I was reading about Nietzsche.
Somehow, a while later, I was wondering whether the universe might be a self-causing cosmic phoenix.
This is generally how things go.
I don’t really know philosophy. I definitely don’t know enough physics. I cannot do the mathematics required to explain half the things I am about to talk about.
These are not answers.
They are just questions I kept following because I found them interesting.
Maybe philosophers just kept asking “why?”
I had a slightly disrespectful thought:
Were people like Socrates and Nietzsche basically just people who looked at the world one day and thought:
“Wait. Why are we doing all of this?”
Obviously, there is considerably more to philosophy than that.
But I think there is something underneath it.
Why is this good?
Why is that bad?
Why do we want the things we want?
Why do we accept certain rules?
Why should I trust what everyone else considers obvious?
And perhaps once something becomes conscious enough to recognise itself, questioning becomes almost inevitable.
First:
I am.
Then, unfortunately:
Who am I?
Who is the “I”?
This seemed straightforward for approximately thirty seconds.
I am my name.
Except my name was given to me.
I am my body.
But my body changes.
I am my memories.
But I forget things. Memories can also change.
I am my personality.
I am definitely not exactly the same person I was ten years ago.
My beliefs?
Those change too.
Fine.
Maybe I am the person doing the thinking.
And this is where Nietzsche arrives to make the situation considerably less comfortable.
One of the ideas discussed in the essay I was reading is that we may be too quick to assume there is an “I” sitting somewhere behind every thought, deliberately creating it.
Nietzsche points out that thoughts seem to arrive when they arrive. Saying “I think” already assumes that there is a stable subject responsible for producing the thought.
Try predicting your next completely spontaneous thought.
It is surprisingly difficult.
If I deliberately choose a thought, then that isn’t really the spontaneous thought I was trying to predict.
Something appears.
Then I notice it.
Then I say:
“I thought of that.”
Of course, that doesn’t mean thoughts come from nowhere.
Your brain, memories, body, emotions, senses, environment, previous thoughts and probably a ridiculous number of other processes are all interacting.
Maybe the better picture isn’t:
me → thought
but something more like:
body → environment → memory → thought → awareness → reaction → another thought
A system continuously feeding back into itself.
Maybe there isn’t a tiny observer sitting somewhere inside me.
Maybe the organism itself is doing the observing.
Which raises another unpleasant little question:
If all of these processes continuously produce what I call “me”…
is the self a thing, or is it something that is constantly happening?
I don’t know.
Wonderful.
Then there was the crocodile
The essay begins with philosopher Val Plumwood surviving a crocodile attack.
Afterward, she described the disturbing realisation that, to the crocodile, she wasn’t only a person.
She was also food.
I haven’t really stopped thinking about that.
Because both things were true.
To herself, she was an entire person: memories, relationships, thoughts, fears, plans.
To the crocodile:
food.
Humans naturally experience ourselves as the centre of our own reality.
Of course we do. I experience the world from behind my eyes, not yours.
But the rest of nature does not necessarily recognise the categories that feel so important to me.
To gravity, I have mass.
To bacteria, my body is an environment.
To another animal, under the right circumstances, I could be food.
I can simultaneously be an enormously complicated conscious person and a temporary arrangement of biological material.
That is both obvious and somehow very uncomfortable.
Does nothing actually exist?
Then I started wondering about the beginning of everything.
If everything has an origin, where did the universe come from?
And eventually you reach the classic problem:
How can something come from nothing?
But then I wondered:
Why are we assuming nothing is the normal state?
Maybe existence is normal and nothing is the strange idea.
Everywhere we look, things seem to be doing something.
Stars form.
Organisms reproduce.
Matter moves.
Energy transforms.
Space expands.
Things die and become material for other things.
Even what physicists call empty space isn’t the same thing as philosophical absolute nothingness.
And whenever I try to imagine “nothing,” I fail.
I imagine a black void.
But a black void already contains darkness and space.
I imagine an empty universe.
Still a universe.
I imagine an infinite blank area.
There is still an area.
There is still somehow an observer looking at it.
True nothing would mean:
No space.
No time.
No observer.
No darkness.
No laws.
No possibility.
Nothing that could change into anything else.
Can the human mind even represent that?
A blind person doesn’t necessarily “see black”
This is where blindness suddenly helped me understand the problem.
When I close my eyes, I associate the lack of vision with darkness.
But black is still something you can see.
Someone with no visual experience isn’t necessarily sitting inside an infinite black screen.
There may simply be no visual experience there at all.
Another way I started thinking about it:
What colour is the space behind my head right now?
It isn’t black.
It isn’t white.
There simply isn’t visual information there.
So maybe I’ve been accidentally treating nothing as though it were something.
When we imagine:
nothing → universe
we put “nothing” on the left side of a timeline.
But now our nothing has a before.
It has duration.
It sits there.
Then something happens.
We have accidentally given nothing properties.
Maybe absolute nothing isn’t a state at all.
And if it isn’t a state, perhaps asking why something emerged from it is already the wrong question.
Maybe our senses are the problem
Then I thought about colour.
Humans can only see a tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Infrared exists.
Ultraviolet exists.
Radio waves exist.
X-rays exist.
They are around us whether we can see them or not.
Other animals perceive parts of reality that humans cannot naturally perceive.
So the version of reality that feels complete to me is actually a tiny sensory window.
Evolution did not need to give us a perfect understanding of the universe.
It needed to make us sufficiently good at surviving.
You don’t need intuitive quantum mechanics to avoid being eaten.
You don’t need to see radio waves to find food.
Perhaps our senses give us something more like an interface than a complete picture.
Not necessarily an illusion.
Just an incomplete representation.
I started imagining an ant walking across a huge painting.
It can study the pigment.
It can understand the texture of the canvas.
It might become extraordinarily good at understanding the chemistry underneath its feet.
But perhaps it can never get far enough away to realise:
It is standing on a portrait.
I wonder how many things we are like the ant about.
What even is time?
This naturally led to time.
Humans clearly invented ways of measuring time.
Seconds.
Minutes.
Hours.
Calendars.
Nature does not know that it is Friday.
But that doesn’t mean we invented whatever phenomenon those measurements describe.
A ruler doesn’t create distance.
Maybe a clock doesn’t create time either.
Without humans, stars would still change.
Atoms would still decay.
Planets would still move.
Things would happen in some kind of sequence.
But the way we experience time might still be very human.
I experience:
past → now → future
There is always this moving present.
But perhaps that sensation of moving through time is partly produced by consciousness.
My brain contains memories of earlier events.
It does not contain memories of tomorrow.
New information continuously arrives.
I call the changing boundary:
now.
What would time be like if nothing conscious existed to experience a “now”?
I have absolutely no idea.
And what was there before time?
Which then creates another problem.
What happened before the Big Bang?
The word before already assumes time.
Maybe that is like asking what lies north of the North Pole.
Maybe ordinary time itself emerged with the universe.
Or maybe something existed that doesn’t behave like the time humans currently understand.
We reconstruct the past through evidence that still exists.
Light carries information from earlier events.
Matter preserves history.
Radiation preserves history.
Telescopes are essentially machines for looking into increasingly old versions of the universe because light takes time to reach us.
So perhaps there is information from something earlier that we simply do not yet know how to detect.
Or perhaps some information is genuinely inaccessible from where we are.
Maybe we are trying to understand the container while being permanently trapped inside the container.
That seems inconvenient.
What if the universe is a loop?
And this is where everything became science fiction.
What if reality doesn’t have a beginning?
What if it loops?
Something like:
universe → complexity → intelligence → some unimaginably powerful event → new universe → complexity → intelligence → event → new universe
Not necessarily the exact same people doing the exact same things forever.
Just the mechanism repeating.
What interested me wasn’t really the destruction.
It was the causal problem.
Imagine that an advanced civilisation eventually causes the event that creates the conditions from which its own universe began.
That civilisation only exists because of the event.
The event only occurs because that civilisation eventually exists.
So:
Which happened first?
Maybe neither.
A circle doesn’t have a natural first point.
I immediately thought of Predestination, where cause and effect fold into each other until asking for the “original” event becomes very difficult.
And then I started thinking of the universe as a phoenix.
Not:
universe dies, then another universe appears.
But:
the death of the universe is what causes its birth.
The destruction and creation would be the same event viewed from different sides.
A cosmic phoenix.
It is almost certainly not how the universe works.
But it is a very cool thing to think about.
And slightly terrifying.
Then why bother?
Eventually another thought appeared:
I’m probably never going to answer any of this.
I’m not Einstein.
I’m not Newton.
I am not secretly going to solve cosmology one evening because I stared at the sky long enough.
I cannot do most of the mathematics involved.
So why bother thinking about it?
Unfortunately, the answer I arrived at sounds dangerously close to:
“Maybe the real treasure was the questions we asked along the way.”
I apologise.
But maybe there is a less embarrassing version.
I don’t need to solve a question for asking it to change the way I think.
I still don’t know what time actually is.
But I’m less certain that the human experience of time and time itself are exactly the same thing.
I still don’t know why anything exists.
But now I realise that assuming “nothing” should have been the default was itself an assumption.
I still don’t know exactly what the self is.
But “I am the little person inside my head controlling everything” suddenly feels much less obvious.
Maybe asking a question isn’t valuable only when you discover the final answer.
Sometimes you just uncover another assumption.
And another.
And another.
No conclusion
I don’t have one.
That’s probably going to be a recurring problem with these Field Notes.
They aren’t supposed to be essays where I pretend I know the answer.
They’re mostly things I’ve been thinking about and haven’t figured out.
For now:
I exist.
I don’t entirely understand what the “I” is.
I experience time.
I don’t really know what time is.
I can imagine empty things, but I cannot seem to imagine actual nothingness.
I can ask why something exists.
Then I can ask why the answer exists.
Apparently this can continue indefinitely.
Maybe consciousness is simply reality developing the unfortunate ability to ask questions about itself.
And somewhere along the way I found myself looking at the universe and thinking:
Maybe the universe itself is a cosmic cyclic tragedy.
I have no evidence for this.
I also cannot do the maths.
Harvard, my email is open.
