Zen and the art of flow

 This was triggered by a newsletter I received from ABC Classic (Australian radio station) with a link to a study done on ‘flow’, which is a term coined by physiologist, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, to describe a specific psychological experience that many (if not all) people have had when totally immersed in some activity that they not only enjoy but have developed some expertise in.
 
The study was performed by Dr John Kounios from Drexel University's Creative Research Lab in Philadelphia, who “examined the 'neural and psychological correlates of flow' in a sample of jazz guitarists.” The article was authored by Jennifer Mills from ABC Classic’s sister station, ABC Jazz. But the experience of ‘flow’ just doesn’t apply to mental or artistic activities, but also sporting activities like playing tennis or cricket. Mills heads her article with the claim that ‘New research helps unlock the secrets of flow, an important tool for creative and problem solving tasks’. She quotes Csikszentmihalyi to provide a working definition:
 
"A state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it."
 
I believe I’ve experienced ‘flow’ in 2 quite disparate activities: writing fiction and driving a car. Just to clarify, some people think that experiencing flow while driving means that you daydream, whereas I’m talking about the exact opposite. I hardly ever daydream while driving, and if I find myself doing it, I bring myself back to the moment. Of course, cars are designed these days to insulate you from the experience of driving as much as possible, as we evolve towards self-driving cars. Thankfully, there are still cars available that are designed to involve you in the experience and not remove you from it.
 
I was struck by the fact that the study used jazz musicians, as I’ve often compared the ability to play jazz with the ability to write dialogue (even though I’m not a musician). They both require extemporisation. The article references Nat Bartsch, whom I’ve seen perform live and whose music is an unusual style of jazz in that it can be very contemplative. I saw her perform one of her albums with her quartet, augmented with a cello, which made it a one-off, unique performance. (This is a different concert performed in Sydney without the cellist.)
 
The study emphasised the point that the more experienced practitioners taking part were the ones more likely to experience ‘flow’. In other words, to experience ‘flow’ you need to reach a certain skill-level. In emphasising this point, the author quotes jazz legend, Charlie Parker:
 
"You've got to learn your instrument. Then, you practise, practise, practise. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail."
 
I can totally identify with this, as when I started writing it was complete crap, to the extent that I wouldn’t show it to anyone. For some irrational reason, I had the self-belief – some might say, arrogance – that, with enough perseverance and practice, I could ‘break-through’ into the required skill-level. In fact, I now create characters and write dialogue with little conscious effort – it’s become a ‘delegated’ task, so I can concentrate on the more complex tasks of resolving plot points, developing moral dilemmas and formulating plot twists. Notice that these require a completely different set of skills that also had to be learned from scratch. But all this can come together, often in unexpected and surprising ways, when one is in the mental state of ‘flow’. I’ve described this as a feeling like you’re an observer, not the progenitor, so the process occurs as if you’re a medium and you just have to trust it.
 
Dr. Steffan Herff, leader of the Sydney Music, Mind and Body Lab at Sydney University, makes a point that supports this experience:
 
"One component that makes flow so interesting from a cognitive neuroscience and psychology perspective, is that it comes with a 'loss of self-consciousness'."
 
And this allows me to segue into Zen Buddhism. Many years ago, I read an excellent book by Daisetz Suzuki titled, Zen and Japanese Culture, where he traces the evolutionary development of Zen, starting with Buddhism in India, then being adopted in China, where it was influenced by Taoism, before reaching Japan, where it was assimilated into a sister-religion (for want of a better term) with Shintoism, which is an animistic religion.
 
Suzuki describes Zen as going inward rather than outward, while acknowledging that the two can’t be disconnected. But I think it’s the loss of ‘self’ that makes it relevant to the experience of flow. When Suzuki described the way Zen is practiced in Japan, he talked about being in the moment, whatever the activity, and for me, this is an ideal that we rarely attain. It was only much later that I realised that this is synonymous with flow as described by Csikszentmihalyi and currently being examined in the studies referenced above.
 
I’ve only once before written a post on Zen (not counting a post on Buddhism and Christianity), which arose from reading Douglas Hofstadter’s seminal tome, Godel Escher Bach (which is not about Zen, although it gets a mention), and it’s worth quoting this summation from myself:
 
My own take on this is that one’s ego is not involved yet one feels totally engaged. It requires one to be completely in the moment, and what I’ve found in this situation is that time disappears. Sportsmen call it being ‘in the zone’ and it’s something that most of us have experienced at some time or another.

The universal quest for meaning

I’ve already cited Philosophy Now (Issue 162, June/July 2024) in my last 2 posts and I’m about to do it again. Every issue has a theme, and this one is called ‘The Meaning Issue’, so it’s no surprise that 2 of the articles reference Viktor Frankl’s seminal book, Man’s Search for Meaning. I’ve said that it’s probably the only book I’ve read that I think everyone should read.
 
For those who don’t know, Frankl was an Auschwitz survivor and a ‘logotherapist’, a term he coined to describe his own version of existential psychological therapy. Basically, Frankl saw purpose as being the unrecognised essence of our existence, and its lack as a source of mental issues like depression, neuroticism and stress. I’ve written about the importance of purpose previously, so I might repeat myself.
 
One of the articles (by Georgia Arkell) compares Frankl’s ideas on existentialism with Sartre’s, and finds Frankl more optimistic. I know that I’m taking a famous line out of context, but I feel it sums up their differences. Sartre famously said, ‘Hell is other people’, but Frankl lived through hell, and would no doubt, have strongly disagreed. Frankl argued that we can find meaning even under the most extreme circumstances, and he should know.
 
To quote from Arkell’s article:
 
Frankl noted that the prisoners who appeared to have the highest chance of survival were those with some aim or meaning directed beyond themselves and beyond day to day survival.
 
Then there is this, in Frankl’s own words (from Man’s Search for Meaning):
 
…it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner-decision and not the result of camp influences alone. Fundamentally then, any man can, under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him – mentally and spiritually.
 
I should point out that my own father spent 2.5 years as a POW in Germany, though it wasn’t a death camp, even though, according to his own testimony, it was only Red Cross food parcels that kept him alive. He rarely talked about it, as he was a firm believer that you couldn’t make the experience of war, in all its manifestations, comprehensible to anyone who hadn’t experienced it. But in light of Frankl’s words, I wonder now how my father did find meaning. There is one aspect of his experience that might shed some light on that – he escaped no less than 3 times.
 
My father was very principled, some might say, to a fault. He volunteered to stay and look after the wounded when they were ordered to evacuate Crete, because, as he said, it was his job (he was an ambulance officer in the Field Ambulance Corp). That action probably later saved his life, but that’s another story. Also on Crete, while trying to escape with another prisoner with the help of a local woman (it was always the women who did this, according to my father), they were discovered by a German, whilst hiding. My father gave himself up so the other 2 could escape. The Australian escapee made it back home and was able to tell my grandmother that her son was still alive (she only knew he was missing in action). But the 3 attempts I mentioned all happened after he was taken to Germany, and on one occasion, the Commandant asked him, why did he escape? My father answered matter-of-factly, ‘It’s my job’. Apparently, due to his sincerity (not for being a smart-arse), the Commandant chose not to punish him.
 
So, I think my father survived because he stuck to some core values and principles that became his own rock and anchor. His attempts to escape are manifestations of his personal affirmation that he never lost hope.
 
Frankl understood better than most, because of his lived experience, the importance of hope to a person’s survival. As an aside, our (Australian) government has a very deliberate policy of eliminating all hope for asylum seekers who arrive by sea. I think it’s so iniquitous, it should be a recognised crime – it goes to the heart of human rights. Slightly off-topic, but very relevant.
 
Loss of hope is something I’ve explored in my own fiction, where we witness its loss like a ball of tightly wound string slowly unravelling (not the metaphor I used in the book), as a key character is abandoned on a distant world (it’s sci-fi, for those who don’t know). I’ve been told by at least one reader that it’s the most impactful section in the book. True story: I was once sitting next to someone on a bus who was up to that part of the book, and as he got up to leave, he said, ‘If she dies, I’ll never speak to you again.’
 
See how easily I get side-tracked - my mind goes off on tangents – I can’t help myself. I’m the same in conversations.
 
Back to the topic: the other article in Philosophy Now that references Frankl, Finding Meaning in Suffering, by Patrick Testa (a psychiatric clinician with a BA in philosophy and political science) also quotes from Man’s Search for Meaning:
 
There are some authors who contend that meanings and values are nothing but defense mechanisms or reaction formulations…  But for myself, I would not be willing to live merely for the sake of my defense mechanisms, nor would I be ready to die merely for the sake of my reaction formulations. (Emphasis in Testa’s quote)
 
This quote was the original trigger for this essay, as it leads me to consider the role of identity. I’ve long argued that identity is what someone is willing to die for (which Frankl specifically mentions), therefore willing to kill for. Identity is strongly related to ‘meaning’ for most people, albeit at a subconscious level. For some people, their identity is their profession, for others it’s their heritage, and for many it’s their political affiliation. The point about identity is that it both binds us and divides us.
 
But if you were to ask someone what their identity is, they might well struggle to answer – I know I do – but if it appears to be threatened, even erroneously, they will become combative. Speaking for myself, I struggled to find meaning for a large portion of my life, seeking it in relationships that were more fantasy than realistic. I think I only found meaning (or purpose) when I was able to channel my artistic drives and also express my intellectual meanderings like I’m doing on this blog. So that axiomatically becomes my identity. I’ve written more than once about the importance of freedom, by which I mean the freedom to express one’s thoughts and any artistic urges. Even in my profession (which is in engineering), I found I was best when left to my own devices, and suffered most when someone tried to put me in a box and confine me to their way of thinking.
 
I can’t imagine living in a society where that particular freedom is curtailed, yet they exist. I would argue that a society where its participants can’t flourish would stagnate and not progress in any way, except possibly in a strictly material sense. We’ve seen that in totalitarian regimes all over the world.
 
Lastly, one can’t leave this topic without talking about religion. In fact, I imagine that many, on reading the title, would have expected that would be the starting point. I’ll provide a reference at the end, but very early on in the life of this blog, I wrote a post called Hope, which was really a response to a somewhat facile argument by William Lane Craig that atheists can’t possibly have hope. I don’t think I can improve on that argument here, but it also ties into the topic of identity that I just referred to.
 
Apart from identity, which is usually cultural, there is the universal regard for human suffering. As pointed out in the articles I cited, suffering is an unavoidable aspect of life. The Buddhist philosophy makes this its starting point – It’s the first of the Four Noble Truths, from which the other 3 stem. I expect a lot of religions have arisen as a means to psychologically ‘explain’ the purpose of suffering. It’s also a feature of virtually all fiction, without a religious argument in sight.
 
But it’s also a key feature of Frankl’s philosophy. Arguably, without suffering, we can’t find meaning. I’ve argued previously that we don’t find wisdom through learning and achievements, but through dealing with adversity – it’s even a specific teaching in the I Ching, albeit expressed in different words:
 
Adversity is the opposite of success, but it can lead to success if it befalls the right person.
 
I expect many of us can identify with that. Meaning can be found in the darkest of psychological places, yet without it, we wouldn’t keep going.
 
 
Other posts relevant to this topic: Homage to my Old Man; Hope; The importance of purpose; Freedom, justice, happiness and truth; Freedom, a moral imperative.
 

Feeling is fundamental

 I’m not sure I’ve ever had an original idea, but I sometimes raise one that no one else seems to talk about. And this is one of them: I contend that the primary, essential attribute of consciousness is to be able to feel, and the ability to comprehend is a secondary attribute.
 
I don’t even mind if this contentious idea triggers debate, but we tend to always discuss consciousness in the context of human consciousness, where we metaphorically talk about making decisions based on the ‘head’ or the ‘heart’. I’m unsure of the origin of this dichotomy, but there is an inference that our emotional and rational ‘centres’ (for want of a better word) have different loci (effectively, different locations). No one believes that, of course, but possibly people once did. The thing is that we are all aware that sometimes our emotional self and rational self can be in conflict. This is already going down a path I didn’t intend, so I may return at a later point.
 
There is some debate about whether insects have consciousness, but I believe they do because they demonstrate behaviours associated with fear and desire, be it for sustenance or company. In other respects, I think they behave like automatons. Colonies of ants and bees can build a nest without a blueprint except the one that apparently exists in their DNA. Spiders build webs and birds build nests, but they don’t do it the way we would – it’s all done organically, as if they have a model in their brain that they can follow; we actually don’t know.
 
So I think the original role of consciousness in evolutionary terms was to feel, concordant with abilities to act on those feelings. I don’t believe plants can feel, but they’d have very limited ability to act on them, even if they could. They can communicate chemically, and generally rely on the animal kingdom to propagate, which is why a global threat to bee populations is very serious indeed.
 
So, in evolutionary terms, I think feeling came before cognitive abilities – a point I’ve made before. It’s one of the reasons that I think AI will never be sentient – a viewpoint not shared by most scientists and philosophers, from what I’ve read.  AI is all about cognitive abilities; specifically, the ability to acquire knowledge and then deploy it to solve problems. Some argue that by programming biases into the AI, we will be simulating emotions. I’ve explored this notion in my own sci-fi, where I’ve added so-called ‘attachment programming’ to an AI to simulate loyalty. This is fiction, remember, but it seems plausible.
 
Psychological studies have revealed that we need an emotive component to behave rationally, which seems counter-intuitive. But would we really prefer if everyone was a zombie or a psychopath, with no ability to empathise or show compassion. We see enough of this already. As I’ve pointed out before, in any ingroup-outgroup scenario, totally rational individuals can become totally irrational. We’ve all observed this, possibly actively participated.
 
An oft made point (by me) that I feel is not given enough consideration is the fact that without consciousness, the universe might as well not exist. I agree with Paul Davies (who does espouse something similar) that the universe’s ability to be self-aware, would seem to be a necessary condition for its existence (my wording, not his). I recently read a stimulating essay in the latest edition of Philosophy Now (Issue 162, June/July 2024) titled enigmatically, Significance, by Ruben David Azevedo, a ‘Portuguese philosophy and social sciences teacher’. His self-described intent is to ‘Tell us why, in a limitless universe, we’re not insignificant’. In fact, that was the trigger for this post. He makes the point (that I’ve made elsewhere myself), that in both time and space, we couldn’t be more insignificant, which leads many scientists and philosophers to see us as a freakish by-product of an otherwise purposeless universe. A perspective that Davies has coined ‘the absurd universe’. In light of this, it’s worth reading Azevedo’s conclusion:
 
In sum, humans are neither insignificant nor negligible in this mind-blowing universe. No living being is. Our smallness and apparent peripherality are far from being measures of our insignificance. Instead, it may well be the case that we represent the apex of cosmic evolution, for we have this absolute evident and at the same time mysterious ability called consciousness to know both ourselves and the universe.
 
I’m not averse to the idea that there is a cosmic role for consciousness. I like John Wheeler’s obvious yet pertinent observation:
 
The Universe gave rise to consciousness, and consciousness gives meaning to the Universe.
 
And this is my point: without consciousness, the Universe would have no meaning. And getting back to the title of this essay, we give the Universe feeling. In fact, I’d say that the ability to feel is more significant than the ability to know or comprehend.
 
Think about the role of art in all its manifestations, and how it’s totally dependent on the ability to feel. In some respects, I consider AI-generated art a perversion, because any feeling we have for its products is of our own making, not the AI’s.
 
I’m one of those weird people who can even find beauty in mathematics, while acknowledging only a limited ability to pursue it. It’s extraordinary that I can find beauty in a symphony, or a well-written story, or the relationship between prime numbers and Riemann’s Zeta function.

Addendum: I realised I can’t leave this topic without briefly discussing the biochemical role in emotional responses and behaviours. I’m thinking of the brain’s drugs-of-choice like serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin and endorphins. Some may argue that these natural ‘messengers’ are all that’s required to explain emotions. However, there are other drugs, like alcohol and caffeine (arguably the most common) that also affect us emotionally, sometimes to our detriment. My point being that the former are nature’s target-specific mechanisms to influence the way we feel, without actually being the genesis of feelings per se.

Daniel C Dennett (28 March 1942 - 19 April 2024)

 I only learned about Dennett’s passing in the latest issue of Philosophy Now (Issue 162, June/July 2024), where Daniel Hutto (Professor of Philosophical Psychology at the University of Wollongong) wrote a 3-page obituary. Not that long ago, I watched an interview with him, following the publication of his last book, I’ve Been Thinking, which, from what I gathered, is basically a memoir, as well as an insight into his philosophical musings. (I haven’t read it, but that’s the impression I got from the interview.)
 
I should point out that I have fundamental philosophical differences with Dennett, but he’s not someone you can ignore. I must confess I’ve only read one of his books (decades ago), Freedom Evolves (2006), though I’ve read enough of his interviews and commentary to be familiar with his fundamental philosophical views. It’s something of a failing on my part that I haven’t read his most famous tome, Consciousness Explained (1991). Paul Davies once nominated it among his top 5 books, along with Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel Escher Bach. But then he gave a tongue-in-cheek compliment by quipping, ‘Some have said that he explained consciousness away.’
 
Speaking of Hofstadter, he and Dennett co-published a book, The Mind’s I, which is really a collection of essays by different authors, upon which Dennett and Hofstadter commented. I wrote a short review covering only a small selection of said essays on this blog back in 2009.
 
Dennett wasn’t afraid to tackle the big philosophical issues, in particular, anything relating to consciousness. He was unusual for a philosopher in that he took more than a passing interest in science, and appreciated the discourse that axiomatically arises between the 2 disciplines, while many others (on both sides) emphasise the tension that seems to arise and often morphs into antagonism.
 
What I found illuminating in one of his YouTube videos was how Dennett’s views of the world hadn’t really changed that much over time (mind you, neither have mine), and it got me thinking that it reinforces an idea I’ve long held, but was once iterated by Nietzsche, that our original impulses are intuitive or emotive and then we rationalise them with argument. I can’t help but feel that this is what Dennett did, though he did it extremely well.
 
I like the quote at the head of Hutto’s obituary: “The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.”

 

The negative side of positive thinking

 This was a topic in last week’s New Scientist (8 June 2024) under the heading, The Happiness Trap, an article written by Conor Feehly, a (freelance journalist, based in Bangkok). Basically, he talks about the plethora of ‘self-help’ books and in particular, the ‘emergence of the positive psychology movement in 1998’. I was surprised he could provide a year, when one would tend to think it was a generational transition. At least, that’s my experience.
 
He then discusses the backlash (my term, not his) that’s occurred since, and mentions a study, ‘published in 2022, [by] an international group of psychologists exploring how societal pressure to be happy affects people in 40 countries’ (my emphasis). He cites Brock Bastian at the University of Melbourne, who was part of the study, “When we are not willing to accept negative emotions as a part of life, this can mean that we may see negative emotions as a sign there is something wrong with us.” And this gets to the nub of the issue.
 
I can’t help but think that there is a generational effect, if not a divide. I see myself as being in between, generationally speaking. My parents lived through the Great Depression and WW2, so they experienced enough negative emotion for all of us. Growing up in rural NSW, we didn’t have much but neither did anyone else, so we didn’t think that was exceptional. There was a lot of negative emotion in our lives as a consequence of the trauma that my Dad experienced as both a wartime serviceman and a prisoner-of-war. It was only much later, as an adult, that I realised this was not the norm. Back then, PTSD wasn’t a term.
 
One of the things that struck me in Feehly’s article was the idea of ‘acceptance’. To quote:
 
Research shows that when people accepted their negative emotions – rather than judging mental experience as good or bad – they become more emotionally resilient, experiencing fewer negative feelings in response to environmental stressors and attaining a greater sense of well-being.
 
He also says in the same context:
 
The good news is that, as we age, we increasingly rely on acceptance – which might help to explain why older people tend to report better emotional well-being.
 
As one of that cohort (older people), I can identify with that sentiment. Acceptance is a multi-faceted word, because one of the unexpected benefits of getting older is that we learn to accept ourselves, becoming less critical and judgemental, and hopefully extending that to others.
 
In our youth, acceptance by one’s peers is a prime driver of self-esteem and associated behaviours, and social media has to a large extent hijacked that impulse, which was also highlighted by Brock Bastian (cited above).
 
I’ve got side-tracked to the extent that this is the antithesis of the so-called ‘positive psychology movement’, possibly because I think my generation largely avoided that trap. We are more likely to see that a ‘think positive’ attitude in the face of all of life’s dilemmas and problems is a delusion. What’s obvious is that negative emotional states have evolutionary value, because they have ancient roots. The other point that’s obvious to me is that we are all addicted to stories, where we vicariously experience negative emotions on a regular basis. In fact, a story that only contained positive emotions would never be read, or watched.
 
What has always been obvious to me, and which I’ve written about before, including in the very early history of this blog, is that we need adversity to gain wisdom. As I keep saying, it’s the theme of virtually every story ever told. When I look back on my early adult years and how seemingly insurmountable they felt, my older self is so grateful I persevered. There is a hypothetical often raised: what advice would you give your younger self? I’d just say, ‘Hang in there, it gets better.’

More on radical ideas

 As you can tell from the title, this post carries on from the last one, because I got a bit bogged down on one issue, when I really wanted to discuss more. One of the things that prompted me was watching a 1hr presentation by cosmologist, Claudia de Rahm, whom I’ve mentioned before, when I had the pleasure of listening to an on-line lecture she gave, care of New Scientist, during the COVID lockdown.
 
Claudia’s particular field of study is gravity, and, by her own admission, she has a ‘crazy idea’. Now here’s the thing: I meet a lot of people on Quora and in the blogosphere, who like me, live (in a virtual sense) on the fringes of knowledge rather than as academic or professional participants. And what I find is that they often have an almost zealous confidence in their ideas. To give one example, I recently came across someone who argued quite adamantly that the Universe is static, not expanding, and has even written a book on the subject. This is contrary to virtually everyone else I’m aware of who works in the field of cosmology and astrophysics. And I can’t help but compare this to Claudia de Rahm who is well aware that her idea is ‘crazy’, even though she’s fully qualified to argue it.
 
In other words, it’s a case of the more you know about a subject, the less you claim to know, because experts are more aware of their limitations than non-experts. I should point out, in case you didn’t already know, I’m not one of the experts.
 
Specifically, Claudia’s crazy idea is that not only are there gravitational waves, but gravitons and that gravitons have an extremely tiny amount of mass, which would alter the effect of gravity at very long range. I should say that at present, the evidence is against her, because if she’s right, gravity waves would travel not at the speed of light, as predicted by Einstein, but ever-so-slightly less than light.
 
Freeman Dyson, by the way, has argued that if gravitons do exist, they would be impossible to detect, but if Claudia is right, then they would be.
 
In her talk, Claudia also discusses the vacuum energy, which according to particle physics, should be 28 orders of magnitude greater than the relativistic effect of ‘dark energy’. She calls it ‘the biggest discrepancy in the entire history of science’. This suggests that there is something rotten in the state of theoretical physics, along with the fact, that what we can physically observe, only accounts for 5% of the Universe.
 
It should be pointed out that at the end of the 19th Century no one saw or predicted the 2 revolutions in physics that were just around the corner – relativity theory and quantum mechanics. They were an example of what Thomas Kuhn called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (the title of his book expounding on this). And I’d suggest that these current empirical aberrations in cosmology are harbingers of the next Kuhnian revolution.
 
Roger Penrose, whom I’ve referenced a number of times on this blog, is someone else with some ‘crazy’ ideas compared to the status quo, for which I admire him even if I don’t agree with him. One of Penrose’s hobby horses is his own particular inference from Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, which he learned as a graduate (under Steen, at Cambridge) and which he discusses in this video. He argues that it provides evidence that humans don’t think like computers. If one takes the example of Riemann’s Hypothesis (really a conjecture) we know that a computer can’t tell us if it’s true or not (my example, not Penrose’s).* However, most mathematicians believe it is true, and it would be an enormous shock if it was proven untrue, or a contra-example was found by a computer. This is the case with other conjectures that have been proven true, like Fermat’s Last Theorem and Poincare’s conjecture. Penrose’s point, if I understand him correctly, is that it takes a human mind and not a computer to make this leap into the unknown and grasp a ‘truth’ out of the aether.
 
Anyone who has engaged in some artistic endeavour can identify with this, even if it’s not mathematical truths they are seeking but the key to unravelling a plot in a story.
 
Penrose makes the point in the video that he’s a ‘visual’ person, which he thinks is unusual in his field. Penrose is an excellent artist, by the way, and does all his own graphics. This is something else I can identify with, as I was quite precocious as a very young child at drawing (I could draw in perspective, though no one taught me) even though it never went anywhere.
 
Finally, some crazy ideas of my own. I’ve pointed out on other posts that I have a predilection (for want of a better term) for Kant’s philosophical proposition that we can never know the ‘thing-in-itself’ but only a perception of it.
 
With this in mind, I contend that this philosophical premise not only applies to what we can physically detect via instruments, but what we theoretically infer from the mathematics we use to explore nature. As heretical an idea as it may seem, I argue that mathematics is yet another 'instrument' we use to probe the secrets of the Universe. Quantum mechanics and relativity theory being the most obvious.
 
As I’ve tried to expound on other posts, relativity theory is observer-dependent, in as much as different observers will both measure and calculate different values of time and space, dependent on their specific frame of reference. I believe this is a pertinent example of Kant’s proposition that the thing-in-itself escapes our perception. In particular, physicists (including Penrose) will tell you that events that are ostensibly simultaneous to us (in a galaxy far, far away) will be perceived as both past and future by 2 observers who are simply crossing a street in opposite directions. I’ve written about this elsewhere as ‘the impossible thought experiment’.
 
The fact is that relativity theory rules out the event being observed at all. In other words, simultaneous events can’t be observed (according to relativity). For this reason, virtually all physicists will tell you that simultaneity is an illusion – there is no universal now.
 
But here’s the thing: if there is an edge in either space or time, it can only be observed from outside the Universe. Relativity theory, logically enough, can only tell us what we can observe from within the Universe.
 
But to extend this crazy idea, what’s stopping the Universe existing within a higher dimension that we can’t perceive. Imagine being a fish and you spend your entire existence in a massive body of water, which is your entire universe. But then one day you are plucked out of that environment and you suddenly become aware that there is another, even bigger universe that exists right alongside yours.
 
There is a tendency for us to think that everything that exists we can learn and know about – it’s what separates us from every other living thing on the planet. But perhaps there are other dimensions, or even worlds, that lie forever beyond our comprehension.

*Footnote: Actually, Penrose in his book, The Emperor’s New Mind, discusses this in depth and at length over a number of chapters. He makes the point that Turing’s ‘proof’ that it’s impossible to predict whether a machine attempting to compute all the Riemann zeros (for example) will stop, is a practical demonstration of the difference between ‘truth’ and ‘proof’ (as Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem tell us). Quite simply, if the theorem is true, the computer will never stop, so it can never be proven algorithmically. It can only be proven (or disproven) if one goes ‘outside the [current] rules’ to use Penrose’s own nomenclature.