A recent up-until-now review of the highlighted moments in my seeker life has underlined three things to me:
- I have become increasingly uncomfortable at using the term ‘spiritual’ as an identifier. When someone says, “Oh, you are a spiritual person!” to my ears it sounds like, “Oh, so you have no clue?” In all honesty, I have no clue. Spirituality used to sound like a step up from religiousness, but now it only feels like subtle condescension masquerading as clarity.
- I have become footloose with my beliefs, God has left the building, and quantum physics has turned my comprehension of reality on its head. From the outside, all of this shaking and shifting may seem like the best thing to happen to a seeker. But to me, it feels like I am fitted and geared to climb the Mt. Everest but I haven’t even left my living room.
- Most importantly, it is bigger than what I could think. It is weirder than what I could imagine. It stays at the outer fringe of my understanding. Hoping to reach this destination is futile. But the journey is sure as hell fun.
Fine Tuning of the Universe:
There is something remarkable about the physical constants and parameters of our universe like the strength of gravity, mass of quark, electron to proton ratio, etc., that had been crucial for life to evolve. These arbitrary values that describe the properties of the world are within a very narrow and precise life-enabling range, which got the scientists to dub as ‘existence on a knife’s edge’ because if any one of these values differ even by the tiniest degree, life form as we know it would not have come into existence.
This means the strong nuclear force had to be a certain value for the fusion rate inside stars to be just right to go from hydrogen to complex chemicals to carbon based life form such as ours. Had it been smaller the universe would be all hydrogen and no life. Had it been larger there would be no hydrogen and no life.
Cosmological constant, the energy density of the empty space that causes the universe’s expansion to accelerate, has a small but non-zero value. Had this value been negative, the universe would have been closed, the age of the universe too short for intelligent life to form. Had the value been a large positive, the universe would have expanded too fast preventing galaxies, thus life, from forming.
Same kind of precision in value goes for every physical constant where had it been greater or lesser, faster or slower, nearer or farther, life would have been doomed. While this looks like a convenient coincidence for life, almost too convenient given the fact that the universe is pretty hostile and well-supplied with conditions that would instantly kill us, this delicate ballet toe stand on top of a pinhead is what makes the theists tout as proof for existence of God, for how else could this universe be made just right to support the likes of you and I if not for the benevolent hand of an intelligent designer?
God – The Unifying Divider
It only seems natural to pin big things on God when science momentarily falters in its long, sure strides. But this loyal move on part of the religious zealots that God fine tuned the universe seems only contradictory, if not downright insulting to God, for the following reasons:
- For one, God is not like Edison to try something a thousand different ways to find that one workable iteration. He is God. If He had a hand in this, there would only be one ‘constant’ value instead of a possible bandwidth of numbers with an ideal warm zone right in the middle for life to happen. In fact if it were up to God, constant would be an indeterminable absolute that requires no fine tuning even from God Himself.
- Secondly, the all-powerful God is under no obligation to operate within physical laws and logic that were created by man to wrap his head around a universe which was established long before he came along. In fact instead of the scientific God pushed by the religious apologists, I am more likely to believe in the Biblical God who fashioned man from dust and breathed life into him, because that would be a logic-defying God who works entirely outside of man’s rhyme and reason.
- Thirdly, if fine tuning is the work of a benevolent God then so is a universe that is largely inhospitable, Mother Nature who wouldn’t stop trying to meticulously scrape us off her surface with natural disasters, diseases that have become a part of gene evolution, and let’s not even bring up evil that renders humanity hopeless. As Ayn Rand puts it, ‘Contradictions don’t exist’ and if we were to find ourselves facing one, we better check our premises and pick a side.
Religious apologists should either stay true to the mysterious God of Genesis origin without trying to justify Him with scientific evidences, or abandon all faith and go full-on scientific. But trying to cherry picking only the s, i, and c out of science to fit their narrative is like asking God to lower his stature so He could be at a level where man can decode Him.
This kind of man’s confirmatory bias that the universe was made so he could eventually come along is rightly described by science fiction writer Douglas Adams as –
“This is rather as if a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, that it must have been made to have me in it!’”
Douglas Adams
The universe was not fine tuned for us but rather we, through evolution, fine tuned ourselves to happen according to the constants and parameters of the universe. This just means that if this universe has these set of values thus giving way to our kind of lifeforms, then by virtue of math, there must be other universes for other set of values too where life evolved differently or did not form at all. Who is to say that life can develop only in a certain way with certain features known to us and that it wouldn’t stand a chance in any other set up? But this controversial concept that for every possible value there exists a different universe, which makes our universe just one among many others in the upwards of 10 followed by 500 zeros, is grandly called the Multiverse.
Life As We Don’t Know It:
If there is one area in science where the rift between two groups of purebred scientists is as gaping as the one between scientists and theists, then it would be the tricky expanse called the multiverse. This wild child of string theory, which is and will forever remain as a speculative concept because it cannot be observed or tested using our present technology, not only implies that there is a different universe for different fundamental laws of physics but that there is a different universe for every potential outcome in any given scenario for any given person, aka, parallel universes.
So if I decided to go left in my current reality, then in a parallel universe I also went right in order to make that possible outcome a reality. If I bumper kissed the car ahead of mine or missed it by an inch, separate universes branched out in mathematical variation and conjunction with the other person’s events, decisions, and his set of realities too.
This exponential forking of universes based on probable outcomes is not just a mind boggling proposition, but in the eyes of some scientists who are skeptical, an unnecessary and empty proposition that undermines the credibility of science itself. Why? Because science is all about collecting data, testing the hypothesis to confirm or falsify the claims, and adding on to the knowledge with more data and more tests, while multiverse is neither accessible for data collection nor testable for confirmation, which makes it a theory built on assumptions and furthered by complications.
But multiverse defenders have a different story to tell. According to them, multiverse is not a theory that scientists cooked up to solve anything in particular, least of all the fine tuning problem. But multiverse was rather an unavoidable prediction that naturally presented itself in the equations of some of the groundbreaking physical theories like cosmic inflation, general relativity, quantum field theory, etc. So when all these theories work perfectly well in explaining the universe, there is no reason to not take the one prediction common to all seriously simply because it is unobservable and hence unverifiable.
Skeptics are not exactly thrilled because they say this requires science to alter its boundaries in order to accommodate what could only be categorized as metaphysical, just like ‘God’. And defenders snap back saying that just because we don’t have the means to prove it doesn’t mean it is unreal.
Like so, the war of equations set on the cosmic landscape rages on between the multiverse and non-multiverse camps with a feeble, “It’s not science. It’s God!” protest of the naysayers droning from the sidelines, which are promptly ignored by those in the field because they have bigger fish to fry. And while I warm the bleachers waiting to see which way the needle would tip, which is certainly not going to be anytime soon, my fancies take an unrealistic flight trying to imagine if the vexing tangents that were nagging me for a while now would come together inside a common frame.
What Ifs and Maybes:
Our brain is known to suppress and manipulate our perception of reality to enable smooth functioning. Over the period of evolution the brain became a master storyteller that weaved million different stimuli coming in through our senses into one seamless panorama that we call reality. But in the process, the brain imposed limitations on what it takes into account and what it leaves out.
The brain shows us the world through three spatial dimensions and one time dimension, which is a highly diluted version of the whole reality out there and nobody can tell what is being missed. If so then what if the 11 dimensions proposed by string theory are very much real and built into our existing reality, but our hitler brain wouldn’t process more than four because it doesn’t serve our species’ evolutionary purpose?
What if the observable universe is a four-dimensional subspace of the 11-dimensional superspace that holds access to a bigger, all-encompassing reality. What if the only way to touch those other dimensions is to surpass the brain of its tyranny, which is precisely what some enlightened people do when they quiet their minds? And what if such people who manifest events from our future do so by fraying the edges of our limited dimensions, opening it up to bring a different possibility from another reality into our present reality, but only we call it miracle or coincidence?
What if in this bigger reality fine tuning made elements to be formed and coalesced in a manner unbeknownst to us whereby life exists simply as consciousness or as vibrational energy form without matter evolving to give it shape? And what if a spillover of that vibration energy from the higher dimension is what we experience as thoughts in our four-dimensional reality, thoughts that couldn’t possibly be created by our brains but only received as stimulus and put together to paint our reality?
Mystics have claimed that the moment of awakening is a state of no-self where there is no separateness from the infinite existence of the primordial energy. Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor mentioned in her talk that when she experienced the right hemispheric silence during her stroke, she felt the boundaries of her body blending with her surroundings that she sensed no separation but only an energy that made her feel one with all there is. Then is this state of nirvana a fortuitous tap into that collective energy field where thoughts, wisdom, peace, answers, questions, and existence remain as one, as the pure things that were before we lesser-conscious humans reduced it with names?
The time dimension is strictly unidirectional in our reality with only the past available to our comprehension. Even the present is available to us only after a moment’s delay, except for highly meditative people who live in the exact moment, and the future just a plethora of possibilities. What if time holds all things imaginable whereby when we have a gut intuition, inspiration or even a strong desire to want something with all our heart, it is nothing but a high-concentration of conscious energy like a burning beam sent through a magnifier of sorts that scorches the veil of possibilities, thus manifesting the desired thing in our reality?
Quantum physics tells us with vehement experimental confirmation that a particle exists at more than one place at any given time, but somehow it is illogical to wonder if we too who are made up of those same particles can be in multiple places?
What if in another version of reality my other self is standing right here right now waiting to go left while I go right? What if there are multiple versions of myself in other realities and these various selves are like identical drawings of me on a sheaf of tracing papers stacked on top of each other with the outlines of my drawing slightly off center as if I am a badly shaken photograph? And what if the reason I feel lost is because my self is not aligned with my other selves and the purpose of my very existence is to make all of my selves align along my own edges?
What if death is the removal of one tracing paper from the pile of selves in order to take us one step closer to being a single Self?
As exotic as these thoughts may be, my tangents do seem to finally come together but I should admit that the picture they pose for is still fuzzy. Questions are on steroids now and answers are elusive even more than before.
This is certainly bigger than what I could think and undoubtedly weirder than what I could imagine. Hoping to reach this destination may be futile, but the journey is sure as hell fun.
