Global Dilemma

How does the world work? It's such a simple question but one that also immediately gives rise to a million other questions, all of which need to be answered to even come close to some semblance of an answer to the original question; how DOES it all work?

_{Image by zeevveez - source: Flickr}

These unanswerable questions often occupy my mind, even when I'm fully aware that there's no answer within my reach; I think that's even the main attraction of these "big questions." The best one person can achieve is to determine for one's self two things; 1) is it even worth grasping for answers to questions hundreds of generations of thinkers and scientists haven't been able to answer, and 2) which of the big questions are worth trying to answer. For me personally, all of them are worth spending time on. This started at a very young age; I believe all children are incurably curious about everything out of a deeply rooted evolutionary necessity to get to know the world we are to survive in. We all have this "oral phase" for example, when we put everything we get our grubby hands on in our mouths. When something tastes bitter or sour, babies cry. There's the first wonderful realization about how every living thing on this planet works so well with every other living thing. You see, in nature there's a general rule; edible stuff tastes nice, often sweet, and poisonous stuff tastes bitter our sour. Poisonous to us that is. When a plant needs its fruits to be eaten by another species to get its seeds spread in the right areas, that fruit will taste good to that species. So, when your kid loves candy and hates vegetables, now you know why kids need to get to learn to like some things that are good for them.

How do plants know which chemicals to release to lure in the right insects to do their pollination for them? They do this and have multiple other ways of communicating among themselves and to friendly as well as hostile animals. How come there are plants that bloom not every year, but every seven years, or every forty years? What stories could a tree tell that's been standing on the same spot for thousands of years? What would it be like to be a fish, to know only free water instead of free air? What if we were an aquatic species? Would we have wondered so little about the world outside the water, as we do about life under water? Less than five percent of the oceans have been explored, yet orbiters photographed 99% of the Moon's surface. Why are people willing to pay money for a certificate of ownership of a piece of that surface? It's true: you can buy a piece of the Moon, even a piece of Mars if you feel so inclined. What's with our millennia old fascination with everything "up there"? What inspired us to draw lines between stars and conjure up the Zodiac signs? What makes a rock not alive? What makes me alive? What IS life? And is that an important question?

What is Time? Is it real or just a trick or our minds? Why does everything deteriorate over time? Why is time the only dimension we can travel only in one direction, eternally moving toward an unknown future? What is eternity? Nothing lasts forever, but matter can't end, it's energy. If something has no end, than why does it need a beginning? I believe my life had a beginning, so I believe it has an end, but the Big Bang wasn't the beginning of this universe, a universe that exists first and foremost in my consciousness. Is consciousness that eternal thing then? It's one of science's hardest problems, the hard problem of consciousness; how does the immaterial conscious experience emerge from the physical brain? Panpsychism, the belief that everything is conscious, isn't that far-fetched. In my consciousness that is... Or should I say, in my private space inside THE consciousness? If consciousness is reserved for living things only, why is life finite? Come to think of it; there's vast differences in life-spans between different mammals. Roughly speaking, small animals live short, and large animals live longer lifes; humans are an exception to this rule, but only the last couple of hundreds of years, due to us expanding our lifespans by much increased food production and, above all, much increased hygiene. Also, small animals have faster heartbeats and faster metabolisms in general. It turns out that almost all mammals live for the same amount of heartbeats, about a billion of them... Imagine that...

_{Image by Pixel_perfect - source: Pixabay}

All these questions... They get my head spinning, but I've always liked that kind of spinning. In my head... That's another big question: is the world "out there" or is it in my head? We know that we don't see the reality of the physical world as it is; our brains build a model of that reality using the input from our senses, a model that's conducive to us surviving in that reality. A bat "sees" its world as a model that's conducive to its survival in its world. We have no idea of how a bat experiences its world, what its world-model "looks" like; does echolocation produce the experience of color in the bat's brain? We don't know and we probably can't know. Ever. So why even take valuable time to think about a Bat's life experience?

Because, and this is my opinion only, not based on any specific research into the matter, trying to "wrestle" with these questions develops a general sense and a deep understanding of the one truth that's anchored in my mind: that everything relates to everything else. Trying to see causes and effects following each other through time and space cultivates a deep sense of wholeness. Instead of feeling minuscule in the face of these impossible questions, there's an immense sense of victory every time another layer of life's veil gets lifted and exposes more of the intricate web in which we all connect to everything, and everybody else. Interdependence is the truth of everything and everyone. Independence is a nice fantasy conjured up by our minds to give us the much needed agency, responsibility and morality that enables us to function as a society of people. The largest size we've been able to grow our "tribe" is the nation; however fake a nation's origin might be, however fake its symbols, and however cultivated the feelings of pride and patriotism associated with the idolization of these symbols, the nation state is humanity's most advanced and most successful experiment in harnessing our collaborative power by unifying a large group of individuals behind some common goals and ideals. Our greatest achievements are built on the truth that we are social creatures that survive only by working together.

Now more than ever are we at a point that our individual problems have become global problems. War, terrorism, climate change, you name any modern challenge and it becomes clear that they can only be solved by increasing the size of our tribe. Global problems need global answers. It takes only one sufficiently powerful individual to destroy humanity as we know it, but it takes all fo us to propel humanity forward. We've reached a point where we are technically and materially able to feed, house, educate and give free time to every person on Earth. We can communicate with every person on Earth, the technology is there. How does the world work? It doesn't. And we have a moral responsibility to answer the question why it doesn't work. Why don't we organize in a way that every human being gets to ponder over all these "useless" big questions? It's not that we can't, technically or materially. So why don't we? This, in my mind, is the most important question of all the big questions that face us today. We're squandering human potential by the metric tons by letting so many fall between the cracks of our political and economical reality, a reality we all helped create. Why? That's the mental challenge I'd like to leave you with, dear reader, if you've made it this far... Don't worry about not being able to answer it, but try anyway; you might surprise yourself ;-) Oh, and here's the super interesting interview with Thomas Friedman I saw just before writing all this, and take it as further proof of the fact that every idea is inspired by other ideas in other heads, slung into the world by other mouths and pens, that everything relates to everything else...

_{Thomas Friedman On The World in 2019}

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