The relativity of existence is hardly a new idea, but it is an idea that most scientists find all too convenient to ignore. The generating impulse of science was to understand how things worked, and the path to that truth was to analyze the world into its simple parts to determine just how they function. And so science set about to deconstruct the world, with considerable success.
Only on occasion was there any serious question as to whether this analytic process might be neglectful of anything essential to our comprehension of the world. On those occasions the scientists could simply ask to be shown exactly what it was they had left out. But, so far, no one has been able to bring a neglected piece of reality into a laboratory where it could be duly registered. But still, not everyone is satisfied that science has done justice to reality.
Those of us who feel cheated can go to church, or go out and hug a tree, or we can do our homework in philosophy 101, or it was philosophy 201? Don't let me put you to sleep with scholasticism, and remember I am usually grinding an eschatological ax, and it will fall on those not paying attention.
First, there is no unique definition for existence, let alone a definition that even looks scientific. Science is off to a rather shaky start if it cannot define its domain of inquiry. If you want to know whether quarks exist, you will just have to take a poll, and then make up your own mind. Even first year physics graduates can deconstruct quarks in their sleep. We are after bigger game.
I find dinosaurs more challenging, especially velociraptors, which are often seen with the blood of misguided geneticists dripping from their jaws. Now please pay attention while I make the velociraptors disappear, and excuse me while I get out the Big Gun.
The big gun is the Observer. When science was just getting started there was a very big observer called 'god.' God was omniscient. God was the one who kept the tree in the Quad from disappearing when all the students and faculty were asleep. God never got bored doing this. Those were the good old days. We took god for granted until we discovered the Quantum, and then decided that even god could not tell whether a certain cat was alive or dead. Now we allow god to be agnostic about quarks, too.
That was as far as things went until the cosmologists got into the game by inventing universes. Soon they had to wonder if there could exist unobservable universes, or would that be like a square circle? Could we have the same problem with a quantum universe that we have with a quantum cat?
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To make a long story short, all of us, including the velociraptors, are left up in the air. For example, suppose the comet that wiped out the velociraptors had been a little bit bigger and wiped out everything. Suppose that the same thing happened to any other planets harboring life. Then suppose the universe fell back down its own black hole. Now did that universe ever really exist? Says who? Whose point of view is determinative, god's, the velociraptor's, the quantum cosmologist's...? Can we be agnostic?
Perhaps the best we can do is fall back on the Cartesian 'certainty' that I think, therefore I must exist? We might then begin to wonder how existence works. Do we exist because of the velociraptors, or they because of us? Is existence some gordian knot?
The only other mystery to challenge the mystery of existence is that of the mind. We seem close to fathoming the depths of space and time, but we have barely touched the surface of the mind. This fact alone strongly suggests that the potentiality for mind, and observers, could be an ineluctable and essential component of our reality, and of any(?) reality. Whether one proceeds by induction or deduction, by analysis or synthesis, one is led back to the problem of existence.
Science is forcing us to rediscover what we conveniently forgot. Existence is no simple matter. Not the whole of it, nor any part of it. Ironically, the how of existence, and all its enigmatic relativity, may suggest a why for existence. Instead of the great chain of being, we have the gordian knot of existence. (Maybe they are the same?) The implication verges upon a cosmic ecology of mind. Each of us microcosmic individuals is an essential reflection of the whole. The dynamic is the reflexive reconstitution of the parts into the whole, and the whole into its parts. Human history is a significant link in that chain which defines our spiritual origins and destiny.
The quarks, quasars and velociraptors are each the logically aesthetic components of a naturalistic veil that temporarily and necessarily shields and distinguishes destinees from destinors, or us from US. As we finally begin to see through that veil, life does begin to get more interesting. All things become possible. Yes! Is that frightening? Yes, indeed! But the eschatological ax is so sharp that one hardly feels it.
Do those erstwhile velociraptors get short changed in this spiritual bargain? The only way to find out would be to ask them.
Dan T. Smith, Baltimore, MD