From Up On Frederick's Stone

This morning I read a brilliantly simple exposition of the main narrative of Roger Penrose’s case for consciousness being a phenomenon of quantum mechanics. See this link. Between consciousness and physics is by no means a clearcut discipline, and its implications on human meaning and human spirituality are enormous. For in the fuzzy domain of quantum physics, conventional causality is transcended, or at least scientists utterly fail to offer an account of quantum mechanics by means of conventional causality. In this deep realm abounding with paradoxes and mysteries, spirituality becomes normative to scientific understanding. The real world, at a certain level, is not itself predictable or discernable. A naked understanding cannot on the one hand tout empirical studies of quantum mechanics and then seriously scoff at the wild (or schizoid) world of religious and spiritual people. We have reached a point where scientific secularity and spirituality can publicly embrace. They aren’t that different after all.

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Entropy is not the same thing as chaos. Entropy is a measure of system equilibrium. Chaos is a subjective experience of when something acts against or without regard to a normal set of conditions. Chaos is the decay of reality from expectations of an ideal.

From what I recall, the storyline of Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone was really rather obtuse. In fact, I barely remembered it when I looked up the SparkNotes for it a few months ago. It was boring and insignificant. Even in conversation today, years after reading it hastily for high school’s weekly English assignments (which I still dream about to this day, just last week actually), the plot still strikes me as irrelevant, Hellenic spuming (spit-fuming), meaningless aged-garb that perhaps captivated Greek audiences then for reasons I do not discern. I mentioned it in a discussion with my friend Wyatt over phone today. He wholeheartedly agreed that Antigone exists as a memory drably arrayed upon the chronology of high school and as nothing more than that.

Buddhist philosophy branched off from Hindu philosophy about 400 years before Christ and continued to develop for centuries thereafter. It begins on the doctrine that the self is an illusion produced by our will to survive, and as such is the source of suffering. The self is an individuated unit which pervades our consciousness and produces all sorts of striving. All greed, malevolence, folly, etc. are produced through this selfhood we believe we have, but in reality, we are not a self. For there are two major problems: (1) we can only know things through our consciousness, and (2) everything is impermanent.

There is a funny problem in spirituality which is very hard to unravel. It goes like this. The self is greedy and wants to control things. We cannot be happy or help others when we let ourselves be in control. What are we to do with this? Five approaches appear to me.

(This is a continuation of the previous piece, “Holy Saturday 2020 Thoughts”)

     Last Saturday, on the Holy Saturday of the Western Church, I undermined common notions of Christian absolutes. I pointed out the fissure that exists in the religious psyche, namely that a reductive mindset is inherent with bad character, the main consequence of this being that the common understanding of objective reality is problematic. I started out with describing what the poet does, and I ended with questions of the blackness Jesus entered upon his death. Today, on Eastern Orthodox Easter, I will return to the notion of the poet’s task in conclusion.

     As a poet, I understand that the goal of writing is to tinker with viewpoints, to present things in a particular way. As knowing subjects, we all experience reality more or less differently, and the poet utilizes this truth to create new avenues of experience. And this doesn’t have to be a threatening, dangerous, or evil thing. After all, there’s more than one way to skin a cat, i.e., there’s more than one way to solve a problem. The fact that you can solve a problem does not hinge upon there being only one way to solve it. The only problems that have one unique solution are in pure mathematics—and even those have proofs that can be said in different ways. You might point out that if a problem can be solved, then in a more abstract sense there is only one way, of sorts; this is a rather keen insight and is really better suited with more delicate language, like, “There is only one set of ways that a problem can be solved.” I would go so far to say as this is where Christianity has really missed the boat. Rather, it’s not so much that the Christians have missed the boat, it’s that there is a ferry that takes people on the hour, every hour, and the Christians are standing by the lines of travellers waiting to board, preaching to them, “All of you need to use my ticket to get on. Our Lord has indeed spoken, ‘All must have a ticket to board the ship. Behold, I leave ye, my disciples, the ticket to heaven: I am the ticket of life.’ Repent, and use this ticket!” And the Christians are wagging their tickets at the passengers, even though most of them already have one in their pocket.

Typically, Good Friday is for me a day of languishing. It’s a day where the whole ceaseless striving pain of the universe criss-crosses through the worn flesh of a human person bleeding in our memories. Christ’s passion, compassion. It is an inglorious liberation, the orthodoxy finally releasing the mystic into union with God, as Joseph Campbell would put it. The moth leaps into the candle flame. “My Father and I are one.” This year it is not.

There is a problem in genetics, supposedly. According to J.C. Sanford in Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome, we have well-developed theories for how natural selection takes place, but we cannot account for the rate of entropy that occurs in genes due to mutations. If mutations occured according to entropy, we would expect a chronic degradation of the quality of all life on Earth. Now Sanford is a Young Earth Creationist, i.e., he believes the Earth is 6,000 years old; I am an evolutionist. But he has a great point: how in the world can we account for really old genetic information being preserved?