In/Out

"All my daydreams are disasters

She's the one I think I love

Rivers burn and then run backwards

For her, that's enough"

Uncle Tupelo, "New Madrid"

I read Michael Benson's Far Out a while back, a compendium of the latest stunning images from the Hubble telescope, ranging from relatively nearby nebulas (a mere few thousand light years away) to the dimmest specks of galaxies whose light, 13 billion years old, streams oh-so-faintly to us from the dawn of the universe.

The images are truly spectacular, nature writ very large and very distant. But as Benson notes, they are images that, while reflective of reality, are not those that could be captured by that very imperfect instrument, the human eye. He even quotes Blake's immortal line, "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is, infinite."

Science fact defeats science fiction. Of the universe beyond, say, Mars (or according to President Obama's recent decree, beyond perhaps the International Space Station), you just can't get there from here. The distances defy belief, and the glorious pictures merely tempt. Either we are alone amid unimaginable vastness, or there are likely myriad other intelligences whom we can never contact or perceive across the gulfs of space and time. Either possibility seems absurd. Someone said (was it Wittgenstein?) that if a question has no good answers, that means it wasn't a good question. We are at the limits of human cognition.

The books drove home for me the utter distinction between Godly and Godless universes. In the times and places when I have been able to hold the concept of God seriously in view, the universe seemed very small: just God and us (or me), in a metaphysically tiny room. But subtract God, and the the universe is dumbfoundingly vast, and unimaginably empty. Is there a happy medium between claustrophobia and agoraphobia? The tightrope of sanity maybe.

(What does Uncle Tupelo have to do with astronomy? A mystery).

God By Committee

From Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City:

"Simulated worlds theory says that computing power is inevitably going to rise to a level where it's possible to create a simulation of an entire universe, in every detail, and populated with little simulated beings, something like Biller's avatars, who sincerely believe they're truly alive. If you were in one of these simulated universes you'd never know it. Every sensory detail would be as complete as the world around us, the world as we find it."
"Sure," said Perkus. "Everybody knows that." He tried to dismiss or encompass Oona's description before she could complete it. "It's common knowledge we could be living in a gigantic computer simulation unawares. I think science established that decades ago, for crying out loud. Your Junrow was--huh!--behind the curve on that one."
"Right, right," said Oona slyly. "But here's the point. If we agree that the odds are overwhelming that it's already happened, then we're just one of innumerable universes living in parallel, a series of experiments just to see how things will develop. You know, whether we'll end up destroying ourselves with nuclear weapons, or become a giant hippie commune, or whatever. There might be trillions of these simulations going on at once."
"Why couldn't we be the original?" I asked.
"We could be," said Oona. "But the odds aren't good. You wouldn't want to bet on it."

This is an old philosophical musing, akin to life as a dream and vice versa, but why is it at once so compelling and so idle? It shows both the potentially maddening limits of our knowledge and the total lack of practical implications for these limits. If it could somehow be shown that our universe is in fact a virtual simulation, this would not, and should not, change anything about what we do. This thought experiment also undermines our now millenia-old assumption that God is singular...