Reality Soup

Back to that soup-induced sense of suchness...

Last Wednesday night Cuz asked me when it was that I blew my mind. He blew his over a decade ago and it has stayed pretty blown ever since. I recall that long before that he was the first person to attempt to explain quantum mechanics to me, but I really was rather young at the time.

My mind has had a serious of significant 'pops' since though. I related how I grew curious in the early 90s about mimickry in Nature - how for example, a creature could evolve into a form which includes a near perfect simulation of another, usually in order to scare off its predators.

Did such 'information' get into the system as a consequence of intelligent design as the God Squad insist, or could it have evolved in discreet steps? So I went and read some Richard Dawkins and pop, I realised that both these alternatives might be significantly off the mark.

Dawkins being a little bit wrong doesn't however invalidate Darwin - Natural Selection remains the only way we know that molecules can grow teeth. However:

- Dawkins cunningly never defines what he means by the "random" in "random mutation". Yet the only truly random phenomenon is the spin of an electron. At any scale above this random is just another word for a pattern that we haven't the processing-power to fully understand.

- Neo-Darwinism breaks everything down to one elementary unit: the gene. Everything outside the gene is lumped into "the environment" which then acts to determine selection and survival. Yet this sort of rigid categorisation is often uncalled for. In collaboration with other creatures within the same eco-system (i.e. the next level of organisation up the scale), many organisms actively help determine their evolutionary environment, as opposed to being just the passive subjects of it. In the field of technology Douglas Engelbart calls this directed co-evolution.

It strikes me that Professor Dawkins is doggedly trying to preserve the "elementary" nature of Biology, something that Physics has had to reluctantly relinquish over the past century. Physicists had for a long while been smashing up molecules, then atoms, then particles, in the hope of finding the smallest units out of which matter is made. Instead they reached a point when things don't get any smaller and start behaving very weirdly. Their quest for fundamental components had led to a mysterious soup of dynamic patterns - ineffable flow, instead of conveniently discreet building blocks.

If an atom had the dimensions of the dome of St Pater's in Rome its nucleus would be the size of a grain of salt. This apparent hollowness is not confined to the 'inside' either. The outer shell of the atom is an illusion created by the 600m per second speed of the electrons' spin. So an atom has a continuous surface in the same way that the pictures on a TV screen appear continuous to the human eye. When you also consider that mass is really just a form of energy, you have to conclude that mutability rather than solidity is the baseline property of material reality.

Objectivity is a bit of a hoax really. Yet I told Cuz last night that while I do accept Richard Rorty's assertion that at bottom everything is relational and provisional, I still can't sign up for all the inferences that he draws from this. I'm what you might call a deferred essentialist: Absolute Truth may not manifest itself conclusively anywhere so it can be perceived and measured, but I like to think that it might exist as a kind of implict pathway.

Time does not flow, but the fact that it appears to may ultimately be relevant. Similarly our indeterminate, relativistic universe seems to go to some lengths to at least appear solid and determinate. Why might this be?

So, while Evolution may not have an explicit goal, it does seem to 'flow' as if subject to certain dispositional forces. Einstein explained gravity as a consequence of dimpled space around massive objects. Perhaps the flow of DNA also follows invisible curves in possibility. These would result in morphological tendencies, not fixations.

If knowledge typically progresses in parallel straight lines, you might say that wisdom is the ability to perceive and understand curvature. Even the void is bent - Einstein's revelation is not a neat intellectual paradox to impress people with at cocktail parties, not just a minor aberration with standard received normality that only matters at the extremes, it is an important truth about our whole environment.

"Have you ever been lost yet known where to go?" Cuz asked me before we left.