A walk of thoughts and paradoxes
A walk of thoughts and paradoxes
A man walks.
What is this? Is it a tree, a flower growing in the gap in the sidewalk? He looks up and sees the clouds on a blue background, half seen through the leaves of a tree. He keeps walking, surrounded by things on all sides. What is this? What are these things around me?
The nature of the world and of things has always intrigued humanity that seeks explanations from the sciences, which, in spite of all its development and expansion, increasingly seems to reach a limit. No. Not a limit, but maybe an absence of limits. A point in which things become increasingly difficult to define. A point in which the old concepts have broken apart and everything seems to slip through our fingers. New concepts are formed, but they still can’t be seen clearly.
Time and space, nothing more concrete, nothing more secure. The sidewalk that moves. My cellphone, synchronized to a satellite, registers the time automatically, with each step. But… What if there are 2 temporal dimensions? What if the familiar 3 dimensions are 4? Or 10, or 11, or 24? Strings, quantum gravity, dark matter, dark energy, multiple universes…
The century of unresolved conflict between Einstein’s theories and quantum physics seems to end with an explosion of dozens of theories, incompatible with each other. Paradoxes are curious. They’re explanations of the world that present themselves as incompatible. They can’t all be true simultaneously… Or could they? Paradoxes tend to appear exactly when the world goes beyond the concepts we have of it.
Could it be that things are exactly the way we’re used to seeing them? Perhaps common sense, accumulated for thousands of years, about how the world is, about how things work, maybe, it has only served to bring us here. To this point. A point where we ask ourselves: What is this, really? What is this, actually? And more: Who am I that asks?
Observe, now, your own thinking. No doubt you follow the text in front of you and think. But then, if you’re thinking, who are you that, now, at this moment, observes what is being thought? Where is the center of the being? In the being who thinks or in the being that now observes the thought? “Am I two, or am I one?”
What is consciousness, what is intelligence? And individuality? What is the role of the observer? Multiple hypotheses unfold. Would intelligence be an intrinsic property of the universe? And what is your relationship with consciousness? And free will? Is life a natural and inevitable consequence of natural processes?
The division and opposition between body and mind, the basis of science since the time of Descartes, is finally questioned by science itself. Physics, Biology, Information Theory, Psychology and many others, they all try to synthesize within their own areas.
It’s a time of change; time of emergence of new paradigms. It’s time for awakening of the mind. It seems that the knowledge left by mystics and philosophers for more than 5,000 years is relevant again.
Time, space, flower, sidewalk, tree, clouds, thoughts, questions and us, who observe everything… And we walk.
Where am I now? Where are we now? At that curious and fascinating point, advocated by all great philosophical systems, in which what is outside meets again with what is inside.
