Sunday, October 5, 2008

What is real in a place that changes?

Searching google images for abstract concepts, I came across a rather strangely put question:

What is real in a place that changes?

Now THAT would certainly be an interesting notion to investigate! The obvious answer to anyone with a passion for unadultered reason would be the fundamental laws that govern the make-up of the place itself.

Yet from a philosophical standpoint, yes I can see why this question would need answering. Philosophy explores the gaps in knowledge and when those figurative gaps are filled, new sciences and aspects of culture (ie music, drama, art, some aspects of politics) are created. The philosopher, exploiting these gaps, comes to the big question: ...well, how do we really know what reality is anyway? I admit I don't know, and those that say they know would rather pursue the philosophical than the practical. What I can say for sure from the various great philosophical works I have read and my own emprical, logical reasoning, is that this very well might not be the ultimate reality even if there possibly is one. The ego in realizing it can think, can without a doubt deduce that it exists, and I would go on to say if one exists then one has to also exist in some perspective of reality. (Whether it is in the imagination of a giant bug about to get squished or in an atom of a geode)
A blue dot, with a dominant species that prefers destruction to discussion

Given all of that, I can say that change itself continues to show it is real. Take for instance our tiny blue planet. It was not always the size it is now and accumulated mass via violent clashes of matter in what we authoritatively call "our" solar system. Those clashes ceased and change happened again as the crust cooled...changing of the seasons, life began, etc.

An amazing achievement of an intelligent species learning about the universe

Scientists throughout human history know that the laws describing how the universe functions and changes occuring due to those functions are what is real. Even the universe itself is changing and has been ever since the Big Bang...and possibly before.

It is statistically improbable that we are the only intelligent lifeform to exist anywhere in this universe

String Theory and Brane Theory are two of many that illustrate scientists, especially physicists, do not limit themselves to understanding only this universe, contrary to what opponents of science would have one believe.

Like the reality of change itself, we can change also and consistently have, mostly for the better...with the exception of the primitive man that answered the question at hand (what is real in a place that changes?) with a statement similar to this: well there must be something that causes all these hardships for us, lack of food, lightning, and predators. It must be a bigger being than us, living in the sky as we are a bigger being to an ant. It must also determine our fate, we should please it. ...unfortunately the chap that went, "hey, how do we know there's a being up there? Didn't we just make that up because we didn't know? Couldn't it be something else like our environment and the pieces within it that cause our plight?", didn't reproduce as well. I wonder how things would have turned out if he did?

No comments: