Endure the Paradox

                                                     PARADOX – ESSAY 2

All we have is the present. The past is gone and we can do nothing with it. The future is before us, but it never arrives. This understanding of time confronts us with a paradox.

Time is divided into past, present, and future. The past once existed, but doesn’t exist anymore. The future doesn’t yet exist. And the present is just a concept which is so fleeting it is gone the instant it appears. It is merely a dividing line between two non-existent realities.

Aristotle proposed this paradox but did not expound upon it or explain it.

Now, thanks to Popper, Einstein, and Schrödinger (among others including Hawking), we have come to realize that not only is time a paradoxical illusion, so is matter.

Atoms are the building blocks of elements. And what are atoms? They are electronic charges, components of energy. A solid rock is made up of chemical elements, which are made up of positive and negative charges of energy (for the most part). Energy, potency, force, potentiality is all that is.

A star is a seething mass of energy in constant transformation. It is a coagulation of remnants of former stars, so intensive that it burns with heat so powerful the potential elements (iron, uranium, calcium, hydrogen, and all the rest) never solidify unless, perchance, they are hurled away from the inferno far enough to form planets, asteroids, and clouds of dust.

Aside from the fact that all matter is energy in combinations, and that it is in spectrums without precise boundaries, is the fact that all we know of what’s going on in any entity is historic. What we see in the sun happened several minutes ago, the time it took for the light to get to earth. And what we see of a distant galaxy may have happened a million light years ago. The present is unknowable. Knowledge is after the fact.

What about space?  How real is it? What do we know about it?

To begin with what we do not know, we do not know if space is finite or infinite. If it is finite, it must be convoluted like a mobius strip, i.e. self-contained (finite) but without beginning or ending (infinite). If it is infinite; it is infinite in its potential, an infinite becoming from a finite beginning (a singularity, a “big bang”) which, nevertheless, recurs infinitely.

The astrophysicist Michio Kaku thought that “music is the paradigm that eluded Einstein.” In brief, Kaku postulates “all the particles we see are musical notes or a tiny vibrating string.” So, expanding on that, “the universe is a symphony of strings.” Which, if Kaku’s postulation can be verified, could lead to the conclusion that “the mind of God is cosmic music resounding through eleven-dimensional hyperspace.”

Either we know only a metaphor or we know next to nothing.

That raises the question, “How do we know anything?”

Again, the answer is mostly about energy – in this case, electro-chemical systems and processes. We see light waves (vibrating strings) enter our eyes and stimulate receptors which convert the impulses into electricity transmitted by nerves to the brain.

We are conscious, but we don’t know how. We fabricate the consciousness of physical realities (e.g. the idea that I am holding a pen and have a potential for thought as well as unconscious processes such as digestion). But how instincts work is still beyond our comprehension. How and why we do this translation of electro-chemical stimulations into coherent ideas, memories, and aspirations or fears, is a matter of still more mysterious steps.

Fortunately, we do not need to know how or why we process reality. It is enough to operate within the configuration of reality that we have learned, and to anticipate the continuation of patterns we have found trustworthy or that we take for granted without thinking about them. That includes almost all of them.

At any instant we focus on one thing, are subliminally conscious of a few more, and are oblivious of all the others. Our thoughts come one at a time, in astounding rapidity, but one at a time. Instantly, these new stimulations search for connections with memories we have (the past) and plans we are considering (the future). These are sifted into flashing plots which may or may not amount to a story or into a more complete reaction.

Thus we function. How infinitesimal we are! But how consequential, at the same instant.