Homegoing

There are a lot of books out there these days that tell us we are only meat, meat with pretensions about what it is. The self-developed complexity of the meat supposedly (nay, definitely) informs the meat about the meat's environment.

Somehow though, this meat is tired of being meat. This meat feels that one day it should succumb to the laws of entropy and of caterpillarism, and die that it should be reborn elsewise.

In short, this tired meat wants to go home.

From Zero

Where all coordinates are zero, there is the origin. If in the beginning, all things are zero, nothing can happen. And if nothing can happen, all remains zero.

But if something can happen, it is the splitting of zero into equal negatives and positives. It is this quantum fluctuation that the natural rationalist must have faith in, or nothing has happened, nothing happens, nothing will happen.

It is more believable, some say, that something happened with such extreme fluctuation that a universe was created. And the proof, some claim, is that the universe exists.

But this is proof of nothing. The universe exists, but we cannot know how and why by any natural means, because this is the nature of universes. We have no statistical probabilities, no learning lessons to use inductively or deductively in order to 'know' how universes are formed.

Maybe we were all born yesterday. Maybe quantum fluctuation is that cool, the fluctuation between nothing and everything. And just perhaps, some people might think that to call it quantum fluctuation, a phenomenon without mind nor directivity, is better than to think of God, a person with altogether too much mind and directivity.

Epistemological Emergencies

I have to keep reminding people that there is a difference between an existential emergency and an epistemological one. (Indeed, I have to remind people that 'emergent' and 'contingent' need not always be linked to 'emergency' and 'contingency'.) I cannot imagine why students should feel that not knowing something should lead to their annihilation.

An existential emergency is just that — the sudden emergence of a personal situation whose circumstances seem to threaten personal existence. An epistemological emergency is something else — the sudden emergence of a situation (whether personal or not) whose circumstances require the drastic interrogation of those circumstances with questions like, "How do you know???"

These latter cases are wearisome but seem to be ever more common these days as the date for submission of the epistemological arguments comes near. I have to suppress my urge to reply, "Yes, well, think of this: HOW do you know, how DO you know, how do YOU know, how do you KNOW?" and provide more obvious scaffolding (no, not the type with a trapdoor and gibbet).

Thank God I have not yet had to cope with any of my students' genuine existential emergencies. Yet.

Onto

Before we think about how we know, we must know what it is we think we know. And so begins the spiral into madness that is the irrelevant little sidetrack of most TOK students these days.

The solution is simple. Ontology precedes epistemology. Something is. As a knower, at the very least you exist. Very likely also, whatever it is, that allows you to have existed and to continue to exist, also exists.

The question of whatever that -it- is which must necessarily exist is ontology. The question of what you claim to know is epistemology. But before all your claims, you must first be.

And here is where worldviews come in. There are only two worldviews. One is that the knower is all that is needed, and everything is derived from what the knower thinks the knower knows. One is that there is something supernatural, something beyond natural observation and which can never be proven to exist. Some people have listed up to seven or eight different possible worldviews, but they all come down to this.

What?

This: either you can explain everything from nothing, or you can explain nothing from everything.

We shun the latter, because then the underpinnings of what we know must necessarily be accidental, revelatory, matters of faith. We love the former, because it is the ultimate reductionism. In the beginning, nothing. Then symmetry. Then symmetry-breaking which isn't quite so. And everything comes from nothing.

But we would then be part of the everything that came from nothing. We would be prisoners of our world. Why is that more acceptable? It's called 'pride of life'.

To Be Or Not To Be

I keep mulling it over in my mind, that odd English thing, the verb 'to be' which is, and was, and evermore will be 'be', implicit and complicit in all our dealings. What is it to be? Is it a continuous operation, requiring maintenance, like some sort of existential red queen's race? Is it a passive state, the state of existing without transformation or translocation? Is it what it is? Or is it just 'is'? I find myself baffled by the Hamletian assertion that 'to be or not to be' is indeed the question – was Shakespeare a bare existentialist?

To be is to live, it implies, and not to be is to die. Cessation of consciousness is cessation of being. And if one's mission is to be, then that is all. If one shifts to another state, does one continue to be? And if one's personal motto is to be better and better, for the rest is yet to become, then one's self is not always what one was, and one is not what one would have been in the past.

This is bad. And it may yet get worse.