Odd O'blography

Existential Questions

You've probably heard of the five W's and one H? They are who, what, when, where, how, and why. These are the essential questions of journalism and also the existential questions of life. Only four of them have answers that I find at all satisfactory.

I'll start with who. It's the easiest question because the answer is simply us. Descartes famously said, "I think therefore I am." The big questions only matter, or even exist, because we are here to think about them and ask them (if you don't think, then you may as well stop reading now). I agree with Descartes that who is self-evident (so to speak).

What is similar to who, but the perspective is turned outward rather than inward. In a way, the who is merely a subset of the what and the what is the observable universe of the who. What simply is. Our senses, and the scientific instruments that extend our senses, provide a measure of what, but they don't actually explain anything. All we can do with what is observe, accept, and describe. And the processes of observation and description make up a large portion of scientific endeavor.

When is a moving target. It seems to slip away just as we think we've found it. Time seems to be a fundamental component of the observable what. Einstein developed elegant equations that describe how the passage of time is intertwined with mass and velocity. The mechanism may be unexplained, but the effect is clear. Every experimental test of Einstein's theories has confirmed the fundamental nature of time. So much so that our what is referred to as a space-time continuum. Perhaps more telling, we don't even think to question the ubiquity of time. "What time is it?" is the only question that virtually all of humanity agrees on. There are no competing belief systems that champion different values for the length of a second or the number of hours in a day (could this faith in time become the basis of a universal religion?). We're constantly aware of time, but that awareness isn't considered a seventh sense. Time is inescapable. It's part of everything we observe, everything we think, and everything we do. So, I've decided to simply accept that when is always now (see my poem Conscripted ).

Where is another subset of what, and like who, it's pretty much self-evident:

Everybody has to be somewhere and if you're not where you're at, then you're nowhere. - ?

It seems obvious to me that I am where I'm at. I sincerely hope that you are where you're at. And no matter where we go, we can look around and say, “I’m here because I am.” So, I will simply accept that where, in general, is the here of the who in the what.

I lose the thread at how. All that we observe has a beginning and an end. Sunrise and sunset mark each day. Birth and death delimit each life. Empires rise and fall. Mountains are lifted up and wear away. But what came first? Aristotle wrote about the prime mover. He observed the inexorable forward march of cause and effect and then reasoned that all of existence could be traced backward in time to reveal a prime mover unmoved by any other mover. And he, she, or that would be the first cause of all the effects that culminate in the here and now of our universe.

Aristotle describes the unmoved mover as being perfectly beautiful, indivisible, and contemplating only the perfect contemplation: self-contemplation. - Wikipedia

But Aristotle stopped at this navel-gazing idea of God and didn't provide any further speculation on how the prime mover came to be. Aristotle just kicked the can down the road and congratulated himself on an elegant half explanation.

Science has arrived at a similar point with the big-bang theory. Stephen Hawking said that information can’t survive a trip through a singularity, so it’s impossible to know what preceded our universe. In addition, he said that time began with the beginning of the universe. So, the very concept of before doesn’t apply. Our reality begins with the big bang and that’s all we know or can know. Hawking's big bang is the equivalent of Aristotle's prime mover. Again, it's a half answer that leaves me doubly unsatisfied with how.

Why is the crux of the mystery. No one has ever provided me with a satisfactory explanation of why. There are far too many self-serving politicians, televangicals, and con artists who have an answer to why. Their why always seems to involve me sending them money. And there are too few authentic spiritual guides who offer a more genuine response. And even the best spiritual guides eventually fall back on faith because they can't explain why. Either way, it doesn't seem logical that Aristotle's self-contemplating perfect God would need humanity in general, let alone me in particular. And what's the point of all the beginnings and endings of cause and effect if God is eternal?

The only answer I've come up with for the question of why is that I have no other choice. Reality is the only game in town. I have to keep going even though I doubt I'll ever find out why. Well-meaning folks tell me, "Everything happens for a reason." And they're at least half right, everything happens. But I'm not so sure that there's a definitive reason. There may not even be a unique prime mover. At the quantum level, reality seems to be governed by probabilistic (random?) processes. Einstein disliked Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. He insisted that, "God does not play dice with the universe." But the uncertainty of reality at the quantum level has been verified experimentally. It isn't a clockwork mechanism of cause and effect. The dice come up with different numbers for every roll. And we still don't know why.

As for me, I pinball between the despair of agnosticism and the desperation of faith. Planning and striving help to pass the time, but then God hits the flipper again and I'm off on another random tangent. The lights flash, the bells chime and the bumpers clack, but there's never any sense of completion. Am I beating the game or just getting beat up? I don't even know if I'm scoring any points.

I write poetry, in part, to deal with feelings that I'm unable or unwilling to approach head-on. My poem Observational Bias  sums up much of what I've tried to express in this post. Wouldn't it be a wonderful (and horrible) cosmic joke if my 'why' is merely to annoy you with mediocre poetry?