The Cosmic Meaning of our Lives

   

There should be a meaning to life

I am an ordinary person living near the German town of Aachen right at the Belgian and Dutch border.

Locality of Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle)

 
Some personal notes in Germansimilar ideas in German
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I work as a mining engineer at Aachen Technical University. Eight hours a day, I spend in front of a computer monitor, helping to develop software applications for the German coal industry.   Mining at Aachen University of Technology (Barbara's World)Museums and pictures about mining and the City of Aachen

On the whole, I am healthy and there is no shortage of material things. I can afford to eat and live well and I enjoy going out with friends every now and then. I have no reason to complain about anything (and I don`t).

   

Yet, I am not fully happy. There is a persistent desire to be part of something bigger than myself, an urge to contribute to a higher end. This desire can be traced back to childhood. I remember well that I was no older than seven or eight, when I began to wonder about cosmic issues like the notion of infinity, the paradox of God being almighty and benevolent at the same time and the very meaning of life itself. It is interesting to note, that many children at that age ask the same question. The answers they usually get from grown-ups, however, are hardly encouraging.

   

So some people dismiss these questions as irrelevant to practical life. Others, however, never stop asking them and they may be termed philosophers in the true meaning of the word: lovers of knowledge.

   

I certainly belong to these and I am one of many. Esoteric literature about Eastern philosophies, angels and healing stones can be found in almost any bookshop in Aachen. There are many courses at Aachen Technical University, at the local Volkshochschule (sort of Open University) and by various other institutions ranging from down-to-earth studies of the ancient Greeks to New Age Mysticism. I am doing some courses at Aachen University and it is surprising to see see that philosophy courses are more freqeunted by old age pensioners than proper students. This seems to reflect a strong need by many people for a larger meaning of life. There is no economic benefit to be derived from learning about plato's ideas or discussing the ontological aspects of super-string theory.

   

A Child`s Cosmos

In a religious sense, my childhood was quite uneventful. The relatives with whom I had most contact were neither militant atheists nor did they practice much missionary zest. The common customs of Christian belief, however, were woven into everyday life in a matter-of-fact way. At the age of about 5, I automatically said my evening prayer before I went to sleep. Memories of Christmas Day are still strongly attached to the small church in my native town and the singing of Christian hymns. When I conjure up my grandma`s and grand-aunt`s houses in my mind`s eye, I invariably recall paintings of Jesus, Holy Mary and other religious motives. And I went to Sunday School more or less regularly, hearing about Jona and the whale, the travels of St. Paul, how Jesus could walk on water and heal the crippled.

   
God I always imagined as the old wise man with the long white beard. He was sitting somewhere up in heaven on a feathery cloud. He had a book made of stone on his lap and there were angels of both genders clad in white garments and with golden hair attending him.
  Sokrates, Greek philosopher 470-399 before ChristThis picture of Sokrates comes very close to my childhood God.

Disillusionment

When I was 20 years old, atheism was just as self-evident and plain a fact to me as the existence of my bearded childhood God had been 15 years before. Disillusionment had been a slow step-by-step process. It was the classical way science was taught at school which had finally destroyed my god.

In biology, chemistry, physics and maths the principle of causality had never been explicitly questioned or asserted. There was no need to even disucss it. The main effect of science at school was to rub in this law by constant demonstration of its validity:

  • under given condiditons certain living cells would always abide by the law of mitosis to divide
  • throwing a piece of sodium into water is always a dangerous business
  • thanks to the laws of mechanics a rocket to the moon will behave exactly in the way engineers have foretold
  • 10 divided by 3 is always period 3.3

Man - simply an agglomeration of atoms?Gradually, I began to realize that there can be no place for any god where everything can be explained satisfactorily by unfailing laws. It seemed only a question of time that the whole universe, all history and every human impulse was to be deciphered by science. With the verve of adolescence, I pushed this newfound principle to the extreme. I remember well how I tried to provoke the parson of our local Methodist church to give opposition.

At the time, I did not experience any bereavement. Instead, I regarded science as something higher than god. Religion, I was sure, was only for the uneducated, the nostalgic and the victims of terrible fates.

I took the pleasure of someone who has found the right creed in applying this deterministic view of the world to all my thinkings. It is one thought-experiment that I remember particularly well. I was 16 or 17 when I first had contact with computers. That was in 1982 or 1983. I was sitting in front of my 1 Kilobyte ZX81 Basic computer. It suddenly occured to me that I myself may be nothing else but a brain immersed in some liquid in a bowl, attached to a large computer simulating all this world around me. Today, this thought fills me with horror. Then, it gave me the thrill of conquering new intellectual worlds.

 


Henry Stapp on classical physics

Is social engineering really only engineering? A book written around 1936 by Yerbury Dent
A materialistic view of the world: humans as machines

I enjoyed reading Nietzsche because he was said do have "destroyed" God. I was intrigued by the writings of Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen who had carried out research into animal behaviour during the 20th century. Without hesitation I transferred their findings to humans. Books with titles like "Reactions of the Human Machine" gave me a strong and immediate delight in being on the right way. And from the teachings of Buddha I distilled all allusions to the renunciation of personal will. As there was no point in life anyway, I thought, the nearest one can get to happiness is complete self-denial.

At the age of about 20, I had completely driven God and even the idea of personal indivuality out of my world.

  A brief summary of the main idea of this behaviourist book "Reactions of the Human Machine", by John Yerburby Dent, Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1936

Quotation from an autobiography by Winston Churchill (about 1930)Winston Churchill on the mystery of "free will"


Resurgence

I don`t know anymore whether it was pure intellectual playfulness or an underlying but persistent need to seek something more lofty than soulless materialism, but in about 1987, I began to ask myself under what conditions could God be allowed back into my personal cosmos.

I never thought of questioning the methods and the validity of science. So God's interference with our world had to take place in a way as not to collide with the laws of science.

   
I began to suspect all phenomena that were either not needed in a scientific view of the world or that did not interfere with it of being potentially indicative of some divine volition. I began to read about Buddha`s lore, medieval mysticism as expressed by the German "Meister Eckehart" and experiences induced by drugs as described by Aldous Huxley and Carlos Castaneda.

It was the existence of consciousness and some mental states of religious or rather cosmic feeling that puzzled me as superfluous to a mechanistic cosmos and for this very reason, they promised to be a good scent on the trail out of mechanistic nihilism.

   
I remember distinctly that I was searching for some higher end at that time. But all my intelligence and all my knowledge had been trained to falsify or at least effectively question all philosophies and religions. This was still in the days of the Cold War between the Communist East and the West.

Sometimes I lay in bed at night with aggressively nihilistic thoughts in my head. I imagined intercontinental missiles carrying nuclear warheads to devastate the planet. I experienced some sort of "Weltschmerz" (World-pain) and I knew not whether I should pride myself on having understood the inescapable futility of everything or whether I should rather deplore this state of things and seek an alternative. It was the latter impulse which was to gain in strength over the following years.

   

Quantum Physics: A New Outlook

Until the start of my studies at Aachen University in 1990, I had not had contact with the natural sciences ever since leaving school in 1986. I had, however, read many books covering a wide range of philsophy and religion. So, I had come across the word "quantum physics" rather often. It was usually mentioned with reference to its mysterious character, the existence of true chance happenings and the fundamental question of what matter and the laws of physics are really like (today, I would use the word ontological).

I began to read about it and soon I wondered why we had not been told about its implications at school. Strangely enough, even in physics and chemistry at university it was only mentioned as something needed to determine the location of electrons around an atomic nucleus.

Yet, I was soon convinced that quantum happenings may be ruled by truly statistical laws. Each happening for itself may be quite undetermined. Here at last there was a piece of physical reality God could interfere with without having to cause a miracle. Small particles or lumps of energy the size of electrons or photons jump through space and time - so to speak - and no deterministic law seems to govern where they go. Only large numbers of these particles must obey certain probabilities. If an electron under a certain condition has a 89% chance of turning up on a certain spot in the next moment it may as well turn up somewhere quite different.

 


Quotations from a book written around 1990Some Quotations on the mysteriousness of consciousness

Quotations from a book written before  the year 2000Some Quotations from a book on quantum physics and consciousness


Pieces Falling into Place

The problem with quantum physics is that the particles that could possibly be influenced by God were less than minute. It is hard to imagine that God could effectively influence people or other physical objects in our reality by meddling with submicroscopic quantum events.

But this problem was solved by two other ideas that were very active in my head at that time:

   
  • Life on earth was constantly getting more complex. Atoms had formed molecules, molecules combined to make unicellular life, cells combined to form cell-colonies and later properly individualized organisms. These, in turn could gather in larger societies. And today, large societies of human individuals begin to show signs of merging into individualized life-forms. In particular, I was intrigued by the analogy of single cells merging into a single organism and human societies merging into something similar. Particularly, the role nerve cells may have played and a very similar role computers may soon play have fascinated me for a long time.
  • I had and still have a recurrent but fleeting experience of being no more than a detached observer of myself. This sensation comes and goes like a deja-vue experience.

Putting these two thoughts together with the probabilistic and non-deterministic nature of quantum mechanics and with the wish to have a God I came up with the following conglomerate of hypotheses:

 
Some mechanisms that may turn economic companies into living, conscious and sentient beings...companies as neural networks

a short essay on the idea of evolutionary economics (companies as genetic algorithms)companies as genetic algorithms: short essay (2002)

  • The world is divided into at least two different spheres of existence: our physical reality and the other world (German: Jenseits). God would have to exist in the other world.
   
  • There is a two-way interaction between these two worlds.
  • Interference from the other world into our reality can occur via quantum events. Not all quantum events must be directly controlled from the other world, but they may. In that sense, our reality could be described as the field of action for whatever volition there may exist in the other world. It is intersting to note that the German word for reality is "Wirklichkeit". The first part refers to the verb "wirken" which can be translated as "to take effect", "to cause", "to work" or "to operate". The second part simply denotes some state as the English suffix "ness" does. The etymology of the word seems to imply that the inventor regarded reality as a place where someone or something acted, worked or took effect in.
 

blue: stream of consciousness, red: quantum manipulations
God controls his creation

Henry Stapp on synaptic influences of quantum events

  • Knowledge about our reality is transferred to the other world via consciousness. Consciousness only scans certain parts of reality and transfers the results to the other world. There, they are interpreted in order to make optimum decisions for some quantum processes.
  • God or whoever else controls us from the other world cannot or does not want to control everything in our reality. Instead, only some particularly important quantum events are selected for manipulation. Consciousness is attached to physical structures in our world that offer a good amount of information about it for a minimum of attention paid to it. Intelligently scanning a human brain, for instance, would reveal much more information about reality than scanning an equivalent mass of ocean water or rock on Mars.
 

Reading a brain rcan eveal more about reality than looking at reality directly.
God reads a man`s thoughts

i. e.: consciousness seems to lag behind volition...Some astonishing facts about consciousness described by Tor Norretranders

God reads in our brain and manipulates it.
blue: consciousness
red: quantum fiddling

  • The natural laws and constants in our universe are fine-tuned as to make evolutionary processes likely that will result in structures (life!) that can both be scanned and influenced by the other world with the least attention and yet yielding maximum effect.
 

God controls our universe to make it ever more complex and orderly.
The creation of order


A man controls the traffic flow in New York. More about this in German...

A dualistic view of the world

The picture above sums up this dualistic view of the world. World One is our physical reality. It so to speaks transmits reports, images, feelings etc. to the other world, world 2. This we experience as a the stream of consciousness. In World Two this information is somehow interpreted by someone or something in order to influence some quantum events in World One.

By focusing on particularly effective structures of this world, the "whatever" of World Two can make use of a crowbar effect. The example above shows the operator of a traffic control system in a large city. By judiciously influencing some quantum effects in the operator's brain, it is possible to divert whole streams of traffic and thereby the course of history to some extent. This is what I call the crowbar effect; some sort of leverage.

All other quantum events are controlled by some sort of probability generator. The volition (god, computer, ideas...) of world two only concerns itself with specifically useful quantum events.

This view of the world can account for some phenomena that had seemed unrelated to me before:

  metaphorical picture: the world-process

metaphorical picture: the universe as a computer animation

Henry Stapp on some sort of leverage effect

God controls a few electrons and thereby alters the course of history.
Limited thought manipulation prevents nuclear war

 Quotations from "VALIS"K. P. Dick: a 20th century science fiction author about the meaning of life

  • Consciousness seems to lag behind the events in the brain, it is a mere looker-on, a pure epiphenomenon.
   
  • God is not almighty, he has only limited computational or data-transmission power available to influence our world or may not wish to use more.
  • The world-process of growing complexity in world one offers world two ever more effective ways of influencing world one.
  • World one looks pretty deterministic, but some chosen quantum events may not be determined by causes originated in world one.
  • World two may influence world one to develop into a certain direction. The influence of world two on world one may be called teleological.
  • Emotions are perhaps some unifying mechanism for influencing whole arrays of quantum events in a certain direction. Emotions and feelings may be an immediate expression of some will of World Two.
  • Theodicy: if emotions are actually a direct expression of God Himself, our suffering would be His suffering. So there is no need to explain any injustice.

This is what I still believe today as the most likely hypothesis to explain the world in a holistic way.

  the masking effect of quantum chanceHenry Stapp on a quantum bookkeeping system to limit the scope of influence

More of this (German)
A metaphorical world processor controlling reality

About 140 (April 2002) Animations and pictures (mainly gif-format)Some more animations and pictures on philosophical speculations

A Community of Searchers

During the seond half of the 1990ies, a large number of books was issued on many different topics broached above. Especially books and articles about the implications of quantum physics and research activities into the nature of consciousness seemed to sell well.

It dawned on me that cosmology, quantum physics, neurology and natural history had been the field of philosophical studies for a very long time. Computer sciences and the theory of complexity added rich stimuli and there seemed to be a large world community busily trying to merge scientific results from many different disciplines into cosmic or even tentatively religious interpretations.

As it is the intention of this website to make contact with other people of similar interest, I would like to name some of the authors and books I have read over the past years. The books one reads often reveal more about a person than abstract words:

 



Heisenbergs theory on quantum mechanics and consciousnessHenry Stapp on consciousness
Mysticism, Fiction, Spirituality

Quantum Physics and Consciousness

  More extensive list of literature

Some German quotations and thoughts on EckhartMeister Eckhart, a medieval mystic, on the mystery of being

Aldous Huxley, 1894-1963, about drug-induced experiences of the selfAldous Huxlexy attaches great importances the mystic strangeness of the inner world of fancy and imagination.

Evolution of Complexity & Basic Priniciples of Intelligence

These books reflect my interests very well.

  Künstliche soziale Wesen entwicklen eine kollektive IntelligenzJournal of Artificial Societies

Geld, Macht und eine generell bessere Welt werden hier versprochen!Extropians: an organization to further the transformation of humans

Star Maker, A Man Divided,  Last and First Men, Odd John...Olaf Stapledon: visions of collective intelligence

Back to the starting siteShort description of the philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin

Igncae Lepp: Die neue Erde - Teilhard und der Christ in der WeltA book on Teilhard de Chardin, written around 1962


Wish for Contact

My way of life, my choice of career and above all my lack of love of detail prevent me from pursuing these ideas in a scientifically acceptable way. But I feel a strong desire to discuss such topics with other people. To this purpose I started taking philosophy courses at Aachen University in 2000. I do this together with two colleagues and we have already met a few people who share our interests.

   

Current Interests

At present, I am particularly interested in the following topics and questions:

  • The nature of chance in quantum physics
  • The idea that our universe may be something like an interactive computer simulation designed to yield maximum effect out of minimum attention to it
  • theories of rising complexity in cosmos
  • theories that human societies or large companies may increasingly develop characteristics of living organisms, i. e. that companies may function as genetic algorithms Some rudimentary ideas on evolutionary economics or neural networks Some fragmentary ideas on modelling large companies as neural networks for example
  • predictions about the next 100 years on this planet and the way carbon-based humans may merge together with computer-intelligence to create the tissue of intelligence of meta-beings
  • any attempts at bringing together science and religion without dismissing science as irrelevant
  • science fiction in the vein of Olaf Stapledon`s work H. G. Wells wrote a serious and positive utopia around the year 1921
  • positive utopias H. G. Wells wrote a serious and positive utopia around the year 1921 in the vein of Wells "Men Like Gods"

I am grateful for suggestions of books, websites or critical comments.

   

More of this in GermanConsciousness scanning a company

   
Will large companies turn into some sort of intelligent biological beings endowed with consciousness?
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