THE BUBBLE UNIVERSE

Does a spider exist in the same universe as a human being? In one sense, yes, we can splat them. They can scare us. So in some physical way we exist side by side in the same world, the same universe.
But does this extend to our appreciation of reality? Does a spider intuit the same universe as a human? Does it inhabit, experience and understand in the same way as us? This, we have to conclude, is doubtful.

There is an important point here.

Much of the way we see the universe is based on our knowledge of it. Indeed, reality is a compromise between how the universe thinks it ‘is’, and how we appreciate how it ‘is’.
Reality – the universe – becomes a subtle construct based upon our consensual view of it, combined with universal realities that help to fashion the consensus. When a scientist talks about ‘laws of nature’, he isn’t exactly being honest. Some can be obviously seen as such – things fall – but other ‘laws’ are based on theory, and are the laws of ‘man’.

Consensual realities are not exact.

The human race itself lives in a cauldron of conflicting consensual realities, the most obvious being the ‘scientific’ and the ‘religious’. In either case, the ‘realities’ of our knowledge confirm the paradigm.
It is almost as if reality is like a vacuum – and knowledge abhors a vacuum, if I may paraphrase a famous scientific ‘law’. ‘Reality’ is flooded with how we think it ‘is’. And the ‘observer’ becomes intrinsic to the ‘reality’ we think we experience.

Let’s go back to the spider.

We can now see that it is feasible to say it doesn’t exist in the same reality as us, and the religionist doesn’t live in the same reality as the scientist. Rather, differing realities co-exist, intermingle, but are fundamentally different.
It is almost as if there are societal ‘bubbles’ of knowledge. But we can complicate the subject even more than this. I’ve written in the past of how the ‘law of large numbers’ leads to greater order dependent on increasing numbers involved.

I’ve applied this to the universe.

In effect, the universe could be made of layered constructs, with a lifeform being less ordered than a species; a species less ordered than a planet, a planet less ordered than a solar system, etc.
This is actually understood in ecology. Existence is constructed of interlaced ecosystems, each reliant on the other, and extending from the planetary ecosystem to the fungi between your toes. And it is unlikely that it understands its existence causes the higher function of a human scratching it because it itches.
The ‘systems’ of ecosystems can, I think, be transferred to the argument I am raising here. We can exist in our own ecosystem, which we recognize both physically and intellectually, but we could also, unbeknown to us, also exist in an ever-increasing number of ecosystems both parallel to ours, and larger with higher function.
We may well appreciate some effects ‘physically’ from those higher systems – for instance, we experience wider influences such as light and gravity (whatever they are), but this does not mean that our ‘understanding’, based on our own little ‘system’ is anything like as high as the larger interlinked systems ‘appreciate’ and react to.
Rather, from differing paradigms, thru lifeforms, to the nature of the universe itself, we could be part of an interlinked web of existences, which we have barely begun to experience and conceive. Existence, good reader, could well be ‘bubbled’.

© Anthony North, December 2008