Unfortunately, the boot-strapping thinking is inherently an illusion of the insight or success- it is like meeting the mafia boss- there is always one above him you have not met…

I think, real  help comes from the analysis of the evolutionary process. Lets , briefly, look at some less obvious elements and consequences of this process  , relevant to the evolving of the nervous system and worldviews in animals and humans.

1. The tricks of the brain.

2. The evolution as a special case of the broader worldview.

3. The evolution is like an onion.

4. The evolution of the nervous system.

5. Integration of the entropy, complexity, time ,space and the kitchen sink. ( sorry, I meant ‘ consciousness )

6.The complexity engines

7. Subjectivity rules

8. The metaphor of the tapestry.

The tricks of the brain.

The other name for them is “counter- intuitive” . The intuition is the advice of your old brain, thousands or millions years old notions, the snakes are bad, the earth is flat, there is no limits of speed, the objective is solid, the subjective is wobbly etc, etc. These days we are bombarded by the surprises from the science, different cultures, life styles, and generations. We should have become immune to the trauma of the magic trick explained! The mixture of excitement, and annoyance and shaking the head.. It is just a matter of time: the roundness of the earth becomes slowly intuitive? When it comes to the worldview .. it is tough, we fight it. Well, my worldview is somewhat counter-intuitive..

The evolution as a special case of the broader worldview.

The evolution has to be seen as a special area of our understanding of the universe. There are no laws of evolution other then the special application of the broader laws of nature. The concept of “broader” is operative here. We discover new and new laws of nature, many of them are broader or inclusive rather than really new. It is like relativity  over newtonian physics, or the yungian concepts over freudian concepts. So, the hierarchy of laws and concepts is almost

all-deciding creator of the worldview. What is on the top, where do I start.

On the other hand : our brain is a master in shifting – the hierarchy , the dimensions- different in the work days and other ones for the weekend, also our brain is the master of keeping completely incompatible and self-contradicting partial worldviews in the same time with surprisingly little headache or nausea.

The evolution is like an onion.

During the “DNA” period of the evolution- circa 4 billions years ago to about 1 million yeas ago- the timing interplay between the changes in the organisms and the changes of its niche were very peculiar. The niche was relatively stable, so the new trait or behavior was “tested” for fitness advantage over many generation in unchanged niche- to stay or die out. That situation favored hugely small changes versus large and adding new function (duplications) versus  replacing functions. So, our body and brain and behavior and mind is build like onions – tiny changes from the archaic bacteria time added and added relentlessly, each coming from a successful animal, a winner, better adapted than the siblings, but very slightly , and only in one tiny area of functioning. Of course the slow changes in niche and the expansions into the new niches allowed for the diversity- there were many temporary winners, some onions were better than others…

 The evolution of the nervous system.

Many before me thought about our brain as an onion, so I think we are ready for the next step. I see complexity of my universe, with the science, philosophy, cultures and worldview being multiplied by complexity of my own mind and experience . I am overwhelmed and lost, and I am not only one. The anthropology and sociobiology attempt to use the laws of evolution to figure out the ways of our ancestors (and ours). We do not know their worldviews but we know that they, as us now, were trying to understand. Their instrument, the nervous system was not much different than ours, just fewer data. I imagine that their goals were much closer to survival than ours (except for academics-they have to publish or perish) but the process was the same. To navigate the world , they used the inherited structures and abilities and they were combining them with personal experiences, building their worldview from birth to death. When I think about more primitive animals, farther removed ancestors, I think about worldsense rather then worldview. All of them had perception systems, memory, the drive to survive and the abhorrence for death, all of them have a wolrdsense, a coherent system of neural circuitry which allows animal to make decisions, to act. Can we look at these simpler organisms and learn from the observations and experiments  about the basic mechanisms of of our nervous systems? We have to assume that there is no mechanisms which would have suddenly replaced their “primitive and animal-like” way of seeing the world into “our modern, advanced, true, human way”. Thus, the survival related perceptional skills/data, for example ”run from the shark” were encoded as the reality and/or law. The failures like” play with the shark” or “smell the shark” or” ignore things with fins” were never played, smelled or ignored again.

The integration

When I think about my worldview, as hard as I try to avoid it, my dimensions shift all the time. I am asking the question  about the objective world, and the answer comes back with the annoying appendage:”it is how I try to understand it” . It means that it is a personal experience trying to be objective. Subjectively I see the world with my nervous system and it works in time and in space. Remember the evolution of the nervous system: the  time and the space were the tools of the animal’s budding nervous system devised to describe behaviors. Time and the space were located within , or inside the dimension of consciousness( for the lowly ancestors we can use the term -”awareness”-if it make us feel superior). The principle of the objectivity tells you just the opposite, it is intuitive, it is what the animals were trained for eons, see the world as true, as objective so you can act and succeed- we live inside time and space, this is what 6 month old baby learns: the permanence of the objects. I guess it is the time to unlearn this like flatness of the earth.

For the longest time people noticed : every two moments differ that one is closer to birth- or ”earlier” the other is closer to the death -”later”. the observations of the closed system, the earlier moments had same or more energy/potential than later! On the other hand in the evolutionary thinking things have the tendency to improve/strengthen with time.

As we try to understand early universe, we see the place with minimal granularity, high energy, and low complexity. As we organize our observations(in the dimension of consciousness)  along the time, the entropy rises: with it the energy dissipates into matter, creates expanding space and increasing complexity.(the matter in our universe occurs in granular, uneven way and it occurs in space)

The Complexity engines

With time increasing and the amount of matter increasing the probability of creating the areas/moments of complexity increases. Then the entropy pushes them mercilessly back to chaos. When we look at these areas of higher complexity we  can discern special mechanism which might prevent loss of complexity. These “chaos busters” or “complexity engines(CE} “ work differently at each stage of universe history. Most primitive CE were just “dense “areas” with a lot of matter in small space ,also uneven distribution of energy helps differentiation of the matter( i.e. makes more likely to be more complex than the other area). The special cases of that process  would be stars and planet with “energy supplier’ and “energy receiver”. If some of energy receivers are also the “time receivers”, then probability , together with the relative niche stability, fosters complexity. The subatomic and inter atomic and intermolecular bonding forces are typical  CE’s. Then come all the stuff of the primordial soup: the sun, the lightnings, the tricarboxylic acid circle, the nucleotides zipping and unzipping, the bubbles of pre-membranes etc., etc.  Some of these complexity engines seem almost magical, pulling the rabbit out of the probability hat- like the planet with the right distance from the sun, right size, crust, density,  and more.. others are “no big deal” like electron, proton attraction, but I guess this is our perception only,  and everything what happened had probability of 1. It is just how we try to understand it…

Subjectivity rules

As I am approaching the question about my vision of the universe the strange feeling overwhelms me. Its tenderness and warmth and awe directed towards us humans and our ancestors. This the paradox: the more magnificent and heroic are human attempts to understand the universe, the more the answers make him small, irrelevant and peripheral! The size and the ambition of his ideas make him divine, but the results of these investigations turn him to dust. What I see is a real world. But I know that it is made of the ancient descriptions of ancient behaviors of bacteria and fish and cave man all piled up and adorned with bells and whistles of our culture. My mind immediately responds:  so, where is the real world our ancestors were reacting to , with these behaviors? There is none. Remember: it is subjectivity, trying to be objective. This illusory “real world” for which we have no senses , no instrument to investigate, never needed one, never asked for one, has all attributes of god. We live inside him, his children, he knows all, has all mercy and the omnipotence.

Remember a strange feeling of being followed? you have three options: first, like most of us: you are not sure, (evolutionary!)- “probably nothing”, but from time to time you suddenly jerk your head- “nobody”-you shake your head and go do laundry. The life goes on.  Clinically this is the chronic anxiety. Spiritually , there are most of the believers. Second option is for the wise and strong guys: “a trick of the brain” ,”pretty common” they say, and they never flinch. Clinically this is the sanity, spiritually- atheism. The third option- make the predator real, his voice, his menace- clinically this is the psychosis, spiritually- fundamentalism.
The metaphor of the tapestry.

In summary: do not be mad, be glad about the tricks of your brain. Enjoy and celebrate paradoxes. Understand that the only worldview is subjective, but act as it would be objective reality. So do not expect dragons, stories, gods and aliens to be really real, but pray and love hard.

My image of the universe is five-dimensional. Our brain works intuitively with images and the metaphors containing geometry and the tridimensional space concepts ( the world in the grain of sand,  the turtle over the turtle, multiverses or string theory) .We are much more awkward and slow (filo- and ontogenetically) with time and consciousness- the other two dimensions.

My image of the universe includes an observer, or the bunch of them , or… all of them, living in or looking at the sort of canvas or a tapestry. On the top it looks like our world, underneath you can see that it is made of mathematical equations or an other form of the information. Accordingly, remembering what is underneath,  the appearance on the top changes with the observer’s intention, capacity or wisdom. The changes involve shifting of dimensions. For us humans (the homo historicus), the universe , as our life, is organized along the dimension of time. As we are using our ancestors’ ancestors brains , we can observe the parade of dimensions as we go from birth to death, from the birth of nervous system in bacteria to  the consciously evolved post-human specia, and from the early universe to the end of it. Close to the observer the image is sharp, all dimensions at his disposal work great. The bacteria knows almost only the distance- one dimension only- the sober human – all five. The further away you look the picture will be dimmer- unevenly though- some animals and humans have some special ability- the bat into the land of ultrasounds and astrophysicists in radio-waves, and the pediatrician can empathize with the newborn. But nobody should be worried about  the edges . They are too far, not real,  but foremost not true.

Unlike the guy in 14th century picture sticking head through the canopy of stars, we worry about only two edges of the “tapestry”- early universe and THE END…

The further from the observer and closer to the edge the situation on the top become similar to the underneath. At the beginning the endless energy, without any complexity, make the concepts of time and space mute and our limits can be seen both by mathematics and physics. At the other extreme we can dream of maximal complexity created by each of us being able to be conscious of all the universe and being able to share it with the rest. There would be no need for energy with nothing more to do, nowhere to hurry.

What ought to be?

My axiology- the theory of values and the praxeology -”how to act”- are pretty simple, obvious and uncontroversial.

The intelligence- figuring things out- personally and evolutionary is the job number one.

Everything else, other values,  follow logically- the wisdom, the cooperation, the empathy and the beauty.

It doesn’t take rocket scientist to see that we are alone on our heroic and beautiful earth. Yes, we are in the center of the universe , and there is the trend. Going with the trend sooner or later will make me satisfied – in peace, happy or fulfilled- going against the trend , probably not so.

No chance for help from gods or aliens, no excuse that “we are insignificant speckle”, no hope in previous or future lives.

You have free will, you live on the top of the “canvas,”( see part I) and it is all what counts.

The information underneath (in my leviathanish metaphor for the Universe, the underbelly was made of the mathematical equations )do not mean” everything has already happened”, this would be the determinism , which occurs in time- an excuse for the lazy or fearful. The information or equations “underneath” is a metaphor and, again, metaphorically means “ everything is happening now”.

Therefore we are witnesses, actors and the originators of this exciting, magnificent complexity march. With the social and environmental doom looming,  we need to get together our wits and possibly squeeze away rapidly through the perils of probability, as it happened before and will happen again. Remember these few rag-clad bands of hominids escaping the drying and overheating Africa?

Epistemology

Again, if you swallowed my schizoid  “what is” , you’d sail happily trough subjective knowledge, trying to be and acting -justly- as if it was objective. In my thinking I find useful the division of the worldview’s content into – personal experience and shared experience. The personal experience is- structured consistently and identically since early life forms around the description of behavior beneficial for survival, with the perception, memory, interpretation and the behavior itself getting more complex with the evolutionary progress. The social animals developed incredible evolutionary tool, multiplying adaptability and diversity by the ability of the exchange of information between other mostly same species animals. The worldsense of the social animal consists of it’s personal experience -( the data inherited from all the tiny evolutionary steps of the ancestors and the  personal development since birth) augmented by data shared with other animals’ sharable part of it’s worldsense/worldview.

. All these sources are jumbled together, as all work the best as “objective truth”  rather then positioned as a constellation of more or less probable hypotheses.  I mean until recently, until human found beneficial for the survival to find the truth. Like with many other areas of the human quest, to understand his folly, we need to go back and unscramble these sources of knowledge..Evo-devo ,child development research and primatology help with that.

Spirituality

In the beginning was the word. “I love you” said between my Mom and Dad. Sounds cheezy but in my daily meditation I think about the gratitude toward them. And towards other people who gave me so much. When I am worried about my kids or other loved ones I pray to God. Which? Some kind of mixture of Catholic upbringing with recent involvement with Buddhism. The Heart God, my Guardian Angel. Sometimes it is (when things are not so serious) Medicine Buddha all Lapis Lazuli Blue with the strange oriental face. I believe this is next for humanity- befriend the stranger, go beyond  relationship with family, nation, religion, race, beyond fear or charity – with the stranger you share only consciousness, nothing else.  There is no small chat about the soccer or the weather, just he or she is as you are, and what shall we say to each other?

Category:

Humanism, nature of reality