What if the universe thinks?
This may sound quite mad but,
what if thoughts and intelligence are not simply invented by us and trapped in our heads as a by-product of the culmination of evolution’s Homo sapiens but thoughts required the universe to be.
What if we did not invent thoughts but thoughts invented us by necessity?
Analogously, as frequencies (logical, ordered thoughts) and radiation noise (chaotic, random thoughts), thoughts as light is ‘transmitted’ from source to sink.
Perhaps, we do not have a clue as to what the ‘medium’ of thoughts could be just as we recently discovered dark matter and dark energy make up most of the universe and we do not have a clue as to what they are.
Perhaps, ‘gray matter’ is a receptor, a sink for a universe of transmitted, sourced, thoughts.
Is the universe the ‘mind of God’?
If so, we are trying to transmit and look for transmitted signals from aliens with radio waves?1 Wouldn’t this be quite comical? Higher intelligence, lower intelligence permeates the universe and here we are trying to send and receive smoke signals.
If thoughts are ‘real’ why do we have to think we invented them? Could they have been around from the beginning, the arche, or even before the beginning? Could they have required the universe to be?
Well, if you believe the ancient Greeks the arche, the origin, is chaos, the gap of indeterminate and determinate. The logos, pitifully transmitted as ‘word’, is a gathering, an ordering, of thoughts, determinate, determining, conceiving, ‘circumspecting’, which is bounded by disorder, chaos, the indeterminate, the apeiron. Logos is the form, the forming, which thinks. Humans are the animal that speaks, that has the forms of thought which culminates in speaking, communicating, transmitting ideas.
Or, if you believe Christianity, “In the beginning was the word.”2, the logos. The logos is the mind of God. The universe is the actual ‘gray matter’ of God. Jesus was the perfect ‘receptor’ of the thoughts of God. We are receptors too and can ‘heed’ the word of God.
Need I say for Hegel there is the Concept, the Begriff, the Idea.
We can receive thoughts and transmit them with speech but also in other ways. Ladies seem to have a keen receptor for picking up certain erogenous ideas from men. We can sense when someone is dangerous or, in this case, mad.
Even more, when cave men threw spears they received the idea of the ‘laws of motion’. True, their reception was bit crude and more refined reception was given by Newton but the ideas were there. Even animals can receive these precepts of their environment and respond accordingly. The physics, phusis, of the macro-universe is ordered and cohere while the bad boys of the quantum-universe dis-order, disrupt, fill all origins with noise.
From the beginning of ‘consciousness’ we perceived the lived stretch of time Heidegger discusses.3 When we are happy ‘time flies’. When we are bored time slows to an unbearable pace. Physically, Einstein more eloquently thought a time-space continuum, a ‘law’ of nature where space and time are two sides of the same coin so to speak. But we felt it, lived it, long before it found ‘scientific’ words.
As thought receptors, we can distort and truncate thoughts. We are capable of Error as Kierkegaard thought. We might call this ignorance or crude or bizarre or dangerous. We may historically fence off a canonical, approved domain, of logos we call sanity and expel insanity to the nether regions as Foucault may have suggested, symbiotically related. Are these de-ranged thoughts dangerous in themselves or simply the defect or ‘frequency limiting’, filtering, of the receptor? I suppose this could give credence to those that ‘hear voices’ or believe they had transmitters implanted in their heads; perhaps, these defective receivers cannot ‘own’ the thoughts they receive.
Could it be that we are not locked up in an existential aloneness but all our lives receiving and transmitting a small portion of an infinite universe of thoughts. We cling to some ideas as ‘us’ or ‘I’. We attach to some thoughts as mine-ness. We own them but perhaps they own us. Perhaps they require the universe to be to actuate them, to flesh them out, to give voice to them in ever more profound ways. What would the universe be without them? How would a universe even get perceived, understood, known, observed without an observer, a receptor and transmitter, source and sink of universal ‘math’, its order, its language, its Forms.
What of the idea of infinity? We truncate it, filter it, of necessity but it always exceeds our truncations as Descartes perceived. Infinity is the perception of the spectrum, the frequencies, of thoughts from crude to profound, highly ordered to chaotic. The background noise of the universe is noise in the receiver, the inability to ever make thought concrete even though it concretizes us, nature, phusis (physics). It is the meta-phusis, metaphysics, which allows being to be. Its absolute indeterminacy determines what ‘is’.
And here we are going around trying to talk or listen to aliens with radio waves. We live in sea of thought and we transmit radio waves to aliens like smoke signals or shadows cast on a cave wall, all the while thinking the shadows are the reality of the sun. This is quite comical in the preceding light. Perhaps what we are really looking for is others as unintelligent as ourselves. The universe is intelligent and the only ignorance lies in something we forget or neglect. Could it be that the universe looks upon us as ‘proof’ that there is unintelligent life in the universe?
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2 1 John 1:1