Monthly Archives: December 2013

Blind spots and black holes

Time is not what we take it to be.  We are suckled with a story of time as a scale stretching from the big bang, extending to the big crunch (or some other unknowable) and somewhere in between is the present moment, the singular now of the subject, slowly advancing towards an uncertain future.

That cosmological picture is a folk creation that serves some purposes, but as a framework for understanding who and what we are, it is entirely unworthy of us.

Scientifically, it is simply inaccurate.  The black hole is not a beginning.  It is a singularity; a point at which the theory that led to its articulation is mute.  There is no point asking what it is, because it is what that story can not express.  A blind spot is not a beginning.  The physical picture is complicated by the assumed presence of other singularities, within black holes, where the theory likewise reaches its limits and must stop pretending to provide a full account.  The space-time picture is not exhaustive, and it is essentially incomplete.

We have another significant gap in our knowledge with the origin of life.  Now maybe this is not a fundamental gap.  That would be an orthodox position.  However if we choose to adopt the view that having a now, a subjective present, is a condition of the living, then it is at least worth considering that this too may represent a finite bound on our ability to see and to understand.

If we stubbornly insist that the true story of our origin is to be told within a space-time framework in which the big bang is a beginning, then somewhere in that framework life happened, and furthermore brains evolved, and lo-and-behold here we are today.  Magnificent, mysterious, and incomplete.  For brains do not secrete consciousness, and life is not non-life with something extra.  Consciousness is not some detail to be added to our almost complete picture of what is.  In taking sentience/experience/living seriously, we must somehow learn to spin more varied stories, to live with alternative, complementary, non-unifiable narrative structures.  We need many stories, not just one.  As beings in time, for whom the past and the future are both entirely conceptual, this really ought to be dear to our hearts.

Of historical time

We subscribe to a belief that the past is more certain than the future.  The evidence for this is rather scant . . .

Nobody owns history. Those entities that seem to persist over historical time must be limited to that which we tell communally.  The fact that France invaded Russia is not a fact on par with the fact that two chemicals, treated thus and so-ly, will change thus and thusly.

To help us differentiate here, we need to interrogate the way measurement functions within a narrative domain. How is consensus arrived at?