“Oh and a thought about the human mind shaping the universe ... don't you think it is kind of arrogant that 'things' don't exist without us observing them?” Bob
“Why oh why are you so anthropocentric, Selena? Why do you think we matter so much, and have such powers...?” Jonathan
Pray, what powers?
‘Ever fewer climb with me up ever higher
mountains,' Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spake Zarathustra, but you, my dear gentlemen, are actually putting the cart before the horse.
I am - for I am an absolute idea...? Nonsense!
Nothing could be further from the truth. I am a relativistic concept,
at best. Forget man’s self-made image as the universe’s supreme conceptual authority. Or that the validity of epistemological conceptions are dependent solely on the species for whose personal comfort they have been created. Nor can homo sapiens arbitrarily dictate the course of events in what is, de facto, a conceptual vacuum.
Heaven forbid!
Man is the most feeble, perhaps, of cosmic animals. Indeed, the first
image that comes to mind - gnashing, primordial apemen pondering the concept of
fire and howling at the moon. Faced with a plethora of dimensions, the only
thing we can do is try to form a reasonable view of the realities attached to
them. Nor have we solved the ancient problem of getting past the appearance of
things. Indeed, there is no proof for the empirical constitution of scientific
concepts such as Black Holes, strings and super-strings or the curved phenomena
that Newtonian dynamics first attributed to the force of gravity. And since it
denies existence to objects having both spatial locations and well-defined paths
of motion simultaneously, not even the atom will stand up to scrutiny. These are
elegant constructs, drawn up by mathematicians and propagated by theoretical
physicists. Indeed, physics has a tendency to deprive reality of all its
homocentric attributes, leaving it no other import but that of economy and
function. Equations are no measure of reality, they are merely terms that allow
us to describe a certain limited number of interactions between the mind and the
world. And our experience of the world reflects only how we represent it to
ourselves, and that has nothing to do with the thing itself.
What anthropocentrism categorically does not mean is that man
intrinsically causes all things to exist (even though he may well have invested
them with the essential attributes by which they are to be distinguished). What
it does mean is that we have established a universal system of measuring reality
which fits the expectations of the human mind, with the added proviso, perhaps,
that all combinations and attributes are theoretically possible - in an infinity
of universes that are at best contingent: the fabled multiverse!
Believe me, gentlemen, we know nothing until we know everything!
Dreamy
