Nice: part 3

Image credit: “Nothing,” source unknown.

part 3 of a series

को अद्धा वेद (Who in truth knows?)

Man, ever desirous of knowledge, has already explored many things; but more and greater still remain concealed; perhaps reserved for far distant generations, who shall prosecute the examination of their Creator’s works in remote countries, and make many discoveries for the pleasure and convenience of life. … For we cannot avoid thinking, that those which we know of the Divine works are much fewer than those of which we are ignorant.

–Carl Linneaus, Reflections on the Study of Nature

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God’s Bureaucrat, aka The Prince of Botany, adopted a motto—which, of course. Doesn’t everyone? You know, mutter a mantra, claim a bible verse, all that? His was Deus creavit, Linnaeus disposuit, which for the poorly educated comes to “God created, Linnaeus organized.” Pretty chesty. And somewhat at odds with Thomas à Kempis’s “Homo proponit, sed Deus disponit,” (“Man proposes, but God disposes”) in his 15th century devotional, De Imitatione Christi (The Imitation of Christ).

But who are you to judge?

A thought intrudes upon your forebrain: Maybe Carl should have named us “Homo, -ish”, the specific epithet to account for LIKE, sufficiently ambiguous to accommodate the variety observable in humans, appropriately derogatory in nature: apish, churlish, devilish, foolish etc. Beats the hell out of “Nosce te ipsum.”

Chin in hand and eyes rolled slightly upward (as if to appreciate the source—your frontal cortex), you smile in self satisfaction at your cleverishness. Linnaeus proponit, ego meliorem. Until grievously interrupted by:

…Lord. Has a dumber thought ever been thunk?

Which would be the other you—You the Second scoffing at You the First, resulting in a tiresome, silent yammering (formally known as metacognition, which, frighteningly, is thought to be normal). And then:

For the love of Mary and poor forgotten Joseph! Can you both shut the fuck up?! I’m trying to read.

Wait, what? Are there three of you?

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You (all three of you?) might be excused for having stupid disputations, given what you’ve shoveled into your (sing., pl.?) brain of late. Apologists, a mad philosopher, an Oxford apologist playing public intellectual, a taxonomic bureaucrat ennobled by a king…. You might have done better sticking to butterfly murder. Or golf (which murders entire environments, so similar).

Yet as it happens, Carl’s precept comports with your favorite subject: yourself. Self knowledge, the Prince proclaimed (citing Solon the Wise as a validating authority) is the first step toward wisdom. Except the first step turns out not to be the first, but the third, as self knowledge requires acquaintance with both your origins and your incumbent duties.

You turn that over in your mind for a bit, drumming your fingers on the desk…. At some point, you hear: Ah, Barbara!

Whereupon you think, What?

But then, dimly at first, you remember the formal logic class you took long ago—and actually liked, as it offered something like clarity. Or at least, the appearance of clarity, which, in your experience, is about as good as it gets.

And after a few minutes of you doing nothing more than staring stupidly out the window, eyes focused on nothing in particular, the following resolves in your forebrain:

All wise persons are persons who possess self-knowledge.
All persons who possess self-knowledge are persons acquainted with their origin and their duties.
Therefore, all wise persons are persons acquainted with their origin and their duties.

And there you have it! A valid “Barbara” syllogism. Which is a deliberately silly name invented by a couple of medieval logicians as part of an elaborate mnemonic device to aid medieval lads in recognizing the structure of various logical argumentations. In the current case, a syllogism comprising three Universal Affirmatives, designated by A. Thus AAA, thus Barbara (the consonants doing no work). You’re comforted to remember that Barbara was a social creature, living in the happy company of other syllogistic structures with such names as Celarent (for the EAE type), Darii (for the AII type), Ferio (for the EIO type), etc.

You can almost hear the lads chanting (in dactylic hexameter):

Bárbara Celárent Daríi Ferióque prióris,
Césare Caméstrēs Festíno Baróco secúndae…

Valid, yes. But sound? That would require the premises to be true as given, which could be a subject of endless and exhausting discussion—which you wisely decide to avoid, relying instead on the sagacity of God’s Bureaucrat and his famously wise antecedent. Quod est demonstratum … sorta.

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On the off chance there might be something to be said for self awareness (nosce te ipsum) and all it entails (origins, duties), where might you begin on your wisdom quest?

Therapy is a popular option. You could spend years muttering about your tangled memories of childhood, to no measurable benefit, various fantastical theories employed: the ancient temperaments, Freud’s fictional trinity, Jung’s theologically elastic archetypes…. To literally no measurable benefit—beyond the therapist’s fee, better understood as a measurable detriment to those paying.

Or you could spend endless hours seeking a mystical oneness with the universe, facilitated by torturing your neurochemistry in one way or another (intense meditation, autistic rocking, mantra chanting, pharmacology)—finding yourself by pretending to dissolve yourself, until chemical equilibrium reverts to norm, as it usually (but not always) does. But you’re more of a “We’re one, but not the same” sort. And, much as you like a cocktail, you don’t think being fucked up leadeth unto utility. (Though it might leadeth unto embarrassing truths, better unuttered, not of a particularly insightful sort, however true. In vino veritas. Careful there, sparky.)

Yet another alternative, the most popular among your sorry species, would be to find self awareness in your ideology, usually inherited, occasionally gained by conversion. Knowing yourself as self situated in your preferred mental framework, religion being the most effective, more recent others on offer. And the best feature of this sort of self awareness is that it limits the need for serious metacognition—a measurable economy of thought achieved by suppression of troubling discomformities. Less, as is said, often being more. There need be no internal debates if all is settled. In which case, only one you, that other voice likely your god whispering in your ear, laying things on your metaphorical heart.

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Science offers a distinctly orthogonal avenue into self knowledge, being based, as it claims, on observation and experimentation. And, frankly, their stories are presently the best on offer, if success at making “discoveries for the pleasure and convenience of life” is the proper measure. And why wouldn’t it be? Even the most believing types, full of fervent prayer, resort to science in times of practical need, seeking the intervention of the Enlightenment as more reliable than their deity’s. Though, it must be noted, the deity tends to get any ensuing credit. The desperate praise of the faithful orant, having been judged deserving worse.

What, then, might science have to say about step one in your wisdom quest, your origin? The origin of origins, the universe you inhabit? -ish as in PLACE?Well, everyone, even you, knows that story: It all starts with a Big Bang, a singularity of infinite density, pressure and temperature some ~13.7 billion years ago when nothing exploded into something and then condensed into everything. Spontaneous generation manifested a mouse which became a mountain. Your mountain, the one you’ll die on.

Which, as it happens, is a very handy story for the faithful, as it leads to a proof for the existence of their god (who appeared only recently, but that’s another matter entirely). A proof known as the Kalam cosmological argument, often expressed in the form of a logically unassailable syllogism:

Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
The universe began to exist.
Therefore, the universe has a cause.

From which it is further argued by grinning enchanted types:

That initial event has come to be known as the “Big Bang.” This cosmological singularity, from which the universe sprang, marked the beginning, not only of all matter and energy in the universe, but of physical space and time themselves. The Big Bang model thus dramatically and unexpectedly supported the biblical doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.

Indeed, given the truth of the maxim ex nihilo nihil fit (out of nothing comes nothing), the Big Bang requires a supernatural cause. Since the initial cosmological singularity represents the terminus of all space-time trajectories, there cannot be any physical cause of the Big Bang. Rather, the cause must transcend physical space and time: it must be independent of the universe, and unimaginably powerful.

Moreover, this cause must be a personal being, endowed with free will. An impersonal, timeless, deterministic cause would either bring about the effect eternally or not at all. A temporal effect could originate from a timeless cause only if that cause were a personal agent, who could freely bring about the temporal effect without any change in antecedent determining conditions. The cause of the origin of the universe must therefore be a personal Creator, who a finite time ago brought the universe into existence by his free agency. In the words of Thomas Aquinas: “And this is what everybody means by God.” (William Lane Craig, “Cosmos and Creator,” Origins and Design 17.2)

Wow, you marvel. The Big Bang is doing a lot of work there….

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What’s funny about that? Any number of things, but for the sake of economy (and sanity), best focus on three.

First, the Arabic word kalam translates to argument, so the proof properly rendered into the King’s English would be the “argument cosmological argument”. By itself pretty funny.

Second is the syllogism’s minor premise, “the universe began to exist.” As an expert logician, you’re no doubt aware that an argument’s soundness (as distinct from logical validity) relies on the veracity of its premises. “The universe began to exist.” Says who?

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A thousand years before the Enlightenment, a certain Greek from Asia Minor had a strange way of thinking. He seems to have picked up a virus, perhaps during his reported travels in Babylonia and Egypt—either or both journeys being possibly apocryphal (scholars disagree). But it would make sense if travel he had, as both civilizations were mathematically advanced and later Greek sages are said to have made such hot and sweaty trips. However that may be, this Greek took rationality to an extreme, being the first known homo nosce te ipsum, Greek or non-Greek, to propose natural explanations for observed phenomena. Logos rather than mythos. In his cosmology, he theorized that there must be a substance (not a being) that persists through time from which all things originate, landing on water as the fundamental principle (arche) of all that you see and upon which your beloved Earth floats. Or, that’s Aristotle’s version of his cosmology. As none of this contrarian’s writings survive (if he took the time to write in the first place), no one really knows.

Blasphemy! screech those with knowledge of the Divine’s works. Who is the author of such a materialist, reductionist insult to the Creator’s works? (Glancing around for stones, kindling to build a pyre.)

That would be one Thales of Miletus (c. 624 BCE – c. 545 BCE), the first of the Seven Sages, who could also be thought of as the first Renaissance man. He made significant contributions to mathematics (Thales’s theorem; calculating the height of the pyramids and the distance of ships from shore), astronomy (predicting the weather and an eclipse), engineering (diverting the estimable Halys River, the longest river in what we now call Turkey), diplomacy (negotiating an alliance between the Milesians and Lydians) and philosophy.

To the last, it is to Thales that the maxim “Know thyself” (Γνῶθι σεαυτόν) is first attributed, the very quip so striking to the Prince of Botany that he named your species after it (Homo nosce te ipsum).

So beganneth the discussion, so persistently disconcerting to the enchanted, among a group of thinkers later to be named (not by Carl) the pre-Socratics.

Following their First Sage, the pre-Socratics adopted the strange idea that the world was an orderly system, open to rational inquiry. They debated whether the universe is singular or one of many, whether it is spatially finite or infinite, what its shape might be, what its essential substance is (“the infinite,” water, fire, atoms…). Where they found general agreement was that from nothing nothing comes—some eternal something underlies all apparent change, suggesting infinite duration—and that the cosmos arose from impersonal forces, not gods:

Most of the earliest philosophers conceived only of material principles as underlying all things. That of which all things consist, from which they first come and into which on their destruction they are ultimately resolved, of which the essence persists although modified by its affections—this, they say, is an element and principle of existing things. Hence they believe that nothing is either generated or destroyed, since this kind of primary entity always persists. Similarly we do not say that Socrates comes into being absolutely when he becomes handsome or cultured, nor that he is destroyed when he loses these qualities; because the substrate, Socrates himself, persists. In the same way nothing else is generated or destroyed; for there is some one entity (or more than one) which always persists and from which all other things are generated. All are not agreed, however, as to the number and character of these principles. (Aristotle, Metaphysics, 983b)

It’s not until Plato, some 200 years after Thales, that a creative demiurge crashes the party like a drunk at a faculty dinner. Which is likely why Christians have a particular fondness for his writings (the creative demiurge part, not the drunk part) and seem unaware of his intellectual forebears. A second point of affinity might be Plato’s taste for book burnings. Diogenes Laertius reports that Plato wanted to collect all of Democritus’s work and put them to the flame. Why? Because Democritus was the co-founder (with Leucippus) of atomic theory, anathema to a true believer, which Plato surely was. That, and Plato seems to have been just a bit insecure:

Aristoxenus in his Historical Notes affirms that Plato wished to burn all the writings of Democritus that he could collect, but that Amyclas and Clinias the Pythagoreans prevented him, saying that there was no advantage in doing so, for already the books were widely circulated. And there is clear evidence for this in the fact that Plato, who mentions almost all the early philosophers, never once alludes to Democritus, not even where it would be necessary to controvert him, obviously because he knew that he would have to match himself against the prince of philosophers, for whom, to be sure, Timon has this meed of praise [offers the following tribute]:

Such is the wise Democritus, the guardian of discourse, keen-witted disputant, among the best I ever read. (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 9.40)

The Judeo-Christian tradition never got past its just-so stories, as did the Greeks, who anyway had better stories. You’ll never find in its sacred texts a Thales of Miletus … just a bunch of prophets spouting condemnation against the monarchic elites or the recalcitrant people or both, promising kingdoms never to come, performing magic tricks to establish their bona fides. (Uh, just to note, there are four syllables in bona fides, not three: bó-na fí-des. Lord….) Oh, and a bipolar YHWH, lacerating between mood fits, bellowing instructions on whom to conquer, whom to kill, what plunder to take, when to use an awl to puncture the ear of a male slave and tag him like a farm animal.

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A couple of things are striking about the pre-Socratics. First is their almost autistic focus on formulating rational explanations for the observed cosmos, finding no appeal in the company of personal gods. The Enlightenment is typically credited with that accomplishment, which, though wrong, is somewhat understandable given how many centuries the maniac YHWH kept the West’s cultural throat in his grip. It took quite a bit of effort to pry those talons free, which is precisely what the Enlightenment thinkers set out to do. Voltaire adopted a mantra, “Ecrasez l’Infâme” (“Crush the monster”), in reference to that coldest of cold monsters, religion claiming supernatural authority—using force to press its epistemic claims. In his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume wrote, “If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school-metaphysics … commit it then to the flames; for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.” (The book-burning impulse no doubt attributable to Hume’s strict Calvinist upbringing.)

What you find curious about Christians (inter alia) is their posture as regards the Enlightenment. A bit of cognitive dissonance (or disingenuousness) seems to be in play. On the one hand, they credit Christianity with modernity, the Enlightenment being impossible without the Judeo-Christian notion of an ordered, decipherable, moral universe. On the other, they condemn the Enlightenment as a menacing cultural detour, the enchanted cart driven into a secular ditch, frightful consequences ensuing.

The historical reality is that a) Christians fought that cultural movement tooth and nail (or sword and pyre); and b) if the bony finger of blame is to be pointed, its proper aim is Thales and his ilk. Enlightenment philosophs knew their pre-Socratics very well and routinely pressed their voices into service when championing “nature and experience” against medieval scholasticism and ecclesiastical authority. They were heirs, not progenitors.

Even more striking about the pre-Socratics is how closely their speculations anticipate current cosmological models. With little more at hand than naked eyes and their entombed cortices, the pre-Socratics hit upon ideas uncannily similar to modern ones: multiple universes, unbounded space, cyclic epochs, invisible fundamental substances, etc.

Like their intellectual predecessors, modern cosmologists are ever desirous of knowledge. They, like their predecessors, develop models to explain the existence of the cosmos. They debate many of the same conundrums: Is the cosmos one unified whole or an assortment of many worlds? Is it infinite or does it have an edge (or a beginning)? What is its shape or structure? What fundamental substance or law produces the variety we see? But despite all their priestly maths and chthonic devices, little agreement is to be found—like their predecessors.

At their conferences you will hear of such wonders as inflation, holograms, cycles, hourglasses, time loops, Big Rips, and Big Bounces. You’ll witness raging debates, such as the inflation-versus-cyclic cosmology debate, or the string-versus-loop-quantum-gravity debate. You might be shocked, having a fairly juvenile idea of the austerity of scientific progress, to hear one side calling the other charlatans, populists, elitists, liars; to witness red-faced theorists storming out of rooms, hitting the crash bars on the exit doors as hard as possible like a proper brat—exhibiting a level of vitriol characteristic of the fans of one god confronting the fans of another.

As things stand, 25 major models are under serious consideration, with a near infinity of variations. (See Handy Table 1: Current Cosmological Models). Of that number, 16 do not envision the universe having had a beginning, eight suggest it might have. Only one suggests it did.

So, to conclude the longest joke ever told, the second funny thing about the “argument cosmological argument” is that its minor premise is at best a minority view, both in antiquity and now. A conjectural (or even false) premise, rendering enchanted Barbara not an invalid, but mentally unsound.

You think that’s funny?

Followed by:

Well, not laugh-out-loud funny, more like funny as in queer … off.

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The third funny thing, verging on the hilarious, is that if your goal is to fit the facts to your conclusion, any sort of universe will do. The Big Bang is offered as support for creatio ex nihilo by a preferred deity. The steady-state model, in which the universe is always expanding but maintaining a constant average density, with matter being continuously created to form new stars and galaxies, can be argued as support for creatio continua, the deity’s moment-to-moment upholding of the world. The multiverse is not a threat to belief, as the theory merely widens the canvas of the deity’s creativity. The quantum-vacuum-fluxuation model, in which “nothing” turns out not to be nihilum but a law-governed quantum state, can be declared to require a divine law-giver—which makes a certain amount of sense … in the early Iron Age. Pick your poison.

Alternatively, you can impose your conclusions on the facts, a trick played by scientists with increasing frequency. Does some observed phenomenon not fit your model? Declare it an illusion. Free will? Illusion! Time? Illusion! Space? Illusion! Your very self? Illusion! Life itself? Illusion!

But certainly, you whimper in protest, as cowed by scientists as some are by priests, the physical universe isn’t…

Illusion! comes the gusty reply. (See Handy Table 2: Your Sorry Illusions According to Prominent Illuminati.)

Pretty chesty. Both.

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So what, precisely, are you to make of all that? And how what you have learned aids your wisdom quest? Could wisdom be an illusion?

If indeed ex nihilo nihil fit, you are forced into imagining some sort of infinity, which, if you’re even slightly honest, you have to admit you can’t. (Go ahead, try.) You may well imagine some cause transcending space and time, “independent of the universe, and unimaginably powerful” behind or beyond or be-whatever the universe. You could even give it a name, have silent conversations with it, learn it requires blood sacrifice. But that’s not nothing.

Which, thinking about it further, what is nothing? You can’t imagine that either. (Go ahead, try.) Turns out, things can be named that can’t be imagined.

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The Hindu Nāsadīya Sūkta is commonly known to speakers of the King’s English as the Hymn of Creation, which makes you want to call the translation police. The title, by convention taken from its first verse, literally means “The Well-Spoken Saying Relating to ‘Not-Non-Being’. It’s date is unknown, but scholars generally agree that it is among the later portions of the Ṛg-veda, maybe composed around 1,000 BCE—half a millennium before the pre-Socratics, roughly the same for the Book of Genesis in its final form.

The saying begins:

The saying ends:

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Handy table 1:
current cosmological models

Model name	Includes inflation*?	Is the model cyclic?	Does it have an hourglass structure?	What’s the source of the variations in the CMB** temperature?	Is this a universe with a beginning?	Description
Eternal inflation	Yes	No	In some versions	Quantum	Maybe	Our observable universe is one of infinitely many bubbles in a huge, rapidly expanding quantum fuzz
Hartle-Hawking no-boundary proposal	Yes	No	Maybe	Quantum	Maybe	Our universe is born from a 4-dimensional space without a time dimension
Tunneling from nothing	Yes	No	No	Quantum	Yes	Our universe is born from a quantum fluctuation in a space with no space
String gas cosmology	No	No	Maybe	Thermal	No	The Big Bang starts fro the hot gas of tiny, vibrating strings
Emergent universe	Yes	No	No	Quantum	No	The universe is static, hot, and dense then then gradually starts to inflate
Pre-Big Bang	No	No	Yes	Quantum	No	A collapsing universe maps into an expanding universe, thanks to the mathematics of string theory
Ekpyrotic	No	Yes	No	Quantum	Maybe	The Big Bang is triggered by the collision of higher-dimensional membranes
Loop quantum cosmology	Yes	No	Yes	Quantum	No	Quanta of space, proposed by string theory’s rival, bounce a collapsing universe into an expanding one
Conformal cyclic cosmology	No	Yes	No	Unclear	Maybe	The universe expands in cycles, but instead of collapsing, it forgets how big it was
Baum-Frampton	Yes	Yes	No	Quantum	No	Incipient phantom dark energy grows to create a new Big Bang
Higgs Bang	No	Yes	No	Unclear	No	An unstable Higgs field turns a collapsing universe into an expanding one
Mirror universe	No	No	Yes	Quantum	No	The future and past of the Big Bang singularity are mirror images of each other
Janus universe	Yes	No	Yes	Unclear	No	The direction of time reverses at the Big Bang
Slow contraction	No	Yes	No	Classical	Maybe	The universe contracts as in an Ekpyrotic model, but the colliding membranes
De Sitter equilibrium	Yes	Yes	No	Quantum	No	Most of the universe is an empty desert, with universes like ours bubbling out as rare quantum fluctuations
Carrol-Chen	Yes	No	Yes	Quantum	No	The universe is in a state of eternal inflation, and the Big Bang is sparked by random downward fluctuations in entropy
Cosmological natural selection	Yes	No	No	Quantum	No	A universe is born inside every black hole, each with slightly different laws of physics
Torsion bounce	Yes	No	No	Quantum	No	A new twistiness in space-time leads to a Big Bounce inside a black hole
4D black hole	No	Yes	No	Thermal	No	Our universe is a membrane, expanding out of the horizon of a higher-dimensional black hole
Varying speed of light	No	Possibly	No	Unclear	Maybe	Light moves much faster as we reach the Big Bang
Bi-thermal Big Bang	No	No	No	Thermal	Maybe	Sound waves move much faster as we reach the Big Bang, but the universe remains hot
Holographic cosmology	Yes	No	No	Quantum	Maybe	The universe is born out of a timeless quantum theory
Space from Hilbert space	Yes	No	No	Quantum	No	Space is an illusion born out of correlations within a cosmic quantum computer
Gott and Li	Yes	No	No	Quantum	No	Time loops abound in the early universe but then evaporate
Periodic time cosmology	No	Yes	No	Conformal rescaling	No	The end is the beginning; the beginning is the end

After Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Halper, Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins (Chicago: Universe of Chicago Press, 2025), Appendix Table 1.

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handy table 2:
your Sorry illusions
according to Prominent illuminati

Phenomenon (Illusion)	Why it’s considered illusory	Major proponents
Free Will	Neuroscience suggests decisions are initiated before conscious awareness; ‘will’ is a retrospective narrative.	Daniel Wegner (Harvard), Patrick Haggard (UCL), Robert Sapolsky (Stanford)
Consciousness (Qualia)	Qualia are brain-constructed fictions; no metaphysical ‘what it‚Äôs like’ properties exist independently.	Daniel Dennett (Tufts), Keith Frankish (Sheffield/Open Univ.)
Self	The unified ‘I’ is a narrative integration of various brain processes; no central controller exists.	Bruce Hood (Bristol), Thomas Metzinger (Mainz)
Reality (Perceived World)	Perception evolved for utility, not truth; the world we see is a brain-constructed user interface.	Donald Hoffman (UC Irvine), Anil Seth (Sussex)
Objective Morality	Moral realism is a biologically useful fiction for promoting cooperation.	Michael Ruse (Florida State), E.O. Wilson (Harvard)
Life	Life is not a fundamental substance but a pattern of organization; no vital force exists.	Paul Nurse (Crick Institute), Sara Walker (ASU), Terrence Deacon (UC Berkeley)
Space	Space emerges from quantum/informational substrates; it’s not a continuous or fundamental entity.	Carlo Rovelli (Marseille), Leonard Susskind (Stanford), Erik Verlinde (Amsterdam), Edward Witten (IAS)
Time	Time does not appear in the fundamental laws of physics; it’s seen as emergent, not fundamental.	Julian Barbour (Independent), Carlo Rovelli (Universit√© de Marseille)
Physical Universe	Quantum mechanics and simulation/digital models suggest physical reality may be emergent or relational.	John Wheeler (Princeton), Donald Hoffman (UC Irvine), Carlo Rovelli (Marseille), David Chalmers (NYU)