.
I sometimes
make a bad joke to my poker companions.
In standard poker, the highest possible hand is the royal flush. Nothing beats it—except, I sometimes say to a
newbie, the Big-Foot. Asked, what the
heck is the Big-Foot, I reply, it is a poker hand so rare that some people say
it does not even exist.
Such is the case with dark matter. Nobody knows what it is, and some scientists even doubt that it exists—but unlike the Big-Foot in poker, it is not a joke. It accounts for 95 percent of the gravity in the universe. Premier physicists around the world are striving to discover what, exactly, dark matter is.
Such is the case with dark matter. Nobody knows what it is, and some scientists even doubt that it exists—but unlike the Big-Foot in poker, it is not a joke. It accounts for 95 percent of the gravity in the universe. Premier physicists around the world are striving to discover what, exactly, dark matter is.
While dark matter may have nothing directly to do with life and consciousness, dark matter may provide an important to clue to answering how biochemicals form, and how consciousness arises. First, let us examine the issue of dark matter.
If it is so difficult to prove what dark matter is, then why do scientists think it exists? They think so, because it explains a great many observations in science. Indeed, if it turns out that dark matter really does not exist, science will need a much stranger answer to the anomalies observed in galactic rotation.
Briefly stated, dark matter is a gravity field, but unlike ordinary gravity, dark matter is not associated with what we define as matter. The very name is a misnomer, since dark matter is neither dark nor, as far as we know, matter. Its existence is presumed, however, because without the gravity field we attribute to dark matter, galaxies would not hold together. Scientists needed to explain why spinning galaxies do not fly apart, and so they concluded that something like dark matter holds them together.
Other than for its gravity, dark matter cannot be detected. If not for its gravity, there would be the very bizarre possibility that it could exist without its existence ever being suspected.
The principle of an unseen force, is not one with which scientists are comfortable. They accept it only because they have nothing better at present to explain their observations.
There may, in fact, be other unseen forces, or factors, that cannot be detected other than for their effects. The existence of those factors might never be suspected until all other explanations for certain scientific observations fail to suffice.
One of those observations is life. Another is consciousness.
Under the physicalist paradigm, scientists have defined life as its chemical processes. Period. Nothing more is involved.
The question of how and why inert chemicals come together to produce life is attributed to chance. By pure chance, the most unlikely of unlikely chances, the universe is intricately designed from quarks to cosmos, to produce and support life. The astoundingly complex array of metabolic actions, the ability of DNA to replicate itself, and perhaps most importantly the phenomenon of civilization, science and technology—all this is said to be due to chance.
Chance can be avoided only if one posits that there are uncountable trillions of trillions of universes, a multi-verse, each of them a roll of the dice, so that at least one of them is likely to be like our universe. Problem: not only is it unscientific to posit such a dramatic hypothesis without evidence for it, but—and here is the kicker—even if there is a multi-verse, it makes it even less likely that it would have the parameters with which to produce and fine tune any bubble universe. There would have to be an ever-ascending hierarchy of ever larger, and ever less likely, multi-multi-universes to make that possible.
The end result of such a hierarchy would be an order of infinities so high that, as some premier physicists have said, “Everything that can happen, must happen, and happen an infinite number of times.” The implication of this is clear: nothing ever happens. That may not be immediately clear, but if a coin flip must come up both heads and tails, there was really no coin flip. I will leave the rest of that for contemplation, without elaborating it further.
If life, civilization and science are said to arise by chance from inert matter, but if chance is an inadequate, unwieldy explanation for this, then what better explanation is there?
The answer is similar to dark matter, but instead of gravity, the unseen force is an organizing principle—and that organizing principle is related to the most obvious, and least definable force of all: consciousness.
Life is not merely its chemical process. It is an unseen force that organizes inert matter into its biochemical forms, guides its metabolic activities, and directs its development. Moreover, there is an unseen force which directs the entire cosmos toward this end.
But “this” end is not “the” end. There is more. Science has mis-defined life as being merely its chemical process, but when it comes to consciousness, science is completely baffled, even more baffled than it is by dark matter.
In this context, consciousness means the inward experience of being aware of oneself, of one’s surroundings, and more than that, being deeply aware of perceptions both physical and aesthetic. Consciousness enables one to perceive physical things that cannot be put into words. For example, the concept of color can be adequately explained in terms of the wavelength of photons, but this is not what one consciously sees. It cannot be communicated to someone who has been blind from birth.
Consciousness enables, and motivates us, to ask such questions as who am I? It gives rise to metaphysical thinking, to a sense of purpose and meaning.
Physicalists dismiss all of this as subjectivity that does not lead us to an understanding of nature. They do not recognize life, consciousness and free will as being underlying principles of nature.
Scientists are now attempting to understand dark matter as either a force, or as a set of as yet undiscovered physical laws (or refinements of them, such as MOND). They are doing this, because otherwise they have no explanation for the observed behavior of galaxies.
Given that the observed behavior of living, conscious volitional humans—Including the scientists themselves! —has no purely physical explanation, one might suppose that they might be more accepting of the value of research into a new paradigm.
If it is so difficult to prove what dark matter is, then why do scientists think it exists? They think so, because it explains a great many observations in science. Indeed, if it turns out that dark matter really does not exist, science will need a much stranger answer to the anomalies observed in galactic rotation.
Briefly stated, dark matter is a gravity field, but unlike ordinary gravity, dark matter is not associated with what we define as matter. The very name is a misnomer, since dark matter is neither dark nor, as far as we know, matter. Its existence is presumed, however, because without the gravity field we attribute to dark matter, galaxies would not hold together. Scientists needed to explain why spinning galaxies do not fly apart, and so they concluded that something like dark matter holds them together.
Other than for its gravity, dark matter cannot be detected. If not for its gravity, there would be the very bizarre possibility that it could exist without its existence ever being suspected.
The principle of an unseen force, is not one with which scientists are comfortable. They accept it only because they have nothing better at present to explain their observations.
There may, in fact, be other unseen forces, or factors, that cannot be detected other than for their effects. The existence of those factors might never be suspected until all other explanations for certain scientific observations fail to suffice.
One of those observations is life. Another is consciousness.
Under the physicalist paradigm, scientists have defined life as its chemical processes. Period. Nothing more is involved.
The question of how and why inert chemicals come together to produce life is attributed to chance. By pure chance, the most unlikely of unlikely chances, the universe is intricately designed from quarks to cosmos, to produce and support life. The astoundingly complex array of metabolic actions, the ability of DNA to replicate itself, and perhaps most importantly the phenomenon of civilization, science and technology—all this is said to be due to chance.
Chance can be avoided only if one posits that there are uncountable trillions of trillions of universes, a multi-verse, each of them a roll of the dice, so that at least one of them is likely to be like our universe. Problem: not only is it unscientific to posit such a dramatic hypothesis without evidence for it, but—and here is the kicker—even if there is a multi-verse, it makes it even less likely that it would have the parameters with which to produce and fine tune any bubble universe. There would have to be an ever-ascending hierarchy of ever larger, and ever less likely, multi-multi-universes to make that possible.
The end result of such a hierarchy would be an order of infinities so high that, as some premier physicists have said, “Everything that can happen, must happen, and happen an infinite number of times.” The implication of this is clear: nothing ever happens. That may not be immediately clear, but if a coin flip must come up both heads and tails, there was really no coin flip. I will leave the rest of that for contemplation, without elaborating it further.
If life, civilization and science are said to arise by chance from inert matter, but if chance is an inadequate, unwieldy explanation for this, then what better explanation is there?
The answer is similar to dark matter, but instead of gravity, the unseen force is an organizing principle—and that organizing principle is related to the most obvious, and least definable force of all: consciousness.
Life is not merely its chemical process. It is an unseen force that organizes inert matter into its biochemical forms, guides its metabolic activities, and directs its development. Moreover, there is an unseen force which directs the entire cosmos toward this end.
But “this” end is not “the” end. There is more. Science has mis-defined life as being merely its chemical process, but when it comes to consciousness, science is completely baffled, even more baffled than it is by dark matter.
In this context, consciousness means the inward experience of being aware of oneself, of one’s surroundings, and more than that, being deeply aware of perceptions both physical and aesthetic. Consciousness enables one to perceive physical things that cannot be put into words. For example, the concept of color can be adequately explained in terms of the wavelength of photons, but this is not what one consciously sees. It cannot be communicated to someone who has been blind from birth.
Consciousness enables, and motivates us, to ask such questions as who am I? It gives rise to metaphysical thinking, to a sense of purpose and meaning.
Physicalists dismiss all of this as subjectivity that does not lead us to an understanding of nature. They do not recognize life, consciousness and free will as being underlying principles of nature.
Scientists are now attempting to understand dark matter as either a force, or as a set of as yet undiscovered physical laws (or refinements of them, such as MOND). They are doing this, because otherwise they have no explanation for the observed behavior of galaxies.
Given that the observed behavior of living, conscious volitional humans—Including the scientists themselves! —has no purely physical explanation, one might suppose that they might be more accepting of the value of research into a new paradigm.
What dark
force prevents them?
