Tempus Frustro

I have gone all slack in the publishing department again. (Memo to self: Remember to slap own wrists when you have finished typing this!) My mind has, however, been unusually active over the last weeks, in spite of domestic appearances to the contrary. Of course what goes on within the confines of my lame excuse for a domicile for my ego is not necessarily the same kind of thing that others members of the species commonly associate with rational thought.

I am one of those nerdy types that have actually read Professor Stephen Hawking's opus: A Brief History of Time and, if I did not actually fully understood all of it, I at least grasped the bulk of the essential gist. In thinking about it again recently I came to realise that if one accepts Einsteinian relativity and the Big Bang as fundamentally established truths then two conclusions are inescapable. The first being that science and theology are not mutually incompatible and the second that the nature of reality is truly as tenuous as suggested in the camp-fire song: Row, row, row your boat.

Now the first is not merely a matter of conjecture. A big bang is as clear an example of a spontaneous 'act' of creation as any described by any theological doctrine or tradition. But the second is significantly more disconcerting, much harder to accept, still more difficult to comprehend at the instinctual level ... and it is a lot less likeable once the logical analysis has left you entrapped in its essential truth.

Briefly it goes like this. Time stands still for a 'thing' moving at the speed of light. Of course only light travels at the speed of light but look up at the sky ... any time, day or night; the universe is pretty well bathed in the stuff. Now it doesn't seem unreasonable to say that if time has stopped then it has ceased to exist; at least for the light, it has. Next we come to the creation. The universe all starts with a big bang from a point with no dimensions and has been expanding ever since ....

Are you with me? If time doesn't really exist then universe only actually looks big to us inside it. It actually doesn't exist at all. Which is what a thought or a dream is (or maybe that should be isn't).

It might well be a slippery slope leading to the pits of total insanity or, worse, a slideway straight into the arms of that strange late twentieth century phenomenon: the conspiracy theorists. It is not a route I feel comfortable in following. Not because I wish reality to possess some substance of tactile realness which is immune to being reduced to oblivion by logic. Nor because I want a theology that possesses an immutable and incontestable "truth" (such theologies to include atheism, because believing there are no gods is as much an act of faith as believing there are). However I am comfortable in pandering to the curiosity that my monkey ancestry has bestowed upon me and this has led me into some strange places.

Nick Bostrom is a research fellow at Oxford university and is about as unlikely a candidate for conspiracy theorist as I can imagine. So I was intrigued to come across his paper: Are You Living In a Computer Simulation? a few months ago during one of my aimless meanderings around the net. "Come back Neo, all is forgiven!" But the simulation argument has been a favourite philosophical bone for centuries from Plato thru Descartes to today. Personally I subscribe to the demands of the philosophers in The Hitchhikers Guide To The Universe by the late Douglas Adams, who fatuously demanded 'rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty' when faced with a super computer that was designed to answer the 'Ultimate Question'. (Said question being risibly and rhetorically succinct, it was: Life, The Universe, and Everything..)

But that is exactly what it is about, isn't it? We demand to know exactly when the plane is due to land and we get annoyed if it is late. We need to know exactly how much we are to be paid before we agree to go to work. Some absolutes are not just desirable they are absolutely essential. But we blithely accept a reality that utterly defies any absolutism. I just dropped a cup in my kitchen. It broke. I knew it was going to break as well as I knew that would fall toward the floor by the shortest possible route. I was not then surprised to see it broken. Was I disappointed? No. My expectations were fully realised and in consequence I should have felt only pleasure. But I was annoyed, damn it! I was annoyed because it was one of a set of six. I was annoyed because it was broken and although breakage as a probability was so close to unity as to be certain for all intents and purposes there remained an incalculable and very small, but nevertheless real, chance that it might not break. On such a minutely honed area of doubt and uncertainty I shall now retire to consider my future options for dispensation of hot infusional beverages to such guests as I from time to time entertain in my shabbily humble domain ....

Besides, I just discovered that this blogger has been over the same sort of ground and, worryingly, made more sense. Maybe I should just sit down in front of the TV and pick at the thick dead skin on my heels until they bleed ... again. Oh! Why do I keep doing that! (Unless I am unconsiously fulfilling a desire to be "interesting" in order to procure for myself an extension to my existence ... but that would only serve to define my level of craziness and -- frankly -- I am not entirely convinced that would be a negative goal regardless of its practicalness!)