I grant that those aforementioned ideas—that we’re all one, and that time and space do not exist—appear simple-minded. But that’s exactly how the Rickmansworth meme would seem: Plain Jane on the surface, but with hidden depths. Therefore, it’s not enough to glance at the above and declare, ‘Right, I’ve got that. Now, what else have you got on offer?’ Not so fast boys! Slow down a mite. Nuggets like these, you need to mull over.
Over the following pages, I’ll chew that cud thoroughly. This text proposes to touch on a few hoary bugbears. It sets out to demolish the odd scientific pillar. It’ll lead you where no man has gone before (and the banner we’ll march under is ‘The Sane Man is Nowhere’). I’ll drag out a bunch of thought experiments that I’d encourage you to replicate (do try these at home). Essentially, this book is a crash course in thought experimentation.
I’ll demonstrate how the results of those experiments bear on my thinking, the point being to derive an insight as to what the implications and corollaries of those findings might be. I want to write a life-changing manifesto . . . and then apply it.
Given that chimpanzees share about 99 per cent of their genetic makeup with humans, I'm someone not that different from you. Choose two people at random, and they’ll be closer—much closer—than they imagine. Did you ever ask yourself exactly who you are? Well, there you go then! That's another thing that we have in common.
Try this on for size: Think of me as if I’m you. Imagine that you'd been beamed into my body or been poured into my pair of shoes (a bit tricky, since I don’t wear ’em). What would you do if you were me? No really, do that right now—our first thought experiment together.
Suppose that you were me. Crawl inside my head. Imagine that you’ve somehow inherited my cerebral estate, the only catch being that you can’t bring any baggage with you—no knowledge of the former you, no memories et cetera. You can only bring your own ‘essence’, whatever that might be. What would you do as me, and how would you act?
If that were really the situation, then to all intents and purposes I suggest that since you are me (or I am you), you wouldn’t—couldn’t—act any differently than I had been, have been, are or will be acting in the future. You’d be ‘locked in’. You would have to make—have made—the same decisions as me. You would have fallen—will fall—into exactly the same traps. This is so because you would possess (or be possessed by) my background, environment, genetic makeup and everything else that pertains. It would be impossible for you to relate to the world in any other way but mine.
Now that you’ve had a preliminary fossick around the upstairs of my head, you’ll want to do a more careful inventory. Where to start? Which box do you look into first? There’re so many to choose from. How about this one labelled ‘My First Thought Experiments’? Tentatively, you reach for it, blow away the dust, and open the lid . . .
I’ve mentioned in passing my preoccupation with a certain mental tool. Thought experiments they are called, or maybe mind experiments—I’m never sure what to call them. But I performed them long before I‘d heard of either term.
Permit me to provide the context for what was probably my first. I was very young at the time. The experiment involved, ironically, my own origins. I wanted to know where I came from, so I tried to retrieve my very first memory. How far back could I go? I would have been six, five or possibly four when I flexed my memory muscles in this way to blast myself into the past.
There was one Easter I remember spending at my uncle’s home. We lived there until I was three, so it might have been during that period.The house had a front and a back garden, and I recall scouring them for chocolate eggs. Each would magically replenish itself while I was busy on the other side. How could that be?
I remember a doctor paying a house call once (which proves that this was well in the past). Oh, the indignity of being injected in the buttock!
Once I ate snow that I scooped off the street. That caused me to vomit my cornflakes, which I then couldn’t stomach for the next twenty years. Not something you forget.
Vaguely, I remember being bathed as a baby. ‘Shaving’ the suds of my leg with a finger. Having talcum applied.
There’s the kinaesthetic imprint of having my diapers changed—that topsy-turvy sensation of being lifted by the legs, and worrying about being stabbed in the midriff by a safety pin.
Lying in my crib and examining my mother’s homemade wall hangings. The way that the crib’s head covering draped.
Being breast fed . . .
But try as I might, I could never isolate the instant that I arrived into existence. There was never a time that I was not and then—pop!—suddenly appeared. I was always ‘here’, no matter how young or how small. How could I not be and then suddenly appear. It made no sense. There was always some awareness, no matter how indistinct.
The evidence might seem scanty, but just as a fragment of jawbone can establish a genus, to me it equated to a surety of knowledge. I was convinced of my continuity in the past, and by extension the future. There was never a time that I was not. I had always been, and for that reason, would always be.
Oh my goodness! By that snap of my finger, I grokked that I was immortal. The Rubicon was dry. Not only had I overcome the fear of death, I’d overcome death too! One way or another, I was eternal. Talk about empowerment! What fun it was to have a brain to work with.
Feel it. Savor it. Heft it. Grok it. Sink into the realization. The episode vaccinated me against any germ of organized religion that I might later be exposed to. That was the effect. Henceforth, I would never be able to adopt any belief system unless it took cognizance of my wonderful discovery.
My next thought experiment was no less powerful. I’ll try to describe it, but I fear that its conclusion won’t so easily be conveyed or grasped. I think of it as ‘returning to the centre’.
Others have also expressed that they sense themselves existing midway between and a little behind my eyes. The pineal gland is often cited as a candidate. When you take the time to relax and to tune out your mind, it’s possible to sink within until you feel you’re at the centre of the universe.
I can’t remember when I first found myself there, but I do remember what I thought. “Damn! Out of all the places I might be, out of all the times, out of all those billions of bodies, Here I Am.” Well I tell you, that notion quite amazed me. How infinitesimally small were the chances? To be right here, right now as me on this miniscule patch of real estate—the odds must be virtually zilch. It felt phenomenal, and the longer I considered the phenomenon, the less I could believe it.
Does that make sense to you? Can you relate to the feeling? I felt like a king or a god to be so . . . special! I must be special, yes, to be thus ‘singled out’. But it also felt paradoxical and even dangerous, because I knew that by no means did I have it all together.
You see, the I-at-the-centre frame of reference (I am he, as you are he, as you are me, and we are all together) can induce delusions of grandeur. And grandeur is not what is wanted here. It doesn’t feel appropriate, because tied to that feeling of being unique is the certainty of limitation. ‘I am centred at this point in my head’ implied simultaneously that ‘I am confined here’. I see things from this perspective and cannot do so from another. The trick, therefore, is to somehow reconcile the two items of awareness. One may be godlike, but one is merely . . . one. One bit out of many.
So, I’m not everything that I would like to be. It’s an idea to handle with kid gloves. It’s philosophical nitroglycerine, be ultra-careful not to spill a drop.
Once I knew this, I had to live with it. I had to live with myself. I remain centred at the centre of the universe no matter where I travel, no matter how quickly I run, spin or tumble, and no matter how many decades pass by. Are other people are in that position too? If they are, I’ve seen little sign of it. No slightly dazed look on blank faces. Well heck, maybe I am the only gorilla in the room. Maybe everyone else is just a figment of my imagination. But who wants to go there?
As I said at the outset, I shy away from—in fact I shun—any system of thinking that claims to be superior to the rest: Philosophy, Scientific Method, Religion and the like. Yes, I will use them, but not exclusively. I’d rather to go for the grok. An idea has got to sit right, feel right, and heft nicely in a way that I can accept totally. It’s like when you test an unknown plant to see if it is edible; you rub it on your skin or hold it in your mouth to see if it provokes an allergic reaction. If it doesn’t, then you proceed a little further.
The scientific way, they say, to verify or disprove a hypothesis is by carrying out replicable work. Instead, I choose to perform thought experiments. They are cheap, quick, and they work. What I’d like to do is to walk you through a few that I’ve conducted. We’ve already looked at three, from which I concluded:
1. I am immortal
2. I am very, very special . . . yet utterly limited
3. I am not confined to my body
Quite a heady philosophical brew for a boy not yet in his teens, wouldn’t you agree?
I’ll now dig out a few more, re-examine their results, and build from there. We’ll see what the consequences and corollaries are. Finally, I’ll describe what I deduce as their implications, and maybe close off with a question and answer session. How does that sound?
Though this seems like a logical and sensible plan, it’ll be messy. I can’t lead you along a well-thought out progression. Along my path there are no easy, clear-cut steps. There isn’t a wheelchair-accessible slope that leads you to a coherent and comprehensive (and comprehensible) overview. My history isn’t like that. It is still being written, in fact, as I write.
The order of these thought experiments will be roughly chronological, but they do not work seamlessly. I don’t have a firm, fixed destination, and I don’t have much of a game plan. I engage in this exercise for myself as much as for others, so I share your curiosity about what will develop. A machete? Yes, we might need one. Bring it along.
Thought experimentation doesn’t seem too dangerous. Nothing is likely to blow up in your face. With thought experiments, you don’t usually expose yourself to the sort of rays that cause cancer. Which is not to say that they are foolproof or that they can’t go wrong; for how long didn’t people believe that heavier object fell faster than lighter ones, or that the world was flat? But are thought experiments a legitimate modus operandi? Can they lead you anywhere?
Actually, if you want to make dramatic progress, they are your only option. Application of the scientific method has never resulted in any great leap forward. Every stride has only ever been achieved through imagination, creativity and lucid dreaming. Thought experiments are extremely powerful. Einstein is said to have arrived at his Theory of Relativity after he imagined himself riding on a beam of light. Other examples include Kekule’s benzine ring, the discovery of Velcro, television, the microwave oven, alternating current, coordinate geometry, chemical transmission of nerve impulses—eureka moments all.
You’re bound to have come across thought experiments too, but maybe in another guise—perhaps as koan, haiku, riddles, puzzles and even jokes. To some degree, these are all thought experiments. If you think about it, the act of reading is itself a thought experiment. Consider how amazing it is that the inky squiggles that your eye perceives translate into a shared experience with their author. And it's all happening right inside your head! Reach up with your hand and grasp the back of it where the entire universe fits ever so snugly.
Science fiction provides a particularly good portal in terms of thought experimentation. Riverworld, Ringworld, Foundation and Chung Kuo—every tale starts off with, and flows on from, one or more ‘suppose ifs’: po statements that we accept for the duration in order to enjoy the story. We don’t worry about how likely or believable they are. This is great training. For example, take that premise that underlies the Matrix movies. Say that everything we perceived as real by our senses is not, and that the universe as we know it an elaborately constructed virtual reality world that we’re all hooked into. If that was so, you wouldn’t know the difference. No one can prove that anything is really out there.
Yeah, but hey, you say, it's real. I can smell it. Nope, that’s just molecules tickling some nerve ends and scooting upward from there into your grey matter. But I can touch it, you protest. Again, that’s just another set of electrical impulses traveling up, this time, from your fingertips. Et cetera and so on. Stick with me, as I pick away at the warp and woof of that insight.
Our bedtime story for tonight (geez, is it that late in the day already?) is called Lust for Life, or Starry Night, depending on whether we’re in a hedonistic or romantic mood. As you might predict, it’s about Vincent Willem Van Gogh—good biographical fiction.
Not ‘Once upon a time’ but for as long as I can remember, I’ve felt a connection to that soul. I share his nationality, middle name, red beard (before mine went grey) and his socially inept manner. I savor his zest for being, his compassion for his fellow man, his overpowering creative drive, his simple tastes, his passion for life, and the way that he railed relentlessly against physical limits and limited means. I’ve read his letters (to his brother) and covered my walls with his prints. I’ve traced the history of his art and have amassed a library of books. I’ve even named my son after him. If I had been he, I couldn’t have lived a fuller life.
Maybe that’s an indication. Maybe I was once Vincent Van Gogh. Would it be so very far-fetched to imagine that he and I are one? Suppose that he is me reborn into this present body. As a thought experiment, where would that take us?
We’d need to think along the lines of reincarnation; I don’t think you can avoid it. For the sake of argument—no, not ‘argument’; who wants to argue? So, for the sake of, oh, I don’t know, mental gymnastics?—let’s suppose that reincarnation is possible. After all, the greater fraction of the world does.
Do I have any evidence—not of reincarnation in general, but of this particular instance?
Well no, I don’t have any clear memories of being him. I haven’t gone through any déjà vu moments of mixing pigments or of attacking a canvas. I haven’t an unexplained taste for tobacco and absinthe. But that’s okay. The absence of hard evidence doesn’t rule out the possibility of a common ancestry.
Still, there are documented accounts of people recalling where treasure is hidden under the floorboards of a house of a previous life. It’s been mentioned in books. Urban legends abound, so let's allow that it has happened. It's just that where Vincent is concerned, I don’t possess that power of recall.
Since it's rare for people to have memories of their previous lives, reincarnation must involve rigorous brainwashing. Otherwise we’d all be confused about our identity. That would explain my inability to demonstrate a closer connection. The exception proves the rule, so there's hope for me and Vinnie yet.
Say that I’m right. How then to explain the period of time—a half century or so—from the day Vincent shot himself (thirty hours later, actually, and possibly by a teenager) to the day on which I was born? Does that pose a problem?
I can’t see that it would. For reincarnation to be the norm, it would be quite inconvenient for the next life to have to start the instant one shuffled off one’s previous life’s mortal coil. The bookkeeping system for that would beggar belief.
My point is: time ought not to be a problem for a god. God can cope, surely. We want God to be time’s master—I mean, who is in charge here? An all-powerful god must be able to run rings around any old sundial. For souls in a state of limbo in between lives, there must be some cosmic equivalent of a capsule hotel. The Milky Way Transit Lounge Cafeteria—I can picture Douglas Adams there.
Okay then, let's tally. First, we touched on the concept of God, where I’ll admit that I might have employed a certain sleight of hand (in the spirit of the means justifying the end). We established that there is one of some form or other, and we fondly nicknamed it Dog (what, you don’t name your pets?).
We established that fact quickly to erect a platform upon which to build (and then launch off from), not just for the sake of argument, mental exercise, or fun. I trust that you are satisfied that there’s some sort of power, even if that role devolves as yours. No way should you fear it—neither that Being, nor of having that mantle bestowed.
We chose to accept reincarnation as a possibility. We tossed around that concept so as to snap off a few sticks with which to build. Men at work: mental Meccano construction. Assuming that it operates, and that it is administered by man’s best friend, Dog (who better?) we’re not going to place limits on what can and can’t be done.
Reincarnation may occur as many times as it likes, without the essential DNA ever wearing out. It occurs as a series, and to everyone—not only to a select few. It doesn’t see bestiality as an issue—no, not that. You know what I mean. At death—physical death—the soul leaps merrily across time and space to take up residence in another body, geographical location not being an issue, and time not being of much concern either.
We were happy for reincarnation to suspend time for as long as it likes, and to leap periods of time ‘at a single bound’, if need be faster than light. Ah, but can it do the superman thing and spin itself backwards along the fourth dimension?
That’s a new one for you, isn’t it? Take a minute or two. Don’t snap back at me with an answer; I want you to give it some serious thought. Is it possible for someone to be reborn at an earlier hour, date, or year than that person’s death?
Tilt your head one way then the other, but hold onto your hat. We’re preparing to topple old Father Time from his throne, just as soon as we’re done with our recap. We’re going to turn the hourglass on its head and chop it into smithereens!
You and I, we’re not human beings you know. Get over that notion. Why cling to your ethnicity, race, tribe or nationality? Borders don’t exist in the real world. Species are not ring-fenced. There are no aliens to fear. When all is said and done, we’re jabberwockies: four-dimensional worm-like bodies with flukes for arms and legs, a zygote-sized snout and a somewhat shrunken seventy- or eighty-year-old tail that is rudely truncated (sooner and blunter, if you are cut down accidentally in the prime of life).
Our entirety exists outside of time like a statue in a blurred time-lapse photograph. Life, as we know it, at any instant, is simply a cross-section of the jabberwocky. The spark that does the cutting dances up and down its spine from head bone to toe bone. As it plucks here, there and everywhere it defines the present where we find ourselves at that moment.
But actually there is no present. Neither is there a past nor a future. There is only the subjective present, the one which we’re forever unwrapping.
Judge for yourself. Let’s run a little thought experiment. Are you ready? Just sit back and close your eyes. Right then, try to feel time pass. See if you can feel it slip through your fingers. Are you able to?
I certainly can’t. You say that you can follow the second hand of the clock on the wall? That doesn’t count. You opened your eyes. And even if you didn’t, it’s just a physical event. It is an external action that you don’t experience within yourself.
What I’m saying is that everyone experiences the present only as an instant, albeit an instant with duration. And, like the principle behind motion pictures, those separate instances link up to generate an illusion of time passing fluidly. In actual fact, though, it doesn’t. It is made of granules, quanta, or instants. Life jiggles instantaneously.
As a diversion, try that same thought experiment out for the other dimensions. You’ll get a similar result. No dimension is really real. When you travel any distance north, south, east, west, up or down, it doesn't matter how far you go. You’re always 'here'. It feels like the same place as you were before. You remain at the middle of the universe, not its edge. Whether you walk, drive or fly, your consciousness stays put. The scissoring of your legs doesn’t propel you across the landscape. It pulls it towards you.
But that the fourth dimension doesn’t exist at all . . . isn’t that ludicrous? We needn’t go down that route, surely. Without time, what are we left with? Where would we be? When? What chance is there for us to grow? How could we hope for a change in the weather or in our situation? How could evolution occur (if it is still on the curriculum)?
The sense of self is relative. It relies on the fact that the external environment is not you. You can't be you unless there is something that you aren’t. There has to be that boundary.
The essence of the Rickmansworth meme is that there is only one being who experiences him-, her-, or itself (us-self) through every form of life. It’s all-inclusive. It includes all of those who are, as well as all of those who were or will be. If there are parallel universes then they are also in the mix.
And so, when the god boys say that it’s okay, it really is. Everything’s just fine and dandy with the universe. Whatever happens to you in life—whether you win the lottery, or whether you become confined to to a wheelchair, it doesn’t matter. Not ultimately.
Oh, it may hurt all right. The tooth may pain as it is pulled—I’m sure I’d fume and fuss along with the best of them. But that doesn’t change the fact that, although each of our stories seem so real, and our programming makes us cry, laugh or scream, it’s all but a technicolor dream.
The whole circus has been set up with just one purpose in mind: to provide everyone with entertainment. That’s why we’ve been compartmentalized. At heart we’re all essentially the same; we’re one. But that won’t do—you can’t put on a great performance with just a bunch of clones (witness synchronized swimming).
Some magic wand has conjured up the illusion that we’re all different and separate. We’re portals opening out into one another. We’re here for each other’s entertainment—hey, it's good to meet you! The circle game is how God passes away the time. That’s the grand conspiracy that we’re an unwitting part of. Think of it as a grand twiddling of thumbs.
