Every once in a while, something happens to change the way you view the world. That happened to me the other night. It was a dream.
I was in a house with my parents hosting some kind of party. Already this is unusual, since I rarely dream about my parents who passed away long ago. While my mother was entertaining some guests in the living room, I noticed my room’s door was ajar, with a light streaming from within. My mother just finished bringing a dead cat to life (remember, it’s a dream). I entered my room, where my father started up a conversation about what my mother just did. He claimed it was impossible, that it made no sense. When I started up a soliloquy, a very unusual one, I became half-awake. I was so impressed that I repeated the speech out loud so I wouldn’t forget it.
I explained to my father that our view of the world is ever-changing. It is made up of bits and pieces of observations that we strive to glue together into a workable thesis. Whenever something strange pops up, we rearrange the pieces like a jigsaw puzzle until they fit in another way. “But, what about the impossible?” my father asked. “You mother just brought a cat back to life.”
Then I came up with this: The glue which holds those pieces together is logic. Our logic developed along with us as we evolved and struggled to survive on this tiny mote of dirt in an incredibly huge universe. It may be that our logic simply cannot explain everything we see in the universe (like dark matter, entangled particles, the creation of matter from nothing, even the big bang), because it was never designed to deal with such questions. In fact, we may not have the language to apply to the rest of the universe. Even the concept of causation, the basis of our scientific method, may have no relevance to existence.
It was then I woke up.
I was in a house with my parents hosting some kind of party. Already this is unusual, since I rarely dream about my parents who passed away long ago. While my mother was entertaining some guests in the living room, I noticed my room’s door was ajar, with a light streaming from within. My mother just finished bringing a dead cat to life (remember, it’s a dream). I entered my room, where my father started up a conversation about what my mother just did. He claimed it was impossible, that it made no sense. When I started up a soliloquy, a very unusual one, I became half-awake. I was so impressed that I repeated the speech out loud so I wouldn’t forget it.
I explained to my father that our view of the world is ever-changing. It is made up of bits and pieces of observations that we strive to glue together into a workable thesis. Whenever something strange pops up, we rearrange the pieces like a jigsaw puzzle until they fit in another way. “But, what about the impossible?” my father asked. “You mother just brought a cat back to life.”
Then I came up with this: The glue which holds those pieces together is logic. Our logic developed along with us as we evolved and struggled to survive on this tiny mote of dirt in an incredibly huge universe. It may be that our logic simply cannot explain everything we see in the universe (like dark matter, entangled particles, the creation of matter from nothing, even the big bang), because it was never designed to deal with such questions. In fact, we may not have the language to apply to the rest of the universe. Even the concept of causation, the basis of our scientific method, may have no relevance to existence.
It was then I woke up.
