Part #5: The Intellectual Beauty of the Cosmos and Physical Reality

"Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me."
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason

Currently, I am reading A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design by the Nobel-winning physicist, Frank Wilczek, and am also about half way through physicist Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe.

From physicist Frank Wilczek's new book on the nature of the cosmos:
“Thus far our meditation on quantum reality has revealed that the world of everyday matter, when properly understood, embodies concepts of extraordinary beauty. Indeed, ordinary matter is built up from atoms that are, in a rich and precise sense, tiny musical instruments."

"In their interplay with light, they realize a mathematical Music of the Spheres that surpasses the visions of Pythagoras, Plato, and Kepler."

"In molecules and ordered materials, those atomic instruments play together as harmonious ensembles and synchronized orchestras.”

"...ideal beauty…feature color, geometry, and symmetry. Consider, in particular the magnificent plate HH. Here the local geometry of the ambient surfaces and the local patterns of their color change as our gaze surveys them."

"It is a vibrant embodiment of anamorphy and anachromy-the very themes that our unveiling of Nature's deep design finds embodied at Nature's core."

"Does the world embody beautiful ideas? There is our answer, before our eyes: Yes."

"The world does not, in its deep design, embody all forms of beauty, nor the ones that people without special study, or very unusual taste, find most appealing."

"But the world does, in its deep design, embody some forms of beauty that have been highly prized for their own sake, and have been intuitively associated with the divine.”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

"Beauty is a vague concept. But so, to begin with, were concepts like "force" and "energy." Through dialogue with Nature, scientists learned to refine the meaning of "force" and "energy," to bring their use into line with important aspects of reality."

"So too, by studying the Artisan's handiwork, we evolve refined concepts of "symmetry," and ultimately of "beauty"-
concepts that reflect important aspects of reality,
while remaining true to the spirit of their use in common language.”

"Concepts live outside of time and, because All Things Are Number, liberate us from it.”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“When religion talks about our aspirations and our sense of morality, I do not believe that science can contradict it. However, when religion contradicts science on matters of fact, religion must yield.”

“In short: the space of color information is infinite-dimensional, but we perceive, as color, only a three-dimensional surface, onto which those infinite dimensions project.”

“Two obsessions are the hallmarks of Nature's artistic style:
Symmetry- a love of harmony, balance, and proportion
Economy- satisfaction in producing an abundance of effects from very limited means”

“Dynamical beauty transcends specific objects and phenomena, and invites us to imagine the expanse of possibilities. For example, the sizes and shapes of actual planetary orbits are not simple."

"They are neither the (compounded) circles of Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Nicolaus Copernicus, nor even the more nearly accurate ellipses of Kepler, but rather curves that must be calculated numerically, as functions of time, evolving in complicated ways that depend on the positions and masses of the Sun and the other planets."

"There is great beauty and simplicity here, but it is only fully evident when we understand the deep design."

"The appearance of particular objects does not exhaust the beauty of the laws.”

“With this, in a powerful sense, our Question has been answered. The world, insofar as we speak of the world of Chemistry, biology, astrophysics, engineering, and everyday life, does embody beautiful ideas."

"The Core, which governs those domains, is profoundly rooted in concepts of symmetry and geometry, as we have seen. And it works its will, in quantum theory, through music-like rules. Symmetry really does determine structure."

"A pure and perfect Music of the Spheres really does animate the soul of reality. Plato and Pythagoras: We salute you!”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“For us, the great conclusion is this: all the colors can be obtained from any one of them, by motion, or, as we say, by making Galilean transformations."

"Because Galilean transformations are symmetries of the laws of Nature, any color is fully equivalent to any other. They all emerge as different views of the same thing, seen from different but equally valid perspectives.”

“Yet it is beautiful to discover that there's another chapter to the story, where we discover deep unity beneath, and supporting, the diversity of appearance. All colors are one thing, seen in different states of motion."

"That is science's brilliantly poetic answer to Keats's complaint that science "unweaves a rainbow.”

“Yet many creative spirits have found inspiration in the idea that the Creator might be, among other things, an artist whose aesthetic motivations we can appreciate and share-or even, in daring speculation, that the Creator is primarily a creative artist."

"Such spirits have engaged our Question, in varied and evolving forms, across many centuries."

"Thus inspired, they have produced deep philosophy, great science, compelling literature, and striking imagery."

"Some have produced works that combine several, or all, of those features. These works are a vein of gold running back through our civilization.”
―Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“The legendary Danish physicist Niels Bohr distinguished two kinds of truths. An ordinary truth is a statement whose opposite is a falsehood. A profound truth is a statement whose opposite is also a profound truth.”

“The entity we perceive as empty space is a multilayered, multicolored superconductor. What an amazing, astonishing, beautiful, breathtaking concept. Extraordinary, too.”
― Frank Wilczek, The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces
--

And other scientists on the beauty of the cosmos and our study of it:

“I have a friend who's an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say "look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. Then he says "I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing..."

"First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is ... I can appreciate the beauty of a flower."

"At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty."

I mean it's not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there's also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes."

"The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms?"

"Why is it aesthetic?"

"All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower.”
-Richard Feyman
--

“I would suggest that science is, at least in my part, informed worship.”
―Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God
--

"My views are near those of Spinoza: admiration for the beauty of and belief in the logical simplicity of the order which we can grasp humbly and only imperfectly. I believe that we have to content ourselves with our imperfect knowledge and understanding..."

"In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views.
I am not an Atheist."

"A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms — it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man."

"I have not found a better expression than 'religious' for the trust in the rational nature of reality that is, at least to a certain extent, accessible to human reason."

"I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. May I not reply with a parable? The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe."

"We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books."

"It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects."

"That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God."

"We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations."

"Scientific research can reduce superstition by encouraging people to think and view things in terms of cause and effect. Certain it is that a conviction, akin to religious feeling, of the rationality and intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a higher order....
bound up with a deep feeling, in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God."

"If I were not a Jew I would be a Quaker."
-Albert Einstein

In the Light of Science, of the Intellectual Beauty of the Cosmos,

Daniel Wilcox

Part #3: REALITY--CREATIVITY and the OPENNESS of the FUTURE

SUBPOINT C: CREATIVITY AND THE OPENNESS OF THE FUTURE

Previously:
Part #1: Monads, Quarks..."I," and God
Part #2: Ultimate Becoming, Divine Process
Point #1: Bottom Up
Subpoint A: Choices
Subpoint B: Ethics and Human Rights


Remember, we left off last time delving into the extremely complex controversies of determinism versus ethics.

A large number of religionists (in history some Jews, the vast majority of Muslims, many Christians, nearly all Hindus) and lots of atheists think that everything is fated, that humans have no choice.

If everything that will ever happen in the future, down to the slightest movement of the smallest quark and atom was totally fated--completely determined at the moment of the Big Bang about 13.4 billion years ago—then we conscious primates exist
in a gigantic many trillion-zillion-kilometered
petrified swirl of amber.

All conscious entities in the whole cosmos including us homo sapiens (in the multiverse, if it exists) are but momentary infinitesimal aware specks in solid ‘granite’
—lock, stock, and barrel.

As so many determinists give the analogy--We humans are but only "shot bullets" headed toward whatever target. locked in, without any choice.

Everything is freeze-framed forever.

If so, then there are no ethics, no choices (the ability to choose between good and bad, rights or not), no creativity, no future as commonly meant, as defined by dictionaries.

Then, life is, indeed, absurd.

HOWEVER, don’t lose hope, don’t despair.

There are plenty of other scientists, philosophers, and deep thinkers who reflect,
that while, it is true, that we do exist within a physical matter
and energy system, within that very complex existence, there is openness,
uncertainty, some chance, and even creativity at play.



Form and freedom both exist!

It is true that our lives are situated within certain parameters of our physical nature,
our temperament, our background, culture and society, family, etc.,
BUT
within that complex system, we as finite conscious entities can make creative choices,
can make a difference in the real world.

Within existence, to a certain limited degree, there is openness to the future, at every moment.



Form and creativity interplay.

First, let’s take care of the “within a limited degree,” before we launch into the wonder of creative openness.

Many cosmologists speculate based on very real world facts that Existence--all of the cosmos--will expand forever, creating space as it spirals out and out.

Our infant universe, from 13.7 billion years ago
By NASA / WMAP Science Team - http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/media/121238/ilc_9yr_moll4096.png, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23285693

The astronomy professor Chris Impey, of the University of Arizona, Tucson has written a number of science books on cosmology and astronomy including How It Began,
How It Ends,
and The Living Cosmos.

Impey makes a number of excellent points:

How It Ends: From You to the Universe by Chris Impey (W.W. Norton)
"The universe is made of stories, not of atoms," said poet and political activist Muriel Rukeyser. I agree. One of the greatest myths of science is that is consists of nothing more than dull, obdurate facts. The myth dissolves in the face of the powerful narrative that science has created to help us organize and understand the world.

We have a story of how the universe grew from a jot of space-time to the splendor of 50 billion galaxies. We have a story of how a broth of molecules on the primeval Earth turned into flesh and blood. And we have a story of how one of the millions of species evolved to hold those 50 billion galaxies inside its head.

This is a book about endings. Science mostly answers the question of how things got to be the way they are. Yet if we stop at the present day, the job is only half done, as every good story needs an ending....As a result, the material in this book is rooted in fact but it extends into conjecture. Scientists steer toward the boundary between what they know and what they don't know because that's where the excitement is."

"The material moves outward in scale from the human to the cosmic, and outward in time span from the familiar to the nearly eternal...As feisty apes with more piss and vinegar than wisdom we may not survive troubled adolescence, but visionaries are imagining ways we could transcend the limits of biology."

"Time is the ruler for these stories. We follow it on scales from a heartbeat to the 1080 years it takes for the galaxy to dissipate. Physicist John Wheeler reminded us that we take it for granted when he said, 'Time is what keeps things from happening all at once.'"

"Everyone likes a good ending...[but]this book is factual and it talks about the actual death of our planet, our star, our galaxy, us. It's not a cue to be glum, however, because the universe is filled with such magnificent possibility."
How It Ends by Chris Impey, pages 11-13, Norton & Company
--

AH, there it is--a word I as a freethinker and free-willer, love--"possibility."

That is the key point of this 3rd subpoint, that we conscious entities DO have possibilities in our very brief finite lives.

We can make a difference in our own life, in the lives of other people, even in the future of our planet!

Qualifier:
All of this does show my own intellectual bias, I admit. I earned my university degree in Creative Writing, taught creative writing to high school students, have spent my life in creative pursuits, am an avid poet and novelist, and an active science enthusiast. Therefore, from the get start, I take a dim view of closed systems, rote determinism.

Form without freedom is slavery, and philosophical determinism is the worst form of enslavement.

Form without creativity isn't even death, because that presupposes life.

Becoming is the opposite of determinism. It is openness to this next moment.

https://globaldigitalcitizen.org/30-ideas-to-promote-creativity-in-learning

Go to that website for some excellent methods to enhance your creativity.


Reach for the gold--what could be.

To be continued--




In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox

Oughter?

Huh? No this isn’t about “an animal with dark brown fur and webbed feet with claws that eats fish.”

That’s a fact of the natural world—an otter--if you’ve been to the Central Coast, Sea World, or to an aquarium lately.

We’re dealing instead with that highly controversial ideal of ultimate reality--the Transcendent.
Speaking Enlightenment talk like Thomas Jefferson and his buddies.

To use slang, “God, not facts”—as a yokel might put it. And then add when doubted,
“Heck, God ‘ott’r exist”;-)

But the famous atheists Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Jerry Coyne, and all manner of various other
non-theists including some Quakers,
claim the Transcendent doesn’t.

To them, the Enlightenment was delusion.

But for Enlightenment thinkers, God is essential--primary before existence, and exists more than any-- ‘thing.’

Yet, Deity ("ultimate reality" to quote the definition in Merriam-Webster's Dictionary) doesn’t exist as a brute fact.

Sound like a contradiction?

It's not.

If God existed as a brute fact, say, as an otter, then everyone would be a theist, everyone would know that the Enlightenment is true, would agree—yes otters and God are.

Even Dawkins would think the Divine is real then. One could prove it mathematically and scientifically.

Ultimate, transcendent reality would be as observable as the big black nose of an otter.

But ultimate reality comes from another non-place--is invisible, isn’t factually discernible in the physical world.

God exists in the sense that the transcendent ideal exists, in the sense of Ought, in the sense of Human Rights, in the sense of the Creative Good.

Again--the Transcendent Ideal, isn’t in the physically testable, observable, measurable universe.

Consider an ethical example: “All humans are created equal.”

Well, that’s simply not a “brute fact.”

Most humans aren’t created equal.

If you’re in doubt, get thee hence to a science textbook or the international news or do an in depth analysis of a large group of individuals.

Check out all the facts showing the incredible amount of inequality in humanity and the natural world.

Unequal at birth--mentally, physically,emotionally, socially, psychologically...

If everyone were equal in a brute fact sense, like “2+2=4” or “water is wet” or “otters swim,”
then that ethical ideal—equality
with its “certain unalienable Rights”--
wouldn’t have to be hoped for, sought after, striven to achieve.

But millions of men and women in history and at present DO think everyone is equal in an ideal invisible unprovable sense.

At least since the Enlightenment, many thinkers have held to equality, justice, free speech, and other human rights.

They claim all humans OUGHT to be equal, ought to be free, and ought to be treated justly.

An "ought" is a very powerful word representing transcendent truth.

Just as Immanuel Kant and many other brilliant philosophers stated.

Most of thinkers throughout the ages from Plato to Whitehead, have thought that the “Ought” itself is more real than any puny brute fact—
that indeed,
the cosmos came about because it “ought” to be created.

Many horrors of “can” exist, are in some cases brute facts, part of ruthless evolutionary history.
Besides, most scientists think that life, evolution, and the cosmos don't operate according to "ought," but are unguided.

Indeed, we humans--even sensitive individuals “can” and often do ignore the plight of children born into impoverished countries, but we OUGHT not.

That Creative Ought is Divine; God is the Creative Ought.

The Conscious Good and Creative Will behind/above/beyond this matter and energy world.

You say, you don’t believe that?

You ott’r. :-)

Only in the Ought is there hope, equality,
and all those other good things, which aren’t things, not facts--
but sought-for ideals, the transcendent truth.

In the LIGHT, the enlightenment ought,

Daniel Wilcox

The ‘Darlossness’ of Dawkins, Harris, and Coyne

One Last Caustic, Satiric Negation of the False Worldviews of this Ending Year--

The ‘Darlossness’ of Dawkins, Harris, and Coyne


It-less blasts energy to matter
less ness

Cosmic lockstep determinism

Or the lucky infinite accident upon accident

To accident—what a fluke!

Every non-act of ours caught like a termite in amber

To be repeateddddd a trillion times

If Time

Runs again and again and again...zarathustraing



Perpetually motioning life from non-life then careening astronomically

Speaking,

Through geologic time


Rock-wearing ever so slower

Than the heart-rending billion cries.

In its juggernaut,

This holo(gram)caustic negation--

Without purpose, no meaning--

This Selfish gene

Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreplicating

Through
billions of generations;

Yes,
Descent
to
the
Lower
Realms of the ‘outer limits’

Through modification.

Reality’s indifferent tyrant--

Natural selection 'chooses' with its

Unconscious, unSmitherly

Hand

Of pitiless indifference

The 1% of species to survive;

Waste muchhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Survival through sorrow

Not the Tree of Life--

But that random bush

of EXCESS.


Life is one eternal screammmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Of total unreason

No One hears;

Huge mirages of hope delude

Brief “i”s

Harris claims to be illusions;

Breathe and think for naught


Worthless flesh for every temporal now;

But a few bones fossilize

While the cosmos verses and careens


continuing to blast out a c r o s s darkness

ever expanding,



Enlarging this petty matter which doesn’t matter

Until squished in the

Quantum’s flux--

Deeply
Vacuum
Cleaned.


Daniel Wilcox
First pub. in The Clockwise Cat


Lessen the darkness with more Light
in the New Year,

Daniel Wilcox

Part 2: What's the Matter?

Heard of the 2 brilliant cosmologists, a husband and wife, arguing?

Bothered by all the dissonance in their life, he asked, “What’s the Matter?”

She responded, rolling her eyes, “Nothing!”

Angrily, he answered, “Don't start at the beginning again! It's observable to me! You don’t seem to have any Energy anymore.”

She said, “On the contrary! Energy never goes away; it’s all that Matters!”;-)

In Part 1 of The Coral Reef of the Moral Code (January 5th), I spoke of how “In many ways waking to moral consciousness is like a tiny new coral life at the top of the great barrier reef off the coast of Australia. Each tiny new human being lives atop all the ethical realizations and accomplishments of millions of humans who’ve lived before he/she came into being.”

So then why do so many humans—especially the well-educated, the brilliant, the scientific--think that ethics are subjective, relative, even illusionary, based only on a “misfiring” of natural selection, that no human being has free will/alternative choice, that we can’t choose rightly or wrongly?

For most scientists, it comes down to their convincement that only Matter and Energy are eternal or that Matter/Energy popped into existence from Nothing, a vacuum-state via a “Singularity”.

In my opinion this wrong understanding of ethics comes about because of a category error. To use a simplistic analogy, the brilliant individuals are treating science like it's the only true method, the only hammer, and everything else is a nail;-(). But science isn’t all of life; rather the marvelous, successful procedure of the scientific method only deals with life at one level and from one perception—the observable, measurable, and testable. For example, it's true that technologists, no matter their worldview can create using atomic energy.

BUT what they create is based on their differing ethics! One scientific group creates atomic weapons which slaughter thousands of civilians in horrific death, another scientific group creates an atomic power plant that gives light to millions of people.

Which will it be? Darkness and destruction or light and creativity?

This is where the areas "outside" of science come into play.

Ethics, truth, beauty, conscious awareness are beyond science's limited expertise. They are the foundation upon which science "sits." As the skeptic Hume intoned, a person can’t get “ought” from “is”, and science is the study of what IS, not the study of what Ought to Be.

When scientific thinkers try and reduce all human consciousness to brain synapse, and ethics to “misfirings” or instinctive adaptions, we are left with a materialistic determinism that those very same individuals don’t live out in their personal lives, never could, nor would want to. If they did it would take away their ability to choose, would destroy their marriages, mal-form their children, and end human society as we know it. And they would lose all sense of beauty and goodness and justice and truth.

Heck, there wouldn't even be any basis to trust the scientific method, if ethics are actually subjective, because science itself is based on the ethical code of honesty and that it's possible to find what is true.

Yet the famous scientist Francis Crick did write, “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” (The Astonishing Hypothesis, 1994)

That’s like saying all great literature is only squiggles on paper! To reduce ethics to nerve cells and associated molecules is like reducing printed language to only visible markings, or claiming that a Van Gogh painting is only mixed chemicals on fabric!

Of course, language is encased in squiggles, and painting in chemical markings—but the wonderful literature and art of the ages, and all the brilliant discoveries of technology, etc. aren’t only squiggles and markings!

Neither are all the ethical truths of the moral code only firings or mis-firings of brain synapses because of undirected, purposeless, meaningless natural processes.

A brain surgeon/researcher may be able to locate the part of the brain where the ethic "empathy" is physically observable, but that doesn’t mean those cells are all there is to the truth of unselfish caring. The cells only encase a sense of Goodness, Beauty, and Justice for we primates so we can comprehend and seek the Transcendent.

In the end, it’s not Matter and Energy that matter, but the Divine Transcendence from whom existence has been created—in whom we live and move and have our being/becoming.

In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox