We may all be part of a living, thinking, creative universe
Published in Contemplate
Jul 17, 2023 (Medium.com)
On the surface, it can look like the Universe is at best indifferent to human needs, and at worst chaotic, ill-tempered, capricious, and mean-spirited.
But I’m a spiritual person, at least in a half-assed way that lets me indulge in magical thinking without spending hours cross-legged on a hardwood floor, no closer to God but with searing pain in my thighs. My soul prefers to ponder and evolve in comfort, say in the shower or half-asleep on the couch with a cat resting on my chest.
This Lazy Person’s Path to Enlightenment has led me to believe there is a sentient Universe, Source, or Prime Mover of which we are all part, and which communicates with us to educate, enlighten, and give guidance.
And now there may be some science to support me.
Disclaimer: I also think there are fairies in the backyard oak tree and that socks have feelings, so any belief system I advocate should be taken with a grain of salt.
Some 68 percent of the known universe is made up of dark matter and another 27 percent is dark energy. Science doesn’t really know what either of these things are, just that they should exist in order to make the calculations work. Regardless, everything we understand about anything is based on the 5 percent of the visible universe which we can see.
And the visible portion of the universe is tiny. Even our most powerful telescopes only see a fraction of a trillionth of a percent of that 5 percent of the universe which is neither dark energy nor dark matter. If the cosmos is infinite, as seems likely, then the size of our data set for analyzing it is effectively zero.
We know very little about the universe except that it’s vast beyond imagining.
But the parts we can see offer intriguing clues as to how things might work.
Science has observed that the universe resembles a gigantic neural network similar to the human brain, with galaxies the equivalent of neurons. I’m vastly oversimplifying a complex concept mostly because it’s beyond my intellectual grasp, but that’s the gist of it, and enough for our purposes.
In this scenario, information would be moving between galaxies in the same way signals flash between neurons in our brains. The universe might be literally thinking, learning, and creating.
But there’s a problem.
In classical physics as in our everyday lives, we observe locality — the principle that an object can be affected instantaneously by another object only when the two are in close proximity. If you throw a baseball in your yard, you don’t expect a window on the other side of town to get broken.
Locality isn’t a problem in our brain, where neurons are packed snugly together, and impulses travel between them more or less instantly. That speed allows us to think.
However, the enormous distances between galaxies and the absolute limit of the speed of light suggest that information in a universe-sized brain could only be exchanged very slowly, if at all.
This implies that God has the mental capacity of a sea sponge, which would explain a lot about organized religion but still be disappointing.
A possible workaround?
In quantum physics, there are circumstances where the principle of locality seems to break, with the most famous being quantum entanglement.
If two particles are entangled and then separated, a measurement of one will cause it to collapse into a spin state which is either up or down. When this happens, the second entangled particle will immediately collapse into the opposite state, even though the two are millions of miles apart and travelling away from each other at the speed of light.
It’s this apparent breach of the law of locality (and causality) that Einstein famously called “spooky action at a distance.” Einstein’s skepticism notwithstanding, it’s been proven true over and over again.
While it’s impossible to use quantum entanglement for communicating, it and other cutting-edge ideas may imply the possibility of non-local connections which we are simply unable to see, making communication between far-flung, fast-moving nodes a possibility — see this article by theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder for a more comprehensive and coherent explanation.
As Hossenfelder notes, there is no evidence for these connections. Maybe it’s just a far-fetched theory.
Or maybe science is catching up with spirituality.
It’s a common theme in both religion and weed-fueled dorm room conversations, that the universe is a single grand organism of which we’re all a part.
Certain schools of Hinduism hold that everything is one, and every being is part of a larger soul. Buddhists believe in the interrelatedness of all things. Even monotheists get in on the action — medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart wrote “Everything is in God and is God”.
And many individuals report transcendent experiences that manifest as feelings of oneness with everything, sometimes chemically induced but valid nevertheless.
Scientists are often reluctant to venture into the realm of philosophy, let alone spirituality, and with good reason — slapping the “science” tag onto a pre-existing belief system would imply proof for the unprovable, and raise suspicions of bias in the experimental process.
But the more we learn about the Universe, the more it seems the mystics and shamans were right all along.
Here’s what I believe, and what science may one day validate.
We are not accidental machines, cogs in an uncaring cosmos, destined to flash into the world for a brief moment and disappear without meaning.
Our view of reality is tiny and blinkered. There is much, much, more to the world than we can easily see, and our intuition screams this truth to us.
If we stay quiet and listen, we can hear.
We are parts of a whole far larger than we can imagine, learning and growing and connecting with ourselves. We are creators, we are teachers, we are builders of worlds. We are eternal.
And the odds of it being a random fluke that you’re sitting here looking out at the universe, and consciously wondering about it, are vanishingly small.
So cheer the fuck up. Everything’s going to be ok.
No, God Often Gives Us More Than We Can Handle
The idea that we won’t be tested beyond our limits is stupid
Written by Patrick Metzger
·Writer for Contemplate
Dilettante, smartass, apocalypticist. ***See “Lists” for stories by genre.***