Let’s take them one by one. Kant’s four whethers.
First —
whether the world has a beginning and some boundary to its extension in space
Growing up, I misunderstood world.
I don’t mean I was reading Kant, aged ten — I was reading 2000AD (which was full of the Big Questions, especially Tharg’s Future Shocks) — but whenever I read world I thought earth.
This is a common error. ‘We Are the World’ was a song about our planet, not some inhabitable place we — ‘we’ — will discover in a millennium’s time.
Yes, world has the meaning of globe-we-inhabit-and-should-be-nice-to but it also means something like totality-of-what-is-thinkable-by-us.
But during the period of my life when I was really preoccupied by these Big Questions, the sci-fi years, I would have been thinking about the world as the universe.
There being only one universe, because uni-.
This universe I inhabited was finite.
I remember 1960s or 1970s cartoons of spaceships reaching brick walls, when they reach the end point beyond which there is nothing.
That was comic, easy to visualise.
I half-believed it.
This first whether of Kant’s forces a harder imagining. It flips from time (beginning) to space (boundary).
When I tried to picture eternity in terms of extension, of journey in a lightspeed starcruiser, it was — I realise now — a very very small endlessness.
Science, rather than philosophy, has recently offered me the chance to replace my universe (unique, bounded) with a multiverse (multiplying, unbounded?).
As I understand it, a bubbling state of being-born and splitting-off multiverses — all equally valid, all being a future start-point — happens perpetually and exponentially.
This is a scientifically respectable account of a cosmic totality. Less, pancake mix spreading out across a pan, more infinitely expanding fizz-burst.
It’s also philosophically recuperable as David Lewis’s Modal Realism.
This is makes my previous endlessness seem very small.
Kant shakes his head, and tells me to stop speculating, even with the help of the Large Hadron Collider, which he adores.
My first whether isn’t a philosophical question that has become a scientific question, Kant insists. It’s still a matter for thought rather than experimentation.
But let’s just say, in answer to the first half of the first whether, that this world has no beginning; it is infinitely in a steady state of becoming more infinitely plural.
How could it be anything else?
To be infinite in any way it must be increasing in extension infinitely at infinitely small intervals of time.
That’s not what we witness, though. Not yet.
There are 1960s cartoons of the Big Bang, just as there are 1960s cartoons of electrons orbiting nuclei.
These look so cute and manageable, in comparison to the multiverse
The Big Bang Theory says yes to beginning and boundary; the multiverse, persuasively (to me), says to both an absolute no.
Take your pick.
I like my big big.
The language we use is always a problem. The word "beginning" refers to an event happening in linear time. Therefore if time itself had a beginning it would contradict the meanings of the words "time" and "beginning". It's possible to get around this problem by creating new forms of the existing words. We can talk about something being "timelike" or "spacelike" but this glosses over whether we are still talking about the same things. In my writing I always structure the universe as built around a central hub called "The Chaos". The Chaos has no time or space or matter or energy as we know them. It is composed of the raw "stuff" from which time, space, matter and energy are created. The Chaos is always there and always will be. It is beyond time and is always the same in the sense that it is always changing and different. Our universe and other universes are extensions of The Chaos with an illusion of linear time to permit events like beginnings and endings to happen. The Chaos can be imagined as a boiling cauldron of primeval "stuff" throwing out gobbets and splashes of temporary reality in all directions. From our linear time POV we would think our universe has "come from" the cauldron and then "fallen back" into the cauldron at the end of our universe's time. From the POV of The Chaos nothing has changed. Everything is still everything and always is still always. In my stories I usually attempt to make it clear that free will does exist, in spite of some appearances to the contrary.
This is interesting to see how others relate to the world.
I was obsessed with the idea of infinity as a six year old child. I remember staring at the patterns in the wallpaper (70s wallpaper was wild), thinking of the idea of infinity. The possibility the universe went on forever seemed as equally impossible as the idea it stopped somewhere. How?
I stared into the sun until I couldn't see anything but a purple circle in a green background. I stared into that wallpaper until I wasn't there anymore. I stared into the sun and the wall until I stopped existing. I also liked to spin. I'd spin and spin till I was nothing.
I was diagnosed schizophrenic in my teens, but by then, I already knew I was infinite. I'd already existed forever. I had no boundaries between super conscious, subconscious, or conscious. I had no filters between my physical self and my infinite entity.
For me, dreams, hallucinations (or visions) and this reality were mixed up in memory and experience. I couldn't tell the difference and still have trouble with what which is where. It's a disoriented confusion at times. I have no edges. No limits. No boundaries. My dark light expands into the universe. I merge. Blurred fuzz, emptiness of dissolved mind.