Agnostic Guide Chapter 16 - Adams and Ants

Contemplation

Contemplation isn’t just sitting around and thinking about just any little thing. Contemplation was an important part of Plato’s philosophy. He thought it would allow us to ascend to knowledge of the Form of the Good. The Form of the Good was the thing which made everything else intelligible, and in some sense provided being to all other Forms, though the Good itself exceeds being. Wisdom is knowledge about the Good or the right relations between all that exists. Essentially it is an understanding of true knowledge through contemplation of reality.

I have to read a paragraph like that several times for it to kind of sink in. Philosophers such as Plato seem understandable but some of it makes my mind swim in and around their concepts with mental gymnastics. It’s easier for me to have some ideas to serve as seeds for contemplation. It’s easier to compare the ideas against reality and see if they survive scrutiny as possible knowledge.

Religious people try to tell me the only logical answer to how reality exists is an intelligent creator caused it all to be. That idea doesn’t survive scrutiny for very long when I contemplate this particular seed because my visions of existence and anything that could be outside of it as a first cause are so much greater than a singular being. I think existence is greater than the simplistic view of a singular and uncaused intelligent creator not invented by human imagination. Here are some other interesting seeds I sometimes contemplate from two men named Adams along with the ants I see wandering around sometimes.

Douglas Adams

My favorite author is Douglas Adams and my favorite series of books is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In it, a great computer called Deep Thought was built to determine the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. Deep Thought worked for millions of years on the question and eventually figured out the answer was 42. The ultimate meaning of life as the answer to the ultimate question is a number.

The computer goes on to say the answer doesn’t make any sense without knowing the actual question that goes with it, which the computer doesn’t know. It’s an interesting idea that you could develop an answer without knowing the right question for it to make any sense. It’s like a twisted variation of the Jeopardy game show with only blank clues on the screens.

Douglas Adams supposedly invented the story of Deep Thought to make fun of those who search for answers to insoluble questions, and he illustrated the stupidity of those who try to do that with this part of the story. Our creator is 42. It’s an invented answer to say “he did it!” without any true connection to the ultimate questions of life, the universe, and everything.

Arthur Dent is the main character in the book and he meets a man who tells the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. He tells Arthur the truth of the universe and knowing the Question and Answer (which is 42) are mutually exclusive and knowledge of one logically precludes knowledge of the other. He says it is impossible both can be known about the same universe so if it happened, the Question and the Answer would cancel each other out and take the universe with it, which would then be replaced by something even more bizarrely inexplicable. He concludes by saying it’s possible this has already happened but there’s a certain amount of uncertainty about it.

This is the observer effect to the extreme and is an interesting hypothesis even though it’s completely fictional and has no basis in reality. The observer effect is the changes that occur because the act of observation impacts what is being observed. A basic example is the difficulty in checking the air pressure in a tire without letting out a little air and changing the air pressure being measured. The hypothesis would be if we understood the universe then it would no longer be that universe and would become something else. Our accurate observation of the meaning of it all would cause the nature of existence and the meaning to change.

The biggest realization and little “aah” moment I get from reading these books is that a single simple answer isn’t the thing we should be focused on when we contemplate reality. The things we don’t understand and the real question that needs to be examined and figured out is simply the true nature of the universe itself instead of what caused it. The more we can understand the universe and existence, the more likely it is humanity might one day determine the real meaning behind existence. We quickly jump to try to claim a simple answer to it all when we don’t even understand the questions we’re trying to answer.

Scott Adams

Scott Adams writes the Dilbert comic strip. He also wrote a thought experiment called God’s Debris which is interesting to contemplate even though it’s fiction and has no basis in reality. It’s an interesting thing to think about related to any other view of God because it’s just as likely or unlikely as any other belief in an intelligent creator.

Scott writes that the only challenge for an omnipotent being would be the challenge of destroying itself and its own omnipotence. An omnipotent God would have no motivation to do or create anything because it already knows and has everything. However, a God might be motivated to try to answer the one unanswered question of what happens if the God ceases to exist. Scott’s fictional hypothesis is our existence is the proof God is motivated to act. Since only self-destruction could interest and motivate an omnipotent being, then we must be a part of the God’s debris coming from the Big Bang as God caused itself to no longer exist.

Scott suggests that matter is the bits of God. The other part of God’s debris is probability as an infinitely powerful guiding force for everything in the universe. All of this, including us, is the building blocks of God reassembling itself. The universe is God with our consciousness, desires, and instincts to communicate and generate collective knowledge serving as a part of God’s reassembly. We can imagine and see God around us because we are all a part of God’s mind pulling itself back together into omnipotence.

One of the more interesting ideas in that book is an omnipotent being wouldn’t have any desires or motivations. If you already knew exactly what I was going to do with each step of my existence then why would you desire to dictate any guidance for me since you already know what that additional guidance does? How could we be given free will when reality is viewed from omnipotence and everything is already known and predetermined? If I can truly do what I want then God is not omnipotent. Omniscience may actually be all of the knowledge of all possible intellects and not something that is held by a single intelligent being. Omnipotent power may only be able to be held by the universe as the totality of everything.

When I contemplate the concept of God’s debris pulling itself back together into an omnipotent singularity then I see the logical conclusion is it’s once again that being. It’s the being who no longer has motivation to do anything because it knows it all and has it all since it is everything. Once it reaches this state of being again, it would again understand the only thing that can be done is to see if it can destroy itself and its omnipotence over and over again. Like Scott Adams says, it’s an interesting thought experiment, but it doesn’t mean it’s real even if we can’t prove it’s true or false.

Thinking of Ants

I sometimes contemplate ants when I want to align my perspective regarding our relationship with a possible supreme being. I imagine we’re supreme beings and ants are our humans. I know we didn’t create ants but some day we may create some similar little creatures with an intellect vastly inferior to ours. We would effectively become their supreme beings by creating them. This hasn’t happened yet, so right now I just think of ants as a placeholder.

What would we want from the ants? Religions say our supreme being wants our worship and our love. Perhaps our supreme being wants some entertainment watching us live out our lives. We do the same thing with ants by putting them in a farm of ants. I’ve discovered the more common version of the “farm of ants” phrase is trademarked. The creator of the Dilbert comic strip was sued for using it so I’m not even going to mention it.

A farm of ants isn’t some plantation where ants toil away farming crops for harvest. The proper term for a habit of ants is a formicarium. It’s a portion of an ecosystem where we can study their behavior. You put an ant nest between two pieces of glass or plastic to reduce the three-dimensional nest down to an easier to view two dimensions.

I imagine we’re the supreme beings and our little formicarium is synonymous with Earth. We can watch this little Earth but the ants are completely oblivious to our observations. They explore the boundaries of their ecosystem but they couldn’t possibly dream of the different environments outside their world. They can barely experience the third dimension as they’re trapped between two pieces of glass. Forwards and backwards, up and down, are all they know. They can turn around so they do have an idea of left and right but they can’t do much with it. Maybe we could do a bit more with our time dimension but we’re currently living with some constraints like the ants.

Can ants sense our presence at all? We can disrupt their materials, pluck one out of the nest, or even shake the whole thing to provide a massive farm quake. Who would they think caused these things if they didn’t just think they were natural occurrences? If they were smart enough to understand it just a little then would they imagine gods providing these forces beyond their understanding?

I try to imagine what ants might think with their inferior brains. We could try to communicate with them. However, our intellects and experiences are on completely different scales so anything we say about science, math, art, or philosophy would be meaningless to them. We try to figure out what they say to each other and interpret it as simple talk about food locations. Perhaps they can talk about the weather or share some sort of artistic poetry we don’t understand because it’s down on their scale of intellect.

We could take one out and let it explore an entire house full of human created stuff. The poor little ant would marvel at our powers if it could just understand what we’ve accomplished. It might worship us as gods if it had some vague notion of what we’re capable of on this planet. Maybe we could get some communication across to say we exist and take care of them but their simple intellect might read more into the message’s meaning. They may screw up our message if they share it with their fellow ants.

I imagine all of these things to consider how a greater power may not be the greatest power. I can imagine the possibility of a superior being not being the Supreme Being. We might be sitting here in our little formicarium universe completely oblivious to a larger scale existence with larger scale intellects.

This is another reason why I don’t fully embrace atheism as a final answer and primary viewpoint. I can imagine so many things beyond our understanding where unknown and potentially unknowable superior beings could exist to create humanity even if they didn’t create existence itself. I don’t think it’s likely but I also wouldn’t be entirely surprised if our ant scale science made an unusual discovery about a higher intelligent existence.