Was there a Beginning?

Musings. 

Sometimes the yearning for an understanding of the full expanse of existence, the Sein, almost hurts. 

The sense of the immensity of what there is hurts in all it's infinite aspects: The earth, the universe, the presence, past and future. The own existence, whose beginning is nothing but fog to all but the parents who now vanish with this, their unique knowledge of my first days. Even the tiny splinter in the grand scheme of things, of our own history is largely unexplored. So many paths not taken, so much love not given, so much not seen, even though it was in plain sight, so much not understood in spite of all efforts. 

All this comes into focus here in the cabin's own forest, my forest as it were, here where the silence is so loud that the ears are ringing from the voices of the past and the choir of desires. Only the sudden stillness allows these to be heard. 

Subconsciously the eyes rise to see the distance, the deep blue sky, or, later in the evening, the stars that shine here as bright as they shone everywhere before industrialization. In German the word for heaven and sky is the same. Makes so much sense when the eyes drift up to gauge scale. 

Humans do this, stare at the moon and conjure up deep thoughts or even deeper longings. Think of love, a lover and the heart becomes heavy. This is never fully explained anywhere but the heart is always heavier with the moon in sight, no matter what cardiologists may think or why dogs howl at the moon. 

For perspective I like to look at the stars. While the moon makes one feel heavy, the stars give the thoughts wings. They make earthly heaviness appear so laughably small to become  ridiculous. Of course in the month of darkness, in December, we string stars to trees and to rooftops to ensure ourselves their enjoyment even when it is cloudy.  

Stars open the view into the past, so far beyond the own small fog of birth that, with a stiff neck from staring straight up, the enormity of what is in view of the bare eye escapes any grasp. All this is supposed to  once have come out of a singularity smaller than an atom? And  has been expanding ever since and getting colder with stars and galaxies being swallowed and others born? The upheaval is so slow, though, that seafarers even now could  use celestial maps from Columbus' time and would still find their route through the night with reasonable accuracy. 

At the cabin I am torn between contemplation and basic direct action: Chopping wood, making a fire in the stove, cooking, love, clearing trails or hiking. Sitting on the porch or on a stump observing the sun rise or set, gazing at the mountain ridge barely visible through the trees. Both, contemplation and action, elevate the urge to read, to understand and to write.  Act, contemplate and report, a trifecta so hard to bring into the right balance. 

Writing is the art of taming wildly tumbling thoughts, emotions and yearnings into an abstract of symbols, domesticating them to being words, nailing down what resists grounding. Making permanent what is fleeting. Giving order to what is chaos, making communicable what is locked deep inside. All that is what it means to find words, to write them down and to string them together.  

But that act is also a terrible reduction, an injustice to reality, words are not even a shadow of the real things; furthermore, writing stops or slows the onslaught of new thoughts and turns treacherous torrents into tame trickles and placid and navigable waters. 

The letters, whether on a screen or on paper, are incarnations of failure. But the failure to match reality also spells success because the reduction of complexity is a condition of understanding, a necessity for finding patterns, laws and meaning in the chaos. 

Maybe that is what is meant with the famous opening statement in the gospel of John "in the beginning was the word". He continues, "The word became flesh" per the King James Bible and per Luther's German translation,  flesh instead of Theon, god, an interesting choice of words. 

This puts the symbol and the abstract in front of and before the objects that they describe: idealism in pure form. God, then, is a principle that humans derive from the overwhelming complexity that surrounds them and of which they are part. God as logos and logos as god. No god without logos and no logos without god, which, of course makes an anthroprocentric god who cannot be thought without humans who think. This is a tautological trap but the concept of the word first makes it eternal, timeless and god-like. It is easier to think of mathematics that way, since they don't need or describe objects. The word is harder to see as the beginning than numbers, unless we say that numbers are words. And why not?  Was the word or math there  before the Big Bang, before singularity? Physicists would not object, they wouldn't allow the question of what there was before the Big Bang, for there was no time before the beginning. 

Free Will, Determinism and Neurology - The Chicken and the Egg all over again

The following musing is based on a mail dialogue with a Suebian theologian whom I met on the occasion of my mother's death. He sent me recently a particular (English) sentence describing instructions in the Libet experiment with the request for help in interpreting and translating it to see if it could have a second or hidden meaning. This as part of his preparations for a talk about freedom, will and religion. At the same time I had received Sam Harris' book "Free Will" as a present. So, the topic was clearly on the table.

Please allow that I write in English today in regards to your preparations for a talk about freedom and free will in conjunction with the Libet experiment. The Libet conundrum has moved ethicists, philosophers and neurologists for some time and you reminded me of something I had been dimly aware of and brought it back to light just after my wife gave me the little book Free Will (by Sam Harris. I have not read it yet). For that I want to thank you.

Like you I feel that the mechanistic causality conclusion (that there is no free will if the brain “knows” about our decision before we do) is unsatisfactory. It may interest you that Neuroscience seems to have confirmed the Libet experiment as far as the time sequence. I found a nice little video on this. But even this much larger time span between neural firings and awareness of a decision or the act does not prove anything, I think. Namely the separation between neurons, awareness and physical action (pressing a button) is suspect since all of it is part of one and the same system, a human.

For one thing, I am not very unsettled by this as physics has already told me that time is relative and that causation isn’t always what it appears to be. Quantum physics, for example has the nice little “Entanglement” problem from which the concept of Quantum Computers is not only derived but even already realized on a very small scale.  The puzzle of cause and effect also reminds me of Schroedinger’s cat which is alive and dead at the same time, a thought experiment with this astonishing conclusion. In short, mechanistic logic (Newtonian logic) is by far not able to describe the physical world on the very small scale nor on the very large scale (of Black Holes, for example). So why should the brain be an exception?

But maybe one doesn’t have to go as far as quantum mechanics to question the simple cause and effect conclusion that seems to be inevitable from the experiments. One could put this into the realm of the dualisms that have governed thinking for eons, namely idealism and materialism (Hegel/Marx). Or the popular term of nature and nurture. Whether Hegel or Marx, we should have learned about dialectic relationships. The relations of the material brain, external factors that made the brain the way it is (genetics and experience) and awareness of what the brain does could be described as dialectic. And that even before one introduces the terms free and will. The issue, then, is where will resides in this dialectic relation or in the time sequence. The problem with the Libet experiment or with the brain scans is that it doesn’t measure will but the lag between neural firings and the awareness of them.

This lag isn’t unknown. Similarly we may already see ourselves running from the tiger before our brain is finished reporting what it just saw and that it was, in fact, a tiger. This would introduce the spheres of the conscious and the subconscious. It is well known from recent neuroscience that there is a lag between those spheres as well and that the conscious mind is terribly slow and often unreliable.

I can’t put any of this into the context of Erasmus and Luther but I think that this is generally just another case of the search for the Prima Causa where science and religion find each other in a pseudo conflict that goes away upon further thought, just as you suggest.  Going back to physics, the prima causa question reminds me of the creation versus Big Bang debate. Was there a creator that made the Big Bang happen, or did it happen on its own or in a multiverse (Hawkins)  where Big bangs happen regularly in a kind of cyclic pattern. The classic chicken and egg question. Anytime we expand our thought model we can internalize what was previously an external factor. This has been the history of physics but it never answered the question of god or the prima causa. It just moved it to a different sphere much in the same way as the Libet test moves “free will” to another level.

Not sure that any of this contributes to your talks about freedom. But I think the question cannot be “are we free” but can we wrestle any degree of freedom from the materiality of our existence. That, indeed, is a matter of degree and the kind of work we put into it. I see religion or ethics as imperatives for us to try and free ourselves from determinism as much as possible, a herculean effort but one that is worth it, for it makes us human.

It was the bite in the apple that expelled us from paradise, created awareness and began the struggle away from the determinism of the rest of creation for the apple came from the tree of knowledge and knowledge allowed humans to follow the dictum Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth. Freedom and knowledge come from the same tree in my opinion.

Klaus