James Web first Deep Field. Not in any way diminishing the amazing achievement but something the West has lost sight of is that the mind is greater than anything like this. As the Hindus say nothing moves faster than the mind. It can get to the edge of the universe almost instantly and can travel before the start of the universe with no effort or cost.
Nonsense say the materialists. Look how hard it has been to get a telescope powerful enough to see almost to the edge and start of the universe (light only travelling so fast so the further you look the further back you look too). In this photo are galaxies as they looked 13.5 billion years ago, only a few hundred millions years after the beginning of time! They are still embryonic and poorly formed.
What an amazing achievement and what a privileged insight into the world. We are almost staring at God himself and the moment of creation. We must be closer to understanding how the world formed.
But look at this picture of a fern frond before it unfolds.
So its not a photo of something as it was 13.5 billion years ago, it is just a few years perhaps. But both the fern and the galaxies are just pictures. And in both cases we are left with the question how did that come to exist?
Now we are trained to think our way out of this. Big Bang we say. The galaxies and the fern were created by the Big Bang. There was nothing and then by quantum fluctuation a universe exploded into existence beginning both space and time. And the universe has been inflating ever since, like a huge 3D air balloon. On an aside its tempting to think that Time is driven by this expansion too but I looked it up and the expansion of space depends upon a fixed time in the models.
There was no "before" the big bang, and the big bang occurred "everywhere". At the start everything was compressed into a point. That means that the space on your left and right were both in the same place at the start of time. Big bang was everywhere. That is why the background radiation is everywhere. Big bang created every bit of space.
Now it all great "ideas" but note we are back to mind now :O All the work done by James Webb is not so important. All the data and pictures it sends us are not really different from the fern. Something happened to create the universe is all we really know from all these picture, and the mystery of that creation is present in everything everywhere!
But true evidence was found that led to the idea of the big bang.
But now the real Big Kahuna Burger issue which has been known since forever. In the Mediaeval it was the a proof of God. Cause and Effect means that for every effect there is a cause. What was the cause of the Universe? You either have an infinite chain of causation forever or you have a "First Mover." JudeoChristian take the First Mover. Buddhism actually takes the infinite past (tho that is just a mechanism to get you back into the Present rather than a "theory"). Yet the larger problem exists which is SRH in this blog. Whatever structures or ideas you identify as fundamental will always pose a new problem. Why this way and not another? At college we jokingly called that Q. The fundamental theorem must be atomic. If it was Q = 2 H we would have a new question of the universe why is there a 2 in there.
Now suppose there was a Universal Theorem of Everything of form F. To be Complete it needs to explain itself, or be a theory about itself. It needs to provide the foundation for why it has the form it has.
In previous blog raised 2 types of SRH. I'll do that again but they are Constructivist and Consistent theories.
A Constructivist Theory of Everything must provide a foundation for itself. This is OSRH (Original SRH) and that it seems is a problem. If your axiom is A and you build a theory out of A you still haven't explained A.
Consider a fractal like Manadlebrot: Z -> Z^2 + C where the set is all those values of complex C that do not diverge to infinity, and the pretty colours we see in diagrams are the number of cycles to escape 2. Now it looks like an infinite amount of structure comes from no where. Such a simple definition creates infinite complexity. But that is an illusion. It's a recursive definition and each recursion provides a less than trivial problem to solve. Iteration (i1) C = 0 is easy. (i2) C^2 + C = 0 (i3) (C^2 + C)^2 + C = 0 is now less than trivial and so it goes on. I believe the Mandelbrot Set is the Union of all the fixed points of this series?? #TODO. So all that complexity comes out of complex structure of the definition. Its deceptively simple. And while the definition is recursive Z -> Z^2 + C this simple axiom and recursion never get added to replaced. You start with Z -> Z^2 + C and you end with it. It is never "explained" by the Mandelbrot set.
Alternatively a Consistent Theory of Everything simply needs to build a theory such that it does not contradict itself. What you are left with is a candidate for the Theory of Everything, and if you can show that all other candidates are self contradictory you have the theory. This is very Kantian Categorical Imperative.
But again we are in the Mind. Returning to the top, what modern science has lost track of is that the Mind is the key feature here and you do not need multi Billion space telescopes to explore the Mind. Our mind is with us right now as we read this, it is the canvas on which the ideas and the world are painted.
Now Mind is a complex word, and I believe and am investigating that Sanskrit makes a load of distinctions. Initially note that Minds themselves exist. Sometimes we have a lazy mind, sometime a sharp mind, sometimes a bad tempered mind, sometimes a warm and kind mind, sometimes hateful, sometime loving, sometimes interested, sometimes bored and so on. But all these states of mind exist themselves and they come and go. When Buddha says "With our Minds we Make The World" he means this. When we are in a bad mood look at the mind state that is a bad mood, do not look at the world. The world is neither a bad mood nor a good mood; a mood is a mind state. The way the world is, its actually a mind state. This is the meaning of karma. When things turn bad., its the mind and why do we get bad mind states? That is down to what we have done to our minds in the past.
But there are more profound meanings of Mind. If we start the day in bad mood and then it goes and we get into a good mood the mood has changed but "I" haven't. I was in a bad mood, the mood has changed and now I am in a good mood. It is like I was wearing a raincoat and now I am wearing a summer jacket. So the mood is not us. Moods are like clouds across a sky: the sky is unaffected. Now this Sky is a really profound mind indeed.
Religious people are unique in that if religion is done well they start to see the Sky. Its no accident that the main god is the sky god in most? religions. Perhaps that is faith in God or perhaps that is something else. But Religious people are not so affected by the things or clouds. Someone insults them on the way to work. This can put us in a bad mood. But the religious person knows this bad mood is not so important and perhaps they forgive the insulting person, or perhaps they let go of the bad mood to focus on compassion and concern for why the person was so angry with them. And that might be trivial in the sense of "what have I done wrong" or more profound as in "how can I help them." But however people achieve it the religious path is opening our minds and hearts to the sky and that lets us see the clouds come and go more freely. I say religious, plenty of people do this without an formal "religion." I say religious just to indicate this type of approach not the hymns, prayers, chanting, good deeds whatever of a specific practice.
Shall we call that Cloud Mind and Sky Mind. There are others even more profound but this is enough for the blog. Pictures of galaxies and ferns are cloud mind. We look at one and think what we think, we look at the other and think what we think. Clouds come and go.
But the Sky Mind is always present. It is present as we investigate picture of galaxies and when we investigate pictures of ferns. It is present right now as we read these words and have any thoughts they create.
Now in the Theory of Everything don't we need to factor in Sky Mind? How can a space telescope help us here? Sky Mind is always with us. It was with us before we knew the Theory of Everything and it will be with us after. In fact searching for the Theory of Everything can change nothing. Surely Everything must include the Past. And so it must have been true in the Past as well as the Future.
So the Theory of Everything that is discovered in the Future is a contradiction cos it doesn't explain where it was in the Past. Self-Reference really is very "self?" destructive. (That is the current avenue for SRH if self reference is destructive then is it self destructive?)
And I will wind this once again long blog up. But pictures from James web are incredible in one way, but they are limited in what they can achieve, because pictures of a humble fern are profound and amazing too and also raise the same identical questions about the nature of existence, creation and Everything. How did it all get here?
No comments:
Post a Comment