Topics for Contemplation

e x i s t e n c e

The first thing to note is that something exists.

As obvious as it may seem, it is a clue so large as to be nearly invisible. It could be the case that nothing existed; yet we don't have nothingness. We have something. Why is this the case? Perhaps it is random? But why should even randomness exist? Why not truly nothing?

Not empty space, not silence, not blackness—the absence of even that. Why isn't there true nothingness?

The fact that something exists seems inexplicable by religion, science or anything. It is a brute fact. If the universe is here because God created it, why does God exist? If the universe exists because the laws of nature created it, why do the laws of nature exist? Why not nothing? Truly nothing? No God, no Big Bang, no natural laws, no randomness, no truth, no logic. Not even the abstract fact of 2+2=4.

Yet, not only does something exist... emotion exists.

It could be the case that what exists is a lifeless universe, devoid of minds. But a dead universe would be the same as nothing, for there would be no one to notice that everything is dead. So in order for something to exist in any meaningful way, (that is to be known), emotion must exist.

And, of course, that is what we find.

o n e t h i n g o r t w o t h i n g s ?

What exists in the universe? One kind of stuff or two kinds of stuff?

If there's just one kind of stuff, physical stuff, then we can explain atoms, molecules, chairs and mountains. Physical things exist and obey the laws of nature we know through science.

But how do we explain thinking things? Are there two kinds of stuff: physical and mental? Would this explain humans and our thoughts, feelings, and emotions? Perhaps we are combinations of physical stuff and mental stuff? It certainly seems that way: We have bodies (physical) and minds (mental).

The modern view claims that physical things like atoms have no mental properties. More complicated things made from many atoms therefore have no mental properties either. A chair is just a bunch of atoms, it doesn't think. But how to explain animals, especially humans?

We are also made from many supposedly unthinking atoms. Yet we think. Where do our minds come from? If each atom has absolutely no mental properties, absolutely no emotions, then how can adding together billions of them all of a sudden conjure up the joys of watching a sunrise or the taste of apple pie? If one atom has no mind, then presumably ten atoms have no mind, and 1,000 atoms have no mind. But, according to modern science and philosophy, somewhere along the line, when organisms evolved to many billions and billions of atoms, a mind suddenly appeared. How? How can you go from absolute zero, to even the smallest infinitesimal bit of anything?

The leap from nothing—from absolutely no mental properties whatsoever—to even the smallest flicker of a sensation or emotion would be the most radical break in all of the natural world. Nowhere else do we see breaks like this, everywhere else in nature and in evolution things happen gradually, from something that already exists.

Believing in two types of things, physical and mental, leaves us unable to explain how they interact. Believing in purely physical things leaves us unable to explain the mind. So we are left with a final option: There's one type of stuff, but it isn't purely physical. Rather, this stuff has a physical and a mental aspect. All things are made this same stuff. One does not create the other, because there is no other; they both exist at the bottom of everything.

t h e n a t u r e o f t h e p h y s i c a l

Neither is mind material, nor is matter mental; neither is the brain process the cause, nor is it the effect of thought; nor are the two processes independent and parallel. For there are not two processes, and there are not two entities; there is but one process, seen now inwardly as thought, and now outwardly as motion; there is but one entity, seen now inwardly as mind, now outwardly as matter, but in reality an inextricable mixture and unity of both. Mind and body do not act upon each other, because they are not other, they are one.

—Spinoza summarized by Durant

Here's another way to think about the problem of how mind and body interact: Ask yourself whether your thoughts cause your actions. We're accustomed to speaking as if mind and body are different things, but is this really the case? Common sense tells us that mind and body influence each other, but are not separate. If they actually were two separate and different things, it's difficult to see how they could possibly interact.

w h a t a m I m a d e o f ?

My mind is real. I know this because I feel my mind directly. It's the only thing I directly experience. It is me.

My body is also real. Unlike my mind, however, I don't know this directly. I don't directly experience my body except through my mind. But I believe my body is real, rationally and intuitively, because to believe that my mind is somehow floating in nothingness, unanchored to my body or anything else seems silly. Thus, the rest of the physical universe is also real and I am embedded in it.

So what am I made of? There is both a mental and a physical aspect to my existence. I am a thinking thing. Am I unique in the universe? That also seems silly. My nature must be universal. I must be like everything else and everything else must be like me in a fundamental sense.

The stuff of my body does not simply exist, statically. It is in constant flux. My body is made up of some 10 trillion of my own cells and another 100 trillion bacterial cells. But my cells are in a constant state of decay and repair. Every day, ten billion die and are replaced.

So what exactly am I? Am I the cells that make up my body today? What about the cells that made up my body ten years ago? Who was that? Am I the atoms that make up my body today? How many times have these atoms already been replaced?

I am like a vortex of matter, a temporary form created from the stuff of my surrounding environment. A knot in the fabric of the universe, unique in the ever-changing pattern I create through time, yet made of the same stuff as everything else.

t h e l a c k o f a p e r m a n e n t s e l f

I form a slowly changing pattern of activity in time, made up of rapidly changing parts. As water flows through a river, the water molecules that make up the river change from moment to moment, forming a river that slowly changes its own shape. In a similar way, matter/mind is rapidly flowing through me. Or to be more precise, the flow itself is me.

I look for my "self" in my mind and I don't find it. Moment by moment, new experiences happen and then they're gone. Nothing permanent resides in my mind, just a never-ending series of ever-changing perceptions. But who perceives my perceptions? No one. No little person lives in my brain, watching my experiences go by, like a man in a theater watching a movie. When I observe my own consciousness I never detect my self; I witness only the stream of sensations, thoughts, and emotions.

My mind is real and in each moment, unified. I experience one single perspective of the universe each moment, but there is no single thing that is me. My mind is the unification of the mental aspect of billions and billions of fundamental particles.

t h e s u p e r o r g a n i s m

How can your consciousness—a unified mental event—arise from many separate mental events? If the basic particles out of which everything is made each has a mental aspect, how can they all unite into a single, unified momentary consciousness?

Consider ants. Each one behaves in a pretty simple way, yet together they form a superorganism: a colony. The colony behaves in much more complicated ways than any single ant, yet it's nothing more than thousands of ants put together. The colony influences the behavior of individual ants while at the same time each individual influences the behavior of the entire colony.

The superorganism emerges from many individual organisms—just like you. You emerge from many individual cells, cells that in our distant evolutionary past were individual, free-living organisms. Your mind is the same: It emerges from many individual comparatively simple neurons, each with its own small mind. Somehow, combined, they create your unified mind.

Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world but because we know so little: it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover. For the rest our knowledge is negative… The physical world is only known as regards certain abstract features of its space-time structure – features which, because of their abstractness, do not suffice to show whether the physical world is, or is not, different in intrinsic character from the world of the mind.

—Bertrand Russell

t h e i s o l a t i o n o f t h e h u m a n m i n d

Each person appears to him- or herself to be an island of feeling in a vast universe of unfeeling and unthinking matter. We assume other people also to be thinking-feeling creatures, but our inability to feel what they feel directly isolates us from others, regardless of how good we are at communicating.

The self is not a thing. The self is a process, a stream of experiences. All things are like this; nothing is permanent or stable. The self simply changes more rapidly than other things, like mountains, mold, or trees. The difference between life and non-life disappears when we observe things on different time scales.

Experiences occur everywhere in nature, in some places more concentrated than in others. We are just such a locus of activity, a concentration of experience like the eye of a storm. Although our minds appear to be isolated islands of thought surrounded by unthinking matter, they are more like the crests of waves formed out of a vast sea.

With this realization, we can see the inherent interconnectedness of all things. Nothing is separate, there is only one process. There is not empty space and matter moving through that empty space, that would be believing in two things. There is just the one process, folding in on itself continuously, a turbulent cauldron of creation spewing forth new forms and experiences in a never-ending stream.

Nothing is so productive of greatness of mind as the ability to examine systematically and truthfully each thing we encounter in life, and to see these things in such a way as to comprehend the nature of the Cosmos, and what sort of benefits such things possess for both the Whole and for humans…

—Marcus Aurelius