Forces of Nature

Who wants to live forever? Well, not me, that's for sure. I have never been seduced by the idea of a life that never ends. A life that stops? Now that is much more attractive. Its true that there was a time, in my formative years, when I was seduced by the dark side, by Christian voices speaking of an "eternal life" in "heaven" where all the "believers" went to. But the problem with that was that the older I got, and the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to be a childish fairy tale. It is now many years since I gave it any thought at all as a serious proposition. A current version of this belief, in new, technological guise, is held by some transhumanists who hope to build machines we can become and therefore expand our lives into the far future.

Another problem with this "eternal" talk (and there are problems with it, to be sure) is our growing knowledge of the universe. It would take only basic scientific knowledge (such as I have) to know that in the last five centuries or so our knowledge of what is out there beyond our planet has increased enormously (in relative, if not actual, terms). Five hundred years ago you could have pointed up into the sky and said that that is where God lives (whichever one you happened to believe in). Its a bit harder to do that these days and believers in gods have had to modify and make slightly more sophisticated what they say they believe in. For when we look beyond our planet's borders now, as we are increasingly able to do, we just see the endless soup of space, a billion planets in a solar system here, a billion more there. And that pattern seems to be repeated everywhere that we can see, minus an anomaly or too. 

It remains true, of course, that we humans have pathetically tiny perspectives on things. That same interest in our universe informs us that we live on an insignificant planet that orbits a nothing star. We have gone from being the centre of God's creation to being just another planet in only a few short centuries. What's more, rather than a feeling of permanence that we often have about our lives, we know that this star we orbit will not last forever. Our sun is burning itself up and one day (in about 5 billion years) the fuel will have run out. At that point the sun will have expanded to such size that life on Earth will have ended long ago and our planet itself will be destroyed. So we humans are here on an extended holiday and we can't stay because the planet itself is scheduled for destruction by the universe.

My new album is called Forces of Nature. In making it I was thinking about those things that seem somewhat more basic, more fundamental, more eternal, if you will, than all the others. Most things around us, our (lack of) insight into them notwithstanding, are very temporary. Indeed, in a world obsessed with things material (and not least scientists, who hold materialism as a tenet of their scientific faith) it is brought home to us very strongly that physical things are things that are not meant to last. To be sure, by our counting some things last a long time. But human eyes and human time spans are as nothing. A mountain range may last 50-100 million years before it is no more. That is age upon age to us. But in terms of the universe it isn't that much. The mountain seems permanent as we climb it but it is going away as surely, if more slowly, as we are. It shows us that how you see informs what you see. Leave anything on our planet lying around for long enough and it will crumble to dust.

So what things did I think of as those basic forces of nature? I started very scientifically with the four actual primary forces (or interactions) of nature that scientists cannot, as yet, break down into any smaller or constituent processes. These forces are gravity, electromagnetic, weak nuclear and strong nuclear. These four are the interactions in physical systems that don't appear to be reducible to more basic interactions. But then things became interesting for me. I wanted to add some things to the list, things not quite so.... material such as our materialist scientist friends might add. Could I think of four non-material things to add to the list, things which, as far as we might be able to conjecture, were equally as basic to the universe, equally as prevalent, equally as universal? What I came up with will surely be controversial but is none the worse for that. As a thought experiment alone my exercise was worthwhile. The four items I came up with were as follows:

Time
Life
Consciousness
Decay

We can quibble over many things regarding my four items and I hope you will think about them as "universals". The four are, at least, ideas. I will also concede that at least three of them are connected to physical things. "Decay", for example, is a process that happens to all physical things (even if it happens so slowly that we humans, here today and gone tomorrow, can't see it). "Time" is the name we give to the fact that we can order things as events, some before others and some after. "Life" is the name we give to certain processes that seem to indicate an organism. "Consciousness" is what we have called a sense of awareness. 

But these things, attached to a world of physicality such as we inhabit, are also somewhat more mysterious (as perhaps all things are). They also point us in a direction which says something about us too. For all these things are our universe as seen through human eyes. The universe knows nothing of time or consciousness (unless it is itself conscious - an intriguing thought!). The universe decays daily and knows nothing of it nor cares. Life, in the terms of the universe, is just another energy process, the universe being understood in its entirety as merely the history of certain forms of energy and their processes. There are no more or less important things in our universe. But there are to us and, in that sense, these things become ideas which are important to people and to the ways they understand things. And so they become constituent parts in the tales we tell us about ourselves, where we live and who we are. They become part of the myth-making we humans have needed to inform ourselves since we could first string words together. In other words, these fundamental forces of nature are part of a human story.

And so Forces of Nature, an electronic, instrumental album made with synthesizers and drum machines, turns out to be a story about the universe and our place in it. In that story there are fundamental, primeval forces at work, inscrutable forces, forces we can neither grasp nor understand. They could be seen from one angle as mechanical processes and from another as the properties of things. I conceive of them, in some ways, as fields of vision on our universe which unite scientific, physicalist points of view with ones more spiritual. In my story all things are mysterious. Human beings are tiny beings stretching out their puny hands to know more but lost in the void of all time and space, not realizing just how BIG and beyond them everything really is. 

My myth of the universe is of a universe unknown, barely grasped, sometimes intuited. It is a universe of physical conditions and as yet unknown possibilities. It is a universe that contains life and consciousness, both things we don't understand, things more than the merely physical. But it is also a myth of a universe with an end. Decay is a constant, on-going process and it occurs daily in the form of change. I have tried to add these ideas to my myth in the form of two bonus tracks to my album, The Void and Heat Death. The Void acts in my myth as the context of everything. The universe is described as a big, dark, meaningless place. There is no logic to this place, no order. There are no rules for how it works. It just is. Make of it what you will. Or can. But then there is Heat Death. Heat Death is our event horizon. It is the terminal limit of this universe of my myth. Scientists tell us that the universe is cooling and in some trillions of years it will effectively become completely dead as it goes cold.

So these forces of nature of mine are a part of my myth of the universe. It is the universe we live in and my way of trying to explain it to myself and situate myself within it. It is, unlike religious myths, not a story of how I may or may not please implacable gods. It is not a story of how they are ultimately in charge of things. It is a story of a universe shaped by forces and processes. To be sure, this seems a lot less secure than it might. But who said that the universe is a place of safety? And it surely does not care what happens to anything. In my universe things just happen. Sometimes in the change and decay beautiful moments occur and sometimes these things can be beautiful destruction. Imagine, for example, a star exploding. My myth does, I think, help us to recognise just something of our place in the order of things. We are not at all important. But we do get to play the tiniest part in the history of all things. 

And that should be enough.


Forces of Nature is available now at MY BANDCAMP.

Change

Its been quite a tough week here at blog central and I have felt unwell. This has been, and remains, an on-going thing prey, as we all are, to both our genetics and our environment. Put the two together and who knows where it leads? In my case it has not necessarily lead to anywhere very good and I suffer from a number of existential challenges thanks to both where I have come from physically and experientially. But whatever your life has given you to deal with and however you continue to experience it, and the world you experience can be, for you, the only "real" world there is, there is always opportunity to think and learn further whilst you can. Ultimately, perhaps, this goes nowhere. All the things you learn will pass away even as you do. But there is always the here and now to consider and human beings just can't help trying to make sense of things. This, indeed, may be part of the problem.

And so it was that I found myself lying on the bed during the middle of the afternoon one day this week simultaneously aware of any number of physical, bodily processes going on with me. I felt fluid moving around my stomach, aches and pains appearing and disappearing around my joints, a sensation of warmth more in one arm than the other, tingling sensations in other parts, muscle spasms, fearful moods arising in my head and making the back of it ache - and any number of other things. I was, for a while, transfixed by what a horror it would be if every process of our existence was conscious. That life would be unlivable.

But the sensation of lying there just experiencing all this attenuated my mind as well. It brought home to me the inevitable, brutal, constancy of change. Our minds work in many ways as do our cultures and societies. One thing they often make use of is the idea of fixity, of solidity, of things basically being the same. Advertisers may try to spin you a line about something being the same for a long time, for example. But in the fine detail, when you actually concentrate and get down to it, fixity and constancy are a lie, a useful fiction. Nothing ever stays the same because things are always moving and always changing. Of course, you may not notice this just as you don't notice the vast majority of the things even your own body is doing all the time. But, to use the old riddle, you don't have to be in the forest for there to be a sound. Something is always happening. Things are always changing. You just need to look closely enough to see it.

This change is related to time and to our perception of time. Watch a kettle, or, better, a pan full of water, boil and in about 5 minutes you will see change in action. But watch a mountain for 5 minutes and you will see no noticeable difference - at least not with the mountain. Change takes place at different speeds relative to our viewing but this doesn't mean change isn't taking place because you cannot see it. On the contrary, it means it is always taking place but that you need to make the right accommodations to see it. Watch the mountain for 5 million years and then say that it has not changed. So, although change is a constant, change also takes place at different times and in different ways. The trick is to not allow yourself to be fooled into thinking that things haven't or won't change. Not only will they but you are observing the process right now even if you don't realise it.

Nature has not been kind to us in this respect. Our world is based on the way our minds perceive it and the mind plays a trick on us to give us a stable world we can make use of. As I mentioned above of me lying there on the bed, if we were constantly aware of the flux and change of the universe in all its actuality we would go mad instantly. No one could survive that awareness of everything constantly changing, never being the same. And so our form of life, a thing which did not have to be as it is and has been molded by existence itself, does not look so closely in general. It elides things by not looking so closely and speaks of identity and similarity. It ignores the change so that we can live. The German philosopher Nietzsche noticed this too and wrote of the "proud, illusory consciousness" that we humans have. He speaks of our drive for truth, something which "becomes fixed" and of every concept coming "into being by making equivalent that which is non-equivalent". He goes on to say that

a concept is produced by overlooking what is individual and real, whereas nature knows neither forms nor concepts.... but only an X which is inaccessible to us and indefinable by us

The thought is clear that human beings make the same what is not, brushing over their precise and inaccessible individuality and change from one thing to another or from one example of the same thing to another. Nietzsche's anthropology is very much one of the human being as an animal that has developed the ability to instrumentalise and make use of things and that this has become their evolutionary advantage. But this instrumentality is not to get reality right. This is merely to make it useful. I find it relevant to note here that Nietzsche himself suffered perhaps three decades of tormenting illness in his life and that he must have lain in bed many times just thinking about and experiencing the constant change, not least in his own mind. Such seems to be part of his biography anyway.

But what does all this change mean to us? It could have a number of consequences. It is a worthwhile lesson of experience to constantly keep in mind that things do not stay the same. And you will find that you do have to keep reminding yourself of the fact. This is useful to do if times are good for you or bad. It means that the good will not last but also that the bad will go away too. It means that you should take nothing for granted and that you should plan for, or factor in, change. I, I expect like everyone else, am granted a certain sense of fixity in my own existence. I get the feeling that my life is not in doubt and that my current situation will go on. But, of course, this is wrong. I am going to die. I will not go on. Things will change. My circumstances will become different, are becoming different even as I write these words. As already mentioned, this perception of fixity is an effect of being human, to believe that things are set. It helps us live, enables us to live. But we must live in a universe where things are always changing, where change is the constant and not fixity. It's useful to remember that.