Reality is infinite, unlike my capacity to perform tasks

On limits and the limitless

Photo by Graham Holtshausen on Unsplash

A few weeks ago a friend said she thought I was very clever for writing an essay on Substack every fortnight. ‘What do you do if you can’t think of anything to write?’ she said.

‘Hasn’t happened yet!’ I responded, preening myself.

I’m sure you can guess the consequences of this statement. The next time I tried to write an essay, I couldn’t think of a single interesting thing to say.

Since then I’ve been hobbling along a bit: resharing something I wrote last year, sneakily giving free subscribers a preview of a paid post instead of a new essay all of their own, and now sitting down to write something—anything—well over a day after I’m supposed to have posted it.

The truth is, I’m feeling a bit drained. I may have taken on too much. In addition to posting regularly on here, I’m supposed to be writing two books at once (hilarious), I have an assignment due soon for my Teaching Creative Writing course and I’ve got a new-ish part-time job in an independent bookshop, which, though lovely, has been demanding a lot of energy. I’ve been acting as though I can do everything, and of course, when you act like this, you soon start to butt up against your own limitations.

This seems to be a common problem. My favourite lifestyle guru,

Oliver Burkeman

—author of Four Thousand Weeks and Meditations for Mortals—has built a very successful career out of reminding people that they are mortal and finite and therefore need to be selective in what they choose to do with their time. The continued success of his books seems testament to the fact that we need these reminders on repeat. I’m a case in point: I’ve read Four Thousand Weeks twice, and apparently the message still hasn’t quite sunk in.

There’s an irony to all of this, because for a little while now I’ve been wanting to write about what is perhaps best described as the limitless. It’s a strange quirk of humanity that we like to imagine we’re limitless, while forgetting on a day-to-day basis about what is truly limitless: the mysterious temporal and spatial reality of which we are but one minuscule part.

Like most people, I have a skewed sense of my ability to exert control within the framework of my own life, and I spend a relatively small proportion of my time thinking about the nature of reality, because it’s of limited practical use to me on the daily. But I do find it valuable—not only wonder-inducing, but also oddly comforting—to stop and think about how small I am in the grand scheme of things. Lately I’ve been gravitating towards media that remind me of this, and in the process, I’ve been introduced to some pretty wild ideas.

Aliens??

A couple of weeks ago, for example, I listened to a podcast about the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Before you roll your eyes, it was a rigorous piece of reporting about a question that turns out to be a legitimate area of scientific investigation, not solely the domain of conspiracy theorists and ufologists. One of the scientists interviewed was Dava Newman, formerly the deputy administrator of NASA and now the Apollo Program Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT—so a woman with credentials, you might say. She was quoted as saying that she believes proof of the existence of extra-terrestrial life will be found before the end of this decade.¹

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I learned from the podcast that we now know of about two dozen ‘Goldilocks’ planets outside our own solar system, which have the potential to host life because they’re neither too hot nor too cold. But those are just the ones in the observable universe, which is, of course, a mere fraction of the whole. The podcast deployed the mind-boggling analogy that for every grain of sand on every beach on Earth, there are 10,000 stars in the universe. Hypothetically speaking, if one per cent of all these stars were orbited by Earth-like planets, there would be a hundred billion billion Earth-like planets in the universe. If one per cent of these Earth-like planets hosted intelligent life, that would equate to 100,000 intelligent civilisations just in our own cosmic ‘neighbourhood’, the Milky Way.

So far, so awe-inspiring. As I listened, though, I heard evidence of the human tendency to ignore our own finitude while underplaying the dizzying enormity of everything else. Of course, what everyone really wants to know is not ‘is there life?’ so much as ‘is there intelligent life?’ The AI developer Demis Hassabis popped up saying that he thinks not, because hypothetical extra-terrestrial civilisations could have been using sophisticated technologies for millennia. If so,

‘when we opened our ears, at the point we got technologically sophisticated enough in the space age, we should have heard a cacophony of voices. We should have joined that cacophony of voices. And what we did, we opened our ears, and we heard… nothing.’

For an extremely smart guy, this does not seem to me like a very smart argument. For one thing, it implies an equivalence between ‘intelligent life’ and ‘life that sends signals into space’. By that token, humans would only have graduated to the status of ‘intelligent life’ in the twentieth century. Sorry, Shakespeare. Why would we assume that these hypothetical extra-terrestrial civilisations are as technologically developed as we are? Or that our technologies and theirs are compatible enough to interact with each other? Or that they share our expansionist mentality, and are devoting similar amounts of time and resources to the search for their cosmic neighbours? It’s arrogant, but also sort of cute, to be so convinced of your species’ top-dog supremacy that when we can’t find the needle in the cosmic haystack, your conclusion is not that there are limits to our powers of investigation, but that the needle doesn’t exist at all.

Other dimensions??

Not long after listening to this podcast I read an article in the New Scientist about a theory so bizarre it makes the possibility of extra-terrestrial civilisations sound workaday and pedestrian. According to this theory, which is based on nascent research by theoretical physicists at the universities of Nottingham and Uppsala, our universe might be the four-dimensional² outer edge of a five-dimensional ‘bubble’. As I understand it in my *extremely limited* capacity as a layperson, this would be the equivalent of a two-dimensional universe existing on the surface of, say, a box. The two-dimensional beings in that universe would have no awareness of the three-dimensional space inside the box—in fact, their 2D brains wouldn’t even be able to conceptualise it. The Nottingham/Uppsala theory (which, to be clear, is far from being properly developed or widely accepted), proposes that our universe is in fact the ‘surface’ of an impossible-to-comprehend higher-dimensional space beneath it.

So, our universe, which, let’s not forget, is so huge that it contains 10,000 times as many stars as there are grains of sand on planet Earth, might in fact be a sort of membrane surrounding something much, much vaster.

Something to think about.

Consciousness all the way down??

The final piece of mind-opening media I’ve consumed recently is Annaka Harris’s audio documentary Lights On, which explores the idea that consciousness could be fundamental rather than emergent. Or, in other words: that consciousness (which is to say sentience, awareness, the ability to have experience of some kind) might be one of the basic building blocks of the universe, like electromagnetism or gravity, as opposed to something that emerges when matter is combined in very particular ways (ie. in the form of brains).

This would mean that consciousness exists everywhere, as an inherent property of all matter, rather than in little isolated islands like our heads. It doesn’t follow that complex consciousness would exist everywhere, that a bottle of wine or a set of floor tiles would be capable of, say, heartbreak or critical thinking. Rather, it suggests that some kind of ‘raw awareness’—the kind that, if you spend an awful lot of time meditating, you might discover lying beneath all your whirling layers of thought and emotion—could exist, to some degree, in matter at all levels.

Harris wrote a book about consciousness and found that the most intriguing question about it—where it comes from and why it exists at all, or ‘the hard problem’ as it’s known in neuroscience—was still unanswered, and still bugging her. So in Lights On, she embarks on a series of lengthy discussions with physicists and neuroscientists to probe at this question further. She is far from dogmatic, describing herself as 60/40 in favour of the existence of fundamental consciousness, and very open to being convinced in the other direction. She also has an impressive grasp of the way different branches of science and philosophy interact, and backs up all her opinions with rigorous arguments. So although the idea of fundamental consciousness seems a bit wacky and counterintuitive, and many scientists remain unconvinced, it would be wrong to dismiss her as some sort of woo woo fantasist.

My own interest in this question is very unscientific. It just appeals to my imagination. I love the idea that my brain might be channelling or tapping into conscious experience, rather than creating it from scratch. This might be because I grew up a devoted fan of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, a rollicking adventure story in which (**spoiler alert**) what we call dark matter is revealed to be ‘Dust’, a type of conscious particle floating gently and benevolently through the multiverse. It might be because I’m drawn to the idea of animacy in nature, or because I feel surrounded by gentleness and wisdom when I walk among the ancient trees of my local forest and I’d like to imagine that this isn’t just me projecting. Perhaps it’s because I’m scared of passing into oblivion when I die; perhaps I’m just ready to grasp at any theory that gives me hope the universe isn’t entirely random and indifferent.

But I suppose what I most like about it is the implication that what I perceive as my limits might not really be limits at all—that ‘I’ am not actually contained by the boundaries of my skull, but in some way fused with a continuum of sentient experience. I can imagine my own conscious experience as a ‘thickening’ in the field of universal consciousness, a gathering of cognitive processes that will one day be reabsorbed into a sort of infinite conscious soup. I like the idea that I’m not just an isolated self interacting with other isolated selves, all of us bobbing around in an expanse of random nothingness. And I like the idea that loneliness, selfhood, personality traits and interpersonal conflicts and differences are all just temporary illusions, born out of a misguided belief in our own isolation and singularity. It makes me feel sort of… relieved.

So there you have it.

We may in fact belong to one of many intelligent civilisations inhabiting a fundamentally conscious universe that is itself a sliver on the edge of a much bigger dimension. I’m not sure if this makes it harder to accept our own limits, or easier. The universe is vaster and stranger than I can possibly imagine, and I can’t even get through my piddling little to-do list! Or alternatively: The universe is vaster and stranger than I can possibly imagine—what does it matter about my silly little to-do list?

Of course, the truth is actually somewhere in the middle: my to-do list does matter, but not as much as I tend to think. Some things can certainly be pruned from it. Like, for example, much of the Substack reading I have been feeling morally deficient for failing to keep up with. Earlier this week, I whittled my own list of Substack subscriptions from 88 (!) to 26, in an attempt to embrace my limits, as Oliver Burkeman would say.

A day or two later, I started reading Burkeman’s latest book, Meditations for Mortals, and came upon the following, as if in retrospective justification for this decision:

‘Your limitations aren’t obstacles to a meaningful existence, which you must spend your days struggling to overcome… On the contrary, accepting them, stepping more fully into them, is precisely how you build a saner, freer, more accomplished, socially connected and enchantment-filled life.’

The promise of an ‘enchantment-filled life’ is catnip to my brain. Perhaps, if I step more fully into my limitations, I’ll have a little more headspace for the wonder-inducing possibilities of the limitless.

This brings me, in an extremely roundabout way, to the fact I’ve decided to step away from my Substack posting schedule for a bit.

I’ll still be sending out my monthly paid offering, and I might reshare a few early essays that most of you won’t have read, and I certainly won’t hold back from writing if I feel I have something I want to say. But I’m going to relax my rule about crafting an original essay once a fortnight, at least until I’ve finished the second draft of my second novel and made some headway on the third (a commission, which means I really have to do it. Yay!/Help!)

This essay is far too long at this point, but if you’ve read this far, thank you for spending a portion of your finite time on it.

‘Til soon,

Kx

1. We might be on track for that, if today’s news is anything to go by.

2. Our fourth dimension being time, in addition to the three of space.