How to control the Universe without leaving a mental hospital

Elementary particle of existence

Throughout the history of mankind, thinkers have been interested in the question of what material the universe is built from, whether this material has any identical indivisible part – a kind of elementary brick of existence. The ancient Greek philosopher Democritus called such a brick the word “atom,” which means “indivisible.”

At the end of the 19th century, scientists actually discovered that all matter in the Universe consists of identical tiny parts, which they called atoms. However, further research revealed that atoms are not indivisible at all, but consist of even smaller parts – elementary particles. When scientists began to study the behavior of elementary particles and discover the laws of quantum mechanics, reality began to crumble before their eyes.

It turned out that elementary particles exhibit the property of wave-particle duality. On the one hand, when considering the evolution of their state over time, they behave like a wave, on the other hand, in experiment they manifest themselves strictly in the form of a particle with a certain value of this state. Moreover, scientists realized that it was impossible to say at all that an elementary particle had any state until an experiment was carried out and its value was measured. It turned out that elementary particles are not material at all in the everyday sense of the word, but are rather a mathematical abstraction than a “building block of existence.” But what then underlies everything?

Around the same time as the fundamental works on quantum mechanics, the book of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Treatise Logical-Philosophical,” was published. In this book, Wittgenstein proposed that facts be considered the basic units of being. This philosophical concept went well with the discoveries of physicists, from which it followed that a wave unknowable to our minds manifests itself in the world in the form of a particle – a fact established by measurement.

The concept of viewing the world as a set of facts became popular among scientists and later developed in the theory of American physicist John Archibald Wheeler called “It from bit” into the concept of viewing the world as information. In such a picture of the world, the elementary “building block” of existence is not just a fact, but its minimal component – a bit of information.

world creation

And God said: Let us make man in our image and after our likeness
Genesis 1:26

The Abrahamic religions, in whose sacred scriptures God creates the world out of complete non-existence, have left their indelible imprint on the thinking of the average European, regardless of his religiosity. But unlike the Abrahamic religions, in most cosmogonic myths of the Indo-European peoples of the world, the gods do not create the world from emptiness, but give order to the already existing primordial chaos. For example, in German-Scandinavian mythology, the god Odin sculpts the world from the body of the giant Ymir, personifying the primitive chaos, generated by two opposites – ice and fire.

The concept of creating the world from pre-existing material was close to some ancient philosophers, as well as early Christian Gnostics. For example, the ancient Greek thinker Aristotle believed that God did not create matter, but found it ready-made and molded the world from it. It is not without reason that one of the main epithets used to denote the divine principle in Greek philosophy and Gnosticism is the word “Demiurge”, meaning “artisan”. The Greeks imagined the creator of the universe as being like a potter who took clay and shaped it into a pot.

For us, the world of facts can serve as clay, from which we can, like the Greek Demiurge, mold our own world. We just need to create the lens through which we will look at the world, and which will give a general structure to some facts and filter out others. Of course, the world we create will not be devoid of inherent flaws, aptly noted by Umberto Eco:

As soon as you start fiddling with clay, even electronic clay, you are a Demiurge. And there is no escape from this, and whoever is going to create the world is inevitably already tainted by mistakes and evil

However, despite this, the ability to create our own worlds is precisely what makes us like God, who “created us in his own image and likeness” and breathed a soul into us, or, in more modern language, endowed us with consciousness. It is within human consciousness that the phenomenal Universe exists as a representation of a noumenal reality that is not directly knowable.

When we look at another person, we perceive his image holistically. And if we try to analyze this image and decompose it into parts, we will immediately discover that we have taken a path leading into emptiness. After all, a person is an image of a set of processes of interaction of his organs, each organ is an image of a set of processes of interaction of different tissues, each tissue is an image of a set of processes of interaction of biological cells, each cell is an image of a set of processes of interaction of molecules of chemical substances, each molecule is an image a set of processes of interaction of atoms, each atom is an image of a set of processes of interaction of elementary particles, each particle is a manifestation in the world of the facts of a wave in physical fields, and the physical field itself is disembodied – it is essentially nothing, emptiness, vacuum. But what does this mean?

Absolute emptiness realizes itself and proudly declares “I think, therefore I am”. Afterwards she looks nearby into the void and declares “Ecce homo” – this is a man. Does man look at man or does emptiness look at emptiness?

Strictly speaking, these two people do not exist – they are just composite images of images in absolute emptiness, an illusion, a dream that no one dreams. They exist in consciousness, and only consciousness is the only really existing thing in the Universe. In essence, this is the Universe itself. A universe that dreams of itself in complete nothingness. Therefore, we can say that our individual consciousness, our “soul” is really a piece of God’s Spirit – the one and only consciousness – of our Universe. And this particle is really like the whole God – every moment it creates a personal universe out of complete emptiness, like the biblical Adam, naming the entities it sees and calling out things from non-existence with the Word.

Consciousness looks at one group of elementary particles and calls it “tree”, looks at another and gives it the name “cat”. Our brain – the hard drive on which the consciousness software runs – is just a complexly organized group of elementary particles. And this group of particles is aware of itself and sees plants and animals in the groups of particles around it. At the physical level, the level of elementary particles, no Universe exists – it arises only at a much higher level – in our minds.

The emergence of the Universe at the level of thinking was noticed by thinkers already at the very dawn of civilization. Sumerian-Akkadian cosmogonic myth “Enuma Elish” begins with the brilliant line:

When the sky above was not named, the earth below was not named

We can say that the statement that the world and man were created only six thousand years ago is not so far from the truth, because it was then in the Nile Valley and between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that the two first written cultures of mankind arose – Egyptian and Sumerian. And along with writing, literature appeared, creating an infinite number of worlds in the minds of people.

Then, in the 4th millennium BC, with the advent of literature, cultural evolution began – the natural selection of ideas, myths, memes. It was not the sharpened stone as a tool that made man a man; it was the written word that made man a man. In the beginning there was the Word, and it was it that created an ever-expanding world in the minds of people: over many thousands of years, this world expanded so much that man even saw structures in the most distant and smallest corners of the surrounding chaos, described them and gave them names.

Everything that exists in our world exists in our mind. A physicist studying combat will see only the movement of many elementary particles. So where does the war take place? Where do friends and enemies exist? Where are bullets flying and people dying? Where are the feats performed? Where does war show its ugly face? This all happens in consciousness.

Physicist and philosopher David Deutch provides an excellent explanation of this statement in his book The Structure of Reality:

The reductionist believes that science is about breaking everything down into its components. The instrumentalist believes that the purpose of science is to predict events. For each of them, the existence of high-level sciences is a matter of convenience. Complexity prevents us from using elementary physics to make high-level predictions, so we guess what those predictions would be if we could get them—the outcome gives us the opportunity to succeed at this—which is supposedly what high-level science is all about.

Thus, for reductionists and instrumentalists who have ignored both the true structure and the true purpose of scientific knowledge, the basis of the predictive hierarchy of physics is, by definition, a “theory of everything.” But for everyone else, scientific knowledge consists of explanations, and the structure of scientific explanation does not reflect the reductionist hierarchy. Explanations exist at every level of the hierarchy. Many of them are independent and refer only to concepts at a specific level (for example, “the bear ate honey because he was hungry”). Many explanations contain logical conclusions that are contrary to the direction of simplistic explanations. That is, they explain things without dividing them into smaller, simpler ones, but consider them as components of larger and more complex things about which we nevertheless have explanatory theories.

For example, consider a particular copper atom at the tip of the nose of the statue of Sir Winston Churchill, which is located in Parliament Square in London. I will try to explain why this copper atom is there. This was because Churchill was Prime Minister in the House of Commons, which is located nearby; and because his ideas and leadership contributed to the victory of the United Forces in World War II; and because it is customary to honor such people by erecting monuments to them; and because bronze, the traditional material for such monuments, contains copper, etc.

Thus we will explain a low-level physical observation—the presence of a copper atom at a particular location—through extremely high-level theories about such outgoing phenomena as ideas, leadership, war, and tradition. There is no reason why there should be, even in principle, any lower level explanation for the presence of this copper atom than the one I have just given.

Consciousness, by arranging the same facts in different ways, can create worlds that are completely different from each other. Existing in the same world of facts, the socialist and the libertarian, with the help of different interpretations of these facts, create in their minds two different, completely different worlds.

French postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida argued that “the world is a text,” or, in other words, the world is an interpretation of facts, not the facts themselves. For example, a shaman and a scientist look at the same world of facts, but where the scientist with his formal, Apollonian thinking sees cause-and-effect relationships and opposing factors influencing the result, the shaman with his poetic, Dionysian thinking sees spirits, ghosts and battle opposing energies. And such a view of the world has a right to exist as long as it does not break away from reality and does not fall into baseless fantasies. In modern mass consciousness, ghosts usually look like Carlson wrapped in a white sheet from a Soviet cartoon, but from the point of view of a shaman, ghosts are truly ethereal and intangible, like cause-and-effect relationships, Plato’s ideas or Dawkins’s memes.

This view of ghosts is outlined in one of the most influential philosophical novels of the 20th century, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig, in which the protagonist encounters the ghost of his own past. In the epilogue, Pirsig reflects on the ghost of his dead son:

Chris is no more. He was killed.
….
I continue to live, more out of habit than for any other reason. At the funeral we learned that that morning he had bought a ticket to go to England, where I was living on a ship with my second wife at the time. Then a letter came from him, which, oddly enough, said: “I never thought that I would live to be 23 years old.” He would have turned twenty-three in two weeks.
….
Where was Chris going? That morning he bought a plane ticket. He had a bank account, a chest of clothes full of clothes, shelves full of books. He was a real, living person who occupied space and time on this planet, and now, all of a sudden, where has he gone? Did he fly down the crematorium chimney? Was it in the little urn with the bones that was returned to us? Does the golden harp pluck the strings on the cloud above? None of the answers to these questions make sense.

One should ask: What was I so attached to? Something in your imagination? If you have been to a psychiatric institution, then this question is not at all trivial. If he was not just a figment of the imagination, then where did he go? Do real things just disappear? If so, then something is wrong with the laws of conservation of matter in physics. But if we accept the laws of physics, then the missing Chris was unreal. Around and around and around. He used to run away from me just to annoy me. Sooner or later he always appeared, but where will he appear now? Really, really, where did he go?

The circles finally stopped when it was realized that before asking “Where did he go?”, one must ask: “What was “he” who disappeared?” There is an old cultural habit of thinking of people primarily as something material, like blood and flesh. As long as this idea persisted, there was no solution. The oxides of Chris’s flesh and blood actually flew out into the crematorium chimney. But they weren’t Chris.

I need to realize that the Chris I missed so much was not an object, but a structure, and although this structure carried both the flesh and blood of Chris, that was not all. This structure was larger than Chris and I combined, it connected us in ways we did not fully understand, and neither of us could fully control it.

Now Chris’s body, which was part of that structure, is gone. But the larger structure remained. A large hole formed in the center of it, and that’s what caused such heartache. The structure is looking for something to cling to and cannot find anything. This is perhaps why mourning people are so attached to tombstones and any material objects associated with the deceased. The structure tries to cling to its own existence by finding new material things to focus on.

Somewhat later it became clear that these thoughts are very similar to statements that are found in many “primitive” cultures. If we take that part of the structure that is not Chris’s flesh and blood and call it the “spirit” or “ghost” of Chris, then without any further interpretation we can say that the spirit or ghost of Chris is looking for a new body to inhabit. When we are told such things about “primitives,” we simply dismiss them as superstitions, for we interpret the ghost or spirit as some kind of material ectoplasm, although they may not have meant anything like that at all.

Consciousness not only allows you to see ghosts, but can also create objects out of nothing and throw them back into oblivion. For example, in the dark a person sees a snake, and when the light is on he realizes that he mistook an ordinary rope for a snake – the snake was incredibly real a second ago, but now it is no longer there. Consciousness has such incredible power that it can even change the past and future. Here you look at the past of your country in one way, and after reading the book it is seen in a completely different way. Look at your future – and it seems vaguely bleak, but, for example, you set goals and made plans for the next month, and the outlines of the future became clearer, and its perception noticeably improved. The facts have not changed, only the interpretation has changed – and now the past and the future have changed, since they exist only in our minds.

Possessing such a powerful tool as consciousness, a person can set himself a goal – to create in his mind his own universe from existing facts and fill it with meaning, joy and light, thus completely becoming like God and essentially becoming one. At the same time, it is extremely important to build this universe from real and not fake facts, since the use of low-quality materials can lead to the collapse of the entire building.

World control

Such ideas are consonant with the view of the world of one of the greatest German philosophers of the 19th century – Friedrich Nietzsche, who spent the last years of his life and died in a not at all metaphorical, but a real psychiatric hospital.

Nietzsche considered man only a transitional stage on the path to the superman – the Creator, who creates his own world according to his own rules and, with his powerful will, directs the surrounding reality towards this new world. Nietzsche considered an integral feature of the god-like superman to be the morality of masters. To paraphrase the Russian classic, “the respectable Lord has the morality of masters.”

Nietzsche contrasted the morality of masters with the morality of slaves – in his book “On the Genealogy of Morals” he explores the differences between these two ethical doctrines. Master morality is self-centered and puts the interests of the bearer above all else. Slave morality often forces its owner to act to the detriment of his own interests in favor of others. Almost without exception, rulers and the highest strata of society, according to Nietzsche, are the bearers of master morality, and among most people slave morality is common.

Nietzsche considered most of the religious doctrines of both the West and the East as concentrated slave morality: all of them, to one degree or another, welcome asceticism, renunciation of the world, contentment with little, sexual abstinence and other similar ideals that “masters” never follow. , but who are extolled among the “slaves.” Nietzsche considered the desire of Buddhists to renounce the world and the desire of Christians for heavenly life as opposed to earthly life as a psychological trick that the masters did not even impose on the slaves, but the slaves invented for themselves in order to justify their position.

Nietzsche describes it this way:

Weakness should be turned into merit, and powerlessness, which is not rewarded, into “kindness”; cowardly meanness – into “humility”; submitting to those who are hated is “obedience.”

When the oppressed, trampled, and subjected to violence exhort themselves out of the vengeful cunning of powerlessness: “Let us be other than the evil, namely, good! And everyone is good who does not commit violence, who does not offend anyone, who does not attack, who does not return evil for evil, who entrusts revenge to God, who, like us, keeps in the shadows, who shuns everything evil, and generally demands little from life, like us, patient, humble, righteous,” then to a cold and unprejudiced ear this sounds, in fact, nothing more than : “we, the weak, are weak, and there is nothing to it; it’s good if we don’t do anything for which we are not strong enough”

Slave morality is well known to most of us; it is literally absorbed into us with mother’s milk and psychologically holds us back from great achievements. For example, it is often believed that money does not make a person happy. However, serious scientific research refutes this claim, showing that happiness levels are strictly correlated with increases in wealth, and there is no ceiling beyond which increases in wealth will not bring additional happiness.

Also, one of the main cognitive distortions of slave morality is the belief in the justice of the world, according to which those who we do not like, the “bad” ones, will be punished by fate, and the “good” ones will be rewarded. But this does not happen, because the world is fair, but in a completely different way: the winner gets everything, and the loser gets nothing. So it makes no sense to be indignant about where the powers that be are driving this very world, but it makes more sense to take everything into your own hands and roll your own.

The path to the Nietzschean superman, who creates his universe from the chaos of facts, lies in squeezing out slave morality and acquiring a master’s morality – this is the only way to begin to manage your own life and direct the reality around us towards the world created in our mind.

… this young man squeezes a slave out of himself drop by drop and … waking up one fine morning, he feels that it is no longer slave blood flowing in his veins, but real human…
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov