Somewhere between the delightful and intriguing feeling of pondering what exists and the precarious and awkward feeling of applying artificial reality constructs is science at its best. At its worst, we are treated to politically-backed prediction stampedes and buzz-word driven technology sinks. It should come as no surprise to hear from me that we may be suffering from confusion-inducing existential impudence on the part of science as well.
Over the last century, the heavy burden, the tautologically self-important nightmare, of formal existential inquiry shifted largely from its invisible but well-grounded philosophical roots to one slim, visible branch that dared to balance it -- theoretical physics.
Such strange balancing acts are perhaps nowhere better demonstrated than in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. We go down a rabbit hole -- or out on a limb -- when we favor believability or relatability over existential accountability. Such situations, while at first thrilling, quickly become overwhelming. Soon, we are looking for an exit.
Over the last half century theoretical physics and cosmology have developed a staggering number of strange, though in their own way believable or relatable, unobservables. Accountability has been reduced to mathematics and machine output, yet the only existential thing that such output attests to is the internal consistency of artificial "phase spaces" (equation's system) or of the programming application.
The paradoxical truth is, there is no such thing as an unfalsifiable fact about unobservables. Existential fact and fiction both are imagination-dependent.
Without direct witnessing of atomic level phenomena we turn to experience. We do our best to create formalizations that reflect reality - the shared experience of the collection of phenomena at various scales of interest, including but not limited to minute scales such as the atomic. We also inevitably find our way to incomplete, storied principles that perhaps even become carriers of unconscious preferences and fears.
I say, give up Wonderland and embrace our own connection to and capacity for existential wonder.
We benefit from putting our imaginations to work within useful contexts. Countless great discoveries throughout history have depended on it.
Imagination can be responsive, but it can also be reactive. "How dare the universe give me chaos! I will temporarily enter a fantasy world to escape the discomfort I feel," is a common context for reactive imagination.
To be of benefit, reactive imagination has to be seen for what it is: an expression of discomfort.
Conversely, when we condemn imagination as if it is a crime against our theories, we criminalize existential inquiry and end up in a court of the ridiculous. Whether release from guilt in such a court looks like an opportunity or a crisis depends on our tolerance for confusion and capacity for responsive imagination.
In the middle of the 20th century, one small but influential community of theoretical physicists did much the same thing as Alice. Finding their otherwise analytic discipline in a state of metaphysical chaos, they adopted the reactive mantle of existential uncertainty.
Now the discipline is in a state of existential dissonance -- out of sync among theories and between theories and repeatable, experiential reality.
In the physics I talk about, I keep it as responsive as possible. For starters, I describe what I need to largely in terms of six physico-cosmic phenomena that are broadly familiar to most people: wave-form light, dark energy, heat, gravity, photons, and elements.
It's not that there cannot be not more analyzing/formalizing of cosmological and physical phenomena than what I name. It's just that the named phenomena are essential, in the sense of being a special class of phenomena. Their inter-relatedness, which mirrors and scales throughout the OKIC reality cipher, is what informs cosmological-level, autocatalytic, scaling behaviors such that rich, coherent existential feedback processes are experienced as arising naturally.
As we reach a new depth of inquiry, we notice that there is a point in the minuteness of existence where tensions cease their relationships with individuals and systems. The interaction of selves and systems of selves becomes simply a question of how does something come from nothing and why does nothingness exist? How do novel things arise (and sometimes persist) and redundant things persist (only to sometimes fall away), each in seeming contraction with the other?
Explore part 2 of the 4-part Fundamentals of ONT to familiarize yourself in detail with the function of tension states in the context of the OKIC reality cipher.
M.C. Escher, Three Spheres II, 1946