I understand everything that I have written in One Bipedal Journey. How do I validate what I have written? I must honestly relate that I have validated to myself what I have written or I would not have written it. The validation for me has increased with the act of writing this manuscript. What I have written should be internally consistent. Where it is inconsistent, resolution must be pursued. If inconsistency persists then revisions must be pursued vigorously even if it means abandoning premises thought to be correct and deviations from large aspects of what was thought to be correct must be taken in the hopes of perceiving better the reality not yet fully understood. That said, it must also be reaffirmed that Wonder and Mystery are forever and always present. The principle of uncertainty is an aspect of the Wonder and Mystery at work.
I am of the opinion, which, perhaps, is a belief, that since humankind is Nature reflecting upon itself and since learning by doing is understandably replete with mistakes or errors, humankind has need for some mechanism to fill areas that Wonder and Mystery obscure from definitive clarity of perception. That mechanism is present in all of the various myths and diverse religions of humankind as demonstrated by the 43 to 53 creation myths discussed in Wikipedia’s article, “List of Creation myths”. As such, formulated responses to the Wonder and Mystery must be structured tentatively and be as flexible as possible to account for the needed modifications required as new or more accurate perceptions produce deeper insight.
The learning-by-doing process of coming to terms with the Wonder and Mystery of our reality that has paradoxes, riddles, hidden forces, nonlinear elements and a sensitive dependence on initial conditions that give rise to unexplainable events is no less replete with errors and mistakes generated by human activity when articulating philosophies and religions. Religions more so than philosophies bypass the fallibility of human activity by proclaiming that their sacred proclamations and teachings originate from some divine infallible province if not directly from the infallible voice of a supreme being. I am most familiar with the teachings and workings of the Roman Catholic Church than any other religion. I have already indicated my living experience with the RCC and its attempt to possess infallibility by the anointed (appointed) men (fallible creatures) of God.**
**Review “The ‘Holy-men’ of the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) are Hiding Behind Their ‘God’ “
Discrepancies in perception of reality also occur in scientific investigations and explanations. Consider the following from James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science on page 68:
The solvable systems are the ones shown in textbooks. … Nonlinear systems with real chaos were rarely taught and rarely learned. … All their [student scientists’] training argued for dismissing them as aberrations. Only a few were able to remember that the solvable, orderly, linear systems were the aberrations.
And then there is Hawking’s thought process stated on page 136 of A Brief History of Time :
God may know how the universe began, but we cannot give any particular reason for thinking it began one way rather than another. On the other hand, the quantum theory of gravity has opened up a new possibility, in which there would be no need to specify the behavior at the boundary. There would be no singularities at which the laws of science broke down and no edge of space-time at which one would have to appeal to God or some new law to set the boundary conditions for space-time. One could say: “The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary.”
The issue of perceiving and understanding the boundary of the universe is a nonissue. The phrase, “has opened up a new possibility,” with an emphasis on the word, possibility, does not make this a definitive statement that the boundary does not in fact exist. It only states that the boundary is not required. Required or not, it might possibly exist. The problem of explaining the boundary of the universe with its probable singularity is avoided altogether through a statement of dismissal.
This is not the only time that I have encountered avoidance issues in the scientific community. Before I had any understanding of quantum mechanics when I was in my high school physics class, I was learning about light, Albert Einstein, and E=mc2. An interesting point was made about light traveling though space and the idea that light was considered to travel in the same fashion as a wave but a wave needs a medium through which to move. This is interesting because sound also moves through wave action and sound is not present in outer space because there is no medium through which sound can travel. Interesting! Light travels though outer space but sound does not. It was explained that outer space has ‘ether’ which is the medium through which light can travel. This is a curiosity to me because light can travel through ether but sound cannot? This persistent curiosity moved me to research ‘ether’ again as I began writing about this section of One Bipedal Journey.
Below is what I found on page 19 in Sidelights on Relativity by Albert Einstein:
…the Newtonian action at a distance is only apparently immediate action at a distance, but in truth is conveyed by a medium permeating space, whether by movements or by elastic deformation of this medium. Thus the endeavour toward a unified view of the nature of forces leads to the hypothesis of an ether. This hypothesis, to be sure, did not at first bring with it any advance in the theory of gravitation or in physics generally, so that it became customary to treat Newton’s law of force as an axiom not further reducible. But the ether hypothesis was bound always to play some part in physical science, even if at first only a latent part.
A scientific hypothesis or theory is an assertion of what is scientifically required but not yet proven. Black holes were once upon a time regulated to the condition of being hypothetical. Now modern scientists have located actual black holes via the advancement in modern scientific instrumentation like advanced telescopes and other instrumentation and procedures to research very distant objects of the universe.
As a teacher, I have observed that young students with holes in their knowledge base tend to fill those holes with their speculations that provide continuity of their thoughts even if those speculations are not accurate. Magical thinking at times is the provider of the needed information to support not yet proven assertions by individuals who have preconceived agendas to promote. Are these behaviors willful deceptions?
Willful deceptions are positions made by individuals who know and have perceived accurate information that is inconsistent with the information they seek to profess as the true reality of the matter under consideration. If the individual has no knowledge of the matter at hand or only partial knowledge and therefore constructs plausible explanations of what is otherwise missing, then such individuals are speculating or, if engaged in a scientific investigation, are hypothesizing a position that will be proven or disproven through structured scientific experimentation. Deception is an attempt to divert attention form what is known to be true. Magical thinking, speculation, hypothesizing, and such are attempts not to deceive, but to fill in what is missing in ones thinking. If my perception of human behavior regarding the tendency for humans to seek a full explanation of any aspect of our reality is correct, then the placement of plausible possibilities in areas of unknowns is driven by the human need to express the whole of something even when some of the parts are missing. I believe Einstein’s comment, “the endeavour toward a unified view of the nature of forces leads to the hypothesis of an ether,” is a demonstration of the human tendency to seek an explanation of the whole.
Learning in the world outside of schools occurs in chunks of information gained here and there depending upon the experiences of the life lived. Learning about the whole of reality takes a lifetime, if in fact the whole of reality can be fully understood in any given lifetime. This bipedal’s reflective journey started with my entrance into a Roman Catholic grammar school when I was five years old. That was 64 years ago and I am still developing and expanding my consciousness. My writing compiled in this manuscript started in 1968. I did not understand all of what is recorded in this volume in a linear, sequential manner. I learned and perceived different concepts at different times. At other times what was learned in different situations at different times were reflected upon and found to be connected in ways that lead to more perceptions that continued to fill in the pieces of a gigantic worldview like a million pieces of a huge jigsaw puzzle beginning to form a recognizable landscape. My consciousness at this point in my history believes wholeheartedly that humans, collectively, are Nature reflecting upon Itself.
A complete, comprehensive and internally consistent description of our reality motivates magical thinking, speculation, hypothesizing, and such as temporary placeholders for areas not yet fully understood to perceive a whole, coherent worldview. Nature reflecting upon Itself is a collaborative effort by all humans past and present that have expressed and recorded in oral and written fashion their understanding of reality at the time of those expressions. We, humans, of the present have the advantage of all of that effort that has preceded us. We have much more to reflect upon and digest than our first ancient hominid ancestors who began painting on cave walls and burying their dead ceremoniously.
I believe the 43 to 53 creation myths discussed in Wikipedia’s, “List of Creation myths” are part of the product of the dynamic, ever evolving quest to know, understand and express a complete, comprehensive and internally consistent description of our reality. This is not to devalue religion or other methods of expressing what we did not know scientifically or experientially. If the universe is dynamic and as long as it remains dynamic, the essential element is change. The process of evolution is the process of adapting to change. It seems to me history demonstrates that if entities do not adapt to meaningful, significant change then those entities have a high probability of extinction. I am no different from other humans that have put forth their understanding of the reality of our existence. I too fill in aspects of my description of reality with supposition and speculation and other tools that assist with consistency of thought.
The wonder that attracts my attention is energy. I have been searching for a definition of what energy is, not what it does. As previously stated energy “is a scalar quantity,” it has magnitude. This is a start for describing what energy is. It is “abstract and cannot always be perceived.” It is intangible. Yet, some individuals could retort, “But you can feel energy when a baseball hits you in the head.” True, however, “work shifts energy from one system to another.” What you feel is the work of the baseball shifting the energy from the ball to your head. You feel the effects of the work the ball has done to your head.” Energy, itself, is intangible. Energy is the ability to do work. To say that energy is the ability to do work describes what it can do not what it is. To say, “A gun has the ability to end life is not the same as saying, “A gun is a human invention constructed of a metal through which a projectile (a bullet) travels at different speeds depending of the amount of gun power stored in the cartridge that has a primer which is ignited by the firing pin attached to the hammer that is activated by the pulling of the trigger.” The latter description tells what a gun is. The former tells what a gun can do. A baseball bat has the ability to end life, but a baseball bat is not a gun. A gun is not a baseball bat. The entity that has the ability to end a life is the human force utilizing the gun or the bat.
Here is where my reflections brought me to an amazing curiosity about energy. A bullet and a baseball have energy and are themselves the product of work. My developed and expanding consciousness is also a product of work and is itself a critical cause of the work that I do. Consider this manuscript that I am writing. Energy brought this manuscript into being. The amazing curiosity that is a wonder for me to perceive is expressed in a simple question. Is the energy of the ball, the bullet and this manuscript the same energy? Is the energy that is producing this manuscript as dumb as the energy of the ball and the bullet?
Stephen Hawking gives a timeline, “…the Big Bang occurred about ten thousand million years ago — it takes about that long for intelligent beings to evolve.” It takes ten thousand million years to develop intelligent beings. But, time is a construct and not a reality. Remove time and the reality is that many events had to occur before my consciousness could develop and expand to what it is today.
Just as energy is understood to have two conditions of being: 1) potential energy (which my high school teacher indicated was “stored energy” and 2) kinetic energy (which was stated as energy at work), I consider consciousness to be an energy state composed of both potential and kinetic energy because all the work that I perform and all of the actions that I engage are the effects caused by my consciousness. Stephen Hawking avoids contemplating the universe just before Big Bang detonates because:
There would be no singularities at which the laws of science broke down and no edge of space-time at which one would have to appeal to God or some new law to set the boundary conditions for space-time. One could say: “The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary.”
The Uncaused Cause of the First Cause was infinitely hot with a space of zero and to my thinking would not have matter. It would be intangible. To me, the significant question is did the UCFC have the capacity of consciousness? Did the infinite energy of the UCFC possess consciousness? An immediate response that rushes into my thinking is, “Of course not. If it is pure energy and there was no matter, what would possess consciousness? It is a wonderment! What if consciousness is an energy state? If the UCFC is pure energy, infinite energy, and if consciousness is a state of energy, then why not have the possibility of consciousness residing in UCFC? Awesome! The ramifications would require an extreme paradigm shift of extreme proportions. Perhaps such a consideration is too awesome to consider, but this is precisely what Three-thirds of One-Third Three Times explores.
This is where singularities come into play. As stated by Stephen Hawking’s statement, “There would be no singularities at which the laws of science broke down.” Singularities are conditions of being in which the known laws of science are unreliable. As such, the UCFC as in the condition of the universe just before the Big Bang occurred could have consciousness because it could be a singularity even if the existence of our universe does not require such a condition. Wonder and Mystery are forever and always present.