September 16th, 2007 Fred McVittie
To the medieval mind, the universe consisted of a relatively simple set of components: the Earth, the various crystal spheres supporting the starts and planets, and the divine illumination beyond the outermost sphere. The revolutions of Copernicus and the extensions to that universe contributed by Brahe, Bruno, Hoyle, Hubbard, Einstein and the rest may, on the face of it, seem to have multiplied the number of parts beyond number, and it is true that the number of basic elements has increased from four (or five) to over a hundred, and it is certainly true that the estimated number of miles between one end of it and the other has been upped, along with the number of years it has been in existence. The low number of parts apparently possessed by the universe that Newton and Copernicus inherited pales into insignificance compared to the immensity of that described by the science of today. Yet modern science has one simplicity than that of Ptolemy et al lacked, and that is in the number of boundaries between the universe and ‘not-the-universe’. The Medieval cosmos, simple though it may seem, has a fracture line around it separating the ’sub-lunary’ sphere from the transcendence beyond. Outside of this boundary is the something else of God, presumably accompanied by hosts of angels, archangels, and the rest of heavenly society. The existence of this boundary, the difference that makes a difference, multiplies the thingness of the universe by two; there is an above and a below, a realm of men and a realm of God, a Heaven and an Earth. What’s more, this division is absolute and there can be no singular embracing of the above and the below in a single totality. No word existed which encompasses The Whole Thing.
Today’s universe is big in number of components only. In terms of conceptual unity it has the snow globe universe of the first millennium mystics beaten hands down. The modern mind has the incredible power, (rarely used unfortunately) to spread its wings throughout this immensity and imagine it as one thing, large and puffy, but easily countable on the thumbs of one hand.
Imagine the biggest thing you can fit into your mind, a mountain say. Then imagine something outside of this entity, a cloud shrouding the peak of the mountain. The duality of peak and mountain is easily dissolved by extending one’s imagination outward to include both elements within a single scene. The eagle flying high above the clouds may temporarily reinstate the dualism you have banished but this can be easily addressed by the simple expedient of moving the line around your mind out and capturing the eagle in these new outer limits. Of course, something else will emerge, a fleck of light reflected off the lake, the Sun going down over the ocean, an island on the other side of that ocean, a tell-tale footprint on the beach of that island which indicates the presence of another human being, but with each addition to the inventory of your mind you only need to loosen the lariat that you are throwing over these entities to catch them all, all at once. The moon rising, the rain falling, a star exploding into supernova, all of these things are contained in the one thought you have, call it ‘everything’ if you like. Nor need the embrace of the all stop at the merely physical; inside the atoms of all the planets are forces that you may have heard of but neither you, your anyone else has seen, and there is no good reason not to include them in the single catalogue of stuff.
You may be thinking around this time, if for no other reason than I am going to remind you of the thought, that the universe is so big that it exists not at a single moment of time, but across the reaches of all the time there ever was and ever will be. The now recorded by a clock on the Sun is nine minutes ahead of now here on Earth (or nine minutes behind depending on which of those two bodies you are standing). The time at the other side of the universe is almost incomprehensibly removed from Earth time and, from our perspective, most of those light burnt out in a remote past that will only become present to this region of space when the Earth itself is a cinder. Does this not mean that the unity that we seek breaks apart across the back of time, and that therefore the centuries are irreparably broken? I don’t think so. I see no reason why we need let time come between us when, with Einstein, we can simply let it be another kind of space, another extension to the mansion of mind, a useful dimension that we can use to measure the shear scale of the One Single Thing. Time is not on the other side of the universe; time, like everything else, is on our side.
Hold that thought; do we have a problem at the mention of the word ‘mind’? We may have if we choose to stop our thinking at cogito ergo sum and rebuild the wall around the world along a line that divides Res Cogitans from Res Extensa. Descartes’ famous formulation of the nature of being as consisting of two non-overlapping ontological magisteria presents a division between mind and body reflecting (probably not accidentally) that between God and man, the snowglobe and the hand of the snowglobe-shaker. And while Descartes may have speculated half-heartedly about the intersection of these two incommissable substances, (something about the pineal gland), he could not find a way, in his philosophy, to include both Res’s in a single unified Res Universalis. But that was then and this is now and no such division exists today. Even though the fields of philosophy, cognitive science, neuroscience, and consciousness studies are riven with conflicting theories and rival opinion, one thing is sure, that whatever mind is, it exists in the same universe as everything else. Some may regard it as the routine product of the symbolic processing of input by a meat computer, others may regards it as a fundamental property of spacetime itself which just happens to congeal inside the folds of human brains. Either way, however difficult the hard problems of the mind might be to think about, let alone solve, there is no suggestion that this difficulty places them, or the mind itself, beyond the universe. When we throw open our arms to grasp the world in its totality, we hold mind in the single circle of that embrace, yours, mine, and ours.
Thanks to this radical and fundamental re-unifying of the universe, we are now able to conceive of space, time, mind, and all the entities, real and imagined, as simultaneously contained within a single term and a single concept. We might call it ‘the universe’, (although this runs the risk of someone inventing neologisms like ‘multiverse’, or we might call it ‘everything’, (recognising that some wag will point to something that is not a ‘thing’ and claim it evades capture in our descriptive net. It would probable be simplest to simply refer to it as One, and begin our counting from there.
We hold these truths to be self evident.
That these totality of all entities can be contained within the single category of the One.
That the One breaks apart into the various phenomena of the universe according to consistent laws.
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