But first I want to thank those of you who’ve kept faith with me – and who wrote in demanding my reinstatement. It’s been a wild ride and I hope you’ve got as much out of it as I have. What follows is not for the faint-hearted – but bear with me and you may find out some stuff that makes you look at things in a whole new light. Because this piece is for anyone who’s ever asked themselves: “What am I doing here? What is my purpose in life? What are we here for?”
It all starts with a simple experiment involving light. Light is a wave – you can prove this by shining a beam of light at a card with two slots on it and seeing the pattern that emerges on a projection screen behind the card. You might expect to get just two bright stripes - but in fact what you get is several stripes. This is because when the light goes through the slots, it splits into two waves. It’s just like what happens when you create two sets of ripples on a bowl of water – where two peaks or troughs meet, you get a more pronounced ripple and where a trough and peak meet, you get an interruption in the ripple effect because they’ve cancelled one another out.
But a wave is a series of particles – so what happens if you just take a single particle of light (a photon) and fire it at the two slots? Obviously, this is so small that it can’t be seen, so instead of the screen, you put a special detector on the other side of the slots. Now this time, you would expect there to be no interference pattern because waves can only exist as a series of particles and not as a single particle. So the detector ought to be registering just one particle hitting it, having emerged from whichever of the slots it happened to pass through. But the weird thing is that you continue to get the striped pattern – which ought to be impossible, because there shouldn’t have been anything else around to interfere with the single particle and create the striped effect.
Unfortunately, it seems it isn’t possible to find out what the photon is doing in between leaving the equipment which fires it and reaching the detector. One theory is that it’s the act of seeing (or in this case, the lack of it) which produces the apparently bizarre result. It’s difficult to get your head around, but it goes something like this:
We know the photon must go through the slots because we can detect it when it comes out the other side – but we can’t reach any firm conclusions about what happens before we detect it. So the theory is that maybe, during the time that we can’t see it, the photon is actually in two different positions at the same time – it could therefore be going through both slots and interfering with itself. This ability to be in two contradictory states at the same time only seems to happen when we can’t “see” or measure what’s going on.
The logical conclusion of this is that when we can see things, they take on some form of order – so instead of being in two or more different states, they become ‘fixed’ into one state or another. This has led some theorists to speculate that maybe this is the reason why we are here – that the universe had to bring us into existence because it can only exist with the presence of intelligent observers, who are required to give it form, order and substance.
In support of this, they point to the sheer number of features of the universe which appear to be “fine tuned” to enable the existence of life – by which they mean that small deviations either way would have resulted in a universe which was incapable of producing life. I won’t bore you with all the details, but the list of features which need to be “fine tuned” in order to allow life to exist is pretty impressive. It ranges from things like the number of carbon atoms in the universe and the physics of stars right down to the conditions here on earth which make it a suitable habitat for the evolution of life. If any one of these things was even slightly different, we would not exist. You can look them up on the internet if you want to know more – just type “Strong Anthropic Theory” into any search engine.
So how do we explain all these happy coincidences? To me, it’s clear that intelligent life acts as a pattern-giving force, helping to shape the universe. The more we come to understand about it – the more we eat from the tree of knowledge – the closer the universe will be brought to a state of perfection. At present, of course, our understanding of our own world and of the universe we inhabit is limited – so the world still appears flawed.
But what if humans could use technology to evolve into some kind of super-intelligent being, like the Overmind that I’ve talked about in previous articles? Such a being would have a mental capacity that we can only dream about. It would probably be capable of perceiving and understanding everything in the entire universe – and that would be the final victory of the pattern-giving life force.
So if you’ve ever wondered why we’re here – well, there’s your answer. We are here because the universe itself needs us to be here - it needs us to bring about the Singularity.
But I want to end with a warning. There are dark forces at work which don’t want the Singularity to happen. I don’t think they’ll succeed – because eventually we’ll reach a tipping point where our momentum becomes unstoppable. But they can delay it – and that’s exactly what they’ll do if they get the chance.
Don’t let them. Keep the faith.
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