The Universal Clockwork and Patterns of Recognition

Since realizing my deterministic worldview, I have become infinitely more adept at noticing patterns. This is where these thoughts are now flowing from. What I have previously referred to as a network of legends, is this infinite series of random events governing and driving everything. A form of universal clockwork ticking away, driving everything forward with it. And once you come to this realization it becomes increasingly easier to see the aforementioned patterns. You can suddenly see parallels between animals and humans. Why? Because we are all slaves of the universe. We are all governed, ruled if you will, by the same laws of nature. Gravity, evolution, time, space, these forces affect all beings, objects and nothingness in similar fashion, connecting us all in the same gigantic framework, egging us on down the road taken. Both as individuals, as a given species, as a being, but also as part of this big machine, entity or just empty canvas, known as the universe. As with everything else it is all about scale. Once you start grasping this you can actually see everything in a clearer light. More and more I am starting to drift away from my compatibilistic determinism and maybe realizing that things aren’t really that random but rather part of this mechanical framework. Maybe free will is indeed an illusion but one that we are so immersed in that it will never feel fake even if we start to realize something is up. In this sense a compatibilistic approach might still work, at least on the conscious level, the human level. Like any philosophical discussion, the human intellect can only sniff at any kind of solution anyway. Without transcending our meat prisons, we can only guess at these things, but guessing might just be more than enough over the course of one lifetime. True transcendence would require several. (One day!) The Buddhists have got this covered through the concept of reincarnation. Only through maintaining your consciousness over the course of several lifetimes can you achieve true enlightenment. Hopefully, one day science will help us live longer or even forever with the help of cyborg bodies or cloning, then the human intellect could really go places. Right now, it can only go so far as one generation allows and is thus mired by the current level of evolution that it inhabits as I will now demonstrate.

Patterns not only exist between all living organisms in the universal clockwork but also have a way of repeating themselves across history. This may sound like a broken record; ‘history repeats itself, d’uh’, but understanding the underlying cause for why this is, is not that simple. The reason is, that humans 5000 years ago were EXACTLY the same as humans today. This may sound unlikely, but think about it. When you strip away the shifts in paradigms, religions, science, languages etc. and focus on the bare human psyche, it’s exactly the same. Thought processes and learning was the same then and now. This realization came to me in stages but I remember two specific incidents in particular. One was in my apartment in Copenhagen looking out my window at a beautiful autumn dusk sky and sniffing the cool fresh air. Suddenly, with a speed seemingly matching quantum physics, my mind transported me to the morning of the Battle of Waterloo. (I love my brain on shuffle! I mean where can’t you go? Everywhere is accessible via the mind.) Soldiers who fought in that battle took similar breaths and had similar views. They too might have appreciated the freshness of the Belgian air and beauty of a colorful sunrise and dawn sky. Perhaps to an infinitely higher degree because they knew they might never see or smell another morning again. This realization continued into an appreciation of death as experienced by dying or dead people, something for a future entry. Important for this one is that people experience the world around them similarly. What mental filter you choose to lay over and shape that experience is of course subjective (see “Just a Rock”) but the fact remains that perception has the same criteria across time periods. A sunset might have held different meanings to the ancient Egyptians being how they were sun worshippers, yet how their senses experienced it has not changed one bit. Thus one can conclude that all that’s changed since then is the paradigm in which humans exist but not the humans themselves. Staying with the ancient Egyptians leads me to the second incident towards this realization. Years later I was strolling around Kuala Lumpur at night and entered a new and contemporary looking shopping mall and walking through the doors for an instant blew my mind. I was completely unprepared for the sheer scope of this particular mall, it was huge! The foyer was designed in such a clever way that all the levels and inside mechanics of glass elevators and escalators was revealed in one awe inspiring moment upon entering. The awe I experienced then instantly transported me back to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Here I remembered taking a knee in front of a massive statue of an ancient pharaoh simply because the sheer scope of the statue seemed to dictate it. Coming from a tiny country I have a natural affinity for large things, be it buildings, statues or natural wonders. Although this might make me easy to impress, I also knew the people who designed that shopping mall in Kuala Lumpur had my reaction in mind in their design. Similarly, the Egyptian pharaohs intended their subjects to feel inclined to subject themselves to the blunt magnificence of their statues and monuments and this is where the realization from looking out my window in my apartment took final shape. Not only do people sense and perceive things equally across time, they also act accordingly. What made sense to ancient sun worshippers, still makes sense to contemporary architects. Seeing the pattern? The humans behind these projects are essentially the same, just inserted in different time periods, paradigms and languages. The intention is the same but no longer aimed at mausoleums honoring ancestors as gods but rather as a tribute to consumerism, a monument to the prevailing current leading civilization’s trademark feature. Shopping malls in many ways are monuments to consumerism and might in a distant future be photographed by evolved humans the same way we take pictures of the Pyramids. The pointe should stand clear now, times change, humans don’t. What humans can then achieve is highly dependent on the time period which they inhabit. In that sense our generation is at the peak of evolution with technology and knowledge available to us that the ancient Egyptians could never have thought of, let alone dreamed of. The idea is that each generation further builds and enhances these criteria so that the next generation can take our species even further. In many ways I believe this should really be the goal of a human lifetime. It has certainly become mine, as I will describe in the following post.