Is Our Model of the Universe Topsy-Turvy?
How my sick cat led me to question entropy, consciousness, and why our model of the Universe isn’t adding up.
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The vet says my cat may have a heart murmur, and a rotten tooth.
They want to check her blood to make sure her kidneys are okay. We forget she’s old — 15 means 77 in human years.
When I first heard, I cried. Now I feel calm.
She’s loved and knows we love her. Whatever happens will be okay.
So I’m thinking about that — the mortality of a cat I’ve grown up with since I was 7 — plus the sticky, ridiculous, omnipresent heat.
Specifically, the way this cold glass of water in front of me eventually warms to the temperature of everything else. Thermodynamics. The way, in the end, all this heat dissipates into chaos.
Which means I’m thinking about entropy.
sick cat + cold glass of water = God knows what?
I’m thinking about the universe’s tendency towards entropy, AKA more spread out energy over time rather than less. (TED Talk animation on “What is entropy?” here.)
How every living being is a surprising, temporary resistance against it —a construction rather than a destruction, a Gesamtkunstwerk.
It’s quite surprising.
The Unlikeliness of Life
I mean, if everything is pushing one way (entropy), why should life exist at all?
Why should so much evolution bloom in so many directions, and consciousness with it?
If the law is that everything will go like this:
How has life gone like this?
How can life temporarily defy entropy?
How can life go one step further, and manage to maintain (courtesy of evolution) more organised lifeforms over time, as the universe becomes less organised over time?
I don’t know.
My cat growing old, sick, and eventually decaying, is unbearably sad.
But the real miracle is how my cat, me, you, and all life, manages to resist entropy to stay that way for so long at all.
(Update: What I’m describing is the Schrödinger’s Paradox. Ironically, not the cat-related one, but a less sexy second law of thermodynamics paradox. I am delighted somebody else was weirded out by this sh*t enough to name and write about it. Thankyou, Mr. Schrödinger and Google.)
It’s insane that life should actively resist entropy for no reason except to further itself.
Under all the nice lines about mitochondria, what’s happening here?
The Mystery Still At Large
Two largely acknowledged truths:
I) The expansion of the universe is accelerating.
We don’t know why. We attribute the effect to dark energy. We have no idea whether “dark energy” actually exists or what it is.
II) The expansion of human knowledge is accelerating. Exponentially.
Since the end of WWI, scientific knowledge has doubled every 9 years, faster than at any other known period in history. Knowledge is now increasing faster than we can absorb it.
Of course, coincidences exist. Correlation doesn’t equal causation. But it’s an interesting one.
Despite all our accelerating leaps and bounds, we’re missing something. And it’s throwing off calculations. We can all agree on that much. Nobody can sew together classical and quantum dynamics.
The Big Invisible C
If I can go beyond the ground of this science into a speculative hypothesis about an unknown — the variable we’re missing in all of this is consciousness.
We still don’t understand it at all. We constantly underestimate the extent of it in other species. We can’t crunch it down to a reductionist biological level in any way that satisfies without losing some of it.
I believe consciousness — or rather, the lack of acknowledging or including it in our models of the universe — is the possible candidate behind the significant and unfixed cracks in them.
Consciousness is an active law or force permeating the universe. One that is a lot stronger and more widespread than most of us will accept yet.
I’m willing to be wrong, but it has my bet.
I believe if we seriously understood and factored consciousness into our model of the universe, our calculations may start to add up to more sense.
Consciousness is widespread on our planet, each of us has it, other species have it to disparate extents — and yet we still fail to agree on what it even is.
It has the power to replicate itself, temporarily resist entropy, and literally create a thing out of no-thing via originality of thought, invention in the mind, leading to its physical creation.
Consciousness is, in short, too important to ignore if we want an accurate picture.
To understand the universe, we need to first understand consciousness.
Not the other way around.
Acknowledging the C
For a powerful thing — a subjective experience that shapes our every waking breath and sensory perception— we take consciousness for granted.
Perhaps it would help to reflect on life beyond my own specific, individual, sentient tofu brain?
For starters, I’m not as separate from anything as I think I am. Neither are you.
I am, literally, never in a vacuum. Even the air is full of elements that keep me alive and odd summer bugs. My body is its own ecosystem for microscopic life.
Even my sense of self can’t be boiled down into one “master cell”. I’m not a girl pulling levers stuck in a brain box, but trillions of self-aware cells. “I” is a team effort.
My life, my “I”, is then one piece in a stained glass window as we zoom out.
If this speculation is proven correct one day, and consciousness truly is its own “thing” — a powerful one, its own mystery variable, still fundamentally a black box to each of us — and we all have it…
Does that imply we can do more with it than we currently are?
It’s time to understand ourselves better. I open the floor to you, beloved reader, to think upon how.
Because the answer to that will, literally, affect everything and all of us.
Author’s Note: This story reflects the personal views, thoughts, and musings of the author originally taken from her diary. I’m a psychologist, not a physicist.
I’m aware there is a rich body of literature from philosophical, scientific, spiritual, and religious sources covering the ideas of dualism and/or panpsychism with differing conviction and depth. I cannot claim to understand or speak for them, only my own thoughts.
