The Dream Merchant

READER NOTE: to see posts sooner, be sure to check out our new blogsite at Steemit.

There once was a man with incredible insight into fools. Douglas Adams noted in his book, "Mostly Harmless," that "[a] common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools."

Someone else, whose name is quite difficult to find said, "Who is the greater fool? The fool or the fool who follows him?"

I have stated on several occasions that Albert Einstein was a complete idiot, but by the common wisdom, we must admit that Stephen Hawking was an even greater idiot for blindly following Einstein. The incredible hero worship surrounding Hawking's death is, or would be amusing if it weren't so foolish.

Imagine, if you will, that once upon a time, there was nothing. No, not empty space, just...um, Nothing. In the center of Nothing was an infinitely tiny, infinitely hot, inifinitely dense balloon that just all the sudden blew itself up. Keep in mind that despite having all these "infinite" PHYSICAL characteristics, it was as much Nothing as the Nothing it didn't inhabit, and like all balloons I've ever seen, it blew itself up with Nothing to become Something (i.e. - the Universe).

This balloon blew itself up between 13 and 14 billion years ago, and we have spent an astronomical amount of money trying to see the light from this event, even though no one seems to know how we got in front of the light so we could be in position to see it. And since we don't seem to be able to see it, then there must have been a celestial Dark Ages where no light existed, even though it existed when the balloon blew itself up, and it existed after the Dark Ages.

Now, this Balloon is floating somewhere in the middle of Nothing, and there are possibly many other balloons around it, though the only proof of that is some numerical wizardry performed by Einstein and Hawking. There are three possibilities for this Balloon: k=1; k=0, and k=-1. In human speak, this translates to a balloon that will expand forever, one that remain exactly as it is forever, and one that is/will contract back to Nothing and presumably blow itself back up again. Inside this balloon, there are things we can't explain without resorting to electricity and magnetism, so the scientidiots invented Dark Matter and Dark Energy: Dark Matter because galaxies don't spin the way Hawking's numbers do, and Dark Energy because scientidiots think the balloon is expanding faster the further away it gets from Earth.

Never mind that both of these things have been completely debunked by their own tools in the past three years.

Now, since the Universe doesn't use electricity and magnetism, unlike every piece of technology humankind has devised, we apparently need Black Holes. Now, you may not know this, but there are four kinds of Black Holes, two of which are named after Stephen Hawking, not because he found them, but because he manipulated magical symbols, glyphs and ciphers in a way no one else had thought to do.

These Black Holes are "Settled Science," even though there is no such thing, and despite the fact that the "evidence" we have for them is the radiation they give off, even though their gravity is infinite and they absorb everything around them, including all radiation of every kind. Also, ignore the fact that Black Hole calculations require assuming only ONE MASS in the entire Universe. I don't know about you, but I do know I exist and I am standing on a rock, so that is at least two masses I am fairly sure about.

These scientidiots didn't like the fact that you can't divide something by nothing, so they called it infinity, which is not a number. No problem, since the square-root of -1 is "i", right? If you get the impression that Cosmology is inventing the rules of the game as you go along to ensure that you win, you're getting the right idea.

Yes, this Hawking feller was a genius, I tell ya. He could explain gravity using gravity. He could conjure infinity out of nothing. He could create Black Holes where none existed.

Don't get me wrong. Hawking managed to survive 50 years longer than other scientidiots ever though he would with his disease, and he managed to befuddle so many people with his wizarding skills that he finagled a fairly comfortable lifestyle for himself and breathless sainthood upon his death. I can respect a good scam, while condemning the desire and ability to scam so many gullible people.

Hawking managed to turn Dark Ages, Dark Matter, Dark Energy and Black Holes into money, and that's no small feat. He was able to take circular arguments and make them look like they led somewhere. He was able to conjure Universes out of Nothing and make it seem plausible. Plausible, that is, until you start picking at the scabs and looking at the festering assumptions underneath.

Yes, Stephen Hawking was a genius, all right, but not in the way most people think of him. He was a Master Scientidiot, and we can concede a certain amount of congratulations for his skill at bamboozling. As someone put it to me years ago, there are bullshitters and bullshit artists. Hawking was most certainly in the latter category.

And he did it by overcoming a fairly significant handicap, but one has to wonder how much leeway he was given for that one fact.

Mathematical wizardry has its place in telling us what is possible, but at some point you have to look up from the ciphering and see what is probable. I will grant that looking up was not an easy task for Hawking, but at some point in his 50-year career as a scientidiot, one imagines that he should have tried.

It is not enough to say you follow a greater fool. Reality, no matter how much we try, is an immutable fact that cannot be ciphered away, nor can facts be created by books full of dancing symbols.

Maps are useful tools, when they are correct, but they can also lead you off a cliff if you don't look up to check reality once in a while.

Hawking, like Einstein before him, was a map-maker who got carried away with his fanciful designs. He forgot to check the lay of the land once in a while, and for that he can be faulted without diminishing the artistry of his skills. After all, Picasso never called himself a portrait artist, and to their credit, neither did the glitterati.

Let's give Hawking credit for what he achieved, but let's be a little less breathless and gullible about what his achievements actually were.

The Doors Of Perception

It is estimated that our Milky Way galaxy contains roughly 300 billion stars.  Further estimates are that the Universe contains roughly 170 billion galaxies, some with far more than a trillion stars in them.

Over the past two decades, a combination of techniques and studies have so far found 925 planets in 713 systems (presumably excluding ours) in a bubble centered on Earth roughly 300 light years in diameter.  Considering the Milky Way is 250,000 light years across, that's a tiny fraction of one galaxy out of 170 billion.  I won't post any links.  You can verify the numbers easily enough.

There are a lot of estimates out there, but the median guess is that there are a couple of billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way alone, meaning roughly the same size, water/oxygen environment, Goldielocks Zone, etc.  Just 20 years ago, we could put any number here, but using statistical reasoning (take it for what you will), we now have a fairly reasonable assurance of some kind of validity.

A number of years ago, a fellow by the name of Drake came up with a back-of-the-envelope equation as a talking point for a symposium.  The idea was to somehow quantify the idea of possible life in the Universe.  Some of the variables were fairly well agreed upon, others were just plucked from the air, but no matter how you sliced it, you got a pretty big number for an answer.

This led to the Fermi Paradox.  You have probably heard of Enrico Fermi in high school physics, but you may not know his paradox:

• The Sun is a young star. There are billions of stars in the galaxy that are billions of years older;
•  Some of these stars likely have Earth-like planets[2] which, if the Earth is typical, may develop intelligent life;
•  Presumably some of these civilizations will develop interstellar travel, a technology Earth is investigating even now;
•  At any practical pace of interstellar travel, the galaxy can be completely colonized in a few tens of millions of years.

In other words, why aren't we up to our Blessed Assurances in extra-terrestrials?  Another question that arises is how likely is it that Earth is a colony of some other civilization?

Aye, there's the rub.

Without empirical data, i.e. some 'authority' offering us plebes indisputable 'proof' that we are not alone, then we cannot reasonably say without a doubt that we are not alone.  However, given the statistical estimates based on observation that fall out of the data we have, it is unreasonable to assume that we are alone.  We have found life in virtually every possible habitat on Earth, so why wouldn't life take to pretty much every habitat we observe in the Universe?

There is a growing minority that believes some combination of the following:

• the Universe is teeming with life;
• we are a legacy of some other civilization;
• we are being visited by other civilizations;
• we are actively engaged in contact with other civilizations.

The first premise I find hard to resist.  Everything we have observed about life on Earth argues that the Universe produces life as a normal function of its existence.  Given the umpteen trillion possibilities that we can reasonably assume to exist, we cannot possibly be the only result achieved.  Whether all results have the ability to recognize each other, much less contact each other, remains to be seen.  After all, we are still debating whether we are the only sentient beings on Earth.  India just recently declared dolphins non-human persons and chimpanzees can learn and manipulate human language.  We can't even agree on what constitutes intelligence.

The second point is a bit more contentious.  There is a growing body of evidence that human civilization is a legacy of some past advanced society.  Even if we dismiss myths such as Atlantis, there are still profound questions about the genesis of monolithic structures that predate anything approaching recorded history.  There are hundreds of submerged structures, roads and cities all over the planet that exhibit advanced architecture and are obviously part of some earlier time when the Earth's coastlines were radically different.

There is also the mystery of our DNA.  A large chunk of our genome is referred to as 'junk DNA', but a significant number of researchers question that designation.  Others speculate that it serves some as yet unknown purpose.  Still others say that it encodes data from a more ancient civilization waiting for us to discover how to read it.  Much of this involves belief, which still requires a leap of faith.  In other words, there is no surety, at least on the level of 'generally accepted' reality.

The third proposition is that we are being visited by other civilizations.  Here we step firmly into the UFO argument.  I think it is unreasonable to deny that there is a phenomenon called UFOs.  I personally have had three experiences with aerial events that I still cannot explain with 'normal' means.  There are also a great many respected and intelligent people who have witnessed these things, from astronauts to beat cops, and are presumably sober and professional in their descriptions.

Furthermore, the observed behavior of many UFO sightings show some kind of intelligent control, since they seem to do things and go places that exhibit premeditation and reaction to environmental conditions.  Whether they are man-made, powered by ETs, or just dolphin technology remains to be seen.  Too many of the reported sightings of beings inside the objects smack of religious delusions for my tastes.

I must conclude that they exist and that many of the phenomena exhibit intelligent control, but I reserve judgement on who or what that intelligence might be.

The final proposition is the most controversial: that some groups on Earth are not only in contact with, but are actively involved with extra-terrestrial societies.  It would seem that the former Canadian Defense Minister believes this to be true.  One assumes that he is a sober and reasonable man based on his title, but I also apply the "Weiner Filter" to any and all public officials.

From von Danekin to Linda Mouton Howe to Richard Hoagland, lots of people speculate on this particular idea, and (in the case of Hoagland) present a lot of evidence worth pursuing, to boot.  Yes, the evidence warrants further investigation, but it is a bit premature to dive head-first into the "contact" camp without some evidence that meets 'reasonable doubt' tests.

What we can reasonably conclude is that there is a large and growing body of evidence that the Universe is full of life and likely other civilizations.  We can also see plenty of evidence throughout the solar system that appears to be manufactured architecture, even massive spacecraft, that deserve much greater investigation, and not just swept off the table as 'tricks of light and shadow'.  Far too much of it cannot be explained by generally accepted phenomena and methods.

There is a huge body of research on ancient myths and legends across hundreds of human societies that show remarkable similarities despite the common belief that far-flung humans had no contact in ancient times.  Wallace Thornhill, Joseph Campbell and Joseph Farrell have, among many others, presented compelling arguments linking ancient myths to real phenomena.

What it comes down to is that we must approach these ideas with open minds.  That doesn't mean unqualified acceptance, as is expected with religious beliefs, but sober and thoughtful consideration of the facts, and support of those efforts that seek to prove or disprove the conclusions.

Among those who believe that ancient human societies had no contact with each other, they posit that the distances and natural barriers between societies was greater than the technology of the time could overcome.  Thus, they were unable to exchange ideas across great distances, such as the Pacific Ocean.

In the same way, those who argue that Earth cannot be in contact with other civilizations because of the vast distances and natural barriers that exist between star systems.  Cosmological Pacific Oceans, if you will.

Yet, there are petroglyphs in California that bear ancient Chinese symbols.  There are ancient Chinese records that show drawings of prickly pear cacti.  There are Egyptian mummies that test positive for cocaine, and pyramids in Central and South America.  There are symbols, such as the swastika, that span ages and continents.  Obviously, there is an error somewhere in our currently 'accepted' history.  It is thus reasonable to assume that if there are other civilizations, that we could have had contact at any point in our history, and the knowledge has been lost, hidden or suppressed for whatever reasons, and certainly undiscovered.

And that is the point.  Clear thinking means that we may come to conclusions based on the evidence at hand.  In fact, we must make conclusions in order to function with any amount of effectiveness.  However, we must be open to new evidence, even if it contradicts what we have already concluded, no matter how seemingly fantastic it is compared to what we previously believed.  All knowledge is open to new evidence, otherwise there is no use to calling ourselves 'thinking' beings.

Nor can we even call ourselves alive.

As J.B.S. Haldane famously said, "Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose."

Buddy, Can You Spare A Paradigm?

Few people take time to realize it, but we - as a species - are on the verge of a Great Shift.  All the bitching and hollering about this problem or that change are myopically focused on symptoms, but missing the cause.

Western civilization, at least for the past 3,000 years, has been predicated on two competing weltanschauungs (literally: world views).  All of our philosophy, science and art can be summed up in two basic camps of thought: Aristotelian and Platonic.  The former is also called the materialist view, meaning that the entire Universe can be directly measured and sensed with the human body.  The latter understands that there are unseen and unsee-able forces at work that can not be measured, but only felt or implied.

These two competing lines of inquiry have battled it out, with science sitting in the materialist camp and religion staking bivouacking in the esoteric camp.  They have divided the Universe into mutually exclusive beliefs that have been heretofore irreconcilable.

The problems began in earnest around the time of Galileo.  The Church (Platonic) insisted that the Universe revolved around the Earth, while the materialists (Aristotelian) insisted that it did not.  Poor old Galileo looked and Jupiter one night and noticed that four bright objects were circling something other than Earth.

Well, we just couldn't have that, could we?  So the Church excommunicated Galileo, forced a public retraction out of him and kept him under house arrest until he died.

Along came Janssen, Leeuwenhoek and Pasteur who discovered an entire new Universe that was undetectable with the five senses, yet measurable with instruments and controllable with technology.  Suddenly, we were confronted with something that crossed the lines of Aristotelian and Platonic.  A shaky peace was negotiated and humanity (at least the Western half) managed to limp out of the battle intact.

However, the truce was short-lived and bombs soon began falling anew until the subatomic nukes began popping off all over the place.  The quantum world put our safe zones into a tail spin.  We could neither sense nor measure directly this strange new realm, yet we could engineer horrible devices of destruction, take pictures of bones inside the living body, cause horrible burns and diseases all with things that had no apparent substance.

We were now firmly straddled across two disparate belief systems, both of which were simultaneously true and false.  We learned how to measure these things (Aristotelian), yet they were invisible to our senses (Platonic).  The phenomena permeated the Universe and underpinned its functions, but in the case of quantum mechanics, the very act of measuring them changed their nature.  They could also act instantly across vast distances of time and space, making the physical world of the materialists just the skin and bones of the esotericists.

And so here we languish at the threshold of the 21st century.  Those two all-encompassing world views that had served us so well for 3,000 years, though they were as oil and water to each other, have blurred into something that is both a blend of the two, and neither of them.

Here lies our conundrum and our opportunity.  We are in a position to merge all of our previous learning of the past three millennia and add great new purviews to them, as well.  We are on the cusp of a Great Awakening in which we will have amazing new insights and thoughts based on our new ruling paradigm.

The problem is, as with all new things (especially those which completely undermine all that has come before), there are those who have their entire lives invested in the old way of doing things.  Whether it's as simple as making a living, or as complex as trying to rule the world, a great number of people are unprepared and unwilling to change.  They are and will continue to fight it with every fiber of their being.

We have seen these things on a micro-scale.  The automobile put a lot of people out of work who had invested in the horse paradigm.  TeeVee put the fear of God into the film establishment,  Digital scared the hell out of the analogue folks.  The internet is killing print and libraries.

All new things require the death of old things.  It is the nature of Universe.  As Genghis Khan once said, "Every man should kill at least one other man to make room for himself."

The Western world, and to great extent the Eastern, is faced with the death of two very old and dear friends: our weltanschauungs.  Because the Buddha straddled these two worlds 2,500 years ago, the East is less susceptible, but not immune.  There is still the nature of political force and control to be dealt with.

Billions of lives have been spent in building our current models of Universe.  Though they competed, they fed on each other giving impetus to many folks to carry on the fight.  It is very hard to simply release our grasp and let them go, especially since we are entirely unsure of what will replace them

And that is the crux of our challenge at this juncture in history.  We are witnessing the death of the very roots of our culture and civilization, and we can see the sprouts of the new, but until it bears fruit, no one is really sure what's growing.  For this reason, they cling tenatiously to what they know, even if they are fully cognizant that what they know is wrong, or at the very least incomplete.

Religion, science, governments and economics all have their reasons to stay put.  All have served their paradigmatic masters well, and they have prospered because of it.  But that world is dying and they want to stake out new territory to preserve their privileged ranks.  They are no more useful now than blacksmiths and wainwrights.  But where do we go without them?  This is uncharted territory.

The challenge before us is to craft an entirely new way of looking at the Universe.  It is inevitable and necessary and a task that will require introspection on a massive scale.  This is not choosing which shirt to wear in the morning.  This is choosing whether the shirt exists at all and what form it will take.  It is that profound.

We have to rethink every single aspect of our world, from toilets to towers, from floor tiles to flying things, from universities to Universe.  Things like the internet, 3-D printers and quantum computing are set to tear our world views asunder and leave us morally, ethically and cognitively dangling in the breeze.  The imperative nature of our task could not be more emphatic.  We literally must begin from scratch and create new institutions and philosophies.  It's taken 3,000 years to build the current world and we're only a couple of hundred years into the change-over.  There's a long way to go.

On the one hand, it is very exciting, like waiting for Mom and Dad to wake up on Christmas morning so we can run down and see what St. Nick left behind.  On the other hand, it is terrifying, like the thought that ol' Nick gave us a pass this year for our various misdemeanors.  That very self-related conflict is, on a mass scale, what we are faced with in the realm of civilization itself.

It is high time we threw off the gloves and started wrestling with our problems in a very personal way.  We must question all of our assumptions.  We must examine all of our institutions.  We must re-evaluate all the ways we do anything.

It's that big.

As Douglas Adams might say, it involves Life, the Universe and Everything.  There's precious little outside of that.

Is Reality Really Real?

Douglas Adams once posited that Earth and everything in it was assembled by an alien race to function as a supercomputer whose purpose was to find the Ultimate Question (the answer being already known to be 42).  Certainly, this hypothesis is about as valid as any other when it comes to understanding reality.

For at least the past couple of thousand years, humans have tried to define reality and about the best answer so far is something akin to the definition of pornography, we know it when we see it.  Some ancient philosophers concluded that reality was a demonic illusion designed to lead humanity into error.  In more recent times, films such as the Matrix series put forth the possibility that reality was a computer simulation designed to placate humans.  All equally plausible.

We used to think light came in seven colors, but now we realize that the very finite bandwidth we can see is just a tiny part of a vast progression of wavelengths spanning frequencies far beyond our ability to directly detect them.  Likewise, we used to think sound was only what we could hear, though now we are aware of far more.

We used to think reality was composed of three spacial dimensions, but cutting edge work is now opening the possibility of multiple dimensions of time and space.  We can even model them in our attempt to visualize things that our senses cannot detect.

In virtually every discipline, our boundaries of reality are constantly being destroyed and rebuilt somewhere further out, only to repeat the process again every few years or so.  Defining that thing we call reality is much like trying to nail water to the wall.  It is a futile exercise that we humans seems hell-bent on performing as if doomed, like Sisyphus, to an eternity of pointless labor.

It wasn't long ago that seeing people walking down the street talking to themselves was an indication that they had lost touch with our communal definition of reality.  Now we have incorporated this activity into our accepted boundaries by assuming those people are using cell phones with wireless headsets.  Thus, people who used to be insane are perfectly normal now simply by a small change in our collective definition of reality.

Conspiracy theories are generally thought to be outside the bounds of reality until they proven real.  Then suddenly, something that was once (violently) denounced becomes an undisputed given.  There was a time not too long ago when anyone who spoke of black helicopters was thought to be on the verge of insanity, yet few people dispute them now.  Same goes for chemtrails, weather manipulation and a dozen other topics.

It is getting increasingly difficult for me to deny what someone else considers real, despite the fact that their reality seems quite foreign to me.  For instance, Indonesians in general believe very strongly in the existence of ghosts and demons.  Though I find the idea intellectually repugnant, I cannot deny it when folks appear to look at these beings and react strongly to their presence though I detect nothing at all.  I also find most of the people having these experiences to be otherwise normal, intelligent and fully functional by my definition of reality.

Another example of this is the topic of evolution.  Millions of otherwise 'normal' people believe that this phenomenon is real despite a complete lack of evidence to back it up and all of the and logical roadblocks that make the theory virtually impossible to exist, much less believe.

The question of what is real still merits serious scientific study.  One group of scientists believe they have hit upon a way to prove or disprove that our entire Universe exists as a computer simulation in some greater reality.  They will attempt to create a new reality inside of a computer to test the rules by which we define reality, which leads to the intriguing possibility that their simulation would be just as real to the beings within it as ours is to us.

It also brings up a number of interesting thoughts regarding the various SimGames or the CGI program that was written to create the massive battle scenes in the Lord of the Rings series of films.  That program allowed the creation of digital creatures with a form of free will within the bounds of certain behavioral rules, not unlike human beings.

In general, we tend to believe that certain things we see on TeeVee are real, though the only objective reality connected with those images are the photons released by phosphors excited by streams of electrons.  The images appear to move even though they are nothing more than a rapid series of still images flashed before our eyes.

When it comes down to it, about the only solid definition of reality is the individual's belief that something is real.  We comfort ourselves by calling other people's experiences that we can't share 'hallucinations' or 'delusions'.  Yet to the person experiencing them, they are as real and tangible as the table I am sitting at to write this.  In some cases, we can even will ourselves to share an experience that was moments before 'not real'.

In a sense, then, both everything and nothing are real.  We cannot say that an experience we don't share with someone else is not real, it is just not part of the shared set of things we collectively consider reality.  In all cases, all reality is nothing more than belief.  The willingness of the perceiver to believe something is real makes it so, and if we all believe something, then we call it reality.

Once upon a time, the Earth stood at the core of a series of crystal spheres with lights attached to them all rotating around us.  That was quite real to the folks who believed it.  At one time, the Universe was comprised of only four elements: earth, wind, fire, and water.  Now we believe there are 117, with new ones beings discovered on a regular basis.  And at some point, we may redefine reality to make the whole periodic table obsolete and no longer part of our reality.

In the end, is there any such thing as objective reality?  Our entire concept of reality are constantly changing, both individually and collectively.  Where this really gets fun is trying to decide if we discover things because be believe they exist, or did they exist before we discovered them?  That may seem like a silly question, but who can honestly say that something existed before it was discovered?  Are we in fact creating our reality every minute of every day?

Just some fun ponders for a lazy Sunday afternoon.  Who knows...perhaps we can make unpleasant things go away by ceasing to believe in them.

Wouldn't that be fun?

====================================================

The Sunday Funnies

Here's an oldies but greaty from the musical philospher Tom Lehrer....

I Am What I Am

What is consciousness?

This is one of those Sunday ponders to twist your noodle in a knot.  Science, and especially physics, will never find the Grand Unified Theory of Everything until it can come up with a formula that explains how atoms, molecules and chemical soups can generate a very simple statement: I am.

For all our self-congratulatory technology, our robots and computers and kitchen appliances, we can't create one fundamental thing: self-awareness.  Oh sure, we can teach machines to run and dance and hold conversations that seem spontaneous, but at the very foundation of these creations, there is nothing by algorithms and calculations.  We can simulate consciousness to varying degrees of eye-poppingness, but ultimately, we can't cause it.

The basic problem is our understanding of the Universe.  We like to strut around talking about quantum mechanics and string theories, but in reality we always bump into, what we used to call in fortran programming, do-loops.  All our efforts end up chasing their own tails, with things like 'black holes' resulting from mathematical dead-ends, where math fails and all the rules get thrown out the window.

Nowhere in all our wizardry does the math reach a point where the individual pops into existence.  And here's the real noodle bake...is everything we think we know being created by our own expectations of finding it?  In other words, did we find the Higgs boson because we created the environment in which it could exist?

Here's the fundamental problem with current particle physics.  We calculate that a certain particle must exist in order for the solutions to be valid.  We set up experiments to find those things.  Thus, we have created the things by establishing the right environment for them to be found.  In other words, these are completely reflexive exercises.

Another example is the periodic table.  In nature, we only find elements up to uranium.  After that, they are all man-made, and most don't exist for more than a millisecond or two before crumbling into more mundane pieces.  Everything from #93 to #120 (and beyond) is simply us tinkering with what is, not finding some aspect of reality.

Another problem with things like CERN and other particle smashers is that we are artificially creating things that are not found by themselves in Nature.  It's as if we are accelerating two panes of glass to near the speed of light and then smashing them into each other.  Then we pick up the pieces and try to extrapolate the whys and wherefores of how the glass was made and what purpose it served by sifting through the pieces.  Are we really finding things that are there, or are we creating them in an artificial environment that doesn't exist in the 'wild'?

According to some theories of the Universe, we will ultimately build a telescope so powerful that we will eventually see the back of our head.  In the other direction, we will finally find that the most minute processes of the Universe are little more than fractal echoes of the macro world.  Ultimately, we are looking in the wrong places for the wrong things, because none of what we have or will find answers the basic question at the heart of all science...who am I?

When Moses asked the Burning Bush, "Who is it that I should tell them sent me?"  The Voice responded, "Ahjeh asher ahyeh."  I am who I am, tell them "I am" sent you.  Basically, Moses was talking to himself, for if we repeat the phrase, either to ourself or to others, we are saying that "I am" is the penultimate meaning and force of Creation.  In other words, we come full circle back to our own consciousness and our understanding of our individual place in the Universe.

All of the machines and computations and sub-atomic particles and proto-galaxies mean absolutely nothing until we can answer one simple question, "Who is 'I am'?"  Until we can answer with certainty what it is that causes us to be able to look at ourselves and call ourselves 'individual', then all the rest is just icing with no cake.

Once we understand consciousness, all the rest will fall into place.  Bigger, better telescopes won't find it.  More powerful microscopes won't find it.  More massive particle smashers won't uncover it.  These efforts will always end up back where we started with n/0, a mathematical absurdity...a 'black hole'.

There is a logic to all of this.  We sense it from the moment we can say, "I am."  We know there is a reason and structure to everything around us, but we can't put our finger on it.  We have come upon a puzzle with infinite pieces and we are smashing it to bits trying to figure how and why it made a picture when it was all assembled.  It's a futile, empty exercise whose results are always more pieces, but still no understanding of how they all came together in the first place.

The foundation of all science is the question, "Who is 'I am'?"  Yet, it is the proverbial elephant in the living room that everyone knows about but refuses to acknowledge.  All our hubris over finding bosons and leptons and fermions does nothing to solve the Great Riddle.  It doesn't even bring us closer to defining the question, much less the answer.  The nature of the Universe will remain an elusive prize until we start to ask the right questions.  Sure, we can make wildly speculative statements like, "Cogito ergo sum," but what is the sum of sum?

How is it we can say "I am"?  What is the nature and cause of consciousness?  What's more, does the Universe exist because we are aware of it?  Or do we exist because the Universe is aware of us?

The answers to those questions are not found in bosons, they are found in the logical absurdities that no one wants to deal with.  We paper over those absurdities and refuse to look them in the Eye.  Yet it is when we contemplate infinity that we start to ask the right questions.

Two thousand five hundred years ago, the Buddha answered all the questions that quantum physics is just now rediscovering, and he did it with pure reason and logic.  He didn't need atom smashers and supercomputers.  He only needed to stare into the Abyss of consciousness and the rest became self-evident. Whether it's Buddha's cosmic foam or quantum physics' flux, that is where we will find the answer to Creation itself, because Creation doesn't exist without 'I am'.

I think, therefore 'I am'.

===========================
Today's Sunday funnies is a classic Darwin Award from 1999.  Since we're on the topic of absurdities, I thought this one fit just perfectly.  The more I picture it, the funnier it gets...

A fellow from Michigan buys himself a brand-new $30,000 Jeep Grand Cherokee for Christmas. He goes down to his favorite bar and celebrates by tossing down a few too many brews with his buddies. In one of those male-bonding rituals, five of them decide to take his new vehicle for a test drive on a duck hunting expedition. They load up the Jeep with the dog, the guns, the decoys, and the beer, and head out to a nearby lake.

Now, it's the dead of winter, and of course the lake is frozen, so they need to make a hole in the ice to create a natural landing area for the ducks and decoys. It is common practice in Michigan to drive your vehicle out onto the frozen lake, and it is also common (if slightly illegal) to make a hole in the ice using dynamite. Our fellows have nothing to worry about on that score, because one member of the party works for a construction team, and happens to have brought some dynamite along. The stick has a short 20-second fuse.

The group is ready for some action. They're all set up. Their shotguns are loaded with duck pellets, and they have beer, warm clothes and a hunting dog. Still chugging down a seemingly bottomless supply of six-packs, the group considers how to safely dynamite a hole through the ice. One of these rocket scientists points out that the dynamite should explode at a location far from where they are standing. Another notes the risk of slipping on the ice when running away from a burning fuse. So they eventually settle on a plan to light the fuse and throw the dynamite out onto the ice.

There is a bit of contention over who has the best throwing arm, and eventually the owner of the Jeep wins that honor. Once that question is settled, he walks about 20 feet further out onto the ice and holds the stick of dynamite at the ready while one of his companions lights the fuse with a Zippo. As soon as he hears the fuse sizzle, he hurls it across the ice at a great velocity and runs in the other direction.

Unfortunately, a member of another species spots his master's arm motions and comes to an instinctive decision. Remember a couple of paragraphs back when I mentioned the vehicle, the beer, the guns and the dog? Yes, the dog: a trained Black Labrador, born and bred for retrieving, especially things thrown by his owner. As soon as the stick leaves his hand, the dog sprints across the ice, hell-bent on wrapping his jaws around the enticing stick-shaped object.

Five frantic fellows immediately begin hollering at the dog, trying to get him to stop chasing the dynamite. Their cries fall on deaf ears. Before you know it, the retriever is headed back to his owner, proudly carrying the stick of dynamite with the burning 20-second fuse. The group continues to yell and wave their arms while the happy dog trots towards them. In a desperate act, its master grabs his shotgun and fires at his own dog.

The gun is loaded with duck shot, and confuses the dog more than it hurts him. Bewildered, he continues towards his master, who shoots at man's best friend again. Finally comprehending that his owner has become insane, the dog runs for cover with his tail between his legs. And the nearest cover is right under the brand-new Jeep Grand Cherokee.

Boom! The dog and the Jeep are blown to bits, and sink to the bottom of the lake, leaving a large ice hole in their wake. The stranded men stand staring at the water with stupid looks on their faces, and the owner of the Jeep is left to explain the misadventure to his insurance company. Needless to say, they determined that sinking a vehicle in a lake by illegal use of explosives is not covered under their policy, and the owner is still making $400 monthly payments on his brand-new Jeep at the bottom of the lake.