The Universe is Not an Object

It is instead a vastness in space and time. It is instead an intricate, multi-level, emergent process. This is its reality at all stages of its development. At all times. At all levels of organization.

Even though the universe is not an object it does include objects which are also processes: Vast tendrils composed of galactic clusters, galaxies, stars, planet, storms, rock strata, organisms, everything, including us humans. We, all of us, all organisms, emerge out of procreative forces, the primordial matter and energy of the universe.

We, like the universe, are not created.

When we think of the Big Bang as the making of the universe, we err. The Big Bang was just another event in an endless number of such events. An eternal quantum foam out of which new universes emerge. Virtual particles becoming real and snowballing into vastnesses through inflation processes as described by cosmologists.

No creation ex nihilo, merely endless emergence. No nothingness. Ever.

That was then. And it is so now. And it shall be so in the far future. Emergence out of the quantum. Processes massive and unguided spewing forth forms most beautiful endlessly down through the eons.

Instead of an end to the universe, instead of everything collapsing back in on itself, or everything stretching out into a long, slow heat death, consider the possibility that our universe, within its black holes is fostering the emergence of endless numbers of new universes.

When you wonder about the precise alignment of the various basic numbers of fundamental forces, and how they align so perfectly with those numbers required to generate life within the universe, consider the possibility that that’s how universes must be in order to be universes. It might not be a matter of “Etch-a-Sketch” dials that can be twiddled in any arrangement of forces and numbers. It may not be a matter of luck or planning and design.

Instead, in order for a universe to emerge as such, it may be an absolute requirement that the universe attain those numbers. Such numbers may in fact be chaos-style strange attractors. Universes naturally converge on them. Such number may in fact be required for existence. If not for them, the wannabee universe simply evaporates; it dies aborning.

What else do I mean by my contention that the universe is not an object, but a process?

We humans and all other objects are all emergents within our emerging universe. We are fooled by the fact that we are indeed objects of limited extension and duration within our universe, so we assume that the same must be true for the universe itself. We think then that the universe is like us but merely larger and longer-lived. It is like us, but in a different way.

We are also fooled by our apparent nature. The stars and planets, the molecules, and atoms, even the subatomic particles (which turn out not to be “particles” at all), all of these “things” are in fact processes, birthed out of previous processes, birthed with no intentionality whatsoever, with no destiny as such, with no plan “written on their hearts.”

As time passes, every object within the universe exchanges substance with surroundings, grows, ages, dies. Every object is an object only with respect to a very limited range of time.

We humans ourselves are processes, entities cohering, yet continually becoming. Our very nature reveals the something important about the true nature of the universe.

Consider the fact that we are indeed conscious and we do indeed have free will. Such attributes cannot be ascribed to mere objects. The theologians were right about that. But they were wrong in insisting that such attributes could not possibly be of material origins.

Likewise, the modern-day philosophers and neuroscientists were right to deny the existence of an immaterial, immortal soul. But they were wrong to dismiss the very real visceral Experience all of us humans have of the world and ourselves and our ability to will an act and to make it so. Technicolor and Stereophonic Sound are ours every moment of our waking lives.

The same emergent processes that permit the existence of highly complex brains made out of many levels of neuronal interactivity, made possible by the substrata of basic components of matter and energy, are the processes which permit and even necessitate the existence of the emergent universe itself, as well as of our most intimate of human Experience.

We do not have souls; we are souls. Material souls.

Souls that are capable of bootstrapping patterns, sensations, observations, memories, intentions, goals out of what may appear to be coarse base materials. And turning these into deliberate actions.

That our theologians, philosophers, and scientists have all made this same error throughout history, on different sides, true, but the very same error nevertheless, is a fact that indicates that there is a deeply flawed axiom about the nature of reality planted deeply within the human mind, one that has misled us throughout those many ages. We might call this axiom “the assumption of the necessity of making.”

We humans have always made things, even before our ancient ancestors became human. And so we believe, earnestly believe that if anything exists, it exists as our artifacts exist, because Something or Someone intended that it must exist.

Our sciences have shown us that this is simply not true. Our sciences have shown us that at every level of reality, physics, chemistry, biology, neurobiology, and sociology, that processes are emergent; they are not imposed from the outside.

It is a hard thing to face, that our must fundamental feelings and thoughts about the reality of nature and our world and our universe are profoundly wrong. That the world in this sense does not mirror our values or our desires or our thoughts. Even worse, our feelings and thoughts about the nature of ourselves and our societies are even more deeply flawed than our feelings and thoughts of the natural world are.

We have assumed that the rise of civilizations and of cultures and of languages and of our moral sense and of our desires, and that of the manifestation of vast networks of communications, transportation, and exchange are the results of powerful creative intentional human minds. They are not.

Of our morality and of our noble striving and our accelerating technology and our booming world civilization, everything, except for the few, comparatively small things we humans can envision and create as individual humans and in small groups, is an unintended effect of unimaginable, massive interactions of those very same unintending, uncomprehending humans.

It is an irony, but nevertheless a brutal fact, that the more that we humans imagine and plan and do in more and more massive numbers, the less of the immense results do any of us comprehend. The last Renaissance Man died. During the Renaissance.

Everything above a comparatively low level of intentional individual human action is process. Every bit of what we humans do is organically related. Every advance we achieve develops out of and ramifies through massively parallel interlays and interchange in directions no one of us can comprehend.

There is an old Communist joke directed at the former masters in Moscow: “We pretend to work. You pretend to pay.” A potentially more sarcastic joke can be posed about modern economists and political officials: “We pretend to follow. You pretend to lead.”

Our sciences have shown us that there are no creator gods or god. Likewise, among us limited human beings, there are no ends, only endless means. Human society is so startlingly like the universe that we naturally flinch when we note the similarities.

We pick up momentum and direction unintentionally as we act guided by our best, flawed lights. We intend this and that, each of us in our small sphere and our small time but the results of our intentions, our cornucopia of creation, our increasing flood of more and different goods and services, our actions, our interactions, our cultural impressions and arts, our political hues and cries, the nested levels of interactions that none of us have any access to, all of these have ramifications none of us can intend or envision.

We are not the mothers of invention nor are we inventions or in the end inventors. Not at those levels of organization at least. We glint and spray and evaporate our ideas and feelings and act as generations of us rise and fall and pass, leaving even more of us to glint and spray and evaporate in our wake. And that is that.

And our strange glory is that we can in fact envision and create in our small spheres. We do so surprisingly effectively. We can feed and clothe and shelter ourselves and each other as we participate unknowingly in the vastness we call an economy, a society. Somehow. Exactly like the universe. And that is that.