My Beliefs on the Nature & Structure of the Universe

Pretty arrogant title, right?

Contemplation of the universe is a most subtle and difficult art, and I do not consider my self (by any stretch of the imagination) to be well-trained in this art. On the other hand, I do consider myself to be well disposed to it, and from time to time I engage in such contemplation spontaneously. I consider this to be a good thing, despite the inwardly directed and arguably uneducated conclusions I may have come to. Nevertheless, I have come to them, and in this document I intend to expound upon them, for no particular reason other than to do so.

A few brief preliminaries:

I have at various points in my life, considered myself to be somewhat of an expert on living. This is, of course, a perfectly natural flaw of youth, and though I knew this at the time (in the back of my mind), I still placed a great deal of trust in my abilities. This had the positive effect of making me unusually self-reliant in emotional matters, as well as the negative effect of making me blind to all that did not fit into my inner representation of the world. In my life I have undergone several major upheavals of understanding, and until a certain time considered each to be the final stage of my growing up and the beginning of my adult mental life. This, of course, is just as naïve as the assumptions that were rewritten in each upheaval. The acceptance of permanent uncertainty and bewilderment came in the most uncertain and bewildering moment of my life to date, a story that should be told at another time, and perhaps not at all. Suffice it to say that I underwent a total mental crisis and all that was familiar to my mind was torn away. I stood poised on the brink of insanity, staring down into it's gaping maw and by pure luck I did not fall. It was an experience I hadn't thought myself capable of having. I'd always considered myself exceptionally strong, and to be crushed into simpering weakness so easily caused me to re-examine my self many times over; however to survive with my sanity intact was a boost to my self confidence. The one thing that was imparted into my mind most strongly by this experience was a total, unbridled sense of amazement, utter astonishment, at the depth, breadth, complexity and eloquence of the universe. It is a construction beyond all mastery, a work of art beyond all criticism. Saying this communicates little, even stated superlatively, but the emotion is overwhelmingly strong in me, and it has played a major part in my beliefs about the nature of the universe.

There is a nameless associate of mine, whose inner life is an enigma to me, and I believe to the individual in question as well This individual is, like myself, of a contemplative bent, but seems to be stuck at a point similar to several I have been at in the past. Though some years my senior, I consider this person to be somewhat immature in the way they approach philosophical thought. This person has done a great deal of reading, primarily obscure texts on obtuse subjects that most would not put much stock in. In addition to this, this person has read a great deal of similarly-minded fiction; fantasy novels, sci-fi novels and the like. I myself enjoy such books, but a consistent diet of them, I believe, will prove that the majority of the material is lacking a certain literary quality. The classics of western and eastern civilization seem to have largely escaped the notice of my friend, and if read, were done so under compulsion and did not make much of an impression. In a word, I believe that this person has had an unhealthy diet of information. Information is only good so far as it connects us with the world. We can use it to inform our minds, as well as influence our environments. An unhealthy informational diet, it seems, has led this person to a life of undue inner contemplation, that is, thinking about the nature of the universe in a purely rationalist way. I think the last hundred years or so of philosophy has shown such methods to be insubstantial for producing anything other than amusing thought experiments, irrelevant conclusions and uninformative truisms. Without constantly submitting one's contemplations to the empirical gauntlet of criticism and comparison, one has no feedback with which to edit one's thoughts. One would be stuck in an eternal lineage of first drafts, as I believe this person is. The result is that when confronted with data or situations that do not satisfy my friend's wishes of how the universe ought to be, emotional responses become unrestrained, causing this person to cry over the proverbial spilled milk, as well as make mountains out of mole-hills. Through an overdose of credulity, my associate has been led to accept many dubious theories as facts of life. Through simply spending too much time in their own head, this person has locked themselves into a struggle to live in their imagination full-time, or rather, to bring the world of their imagination fully into reality.

A second associate of mine is currently living a life of clandestine suffering, and has yet to perceive the chasm over which they are teetering. This person has been through various tribulations of both an emotional and a physical nature and as a result has a hard-knock-life type of attitude. This attitude is the brick wall behind which hides the mind of a true artist who yearns for liberty. Though outwardly this person's goals are lofty, and their creativity profound, they are held back by internal blockages. This person is very communicative about their problems, which is good, but seems to take communicating about them to be the same as acting to change them. This person has repeatedly told me that they respected my way of thinking, yet upon hearing frank advice and opinions from me, became offended, occasionally dropping out of the conversation completely. I do not feel as if this is my fault, but it has set up a certain blockage between they and myself. All in all, I have become another brick in the wall. From my point of view, it appears that this person lives in a world of constant self-induced agony, yet does not accept that changes in thinking and behavior are required in order to correct this. I suggested that fact, and this person took it as a personal attack. I was at a total loss for words, an still cannot think of a single thing to say. I do feel strongly on one issue, however: This person is an atheist, as well as completely individualistic. In times of suffering, there is nowhere to run but inward.

From these three experiences, I have learned the following three things which have been guiding principles in my recent contemplations:

1. In daily life certainty is a myth, and that is okay, because that is the way it works.

2. You can only expect out of your mind the caliber of things you put into your mind.

3. It is not weakness to need help, and if you find it nowhere on earth, there is still one place to look.

From these maxims, you may deduce about me the following true things:

1. I have faith in empirical reasoning.

2. I believe in an all-powerful God.

And any number of false things you like. It is the latter which I wish to address first.

On the issue of my belief in God:

First I would like to say that I have not always believed in God, and that I have come to belief through self-education and personal experience. I therefore have no rigorous logical “proof” of God's existence, nor for my personal faith. The short explanation for why I believe is simply this: I feel God's presence and will in my life. I pray and see my prayers answered (though seldom in the way I expect), I ask for guidance and receive it. It is a purely subjective experience that I cannot deny without denying the existence of my self. The slightly longer explanation is that the overwhelming majority of humans believe in God. Not that one should choose one's beliefs on the basis of popularity, but the persistence of a belief (however disguised) across cultures is indicative, I think, of something deeper. The belief in a deity arises naturally in a variety of settings. True, it is taught from generation to generation, but I don't think this is the only reason why we see religion in almost all major cultures. Saying so would seem to suggest that the idea of God was some sort of ancient contrivance created by some group of conspirators, which I find exceedingly unlikely. I find it more likely that it is innate to all humans because it is true. It is a belief that must be actively discouraged in order to be supplanted, not one that must be implanted. It is primitive to our minds in the sense of “coming first”. Most cultures begin with religion, and only later distance themselves from it. This does not mean, however, that belief in God is the province of the under-educated. I think if you took a poll you would find that the majority of highly educated members of various cultures hold some form of belief, albeit one that has changed shape to accommodate the knowledge they have accumulated. The fallacy that knowledge somehow makes God-as-explanation unnecessary, I will address later. Suffice it to say that my belief in God, and that of many others, exists quite apart from the need to explain certain phenomena, and I take it wholly on faith.

Faith may be defined as the belief in something in the absence of empirical proof. As to why one would engage in this practice, I can only answer that we all do it, all the time. If the only thing one can know is what one experiences directly, and if one's senses can be deceived, then Descartes was quite right in positing that the only thing one can truly know is the existence of something that is one's self. However, to refuse to act because of this is called “solipsism” and is a wholly useless philosophy, providing as it does, no modus operandi. So one must take whatever one's senses tell them on faith. To me, it follows that one must take anything that seems sensible or logical or appropriate on faith. I take it on faith that molecules exist; I have never seen one, yet it seems reasonable to me that they do. So faith is not an absurd practice in itself.

I have recently read a number of books that have forced me to change my thinking on the issue of religion, specifically Christianity. I don't think I qualify as a Christian just yet, but I am convinced that God exists (though I've been convinced of that for some time), that Jesus was his chosen representative to Western Civilization, and that the relationship between the two of them is something analogous to the relationship between a father and a son (though they also share a oneness in being that transcends that of the father/son relation). The specifics of my faith are the groundwork for everything I have come to believe, but they do not shape my thoughts entirely. I have for a long time had a passing interest in cosmology and particle physics, however, contemplation and reading on these subjects has merely reinforced the faith I have in God. In my mind, physics is the “how”. God is the “who”, and the “what”, and only he knows the full “why” (the “when” and the “where”, I take to be everywhen and everywhere, and I think that is perfectly natural). Far from removing God from the picture, I believe that science and philosophy merely speak to the elegance of his creation. God may not be superficially in the picture, God is the canvas, the frame, the wall and the museum, etc. God is irreducible in the extreme. No analogy can contain God.

I believe that all conceptions of a complete deity, personified or not, one-with-the-universe or not, active, passive, or what have you, all of them are the same idea seen through different lenses. It is as if God has different “deals” with different cultures, on this planet and certainly others. There is not one right religion, in fact, in some sense, I think all religions are true. I believe that when death claims each of us, God will show us things we expect to see, as well as many we don't. Trying to describe God's framework in too much detail is the same enterprise that my first associate is locked in. We live in the physical universe, and that is what we can and must direct our actions to. That is why I think of science as the ultimate act of worship (though I would not consider it a religion). What more is it that an attempt to understand and perceive all parts of God's creation? But there are some things which are beyond our powers of perception and cognition, so we must always leave the door open for God. No matter what we know, there is always room for God.

The universe, science tells us, began as a zero-size (that point is arguable, but it is not necessary that we go into it) singularity that contained (in a manner of speaking) all the matter and energy that makes up the universe. In a cataclysm of indescribable proportions it expanded rapidly and, over eons, cooled and organized itself into the universe we know. It is of an indeterminate size, possibly infinite. It contains many mysteries like dark matter and energy, which make up the vast majority of the universe; black holes that do unimaginable things to matter and energy; properties of the space-time fabric that defy imagination; forces like electromagnetic radiation that have both particle and wave-like properties; and most famously, that enigma which is life. Life is a most difficult thing to define, and a seemingly improbable thing to begin with. Nevertheless it is evident that it is persistent, and in systems of sufficient complexity will arise spontaneously and evolve into organisms that can perceive and manipulate the universe. That perception exists at all is spectacular enough, but consciousness takes the cake as the biggest humdinger of all. What exactly is this consciousness? How is it tied to this body I am in? Where is it located, if it is located anywhere at all? How is it that some things come to have it while others seem to lack it?

It is in this capacity, as well as the will to creation, that I think we are like God. Other that that virtually all mental phenomena are seemingly traceable to the brain, and all biological phenomena to applied chemistry, which is in turn just applied particle physics. The physical side of the universe is elegantly self-contained. To create such a thing, God would have merely to write the rules of Physics, instantiate the material and let it go. But God wasn't satisfied with that, it wasn't interesting enough so he put a few drops of himself in the mix. The internal spark of consciousness and the will to creation are all that I do not believe science will be able to fully explain about the mind. When it comes to the physical world, more things are becoming explainable each day, but each answer we find opens up a multitude of questions. To expect to answer them all in any amount of time seems ludicrous to me. Some would no doubt argue at this point that that is merely a “God of the Gaps” point of view, but I would merely respond that I have no problem with that. There will always be gaps, and the fact that that is where I find God merely makes me feel like that is how God works. To return to an earlier analogy, God is the canvas. Even if the canvas is covered with the paint of our understanding, it nevertheless continues to exist.

I recently read a book where it was suggested that the universe was finite, enclosed and existed as one of many possible universes that dwell in a greater realm that has only one type of constituent entity, and only one rule to govern it's behavior. The book referred to this realm as “Outside”. Outside there was no size, no distance, no time. Outside, there was nothing but an infinite number of “entities” that resembled the modern idea of strings. They had no properties except to follow one rule: bind together according to the will of a consciousness. God's consciousness willed universes into being, putting the strings into increasingly complex systems. Inside the universes into which the strings were organized, they responded to the will of individual agents. Though this book was science fiction, I suspect that something similar to this arrangement is the actual state of affairs. I naturally cannot explain or support the hypothesis, but it rings true to me, and whatever you call the constituent parts, I suspect that a similarly elegant, “simple” system has just undergone a series of emergences, where new levels of existence and awareness are constantly being achieved.

Look at how far our universe has already gone: strings, quarks, atoms, molecules, cells, tissues, organs, organisms, organizations, civilizations and God knows what next. At each level properties emerge that could never have been predicted from the constituent parts, and we have no idea where it could possibly end. There was a time when this hierarchy led me to think that conscious agents were to God as atoms are to molecules. But no matter how high the ladder, God is something fundamentally different. We have some of him in us, but that's no reason to think he's as simple as those parts of us. I think it plausible that in other universes other beings have other parts of God in them, properties we couldn't even contemplate. I feel like God would not impose any limits on the universe, simply because God is curious how far things will go.

But why? What does it all mean? Why should there be anything at all? Why does God exist in the first place? We'll never be able to answer these questions, and somehow I don't think there really are any answers. God's existence is to total, so all encompassing, that the idea of God's instantiation into being as an actual event is absurd. Time is obviously not a reality for God, it is merely a property of our universe. So there could never have been a “time” when God did not exist. God is pure existence. So why? Why does pure existence exist? My only answer is that the true, underlying nature of the universe is most brilliantly summed up by the symbol of the yin-yang. There is God, pure existence, creating reality in an eternal act of will, merely for the purpose of defying nothingness. I believe that this non-existence can exert forces on existence and vice-versa, which is elegantly pointed out by the dot of black in the white and the dot of white in the black. The universe is a persistent duality, a balance of eternal, absolute forces, and that all we know, all that we see, all that we hear, all that we touch, all we create and all we destroy is God's great gift to us and himself. That is the source of his love.

As to my faith in empirical reasoning, there are several things I would like to say:

Having a mind can be a big responsibility, and the simple acts of everyday life can be taxing enough to destroy some minds entirely. For this reason, most people prefer to remain on the surface of things, and I think that's just fine. My first associate is a perfect example of how delving beneath the surface can be dangerous. A wiser man than myself once said “The sage and the lunatic swim in the same ocean, but the lunatic drowns.” It is for fear of this fate that most people choose not to contemplate the nature of the universe. Beyond that consideration, it is plain fact that we all (with the exception of some schizophrenics and cases of severe dementia) have to live in reality, whether we want to or not. Wishing and believing cannot change reality, even if it changes how we perceive it. So it is valuable to learn to control your body and that part of your mind which is your brain.

I think that other than the two drops of God mentioned in the previous section, all human mental states are explainable in terms of brain states. Emotions are related to well-known chemical interactions, and certain types of mental states can be shown to be strongly correlated with specific brain states. Causal theories have proved hard to test, but work on the problem will, in all likelihood, never stop, so we can have high hopes for the future of cognitive science and philosophy of mind. Through learning what our minds are, we hopefully will learn to control them absolutely. Through learning what the universe is, we will hopefully learn to use all its vast resources to enhance our experience of reality.

The universe seems to be set up with specific rules that we can use to navigate our selves and our minds through reality. In physics laws like special and general relativity teach us how we may one day move about the universe and how doing so will affect us. Laws like those of Newton have taught us to build machines with which we change our environment to our liking. In the mental world, laws like those of mathematics give us a peek into a universal structure of relationships. Language, though manifold, seems to be based on innate deep structures that are, in some sense, a universal constituent of our reality; some deep ability which consciousness has for communicating, and we just assign it symbols. The impression I have of these types of laws is that they are (perhaps in a vaguely Platonic sense) real entities in reality, not mere inventions of mankind. They are to be discovered and only understood upon sufficient examination. If they were mere inventions, they would bend more easily to our will, uncomputable functions and opacities in language could not exist. Tools like language, logic, mathematics and physics are not like hammers or screwdrivers, they cannot break or be poorly constructed, it its only our theories or minds that fail to work.

It is for this reason that the process of empirical study is so pivotal to civilization. Everything else seems like details or diversions in comparison with the quest to understand the universe. Even if an individual is not involved in the really ground-breaking empirical sciences, each of us is constantly engaged in an empirical process of self-revision. We examine our attitudes in terms of the effects they have on our environments and others with whom we share them. The act of communication itself is an empirical process; checking facts, positing ideas, explaining knowledge. Other than physically moving our bodies and tangible objects through space, communication is the primary way in which we affect the universe. Because of all this, it is important for individuals to take great pains to observe, as impartially as possible, all that they experience. Creating a self and controlling the will requires the full energy of the mind.

It is my belief that virtually all interaction within the universe is some form of exchange. This can be seen rather plainly in Newtonian physics, but is perhaps far more important to us as individuals in the realms of socialization and politics. If all human interactions are to be some sort of exchange, it is pivotal that those interactions be based in an objective, consensual reality. Inconsistencies in our respective views of the universe have historically led to conflict and misunderstanding. At a base level, we are all trying to vindicate our image of life and reality, but when one image is confronted with another, the only sensible thing to do is to cut both down to the common ground only, and build up from there. If you begin by fighting over whose views are correct with respect to each disagreement, odds are that no exchange of any kind (with the exception of blows, perhaps) can be achieved. Neither party benefits.

In society, we have established realities that do not require our mental agreement to persist. Objective standards such as currency and law exist to give us that common ground from which to build. They are not perfect or immutable, they change, but they are the centers of objectivity in our society. Phillip K. Dick once said that “reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away”. The point of money and law are just that, to exist independently of each person's wishes. It is from this that the quest for the “correct” moral law comes. Laws as they exist now can disappear when everyone refuses to follow them, but this is only because they are our imperfect, human attempt at creating objectivity in our realm as God has created it in his. It is necessary that we do this, otherwise human interactions would be completely uncontrollable; as another wise man said “If we all do what we believe to be right, there will assuredly be utter chaos”. There was a time when I trusted chaos with the burden of organizing human interactions, but this was also a time in which I believed that chaos was responsible for organizing the physical universe. It is a belief I no longer find consistent with my experience of the universe.

Everything in the universe, though bound by the thermodynamic law of entropy (which no known system breaks, upon final analysis) seems to tend towards order and coherence in a gross examination. The universe is complex, not chaotic (I intend both terms to be taken in the full mathematical sense). This, to me, is evidence that it should also be our quest to seek order and coherence, both in our individual lives and in the life of civilization. I am vindicated in this view whenever I meet a person who does not seek order in their life, or deliberately invites disorder into it. They are uniformly unhappy, confused and impotent individuals. What is strange is that they never seem to acknowledge the effects of their own mentality on their situation. I have, through a lifetime of empirical examination of my life and the lives of others, come to the conclusion that a positive mental attitude is invariably correlated with positive stimuli entering one's life. Every person I have known who maintains, for whatever reasons, a negative mental attitude, is consistently assailed with negative events in their life that reinforce the attitude. I cannot posit a causal relationship here, but it seems that when faced with these facts, it all comes down to (at some very basic and deep level) a subconscious choice. One either spends one's whole life laughing or crying. This is not to say that we can make ourselves happy by a sheer act of will, but it is to say that through training one's own mind to put down negative impressions (arbitrarily if need be) one can overcome negativity, and events will begin to reinforce each other in the other direction. As I've said, no real causal law can be posited here, but one would think that people would see this correlation when faced with the evidence. Naturally, one might argue that the events cause the attitude, but it think it is not hard to show that this is false. Who among us has never heard an inspirational tale of some poor soul who was robbed of their legs or sight or some other part of their life and yet soldiered on and eventually came to view the event as the most important and positive thing that had ever happened to them? The world we live in is replete with tales of rising above adversity, and to think these people did it without making decisive changes in their own thinking is just naive. To think they were just “that type of person” or were somehow helped by external factors is equally narrow-minded, however, such thoughts only seem to come from the mouths of individuals who have not similarly overcome their own difficulties.

I think we as agents in the universe are meant to figure these things out, and that when we meet other agents not of our species, we will find that they have a similar task before them. I cannot think of any ultimate reason for agents to be conscious or free of will other than to enable them to contemplate, understand and interact with each other and the universe successfully. Hopefully it will prove possible to understand a sufficient amount about the mind, and we can get down to the business of living in the universe and experiencing all it has to offer.

Before I conclude will present a few views that I find to be absolutely irreconcilable with the universe I observe:

1) The view we term “atheism”, is chiefest among these. I simply do not have sufficient faith in complexity or chaos that I could believe all we perceive in the universe is some sort of cosmic coincidence. It's all far too breathtaking and awe-inspiring for that. Secondly, I cannot believe that this consciousness we have is a mere property of complex chemical systems. I can and do believe that of things like emotion, internal monologue and pain. And if consciousness is not mere happenstance, then I find it equally impossible to believe that it persists only so far as the body does. It is far too unique for that. Living in a universe of meaningless coincidence as atheists do, I would be crushed under the weight of unrelenting despair. No achievement could possibly have any meaning other than to lodge itself in the memories of others, and even the greatest of those are sometimes forgotten. If that spark of consciousness exists (and I am absolutely certain that at least one such spark does, namely the one in me) I find it irrational to think that it is not part of God and does not eventually return to God in some manner.

2) The views expounded by fundamentalist religions are to me, absolutely unexplainable. God is not unknowable to us, we have a bit of him in us, but the absolute specifics of his nature and the place in him to which we return after death are not for us to know until we do so. It simply does not matter. Any number of virgins and pearly gates sound equally mundane to me. I find it insulting to God to render such one-dimensional images of his universe. Along with this is the idea that we, as humans, have somehow defied God's will in pursuing technological and social progress. He instilled us with the will to create, but because we are not perfect like God, our creations can go awry. This, however, is no reason to say we should abandon the idea of progress. Progress is essential to fully experiencing God's great gift of the universe. We have to go out there to see it. If we remain caged within our rigid ideals, never allowing events to change our views, we are denying God's gift of cognition.

3) The view that science and philosophy will or already have “explained away” the notion of God is absolutely unsupportable. When we answer, with a rigorous empirical theory, a question whose former answer was an opaque reference to God, that does not take God out of the equation. One need simply continue the child's game of asking “But Why?” until no more answers are left. Each door we open leads us only to more rooms with more doors. It is my belief that this process will never end. Behind each closed door is God. When we open it and fail to find God in plain view, we are forgetting his absolute irreducibility. He is the door, the wall into which it is set, the building made up of the walls, etc. The big bang explains how (by what physical machinations) the universe came to be, but no theory can explain why. Even if we find evidence of some events that precede the big bang, it will not explain it. Even though we know our will to create other humans through reproduction is merely the will to spread our genes, genetics will never explain why genes exist. That these types of things simply are is purely unscientific. Any good empiricist will always see that there is room for God. We can travel down the causal chain forever and never find an answer that is complete without God.

4) The view that hierarchical power structures are the root of evil in society is baffling to me as well. Linked with this is the view that all men are equal, and we should therefore be able to create a system of living which pleases everyone. If history is not sufficient evidence to the contrary, let me return to my views on interaction-as-exchange. Nowhere (save Newtonian Physics) is it written that all exchanges must be equal. It is a fact that they will not always be so, whether the law tells us they must be or not. In order for such equality to be perpetuated, no freedom could exist. It is plain as day that some people are smarter or stronger than others. It is plain to me that we should desire the wisest among us to lead us. I always submit willingly to any person I believe to have judgment superior to mine, or greater practical knowledge in a specific situation. So long as I trust and respect the person in question, as well as agree with the stated goals, I have no qualms with submitting myself and my actions to the will of another. People who view hierarchical power as a bad thing in itself, do so based on the assumption that all power is arbitrary. Whether or not they realize it, they believe every human to be equally well-equipped to deal with any situation. This, of course, is crazy. Believing that there need be no leadership at all is the least sane view yet. It must hinge on a simple misunderstanding of the scale of the universe. With so many individuals and facets in the universe, it is ignorant to think that progress can be made without delegating decision-making to decisive people. It is ignorant to expect such people always to be right, and it is a death-wish to wish for no progress at all. Stagnation, even if accompanied by stability, is another way of rejecting God's gifts.

5) This brings me to the view that stability is more important than progress. This particular view aggravates me the most with respect to the idea of space travel. I think most people in the world today think that we have to get the problems on Earth buttoned down before we can venture into space. People think it a waste of money; building rockets and such. Others believe that the Earth was meant to be our eternal home, and that leaving the planet of our origins is somehow blasphemous. To begin with, this planet has an expiration date. It will not last forever. True, it will continue to be habitable for billions of years, but that is not forever. The sooner we begin to spread ourselves across the universe, the less impact this cataclysm will have. I dearly hope that we never forget that special connection to the planet where our species was born. I have never lost my emotional connection to the house I grew up in, in fact the majority of my dreams still take place there, though I have not lived there for years. If I can help it, I never intend to live there again. But I love that place and always will as long as I continue to have access to it. Such should be our relationship to the Earth. It is a jumping-off point.

One final reason why I think progress (specifically in those areas which help get us off the planet) is desirable even if accompanied by war and pain is the simple fact that many of our wars and pains are symptomatic of the crowding of humanity. We are all so different and we all want to create civilization in our own image. Some of those images are inconsistent with one another. If autonomy of civilizations is to be maintained and if crowding many civilizations onto one planet inevitably produces war and strife, it seems that spreading out is a great solution. I quarreled a great deal with my brothers when I was younger, even though I loved them, and frequently the solution to a quarrel was as simple as a few minutes of separation. It think we will experience the same thing with our brother civilizations.

Views like those above are the sandpaper which grinds against the wooden block of civilization. They help to smooth out our edges by keeping us aware of certain things which must be balanced. But each piece of sandpaper must eventually become dull and old and no longer useful. Ideas, like information, are no good in and of themselves (though any idea is better than no idea), they are only good insofar as they help us manipulate our world. We must expect to go through many more growing pains, and hope against hope that none of them prove fatal. We have a whole universe to expand into, it would be a shame if our journey ended before it began.

One final thought. In this paper I made extensive use of analogies to get at my point. In part that is because I frequently do not possess the knowledge necessary to be more straightforward. At other times it was because I wasn't trying to directly explain a phenomenon, but rather hint at a type of relationship. At still other times it was because I know of no words or ideas that encapsulate what I intend to say in a familiar way, so I use familiar things to hint at more ineffable things. Mostly, though it is because I have found that I am incapable of learning anything without making analogies. It is arguable that with the exception of rote memorization, this is all that learning is, and that problem solving is merely applied analogy. Either way, this process of constantly, sometimes unconsciously making analogies to things I hear has always bewildered me. When I really dwell on it, I can't even say what an analogy is. All I can do is give examples. It is one of the many mysterious things in the universe that can only be pointed at, danced around or (frighteningly enough) analogized.

This has led me (through a process I could not explicate even if I desired to do so) to the belief that in it's basic structure, the universe is but one giant analogue to God. It is analogies within analogies, dichotomies at every level, a giant mass of interrelated facts and objects that is filled with so many connections that the background has been blotted out by all the lines we can draw. With so many strange and seemingly magical phenomena emerging out of this mishmash, not the least of which is myself, I find it totally impossible to take the universe for granted. It is far too mind-shattering, too thought-defying, it belittles our wildest imaginations by such a huge margin that we can't even begin to compare anything we do or create or experience with what God has given us. Figuring this place out will likely take forever, and it is likely that this is what God wants. Another eternal act of will to complement God's own. In short, reality is the strangest thing that ever happened to me.