How do we explain our world? Today, we do it with science. Rationally. Reality is based on matter – matter, made of atoms, atoms that obey the laws of physics. All can be explained this way. At the base – there's physics. On top of that – chemistry. And then on top of that – biology, with us humans, at the apex. Cause and effect. All neatly packaged, everything explainable.
Yet science as we know it today might not have all the answers; reconciling quantum mechanics with general relativity, or explaining dark matter and dark energy – these increasingly seem like intractable problems. The past 40 years of particle physics has yielded little more than confirming the existence of the Higgs boson. String theory has got nowhere, as have efforts to quantise gravity. And what's beyond the Standard Model? Don't know. What was before Big Bang? We don't know that either. And consciousness remains a deep mystery for science and philosophy. But will we ever know?
Here's AI's attempt to explain what was before the Big Bang. (Quite interesting, if you look closely. Multiverses? Fake universes?)
To paraphrase Stephen Hawking, there are only three scenarios for science: 1) There really is a complete unified theory of everything, which we're bound to discover in due course. 2) There is no one ultimate theory of the universe – just an infinite sequence of theories that will describe the universe ever more accurately. 3) We are destined never to know for certain.
What if it's scenario 3?
Science has been on a roll since Newton and Leibniz began the process at the end of the 17th century, shaping a deterministic reality in which (in theory) everything can be predicted with mathematical formulae. Yet ever since the discovery of quantum mechanics, doubt has started to creep into the scientistic world view. How can the cat be dead and alive at the same time? How do we interpret wave/particle duality? How do we reconcile classic physics with the quantum world? Cosmology, too, has sown doubt in the minds of science. What is causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate? How will the universe end? In heat-death? Or a Big Crunch? Will we ever know?
Maybe we need something more than science to explain the ultimate mysteries at the heart of the existence of the universe. Could it be Consciousness? Could that consciousness be what Homo sapiens has for thousands of years called God?
Tomorrow: the religious narratives.
Lent 2024: Day 17
Do we have Free Will (Pt I)
Lent 2023, Day 17
Intuition, Precognition, Divination
Lent 2022: Day 17
Defining God
Lent 2021: Day 17
Karma - more than just social control?
Lent 2020: Day 17
Religion and Feeling Good
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment