The Ineffability [GOD]

Let’s assume that the Ineffability (God) is the Universe (pantheism) or is the integral force, maybe the controlling force, within the Universe (panentheism).

This shouldn’t aggrieve physicists, especially those of an atheistic bent, nor should it irritate those who believe in God generally. It might, however, disturb those who have faith in a personal God, and His offspring, Jesus/Christ.

But all that aside, we conjecture that the Ineffability is real, tangible, the Totality of existence, and evidenced as the Universe.

Whether or not the Ineffability is conscious, in the way we understand consciousness, that is another matter (which we shall address again upcoming).

But what is the exact nature of the Ineffability, the essence, which transcends existence?

Dark Matter and Dark Energy are intrinsic elements in the nature of the
Ineffability.



And it’s those elements we’ll deal with here for now, delineating the other aspects, the less dynamic aspects of the Ineffability later on.

Probing Dark Energy using Bayesian “evidence” (as some physicists suggest) or applying a new cosmological constant doesn’t tell anyone what the true nature of Dark Energy is.



The analogy might be a palm-reader providing “insights” to one’s fate and psyche when a psychoanalyst is really required.

Bouncing theories and mathematical equations off the reality of Dark Matter and/or Dark Energy does nothing but establish a veneer that is superficial in the extreme.



Yes, the façade of both Dark Matter and Dark Energy are addressed by cosmological meanderings but the actual nature of each mysterious structure – and they are structures, even though they appear amorphous to observation – is not discerned by mathematical wizardry.

Let’s use psychoanalytic constructs to make our point…



The Universe – the Ineffability – is made up of 4% visible matter and energy, Michio Kaku tells us, 23% Dark Matter, and 73% Dark Energy.



In psychoanalytic parlance the visible matter/energy would be the superego (4%), Dark Matter the ego (23%), and the Id (73%), which coincides with our “hypothesis” that God, the Ineffability, is pirmarily primitive, or Evil – using Evil in the theological sense as the absence of Good.

This would explain the crushing plights that afflict mankind: childhood disease and death, terminal illnesses for the mature, old age, and ultimately death, among others.

(Wars, genocide, murders and the like are not natural occurrences so one can’t blame God or nature for them.)

Now if Dark Energy is likened to the Id, one can approach its nature much as a psychoanalyst would conduct a session with a neurotic individual.

(Psychoanalysis can’t address psychosis, practitioners say, so if God – the Ineffability – is psychotic as Dawkins intuits, the metaphorical psychoanalytic quest would be futile; but let us proceed as if psychosis is not the underlying nature of the Universe, or God.)



The Id is uncontrollable said Freud, and Jung concurred pretty much. But both thought that it could be ameliorated, by various techniques, all of which wouldn’t work with the Universe obviously but do provide a template for understanding the inherent nature of the Universe.

Dark Energy, the Universe’s Id, can barely be avoided, but it can be, to some extent, by ignoring it, as Melville suggests in Moby Dick when the White Whale (Evil God) is innocuous until hunted down by Ahab.



Can the nature of the Universe’s Id be understood completely? We think so, if one applies the analogy we provide here: the Id is primitive, Evil, but for all practical purposes benign as far as humankind is concerned.

If Kaku’s (among others) hypothetical proposition that perhaps cultures trillion of years old, from other Universes – he posits many Universes existing in parallel with this one – mastered the way to intrude on our Universe (to escape the ultimate death of their Universe), then their must be an Ineffability (God) that is their Universe, or is an integral part of it, the controlling part.

(Mormon theolgy claims that each Latter Day Saint, if virtuous – or not – will become a God for some part of the Universe; not just symbolically but in total, tangible reality.)



So we’re dealing with the Ineffability (God) of this Universe to which we are tethered. And our Ineffability (God) has a major component that is Dark (or Evil), as the Gnostics believed, and as historical evidence seem to indicate also.



God is impotent perhaps in that He or It cannot thwart physical disasters that have plagued mankind since the beginning of creation.

Or God is malevolent and purposefully wrathful.

Dark Matter and Dark Energy either represent a malevolent force or a benign but perhaps ultimately dangerous force.

Searching for clues to the nature of Dark Matter and Dark Energy lies not in science but mythology, religious revelations, and historical occurrences which are not attributable to man (such as natural disasters).



However, science has made obvious the Dark Nature of the Universe (our Ineffability or God).

Thus, it now becomes necessary to address that Dark Nature, if possible, in such a way as to alter it or to find ways to avoid it, and its potentially disastrous denouement.

To do that we’ll have to go into the mystical realm. (Science and its incantations, mathematical gyrations, are mystical in their own way, just not useful for humankind, except in the abstract, which isn’t beneficial to physical life, on Earth, now.)



And that’s where we’ll go next….to the mystical realms, with help from some physicists who do not find mysticism anathema to science. Michio Kaku is one….

Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Dark (Evil) Side of God

If Universe is God (pantheism), and if God contains, as Jung suggests, an evil or malevolent nature, then Dark Matter, Dark Energy, even Black Holes, are attributes of that malevolent aspect of God.

Michio Kaku approaches this in his book Parallel Worlds [Doubleday, NY, 2005] but Kaku doesn’t succumb to theological conjecture, merely outlining what some theologians and God-devotees believe.

However, the “fact” that physicists haven’t a clue as to what Dark Matter and Dark Energy are, as Kaku admits, indicates that the God-Enigma isn’t any stranger than the Dark Matter/Dark Energy enigmas, and each enigma is grist for evaluation, with the Dark enigmas getting attention from cosmologists and scientists only because they have tools and mechanisms (such as mathematics) to address the Dark enigmas but no tools or mechanisms to address the God-Enigma.

No reasonable person would tackle a seemingly insurmountable problem, such as that which posits an unfathomable supreme being who is hidden from view and ratiocination.

Whereas the nature of Dark Matter and Dark Energy seems open to scrutiny, even though how that scrutiny is to be employed remains a mystery also.

Here are several papers [PDFs] about Dark Matter and Dark Energy, showing the perplexity (for physicists) of the mysterious entities – Click to read:

Dark Matter and Dark Energy

Dark Matter and Dark Energy: The Critical Questions

Dark Energy: Mystery of the Millennium

Insights into Dark Energy: Interplay Between Theory and Observation

Towards a Natural Theory of Dark Energy…

Dark Energy and the Preposterous Universe

The Fate of (phantom) Dark Energy Universe with String Curvature Corrections

A Phantom Menace?

Phantom Energy and Cosmic Doomsday

How do we connect Dark Matter and Dark Energy with the “hidden” and Evil side of the Godhead?

We’ll go into that, next……

The Wisdom of Arthur Koestler

The esteemed polymath Arthur Koestler wrote this [in the late 60s]….

The citadel of science…rests on a number of impressive pillars, but some of them are beginning to show cracks and turn out to be hollow, or reveal themselves as monumental superstitions. The most important among them I have called “the four pillars of unwisdom.” They represent the doctrines:

(a) that biological evolution is the result of nothing but random mutations preserved by natural selection;

(b) that mental evolution is the result of nothing but random tries preserved by reinforcements;

(c) that all organisms, including man, are nothing but passive automata, controlled by the environment, whose sole purpose in life is the reduction of tensions by adaptive responses;

(d) that the only scientific method worth that name is quantitative measurement; and, consequently, that complex phenomenon must be reduced to simple elements accessible to such treatment, without undue worry whether the specific characteristics of a complex phenomenon, for instance man, may be lost in the process.

The common element in these four fallacies is the philosophy of Reductionism…which holds that all human activities can be reduced to (explained by) the elementary responses” displayed by lower animals (such as the psychologist’s laboratory rat) and that these responses in turn can be reduced to elementary physico-chemical laws.*

* Pages 200-201 in The Encyclopedia of Delusions (Nothing but….?), Edited by Ronald Duncan and Miranda Weston-Smith [A Wallaby Book, Simon and Schuster, NY, 1979]

What does this tell us about anything?

Heini Halberstam, in the Chapter “Some Unsolved Problems of Higher Arithmetic” [Pages 191-203 in The Encyclopedia of Ignorance, Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1977], writes this:

“Turning to numbers that are the sums of two squares, these are only a littlem ore common than the primes…, and very little indeed is known about their finer distribution. For example, it is almost trivial to see that there is always such a number between n and n + n¼, yet literally nothing better is known…” [Page 201]

And this [ibid]:

“We know that, in a certain precise sense, most numbers are transcendental, yet the problem of deciding whether a given number is transcendental is profoundly difficult.” [Page 201]

Roger Penrose, in the same book, Chapter “Is Nature Complex?” [Page 160] writes:

“Though Nature [sic] is undoubtedly subtle, she is surely not malicious. This, at least, we have on the authority of Einstein…

That Nature can be usefully described, at least to a considerable degree according to the laws of number, has been in evidence for many centuries. But what is not so familiar to those without a mathematical background is that are several different kinds of number, many of which are nevertheless subject to the same arithmetical laws.”

Arithmetic (mathematics), in all its permutations, represents a reality that is as abstract and intangible as the theology of Jesuits. But it has “proofs” which theology does not.

Pi is infinite, and can be (almost) proven to be so. God is infinite, but there is no proof, so far, that can establish that “fact of faith.”



Mathematicians, and their lackeys (which we mean descriptively not pejoratively), including physicists, resort to the “provable” abstractions of arithmetic to resolve issues of physical reality that belie the meta-reality, even though it appears – and we use the word “appears” advisedly – that physicists, cosmologists, and their ilk, are dealing with the meta-reality. (They are not.)

Psychiatry would call the mathematician’s province that place where they (mathematicians) go to escape from the world. It’s not just an escape from the practical reality of life – the vicissitudes of daily living; it’s an escape into a contrived reality that pretends to cope with profound issues affecting mankind.

But what are mankind’s ills that physical laws address? Hunger? Poverty? War? Disease? What?

When theologians tackle the idea of God and/or morality, they are net with opprobrium by scientists, generally.

But when science addresses issues that are not biological, geologic or in ways that are not beneficial to the plight of humankind, such as quantum physics, string theory, and all the other subsets of physics, no one (or rarely anyone) reproaches them, and they win Nobel and other prizes.

We don’t deny that the study of the transcendental ether is important -- some saying that it may even lead to the discovery of God.

But it seems strange that so many scientists, who don’t believe in God or a hereafter, would spend so much time and effort on the curiosities of the Universe which, for them, has bearing on their eventual physical mouldering….unless….unless they, deep down, want to prove that there is a God, or a life after this one, or something more than what we perceive as the human, sensory reality. (But that for another time.)

When one studies the laws of harmony and musical theory itself, the end result may end up being a Beethoven symphony or a Beatle tune.



When one studies art – color, perspective, form, et cetera – one may produce a painting, as that by Monet, Titian, or Hockney.



And if one studies literary manuals, one might even create a work of fiction (or non-fiction) like that of Shakespeare, Gogol ,or Updike.



Those endeavors please the senses, and bring pleasure to an existence which is sometimes fraught with horrors of subtle or unimaginable kinds.

But what about mathematics, sometimes elegant in their construction? What sensory pleasures to they provide?

Yes, they stimulate the mind, so we give them that. And such stimulation can be quite as wonderful as that which one gets by looking at a Van Gogh painting, hearing a Verdi opera, or reading a Eco novel.



But is mathematical stimulation as glorious as sensory stimulation? For some it is, but for the rest of us, it isn’t.

Thus, we see the pursuit of mathematics and physics, not so much as a useful mental endeavor but, rather, as an escape into and from the delectabilities of things mundane, but oh so very delicious mundanities.

And so we’ll address here, some of those delights that assuage the humdrummery of everyday life, and even the stilt of mathematics that afflicts us, and almost everyone else we know….so that we might pursue the ultimate question: Not what does reality consist of but why are we here?

The Madness of the Evolutionary Designer

Richard Dawkins’ insightful book The Blind Watchmaker aside, believers in an Intelligent Designer of the Universe, and mankind (God apparently) have to concede that creation has been not only murky but also a bit psychotic.

The process of creation begins with the Big Bang (estimated to have taken place 13.7 billion years ago) and really gets underway for the eventual residents of Earth when the Earth is formed (about 4.57 billion years ago).

With the origin of bacteria and archaea 3.8 billion years ago, life on Earth began.

The “evolution” of life -- various plants, insects, mammals, and dinosaurs – took various paths that Darwin’s Origin of Species recounts, and the hominid ancestors of man appeared (Sahelanthropus tchadensis: Toumai), 7 million years ago.



Now the question to ask is what were all the permutations about? What Designer, intelligent or otherwise, would hem-haw around so diligently, seemingly experimenting with life-forms, before coming up with the species (man) that is supposedly the Designer’s masterwork?

But let’s go back a bit….

Dawkins and his ilk give enhanced purposefulness (Chance by any other name) the accolades for the Big Bang and subsequently the evolution of life on Earth, culminating in man.



The theory that Darwin proposed and his supporters tout is fascinating but contrived. Yes, the process of evolution is scientifically sound, but putting all of the processes in place, from the Big Bang through the dynamics of the geologic ages, to man, is really a stretch. Too many things had to adapt to too many natural vicissitudes to make sense.

That’s why Creationists and fellow travelers (proponents of Intelligent Design) still get text-book space in some quarters.

However, believers in an Intelligent Designer have to admit (or should) that the folly of their Designer is palpable, if one examines the evidence, and we’re not taking about the fossil evidence.

What, for example, was the purpose of the dinosaur eras, and the eventual extinction if the Designer had some ultimate plan in mind?

Either the Designer is operating with a plan that was and remains an enigma to rational beings, or the essence of the Designer is madness. (Yes, we mean essence, in the Thomistic sense.)

Dawkins’ proposal [The God Delusion] that the God of faith was (and is) a psychopath goes to the heart of the matter.



Either we have Darwin’s quasi-rational explanation for life (evolution) or we have an Instigator (God or the Intelligent Designer) that has created in fits and starts, indicating that the Mind of the Instigator is overly convoluted or seriously flawed.

How can reasonable people come together, philosophically, when their choices or belief systems are contrary in ways that seem insurmountable?

The Intelligent Designer is quirky, maybe even insane, while Darwin and his supporters maintain evolution is the only way that life can be explained.

The clue may reside in a the mystery of DNA, which forms life on its own, and was put in place by a prime mover, one with consciousness, or one without.



But that for another time….

The Coin of Tyche and Chaos

The concept of the lucky coin, as Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh dub the coin-flip in their book, The Mathematical Experience [Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1981, Pages 163-8, and online] bumps up against order and chaos, and Chaos [ibid, Pages 172-9].

The mathematics of probability, and the mathematics of Chaos Theory, are contrivances, as all mathematical constructs are. The mathematical edifice helps some thinkers create a manageable universe, an ordered reality that they can cope with, psychologically more than anything.

The randomness of the Universe is palpable. Luck, whatever it is, seems bidden to hit haphazardly, affecting all kinds of persons, with no rhyme or reason, and without a nod to virtue, vice, or any other human characteristic.



But scientists – cosmologists, physicists, and others (as we continue to note here) – seek to provide order, by using mathematical theorems and symbols. Or at least they wish to heap the mantle of order on the mess that is reality.



The Greeks thought they had reality down pat, but it was only Plato who understood that a real reality existed that we humans could not actually see (looking a glass darkly as St. Paul had it) or experience.



St. Thomas Aquinas got a peek, and gave up writing his theological treatises (Cosmic Consciousness as Richard Maurice Bucke elucidates in his famous book by that title, without citing Aquinas’ incident however).



Mathematics won’t and can’t accommodate that other, real reality. Math, as we keep writing, is its own reality, but has nothing to do with the Platonic reality, nor the Jungian reality (which we’ll address later on here).

But back to the Coin of Tyche, the lucky coin.



If one tries to impose order on coin tosses, even hoping that chaos will eventually produce that order, they will have an eternal wait on their hands.

The universe doesn’t work (and hasn’t worked) that way, ever.

The Copernican/Newton system(s), even the great Einstein’s theory of how things are, cannot broach the luck, good or bad, that the Goddess Tyche represented.



Gravity, for instance, works at local and galactic levels. But gravity may not (and probably does not) work in the recesses of black holes or the universes they (may) lead to.

Quantum mechanics provide an environment to Plato’s cave in The Republic, where hints at the ultimate reality are quirked by uncertainty and local and non-local quantum repercussions.



But it’s the luck of the draw, not mathematics, that will open the door to that ultimate reality, just as the apple falling led Newton to formulate the quasi-reality of gravity.



And that luck is not predictable or calculable.

As for the long-range order out of chaos, who has the time or patience to wait it out?



It’s not a matter of wanting instant gratification. It’s a matter of “life is short.”

Math is a plaything of scientists, no matter how couched the processes and formulae are in the usual pedantic overlay.

Math can’t help us, scientists and everyone else, understand the reality that Plato envisioned or that Aquinas actually experienced.

Scientists can pretend that math is the doorway to the truth of existence but that is a monumental canard, ballyhooed by persons who can’t face the prospect of a meta-incongruity – in the universe, in physical laws, in life itself.

(Maybe that’s why they take it out on a deity who has been no help either.)

The Unanswered Question(s)

Charles Ives’ pithy philosophical musical construction, The Unanswered Question, sums up mankind’s existential predicament.

Ives does, in six minutes or so, what Aristotle, Kant, Heidegger, Sartre, Einstein, Bohr, Sutton, Smolin, Dawkins, et alii have not done: explain the human condition as it simply is – man is mysteriously marooned on Earth with no map telling him where he really is, where he is going, and why (or why not).



The questions posed by humans go unanswered, by the gods (as Ives intimates) and unanswered by the sages of our time and those of the past.

What is the purpose of being?

What is consciousness?



Does man have immortality, in some form?

What is the nature of the Universe?

Is there a God?



Is there no God?

What are the ultimate components of reality?

(Who wrote Shakespeare’s plays?)

What are strings? And do they matter?



Speaking of matter, what is Dark Matter?

What is Dark Energy?

What causes Black Holes? (We mean what really causes Black Holes?)

Where’s the Missing Link?

(What happened to Amelia Earhart?)



(What happened to Ambrose Bierce?)



(Judge Crater?)

Where does the Universe End, “geographically”?

When does the Universe end, time-wise?

Why are quantum particles (or waves) uncertain?

Did the Big Bang occur or not?



Well, the questions go on and on, as Ives’ little opus harmonically states.

And there have been and are no answers, none readily available anyway. But the scientific and philosophical poseurs continue to seek them, and for that we are grateful, are we not?

[Scientific] Glossolalia:

Speaking in [mathematical] tongues



Scientists, especially physicists, like to be arcane, abstruse.

Of course scientists use the language of the gods, mathematics, but that should not prevent them from communicating their hypotheses and theories in the languages of mankind.



Yet this is what happens, except for a few scientific popularizers, such as the late, greats Stephen Jay Gould and Carl Sagan (to name only two).



Certainly physicists (and other scientific types) should be able to talk and write in the argot of their own kind, just as dolphins communicate with squeals and clicks to their own kind.

But that back-and-forth alienates those who want to know what’s going on in science but are excluded because the language employed, mathematical equations, is obscurant.

Science is an exclusive club, or has become one. It wasn’t always that way; well, not for the ancient Greeks anyway.

Science doesn’t exclude others by race, creed, nationality, gender preference, et cetera, but it does exclude those whose mental faculties have been short-changed.

And the shame is that such persons – the vast majority of humankind – do not have access to the truths that science has stumbled upon or ferreted out by ratiocination.

This is what has happened with Darwin and the creationists or intelligent design aficionados.



The science of evolution, although somewhat incomplete, can be accommodated by intelligent design, and no mathematics are involved.

But virtually all evolutionists (scientists) despise the idea of an intelligent designer (whom some imply is God) as we note elsewhere here.

And creationists and intelligent design proponents (nearly) loathe science and its practitioners; this because science has excluded them, as we indicate above.

Science isn’t concerned with the existential of the great unwashed, and why should they be? The hoi polloi’s interests are sensual not cerebral, usually.

But what about those who wish to evolve beyond the rabble-state? How can they do so when science speaks in language that is, for all practical purposes, foreign in nature, but more difficult to master than an actual foreign language (unless that language is Islenska perhaps).

Can mathematics be mastered by those without the mental acumen to do so? And should it be necessary for those math-defectives to learn the ins-and-outs of calculus or its abstract mathematical brethren?



To understand scientific exegeses one shouldn’t have to comprehend the machinations or tools that brought about the conclusions that those exegeses produce.

And scientists should defer, somewhat, to the needs of a select few who want to understand the reality in which they find themselves but don’t want to (or can’t) decipher the mathematical haze that is employed by science.

Anticipating science’s accommodation, should we hold our universal breaths? Probably not…..

God's Game

Many (most?) scientists are irked by the idea of God, and some – Richard Dawkins – are absolutely livid at the thought of an “omnipotent psychopath” getting inordinate attention when that “omnipotent psychopath” only exists in the minds of those with faith, not evidence or facts that God (or a God) actually exists.

The reality with which humans are confronted does not, in the modern era, allow for a God. He (or It) hasn’t provided evidence, circumstantial or otherwise, that He (or It) exists.

Of course, Joseph Smith, the Mormon founder, and quasi-religious incidents (Lourdes, Fatima), seem to indicate that a divine entity is at work in the world, but let’s discount those rather unverifiable events and consider where God is now.

About 10,000 or 11,000 years ago, humans appeared, if one accepts their mythologies, to have had some kind of contact with entities they deemed as God, or gods.

The accounts are ubiquitous, so they can’t be dismissed out of hand. But that’s not our concern here.

Today, God does not exist, as far as anyone can tell. And that’s what boggles great minds (Einstein’s, Dawkin’s, et al.).

God, as we posit elsewhere here, may be the Universe, or an ineffability that is not accessible by the human mind.

God is not a presence that intrudes on human existence. Or does He (It)?

What if the presence of God is so subtle, subliminal, that mortal minds can’t immediately recognize that presence?

Believers jump at the chance to see God in nature and other prosaic elements of the human condition. Others see God as malicious (as evidenced by childhood cancers or genocidal efforts that are successful).

And still others see no God at all – atheists, and scientists, who need proof of divine being and find none.

Artists find God in the course their enterprises. Yet those artists are often subject to the whims of a psychopathic God: Beethoven’s deafness, Mozart’s early demise, Van Gogh’s dementia, Monet’s glaucoma, Joyce’s blindness, and so on.

Stephen Hawking, lambasted by God, debilitated by Lou Gehrig’s disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), edits “God Created the Integers” (from the Leopold Kronecker quote, “God created the integers. All the rest is the work of Man.”) so one assumes that Hawking, like Beethoven (in his Pastoral Symphony or magnum opus, Ode to Joy symphony), is being just as subtle as God on one hand, but not as malicious on the other.

God for Hawking, Beethoven, and every other genius, abides somewhere in the recesses of existence, working His magic (through them, via music, mathematics, painting, literature. poetry – as Graves indicates in “The White Goddess), but not visible in any tangible way.

But God is not real, for them; God is symbolic, a transcendent concoction, brought into being by man’s art, man’s ingenious minds. The God that artists note, and play to, is their exalted creativity, not a divine entity with a separate, exalted existence.

Some physicists intuit, as we write elsewhere, a consciousness behind the cosmos, physical laws, even quantum and string theory. But that consciousness is not available to them, or anyone else, so they work around it.

Yet, what if that ineffable Being is playing a game, with man, His (Its) creation? Or is oblivious to man altogether, unless piqued by man, as Melville suggests in Moby Dick?

That is, God’s reality is masked or subverted by His (Its) deliberate obfuscation, which the Gnostics attribute as the essence of god, the demi-urgos (demiurge, such as Yahweh in the Hebrew texts) but may really be the essence of the God who created the integers, the God above god.

That would be the game of God – a malicious game in some instances, but a game nonetheless.

How can one best a God who controls the rules of the game?

Artists acquiesce to that God (their own creation or the one they conceive as real).

Scientists (evolutionists, physicists, biologists, geologist, and the rest) eschew a God who doesn’t play fair, is malevolent, is dead, or never existed, at all – not in the infinite past and certainly not in the time-line of mankind.

But that is God’s game: a ruse to bring poor, mortal man up to the level of the Supreme Divinity by spurring man’s mind. The problem has been, and is, that man is not able, and has never been able, to fathom the underlying rules of God’s game, and when they get close, they are thwarted, as in the case of Hawking, by a ploy equivalent to that in the game Sorry!

No wonder Dawkins is irritated. Smart guys like him won’t play the game, and choose to expose the Fraud who perpetrated it.

We tend to think that such Bartleby-like aloofness is the smart way to go….

The Three Universes: A Freudian Interpretation

If the Universe is God (in a symbolic but real sense), as Teilhard, Lecomte du Nouy, and others intuit, then perhaps it is constructed along the lines that Freud postulated for the human psyche: Superego, Ego, and Id.

The Ego would be the Universe as we experience it. The Superego would be the (truly) hidden, ruling aspect of the Universe. And the Id would represent Dark Matter or Dark Energy.

Before you readers discount this “hypothesis” as farfetchery, you might consider that the mystery of the Universe remains unfathomable but hinted at in the collective memory (or collective unconscious as Jung would have it) of humankind.

And the hint or hints are just as reasonable as the mathematical posturings of physicists and cosmologists.

Spengler’s Decline of the West caters to the idea that societies, more pertinently, countries, are actual biological entities – suffering the very same vicissitudes as the human body: illness, disease, growth, happiness, decline, et cetera.

In a more sedate rendering Tielhard de Chardin and du Nouy, both, present the Universe (God?) as a living, quasi-biological being, affected by what human beings do and think.

Chardin’s theology, made heretical by the Church but accepted by it in part, indicates that a human sin causes discomfiture in the mystical body of Christ – God, the Universe. [The Divine Milieu].

If the Universe is alive, and even many physicists (Wolf, Penrose, Bohm, Gribbin, Dyson) accept the possibility that the Universe is a living entity; some even pressing the idea that the Universe is conscious, then it seems reasonable to provide the mantle “God” to designate what that consciousness may mean to humankind.

To extrapolate the Freudian slant, we might allow for Evil (Dark Energy/Matter, even Black Holes) to be a major element in the psyche of this visible Universe, the Ego Universe.

The Id Universe is that part of the “unconscious” which allows for novae, and other cosmological catastrophes which have no meaning or rational reason for their being or occurrence.

But what about the Superego Universe – that part of the Universe psyche which impacts human life or quantum consciousness (to differentiate it from the macrocosmic consciousness of the Universe itself)?

This is where science can’t or hasn’t been able to intrude, and mysticism must reign, as with Bucke’s presentation of Cosmic Consciousness.

Science can deal with the Ego Universe, the overt, conscious mind of “God” and the Id Universe, the uncontrollable, violent manifestations of the visible and invisible Universe.

But the higher psychical structure of the Universe, the Superego? That can’t be approached, let alone attained, with the tools of science as they’ve evolved, many scientists eschewing Newton’s thinking along the lines offered here, and losing contact with the covert reality of the Universe.

Even Freud, by discounting a living, breathing God (Universe), was thwarted by his atheistic intransigence, while Jung pursued the Newtonian ideal, which even eluded his great mind.

However, we contend that the layering of the psychical artifacts of Freud upon the Universe, as it is conceived nowadays, might take us forward to a new understanding, so long as we incorporate the “unscientific” but insights the ancient mystics.

Yes, this is anathema to many in the scientific community, but could it provide any less understanding than the obscure theorizing extant? We don’t think so.

Cosmology, Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and a Resolution of the Fermi-Hart Paradox

Click here to read Paul S. Wesson’s 1989 paper about the cosmological constraints on receiving signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.

Copyright: Royal Astronomical Society

Being and/or Nothingness?

Anastikaya – Sanskrit’ use in Jainism to mean “nonphysical.”

Ouk – Greek term for nonbeing (nothing).

Sartre’s masterwork, Being and Nothingness [L’Etre et le Neant] ruminates about psychic life, but accepts, explicitly, existence; there is something: consciousness is directly a revelation of a being other than consciousness – an ontological proof for Sartre. [A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness” by Joseph S. Catalano, Harper TorchBooks, NY, 1974, Page39]

“Consciousness… by its nature is a revelation of a reality other than consciousness.”

Sartre, relying on Hegel, posits that nonbeing, nothingness, is only possible by the reality of being; that is, non-being (nothingness) is part of the gestalt known as being.

But what if “nothingness” is not an abstract as some say or the other side of Sartre’s life-coin – the complimentary of being?

What if nothingness is ouk, without the semantic hodgepodge of Hegel, Heidegger, and Sartre himself?

That is, nothingness is the total and actual state where existence (or being) is not just an archetypal void but nihilo, pure and simple.

Can that be? Is the Universe bounded by nothing? Creation in the midst of an absolute void?

Physicists (and that dying breed, philosophers) have to contend with being. It’s not just a matter of career, but a substance of the curious mind.

Yet, it is futile, that search for the explanation of everything, is it not? Because, after all, one bumps up against the possible demise of consciousness, not just the death of the body (and concomitant brain).

If Sartre is right, that being and nothingness, are two-sides of existence, then how can the fragile, non-tangible side exist without the physical attribute that constitutes the part of being that is accessible to reason, or seems to be?

Nirvana is bliss, not non-being, as some mistakenly think.

Anastikaya is only non-physicality, not the total absence of everything.

Nothingness does not, as Seinfeld told George, have to be something.

Nothing means no thing.

Is it possible for there to be nothing? After all our senses tell us that things exist.

But the senses can not tell us if things exist after consciousness departs from the body from which those senses operate. (Human senses are relegated to use by the body filled with life only.)

And we have the possibility (harking back to our previous post) that consciousness may not exist at all after death ensues.

Here’s the dilemma: There seems to be being. But the question of non-being seems to be unanswerable.

How is that part of the human equation to be addressed? Can it be? Or does it all boil down to nihilism or faith?

And even scientists have to have faith, else they’d quit searching for a theory of everything, since to go on seeking that theory implies faith that one exists.

Even the rabid Richard Dawkins has to admit that.

See if this helps:

http://faculty.fullerton.edu/jeelooliu/Cosmic%20principle.htm

Where does consciousness reside?

Descartes' oft-quoted mantra “I think therefore I am” is pithy but not necessarily true, as most cognitive psychologists posit.

But when one is conscious and thinking, one can locate the thought, consciousness, as if it were somewhere above the eyes, hanging like a constrained cloud of intangible mass just beyond the cerebral cortex, but not outside one’s head.

Wikipedia has a concise section on consciousness:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness

And for the more academically inclined, Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a rather complete exegesis:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/

But for this posting, we’ll set aside the amorphous cogitations on consciousness for a down-to-earth rendering….

If Descartes had stopped at “Je pense” (or just “Cogito”), he would have made a metaphysical statement.

But by adding “Je suis” he extrapolated beyond a reality that could be or can be verified.

Not wishing to get bogged down in the niceties of the philosophical meanderings about consciousness (or the “soul” for some), it is patently obvious that the person typing this is conscious.

And if that is only a reality in the typist’s firmament, then so be it. The “discussion” is valid within the framework created by the cogito dictum.

The question then arises, What happens to that consciousness when the typist expires, or goes dormant as with a coma or stroke?

Does it (consciousness) remain connected to the defunct human being, eventually to wane, along with the living tissues?

Or does it transport to an ethereal state, disconnected from the brain or pineal gland that generated it? (Did the brain or pineal gland actually generate it?)

What formed the consciousness in the first place? A nexus of sensory input accumulated over the lifetime of the typist? An accumulation of “spiritual-like DNA” provided by the Collective Unconscious? Or a combination of both, as Jung posited?

Life after death experiences and out-of-body anecdotes purport to tell us that consciousness continues to exist, away from the body.

But those episodes have not been substantiated in any real way, so one should discount them to maintain a kind of scientific objectivity.

If consciousness does continue to exist at the demise of the body that housed it, where does it go when the body no longer lives (exists)?

If it persists, consciousness that is, why can no one access it? Houdini, among others, wished to do so, but to no avail.

If it goes to another realm, as religionists insist, one can never access it, until or unless their consciousness also goes to that same realm. And if quantum physicists or string theorists are right, how can consciousness be tethered to one realm rather than any other? What would be the mechanism for the sorting of consciousness to one realm over another?

Matter can neither be created nor destroyed, as the maxim states, but consciousness is not matter. The essence of consciousness seems to be evanescence. Consciousness is a reality without substance – the only such reality.

How is it possible to concretize that insubstantial reality? It isn’t possible.

Consciousness, like many other discussable matters of philosophers, physicists, and in this instance, psychologists, is an ultimately non-provable state of being.

Like the concept of God, or the infinity of the Universe, consciousness will remain an unresolved enigma.

It can’t be deconstructed. It can’t be defined (and hasn’t been defined). And what happens to it will not be, cannot be, deter- mined, so sane persons should move on, to matters that can be.

But perhaps you disagree…..

The Neo-Philosophers: Decline and Fall of Science

Science has regressed to the Grecian age of ratiocination, circa 500 B.C., when the meaning of existence was paramount or thinkers.

The regression isn’t a bad one, since the Greeks had a grasp of the fundamental questions plaguing mankind.

But it also means that science, even Einstein, the quantumists, singularity mavens, and now string theorists, have progressed not a whit, despite all the regurgitation of Greek thought, repackaged and regifted to those still hoping for answers to why we are here, and what can we do about it.

Richard Dawkins takes Thales one step further, but only a step. And Bohr, Planck, Heisenberg, Dirac, Penrose, Susskind, Smolin, even Hawking, have dealt with and extrapolated, minutely, what Diophantes, Apollonius, Hipparchus, Aristarchus, and Euclid (among other Greek greats) has cogitated about over 200 years ago.

Philosophy, like music, art, and literature, reached an acme in the 1800s, having evolved through Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, the great Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Comte, Wittgenstein, Russell, and Sartre to a point where physicists took it upon themselves to replace the old thinking with new thinking, which was, for all intents and purposes, a resurgence of recycled arguments for reality and God, but couched in mathematical terms that laymen (the whole of mankind) hasn’t been able to decipher, thus allowing the patina of new, unique thought to be the mantle of physics – a falsity that reigns to this day.

String theory, rightfully excoriated by Lee Smolin, is merely a reworking of the Atomists: Parmenides, Heraclitus, Leucippus, and Democritus.

(The Atomists contended that atoms were unchanging, but constantly rearranging into different shapes Richard Osborne relates in Philosophy, Page 10. Isn’t that what string theory proposes, replacing atoms with unchanging, constantly rearranging strings?)

But it isn’t the assumption of ideas from the Greeks (and the reworking of them) by 21st Century physicists that is the issue. It’s that philosophy has been co-opted by mathematical brigands who don’t give a fig about ultimate realities, preferring to masticate equations and hypotheses which take mankind and civilization nowhere; nowhere transcendental, nowhere practical, and nowhere edifying even in the realm of thought.

How did this happen? Lee Smolin touches on it in his book, The Trouble with Physics, but that only besmirches the obsession with string theory (as we’ve noted earlier here).

Smolin blames academe for the decimation of physics theories other than those regarding “strings.”

Yet it’s the whole scientific community that is excommunicate. Science – that is, mathematics – flush with concocted equations – has removed clarifying logical thought with esoteric logical thought, and thus taken profundity away from thinkers and replaced it with a Freemasonry kind of code and secrecy, not unlike that of the alchemists, who established their brotherhood as to appear more enlightened than those who wanted simple, clear answers about, not arcane nostrum and experiments which produce nothing but charlatanry and hokum.

It’s seem time that philosophers, the non-mathematical kind, reassume the high road of thought, taking it away from the whiz-kids of geometry and arithmetic so that the human race can come to grips with the existential reality confronting it, and has always confronted it, well before the raft of “scientists” pillaged rational thinking.

Cosmic Intelligence and Black Holes

The paper by Vladimir A. Lefebvre, School of Social Sciences, University of California, Irvine and Yuri N. Efremov. Sternberg Astronomical Institute. Moscow State University, Moscow, titled above, takes the idea of Teilhard de Chardin and others, about the “living” -- even divine – universe, and puts a scientific patina on it, providing a new operative template for SETI in the process,

The paper can be read by clicking here….

The number four is a clue to the universe (and reality)?

The fundamental forces of the physicists consist of four: gravitation, electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force.

Swiss psychologist and philosopher Carl Jung posits the number four as an archetype (from Quodlibet.net):

QUATERNITY. "The quaternity is an archetype of almost universal occurrence. For instance, if you want to describe the horizon as a whole, you name the four quarters of heaven...There are always four elements, four prime qualities, four colors, four castes, four ways of spiritual development, etc. So, too, there are four aspects of psychological orientation. The ideal of completeness is the circle or sphere, but its natural minimal division is a quaternity.” (Jung’s Psychology and Religion: West and East)

Four is the secret number of Kabbalists.

And this is what Wikipedia has to say about the number four:
Four is the only number in the English language for which the number of letters in its name is equal to the number itself. This is also true in several other languages.

Four is the smallest composite number that is equal to the sum of its prime factors. As a consequence of this, it is the smallest Smith number.

It is also a Motzkin number.

In addition, . Continuing the pattern in Knuth's up-arrow notation, , and so on, for any number of up arrows.

A four-sided plane figure is a quadrilateral (quadrangle) or square, sometimes also called a tetragon. A circle divided by 4 makes right angles. Because of it, four (4) is the base number of plane (mathematics). Four cardinal directions, four seasons, duodecimal system, and vigesimal system are based on four.

A solid figure with four faces is a tetrahedron. The regular tetrahedron is the simplest Platonic solid. A tetrahedron, which can also be called a 3-simplex, has four triangular faces and four vertices.

The smallest non-cyclic group has four elements; it is the Klein four-group. Four is also the order of the smallest non-trivial groups that are not simple.

The four-color theorem states that a planar graph (or, equivalently, a flat map of two-dimensional regions such as countries) can be colored using four colors, so that adjacent vertices (or regions) are always different colors. Three colors are not, in general, sufficient to guarantee this.

Lagrange's four-square theorem states that every positive integer can be written as the sum of at most four square numbers. Three are not always sufficient; 7 for instance cannot be written as the sum of three squares.

Four is the first positive non-Fibonacci number.

Each natural number divisible by 4 is a difference of squares of two natural numbers, i.e. 4x = y2 − z2.

Four is an all-Harshad number and a semi-meandric number.

4 is the supreme number of the universe according to the Time Cube.

Now how does reality or the universe come into the picture?

Underlying all laws of physics, all theological discourse, and all philosophical postulations resides something that defines nature, the universe, human existence.

Scientists search for it in evolution, string theory, or mathematical constructs.

Theologians look for it revelations from God.

Philosophers seek it in discourse.

But it is elusive, as has been the case since time immemorial.

The number four is the cover for that ultimate reality; the red-herring that takes mankind away from the underlying truth of life.

By disguising reality as a composite of four things (many listed above), the progenitor(s) of the idea have confused even the most brilliant of minds – Jung is a prime example.

Jung’s God doesn’t consist of just the Trinity (God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost – the Paraclete); it also consists of a fourth entity, Satan or Evil – the dark side of the godhead, shorn by the early Church fathers so as not to confuse the masses or derail the political thrust that the Church needed to maintain its worldly power.

But Jung’s quaternal God only answers the conundrum of Evil in the world; that is, God is both Good and Evil – all things, as Aristotle proclaimed by his captain of the ship analogy and which the great Thomas Aquinas didn’t exactly quell in Summa Theologica.

Just as three (The Trinity) is a falsehood, so is the number four. We know what three is pulling us away from, but what is four pulling us away from?

Pi

Yes, Pi…..3.14 (ad infinitum?)

If scientists – mathematicians, physicists, abstractionists – can’t arrive at the Pi culmination, how can we expect them to arrive at the ultimate singularity, the so-called theory of everything?

To derive the final integer of Pi would provide access to the final mystery that confronts man.

Yes, since the game of God, or the consciousness that pervades (we assume) the universe, and certainly this Earth and mankind, will be made clear when (or if) Pi is finalized.

Is there an end to Pi? Or is it infinite in the same way that some say the universe is infinite? Or does Pi have an edge, as others say the universe has?

Pi is God, some say. We won’t go that far, but we do think it’s what 3 and 4 masks, and that Pi, which includes, upfront, 3 and 4 (and significantly) the number 1, seems portentous, and not just in a mystical sense, but in a practical, mathematical, scientific sense.

Do we not have the computing power to bring this about? Or will we, as an intelligent species, continue to be flummoxed by the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter?

Nothing new under the sun [Ecclesiastes]

Physicists, philosophers, theologians all regurgitate ideas that were examined by the Greek philosophers [circa 500 B.C.] or Oriental thinkers [circa 650 B.C.] and pretend they are the discoverers of new concepts.

Darwin’s theories, especially evolution, has antecedents in Anaximander [610-547 B.C.].

Einstein’s relativity is hinted at by Thales [640-546 B.C.]

Quantum Theory originated with Leucippus and Democritus [circa 540 B.C.]

Hawkings’ mathematics can be found in the works of Pythagoras [570-500 B.C.]

Perhaps if all the works of the early Greeks or Orientals were available – most have been lost to us – the answer sought by today’s scientists could be found, or helped along.

The point of all the theorizing extant is a solution for the meaning of life one supposes, which is exactly what the early thinkers hoped for also.

The problem today is how to mingle technology and the apparent evolution of thought with the great ideas of the past.

But will today’s scholars set aside hubris to do that? Some may, most will not.

The brilliant Douglas Hofstadter has tried, but mostly confuses the hoi polloi, and not a few scientific elites, as has Penrose, Paul Davies, and a few others.

Early thought, more often than not, intermixed ideas about the gods of God. Few scholars today, and even fewer scientists, concede there are gods or a God. And they are right to eschew the concept (for reasons we enumerate elsewhere).

But can a definition for the idea of God, a Supreme Being, be mitigated to allow its integration into the hypotheses and theories of science, as mathematics have been integrated?

Or is the idea of a God not necessary for an explanation of the mysteries that still rankle science?

One can do work-arounds (eliminating God from theoretical equations) but will that allow for a final solution of questions asked, such as why does string theory, relativity, or quantum not produce answers that satisfy, that will not produce a “theory of everything”?

We’ll address all this with notes from the literature, new, old, and arcane.

Meanwhile, let us suggest a simple but thoughtful book to get started:

Human Destiny by Lecomte du Nouy, available at Amazon, Powell’s, and other online bookstores.