"Hold up," Zac said. "Don't our laws of physics account for why some things stick together and why other things don't? Shouldn't particle physics explain this?"
"No," I replied. "Particle physics is an illusion. It's just noise."
"What are you talking about? Our laws of physics allow us to create all kinds of technology in this world. They're pretty accurate."
"Of course they are. I'm not disputing that."
"Then how come you think particle physics is just noise?"
"It's not just particle physics that's noise," I replied. "Chemistry and biology and everything else is just noise too."
"Yeah, well, I happen to have a lot of faith in chemistry and biology and physics. They seem to accurately describe how the world works."
"I agree."
Zac shook his head. "I'm really confused. If you agree with me, then why are you dismissing science?"
"I'm not dismissing science," I said. "I'm just calling it what it is: noise. I don't care about noise. I care about the signal; the essence; the underlying cause.
Let me explain it this way: imagine you are an AI bot in a game of Minecraft. You run around the world, observing your reality, and you call this 'science.' You conduct experiments and make observations. Pretty soon, you have all the Minecraft blocks in a list. You have wood blocks, and glass blocks, and wool blocks, and redstone blocks, with all their properties figured out. All the different elements and forces are written down and categorized."
"What you don't realize, however, is that you've been studying an illusion. In Minecraft, when an AI bot moves her hand up and down, she believes it moves because of her muscles. There appears to be a linear cause-and-effect relationship between her muscles flexing and her arm moving. If she were to remove the muscles from her arm, her arm would no longer move. So, according to science, we say 'muscles make her arm move.'
But, of course, muscles don't make her arm move. If reality and consciousness are the same thing, then her muscles are an illusion. Here, hold up your hand."
Zac and I both held our hands against the moonlight.
"So," I continued, "twirl your arm around and look at it. Is there blood running through your veins right now?"
"Yes," Zac said.
"No," I corrected. "There's not. If reality and consciousness are the same thing, then blood is not running through your veins right now. To have blood running through your veins right now, three dimensions of space would have to exist, and they do not. Space is an illusion. The insides of your body are like the contents underneath the floorboard. Their state is not decided upon until a measurement is made. If you were to cut your arm open, blood would start pouring out. But that doesn't mean that blood is running through your veins right now. It can't be, if reality is emerging from a lower dimension.
This also means your muscles don't fundamentally exist, in the same way that muscles don't fundamentally exist in a computer game until you observe them. When I move my arm up and down, I think it is moving because of my muscles. At the deeper level of reality, it's moving because the algorithm says it must. The algorithm is the cause, and my moving arm is the effect. Therefore, the algorithm is the signal, and my moving arm is just an emergent pattern unfolding in the explicate order. It's just noise.
Particle physics is the same. You can observe a whole bunch of detail right here, in the explicate order. Everything in the explicate order appears to have linear cause-and-effect, which is why materialism is such a prevalent belief system in the scientific community. Scientists are like AI bots running around in a Minecraft game, thinking that there is an actual world outside of them to study. They don't realize that classical physics is an illusion, just like it is in a computer game.
That doesn't mean science isn't useful, of course. If you're playing a game of Minecraft and you want to build an electric train track, you need to know which blocks can conduct electricity and what materials work together to create the train. You can do all of this marvelous science without ever being aware that there is a lower dimension. However, the physicists won't find their 'theory of everything' until they forget their intuitions and see reality for what it really is: a mathematical illusion.
The evolutionary biologist and atheist, Richard Dawkins-"
"The guy you mentioned earlier, when you were talking about induction and deduction?" Zac asked.
"Yeah, I mentioned him briefly. He is a great communicator of science and a voice for reason. I generally like his work and a lot of the things he stands for. My main gripe with him, though, is that he's very clever but not very wise. In fact, you could give that label to all of humanity: we're very clever, but not very wise. We were clever enough to build nuclear weapons, but not wise enough to not need them in the first place. I think it was Einstein who said it's harder to crack prejudice than an atom.
Anyway, Dawkins believes that evolution completely removes the need for God, as if God and evolution are mutually exclusive. He can't quite explain how consciousness emerged out of inanimate matter in the first place. But he can explain how single-cell organisms evolved into complex human beings via natural selection.
That's great and all, but it's kinda like being in a Minecraft game and saying 'my arm moves because of my muscles.' No. Your arm moves because of the algorithm at the lower dimension. Your arm is an illusion. Biological evolution is an illusion. It is true, but it is also noise.
And so, if we extend this idea, God and science are not incompatible at all. The idea of a theistic, judgemental, religious God with objective morality is incompatible with science, but not 'God' in the truest sense of the word: a pantheistic infinite intelligence. Both sides of the debate are correct, but in different ways. Here, listen to this..."
Life evolved through a series of steps in the blink of an eye that you now call billions of years. And in this holy instant came you, out of the sea, the water of life, onto the land and into the form you now hold.
Then the evolutionists are right!
I find it amusing — a source of continual amusement, actually — that you humans have such a need to break everything down into right and wrong.
It never occurs to you that you’ve made those labels up to help you define the material — and your Self. It never occurs to you (except to the finest minds among you) that a thing could be both right and wrong; that only in the relative world are things one or the other. In the world of the absolute, of time-no time, all things are everything.
There is no male and female, there is no before and after, there is no fast and slow, here and there, up and down, left and right — and no right and wrong. Your astronauts and cosmonauts have gained a sense of this. They imagined themselves to be rocketing upward to get to outer space, only to find when they got there that they were looking up at the Earth. Or were they? Maybe they were looking down at the Earth! But then, where was the sun? Up? Down? No! Over there, to the left. So now, suddenly, a thing was neither up nor down — it was sideways… and all definitions thus disappeared.
So it is in My world — our world — our real realm. All definitions disappear, rendering it difficult to even talk about this realm in definitive terms. Religion is your attempt to speak of the unspeakable. It does not do a very good job. No, My son, the evolutionists are not right. I created all of this — all of this — in the blink of an eye; in one holy instant — just as the creationists have said. And… it came about through a process of evolution taking billions and billions of what you call years, just as the evolutionists claim.
They are both “right.” As the cosmonauts discovered, it all depends on how you look at it.
Neale Donald Walsch
"That makes sense, doesn't it?" I said. "If I was an AI bot in a game of Minecraft, it looks as if the world evolved over billions of years. You could even watch the world evolve via linear cause-and-effect in the 'explicate order.' However, we also know that time doesn't exist in the game, and the world is back-loaded with a history the moment we observe it.
Therefore, the clever answer is 'life evolved according to Darwin's theory of evolution.' The wise answer is 'life was created in an instant.' Both are true, but the former refers to the explicate order, and the latter refers to the implicate order. It's like saying 'my arm moves because of my muscles' and 'my arm moves because the algorithm residing at the lower dimension says it must.' Both statements are true, but it takes a deeper understanding to recognize that.
Which brings me back to my ice cube model of the universe. We are not looking for a linear cause-and-effect relationship between particles and forces in the explicate order. Scientists are approaching this problem with the underlying assumption that our universe works like a mechanical system. If they can just assemble all the different parts of the system, then their 'theory of everything' will be revealed. To quote Nikola Tesla — 'The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.'
We've already established that today's scientists are absolutely fucking delusional about their dogmatic belief in materialism, so the last thing we want to do is think like them. We're not sheep, Zac. We're artists. We are perfectly capable of thinking for ourselves. That's why I will not allow us to become distracted by irrelevant noise. Instead, we will be looking for a single, deep mathematical pattern, okay? Ignore all the specifics and focus on the essence of the pattern, which is this: the universe has a mathematical pull towards entropy and another mathematical push against it. Something is keeping those ice cubes intact as particular things, so they don't melt. Are you following?"
"I think so," Zac said. "So, you're just creating a very high-level abstraction?"
