In my last post, I suggested that the current crisis might be a natural consequence of our failure to engage actively with the deeper reality that underlies human society, in which case it could in fact be a gateway to a profound transformation of our society. So, what is that deeper reality and how do we engage with it?
One of the barriers to understanding it, I believe, is the gulf between the rationalist perspective that underlies most of our scientific understanding, and the intuitive, imaginative and emotive perspectives that underlie our spiritual, philosophical and emotional lives (a gulf which, in my view, is less real than it appears).
The extraordinary impact that technology has had on human life would not have been possible without the understanding of the natural world that scientists have developed over the last few centuries. That success has endowed the scientific community with undisputable authority – which has been accompanied by significant decline in the self-confidence of more spiritually-oriented people, and massive erosion of religious authority. Our current understanding of the material universe seems to leave little room for the spiritual so, as our mastery of the physical realm has grown, our understanding of the metaphysical universe seems to have become ever more abstract.
From this new perspective, the power that the Church used to exercise is somewhat baffling, and can only be ‘understood’ by explaining it as irrational superstition. There are many good reasons for doubting the literal truth of ancient stories about the supernatural but, personally, I’m very reluctant to believe that our ancestors were any more gullible, or less intelligent, than we are today. Historical records suggest that belief in a variety of supernatural phenomena was once widespread – not just divine and semi-divine beings whose actions hugely affected human life, but also other worlds inhabited by intelligent races with whom humans had irregular contact. To my mind, those beliefs should be taken seriously unless there is compelling evidence that they were mistaken.
If we take the current rationalist worldview at face value, and accept the narrative that scientists have largely understood the basic framework of the universe we live in, then it is easy to dismiss all those stories. But that demands a level of confidence in the edifice of science (and the critical thinking of scientists) that’s hard to sustain when we look closely at its foundations, and at how scientists perform when they probe beyond what is empirically verifiable1. Whereas a relatively simple (and uncontroversial) adjustment in how we understand the basic structure of space and time opens up a host of possibilities that make supernatural beliefs much more credible, and the erstwhile power of religious leaders much more understandable.
Philosophers have pondered the problem of whether space and time is infinitely divisible for centuries2. For pragmatic reasons, physicists assume that it is, but they do generally recognise that this is just an assumption. And there are a handful of researchers (for example, in the fields of digital physics and loop quantum gravity) who are actively exploring the possibility that, at a fundamental level, both space and time actually consist of discrete units.
This has profound implications for how we view the world. For me, when I was younger, the belief that physical space is indivisible made it very hard to believe in a metaphysical reality that can actively affect the material world because … well, where would that metaphysical reality interact with the physical realm? However, once we accept that space and time might be built of discrete units, the concept of parallel spaces is very easy to accept. We only have to look at a chequerboard to see a two-dimensional example: a space made up of white squares is interlaced with a space made up of black squares – and anyone familiar with how bishops move in chess should immediately understand how those two spaces can function either independently or as part of a greater whole.
The possibility that we live in a universe of interlaced sub-spaces raises a host of questions. For example, what laws govern the interactions between those separate sub-spaces? Might the details of those laws be determined, at any level, by deliberate actions of a conscious being? And, if our own physical world exists in one of those sub-spaces, how might changes in those laws affect the ‘laws of physics’ as we perceive them? Those are intrinsically complex questions which we can’t expect to answer easily; but there are assumptions we can make on the back of them that may cast some light on both the past and the future.
This perspective on the structure of space and time has allowed me to reconcile, in my own mind, the apparent contradictions between the beliefs of our ancestors and our modern understanding of the physical world. I now find it easy to believe that parallel worlds exist and that our isolation from them might not be as absolute as we are currently led to believe. How and why that isolation came about is an interesting question, and there are various clues in history that hint at an answer. But there’s another set of questions that are perhaps more pressing: what if that isolation is coming to an end? What signs can we expect to see? And how should we respond to them?
However, I think this post is long enough so I’ll save those questions for the next one.
This piece was originally posted on my T’ReasonableMan site and was transferred here in April 2023 to keep that site focused on mundane jurisprudence.
My own scepticism about scientific consensus goes back to the time, in the mid nineties, when I decided to get to grips with the Big Bang Theory. What I found was a chain of reasoning, explicitly based on the assumption that the laws of physics are the same throughout all time and space, which arrived at a conclusion that there was an original moment when those laws were different. I’m old-fashioned enough to expect the conclusions of a scientific theory to be compatible with the assumptions it’s based on and, in my view, that conclusion calls for systematically reviewing every single underlying assumption (especially when the theory postulates a ‘counter-intuitive’ model of the universe). The fact that the physics community preferred to call it a Singularity and congratulate themselves for their cleverness in understanding it, persuaded me to see where trying to understand physics from first principles would take me.
According to Wikipedia, Aristotle's objection to one of Zeno’s paradoxes was that "Time is not composed of indivisible nows any more than any other magnitude is composed of indivisibles."
I’ve found myself reading this piece over and over. The first time I had to read slowly. The second time was necessary because I still hadn’t fully understood it the first time. The third time because I saw I was beginning to get my head around it and suspected that there was more to understand. This experience threw my mind back to your previous piece (‘Beyond Reason) that alluded to your exasperation over the lack of apparent interest in your efforts. It has me wondering if most just don’t have the time to consider anything so deeply due to the day to day pressures of life rather than a lack of interest 🤔