We cannot conceive of ourselves as not existing.

I've always been fascinated by space. When I was growing up, I had a giant, blown-up photograph of Earth as seen from the moon. I think my grandma's neighbor gave it to me (along with an equally rad photo of Mt. St. Helens blowing up, which incidentally highlights another obsession of mine: volcanos/geology) and I hung it on the wall of my bedroom. Last year I was reading a book about the planets, and I remember reading that the ring on Uranus is oriented vertically instead of tilted horizontally because it collided with another giant body and the collision knocked the planet's axis on its side. The fact that most fascinated me, though, is that we will never know what color the moon is. It looks different colors in the shade and in light. There is zero moisture on the moon, so when moon rocks are brought back to Earth, the moisture in our atmosphere changes the color of them. I remember being stunned by our inability to factualize a simple piece of information like the color of the moon. I think that's always been the draw of space for me: that its characteristics cannot be confirmed. I was reading an article about space today, about how only 4% of our universe consists of the matter that makes up our planet, humans, my computer, and so on. The rest of it is unknown "dark matter" and "dark energy," phrases that have no meaning, that are simply place holders so we have something to call the great unknowns of our universe. What is so fascinating to me is that dark matter and dark energy canont be detected by our five senses. We can only infer their existence from what we know of the universe through our observations; without "dark matter" and "dark energy," our universe doesn't make sense, and yet we don't know what they are, except that they are somehow related to gravity, another force we don't even understand. The idea that there are phenomena out there that define our existence that we cannot even sense fascinates me. We do not know it because we do not know how to know it. Something else that got me really excited is that, if there are more dimensions beyond the four we can sense (time, and the three dimensions of space), there could potentially be 10 to the 500th power more universes out there. This is why I need to make friends with a physicist, because I always have more questions at this stage. How did they figure this out? What has led to this conclusion? How does it work, the other dimensions, to allow for 10 to the 500th power universes, and is there "room" for more? It's so interesting to me, but I've never actively pursued my scientific interests to be able to understand it on my own. The article I read about this was like 5 pages, and it took me almost 45 minutes to read it and understand it (for anyone vaguely interested, it was "Out There" from an old issue of the New York Times Magazine). I'm always trying to find well-written, accessible material on these subjects, but they are hard to come by.

The mind is a tricky bitch. I remember reading once that there are areas of the brain that light up when we are angry, or are concentrating on a math problem, or what have you, but that when people are asked to think about their consciousness, there is no one area that lights up, i.e. no one area in the brain where our consciousness resides. This same article suggested that perhaps our brains had not evolved to the point where we could comprehend our own consciousness. The philosopher Miguel de Unamuno wrote in "Tragic Sense of Life" that when you "try to fill your consciousness with the representation of no-consciousness...you will see the impossibility of it. The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness. We cannot conceive of ourselves as not existing." I have experienced that mental dizziness most notably at two times in my life: when I contemplate death (to which Unamuno is referring) and when I contemplate the universe. I remember the first time I very seriously thought about death. I was in my mom's brown Ford Explorer, and I had to be about 11 or so. We were driving through FW, at the intersection of 348th and Enchanted Parkway, and I remember thinking about the idea of "forever." Brought up in the Catholic faith, I had begun to question the idea of "heaven," and I remember trying to think about what it would be like to die, but to live on in my consciousness forever. My brain literally shut down--there was an impasse which could not let me think about it, and I remember being hugely terrified at this moment. (Incidentally, and another little mental oddity, I remember this sequence in shades of blue. Many of my memories occur to me in different shades of the same color. The time period after my parents' divorce is all in shades of brown in my memory. Isn't that nuts?)

I've also been really interested in evolutionary psychology lately, for the reason that it brings up these topics like consciousness and our beliefs about the afterlife. Apparently, there is a debate ocurring right now as to whether the human capacity for religion serves an evolutionary purpose or not. One group believes that religion aided the survival of our early ancestors; it helped them form functioning groups because religion influences individuals to make sacrifices for the group--be more selfless and less individualistic, which benefits the group at large. There is another group (whose arguments I find much more compelling) who believe that the human brain's capacity to contemplate our exisence and our willingness to insert God into such contemplation is simply a byproduct of our evolutionary mental processes. Our ability to fill in a narrative of fantasy served our ancestors well; it aided their survival to be able to imagine a bear when what was really there was a rock or imagine the intentions/thoughts of a predator. While belief in miracles, or gods, or whatever, fills no immediate role in our survival, it is a natural extension of the process of inserting narratives where none exist. We do not know what others are thinking, but we can imagine it. We do not know why we exist, but we can imagine it. The byproduct theorists call it a "spandrel," which in architecture is something that is an outcome but was not the intended purpose. For example, the space under a staircase is a spandrel; it's the byproduct of the staircase, and it doesn't matter how the space is used, but it has nothing to do with the original purpose of a staircase. Apparently, the capacity of our minds to imagine God is a spandrel of the instincts that kept us alive and out of the jaws of predators. This line of thought can also explain why most religions have several core beliefs that are universal; they are ideas that most comfortably fit within out "mental architecture." It relates to Unamuno's idea, in that it is much easier for our mental construction to imagine that we will keep on existing. The idea that really got me out of this whole article (another gem from New York Times Magazine, although I have forgotten the title or author, but I saved this quote) is that "athiests have to work hard at being athiests, to resist slipping into intrinsic habits of mind that make it easier to believe than not to believe." That could explain the reason 84-year-old life-long athiest scholar Anthony Flew back-pedaled so devastatingly on his core beliefs in his later years; a mind in decline is no longer as able to resist its instinctual deceptions.

I'm really afraid of getting old. Not necessarily because of fear of death, or the unknown, because I feel pretty certainly that there is nothing beyond what we have here on Earth, and I'm as okay with that as possible. However, I am horrifically afraid of the possibility of the decline of my mind. I think of my great-grandmother, who has very little control over her thoughts, reactions, words, and as a result, her life is slipping away before she physically passes. She cannot take care of herself, but she is still "living." How ghastly.