Heroes Not Zombies

If you look very carefully you’ll be able to see a person in this photo. They are standing on that elaborate metal creation protruding from the top of the cliff. Can you see them?

This immediately made me think of one of the core paradoxes of life – significance and insignificance. This single human being looks so tiny, even from the perspective of this small part of the world. Think how tiny each of us are on this planet, Earth. Think how tiny we are in this vast universe.

Doesn’t that make you feel pretty insignificant in the whole scheme of things? It makes me feel that way. A single human being, a single life, lasting just a few years. In the vast scales of time and space it’s hard to see how any of us matter.

There are many people who think this way. They think the universe and all that exists came to be completely randomly. A series of utterly chance events producing all the stars, all the planets, all forms of life, consciousness. It’s all random and purposeless. Evolution proceeded by a series of spontaneous chance mutations which were “selected for” by the environment as more likely to promote survival. Any single organism in this view is both pointless and purposeless, apart from any usefulness they might temporarily provide.

Yuck!

Not convincing to me!

I spent my working life one to one with individual patients. I found every single one of them to be unique, every single one of them to be valuable and worthy of attention and care. So I start from the other end of the scale. The human one. And try to make sense of the universe from that perspective. Not by observing others as detached objects, but through compassionate engagement, subject to subject in relationship.

The figures don’t stack up for me. The chances of the stars coming into being completely by chance are infinitesimally small. So small some people have come up with the multiverse idea….that all that can happen does happen in an infinite number of parallel universes. But that strikes me as a cop out. It’s a mathematical trick to make the chance explanation feasible.

Then there’s evolution and life. The truth is that the most successful organisms in terms of survival are single celled ones. There are bacteria and amoebae millions of years old. But the direction of travel of evolution has been ever increasing complexity. We know of no more complex creatures than human beings. But we only survive around eighty years or so. Goodness, trees can live thousands of years, how come the direction of evolution has produced more and more complex creatures which can survive less and less years? Why didn’t it stop with amoebae?

And then how did consciousness come to be, and at what point? If it’s an end point in complex matter how does that work? How does consciousness “emerge” from matter?

Or did consciousness come first?

Has matter emerged from consciousness? Is the direction of evolution not survival as a quantitative phenomenon but the creation of ever greater complexity, difference, beauty and uniqueness?

I don’t buy the dominant materialist mechanical view. It doesn’t make sense to me and it appears to reduce human beings to cogs in a machine, flawed and replaceable. Life without purpose.

But I do buy a wholistic, connected, consciously value based view. That every single creature is a unique subject. That it’s relationships and experiences that we should focus on, over objects and parts. That each of us has a wholly unique role to play in existence. That the universe took 14 billion years to produce you, and that alone is pretty damn amazing.

I find wonder everywhere and everyday. The older I get the more I know I don’t know and that fills me with awe and respect. What a gift to be alive, to have this singular opportunity to contribute to the development of consciousness, to witness and create beauty, goodness and truth.

Do we matter? It depends on your world view. How does the universe appear to you?