I'm writing this first part after I wrote the rest. This essay turned out to be a lot more philosophical than I had originally intended. I am saying this as a courtesy, so that if you are not interested in reading one man's long-winded philosophical discourse on life, the universe and everything, you can move on to more interesting discussions. I do get to individualism and collectivism at the end though. Anyway, here goes:
So this came to me while philosophizing on a completely unrelated topic: the ultimate fate of the universe. The most common prediction is of an ever-expanding universe, which will end when all free energy is used up and all energy becomes evenly distributed throughout the universe, the state of maximum entropy in which nothing at all can happen ever again.I have a problem with this idea. From everything I've read, the science seems to indicate that this is what's going to happen. My problem with it is really an intuition, but as I hope to briefly show, not an entirely unreasonable one. My intuition tells me we will end in a Big Crunch (a reversal of the Big Bang), and a significant minority of cosmologists agree.Why do I believe in this? Because everything in the universe, from the smallest of particles to large, internally complex systems (including civilizations composed of intelligent life) behave in a cyclic, wave-like fashion. Everything is bounding back and forth. Quantum mechanics tells us this about the most minute of forces and particles, and everything in existence is built upon that foundation. Organisms grow, thrive, then wither away and die, only to have their components re-integrated into new organisms. Civilizations follow the same life cycle, achieving greatness for a few centuries at most and then succumbing to corruption and decay. Commercial companies in a free market do too, as after they've had much success they are eventually superseded by younger and more agile companies more in tune to the current needs of the market (as Mises said, "the market is no respecter of vested interests", and this is precisely why they turn to protectionism: a vain effort to gain immortality). Anything that remotely resembles life follows this same life cycle. Long before modern physicists discovered the cyclic wave nature of the most fundamental particles, ancient Chinese philosophers saw this duality in everything, creating the concepts of yin and yang.It just "feels" absurd to me that everything in the universe should operate on this principle, but the universe itself should not.How do I get over the evidence of accelerating expansion? I think it might be that the universe is still very, very, young, and so all the observations, including fundamental constants and equations, are telling us that the universe is expanding and even at an accelerating rate, simply because that is precisely what it is doing right now. In short, I'm suggesting that cosmologists are making an unfair extrapolation. After all, the curve of a sine wave has even a positive second derivative before it reaches the point where concave turns to convex.With these thoughts in mind, I couldn't help but start thinking about the hippie notion that "we all are one". Obviously, we are a part of nature, we are composed of the same fundamental elements and interactions that make up all nature. The distinctions between physics, chemistry, biology, geology, psychology, etc., are more or less arbitrary distinctions we make to allow us to study certain things we observe in more detail. But nature herself does not care about these distinctions. It's all just interaction, giving rise to all sorts of complex beauty that we then break apart and study.This would suggest that the ancient philosophers who founded Buddhism were on to something with the idea of anatta, that "self" distinctions are fundamentally deceptive. If nature is really just one big blob of interaction, "selves" are then just momentary clusters of complexity that blob up in the chaos, clusters which, as far as nature is concerned, have no identity of their own. Individualism then in a sense becomes philosophically untenable.But here's where these hippie-mystic types go astray. They often come to this conclusion, and then decide "therefore we should embrace socialism".But, in the sense of philosophical "individualism" being the apparently erroneous idea of separateness, political collectivism (socialism), paradoxically, is the ultimate individualism. It deifies one person, separates that person out of all the rest, making him the supposed caretaker of all. In doing so, it destroys the natural, organic social bonds that form in a free society, turning a graph of tightly interconnected nodes into a fragile graph in which all nodes are connected to one central supernode. Rather than being interdependent, interacting in a natural, organic manner, we become dependent on one "superman". And if the idea of the individual "man" is philosophically erroneous, then the idea of the individual "superman" must be almost infinitely more so.Political individualism is the natural order, and paradoxically the order in which the individual is most likely to be capable of discovering ways to transcend the individual consciousness and "join the universal collective" (whatever that might be). Political collectivism, by contrast, is an unnatural order that aggrandizes the individual, both the leader who is deified and the commoner who, without the horizontal personal connections of an individualistic society, ends up insanely selfish, full of envy (since equality is an impossibility), and thus hating his neighbor. Mises termed this result of socialism "social disintegration", and viewed from the standpoint of graph theory, it is probably one of the best terms he could have come up with for the concept. An individualistic society, viewed as a graph, is tightly integrated, while a collectivist one is a fragile connection to a highly questionable supernode, with no horizontal integration, thus disintegrated.
Interesting. Although when you've embraced the idea of all as nothingness, or accept it all as an illusion, it is hard to really advocate anything, individualist, or collectivist.
Some reading for you:
DMT: The Spirit Molecule by Rick Strassman - To gain perspective on how little we are completely sure of.
The Ego and It's Own by Max Stirner - To understand the futility of living for an ideal.
Dzogchen - The Tibetian Buddhist philosophy of the illusory nature of consciousness
Hindu Cosmology - The Hindu perspective on the cyclical nature of the Cosmos.
Yes state is contrary to society. The more state you have the less you have of society.
Mike:My intuition tells me we will end in a Big Crunch (a reversal of the Big Bang), and a significant minority of cosmologists agree.
There can also be a crunch without a reversal. Expand a circle around a dot on a sphere. The circle can keep expanding away from the original dot and then collapse into another dot on the opposite side of the sphere. A crunch without a reversal.
Z.
z1235: Mike:My intuition tells me we will end in a Big Crunch (a reversal of the Big Bang), and a significant minority of cosmologists agree. There can also be a crunch without a reversal. Expand a circle around a dot on a sphere. The circle can keep expanding away from the original dot and then collapse into another dot on the opposite side of the sphere. A crunch without a reversal. Z.
Interesting - that's consistent with the behavior of waves having a speed and direction as well as internal oscillations. Sort of a hyperdimensional motion.
Mike:Interesting - that's consistent with the behavior of waves having a speed and direction as well as internal oscillations. Sort of a hyperdimensional motion.
Not sure I get the wave analogy, but I don't want to derail your thread. What I meant was a simple iteration: The same way a 2D circle expands away from a dot on a 2D surface curved into a 3rd dimension (sphere), our 3D universe could be expanding away from a dot in 3D space curved into a 4th dimension. In both cases, the expansions end in crunches at "opposite" points without reversals.