Years ago, Dr. Richard Feynman was told he
couldn’t see beauty. As he explains:
Dr. Feynman goes on to explain how he sees all the beauty in the flower that anyone else does, and that on top of that, he sees inside, imagining the networks in the petal, then down to the cells themselves, and the complex dance of the many intricate molecules working together, and then, even more! Behind all of that is the deep time history, the long process of evolution which – more than 100 million years ago, drew together insects and plants in mutually beneficially teamwork. He describes how he sees all of this, each level adding to the excitement, mystery, and awe of a simple flower! He concludes:
“It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.”
I know that rush. It’s incredible. I see it unfold, level upon level, in the blink of an eye, time and again in my life, all around me. That tree, this rock, that cloud, a blue jay, this computer, and on and on! And that’s not even getting into seeing other people. I can’t imagine living without it, and for anyone who hasn’t experienced it, it’s indescribable. For someone to suggest to Dr. Feynman, that he sees less beauty in a flower, when he sees so much more, just shows that this friend doesn’t understand what knowledge can do. When I first read Feynman’s flower story, it hit me – Here was someone who sees the world as I do, and experiences that beauty of so many things as I do! Wow, it works with other people too!
I caught glimpses of it in others too. Carl Sagan comes to mind, as does this quote from Charles Sherrington, 1942:
The brain is a sparkling field of rhythmic flashing points
with trains of traveling sparks hurrying hither and thither. It is as if the
Milky Way is engaging in a cosmic dance. The cortex is an enchanted loom where
millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful
pattern though never a lasting one; with a shifting harmony of entrancing
subpatterns.
Any attempt at examples will fall far short of reality, but a few come to mind.
We just saw how someone could describe our
brain as an “Enchanted Loom”. How our brains work, on a basic level, isn’t that hard to
understand. We can start with our senses that feed into the brain.
For instance, well understood cells in our eyes convert light into electrical
pulses, sent along nerve cells to the brain. Nerve cells are also called
neurons, and each has many long, thin branches connected to other
neurons. It takes many electrical pulses from many neurons to cause
another neuron to send its electrical pulse, which may then reach many other
different neurons. A number of connected neurons make simple “logic
gates”, similar to those in computers. Many logic
gates linked together can process information like a computer does. But
how do they get connected the right way? Our genes, built by trillions of
our Ancestors over millions of years of evolution, give us the starting
structure, and our history builds the rest, ending up with trillions of
neurons, and a hundred trillion connections between them!
The incredible realization here is
that this shows how the mind works. These basic chemical reactions and
electrical pulses, all working in milliseconds, make up your every thought from
“where did I leave my keys?”, to “Yes! I’ll marry him!”.
I don’t know about you, but I find that realization to be mind blowing.
We are
our brains, without a need for the idea visiting ghosts from some imagined
supernatural realm. There are no disembodied “minds”, and so any damage
or chemical change to our brains affects (or even eliminates) our thoughts.
My thoughts seem to me to be the essence of who I am, yet, at the
simplest level, they are undeniably made up of basic chemical reactions!
And it’s not just my brain that is
this amazing, but your brain, or his brain, or her brain, too! We are
surrounded by so many of these incredible thinking chemical, biological
machines!
And what if we turn our gaze
skyward?
As
a ball of plasma a million times bigger than the entire Earth, the Sun is *not*
a ball of fire – it’s much too hot for even fire to exist! A few numbers can show us nature more
clearly, and for a person like me, practically everything about nature is
spiritual.
So
how can we conceive of the sheer awesomeness of our Sun? Size?
Oh yeah, we already did that. Ok,
how about power? The energy output of
the Sun produces over 18 million times more energy in one second what the entire worldwide nuclear arsenal! Our local star produces that flood of energy
by nuclear fusion, turning 370,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
(that’s 3.7 X 1038) hydrogen atoms into helium, which by Einstein’s
famous E=mc2 equation, directly converts 4 million metric tons of
matter into energy each second. If
every grain of sand on Earth were instead several whole planet Earths, then the
total number of grains of sand on all those millions of quadrillions of Earths
would still be less than the number of hydrogen atoms fused every second by the
Sun! And all that energy is only just barely enough to keep gravity at bay.
We
could go on all day. It’s truly mindbending. I find it even more mindbending to realize
that all this energy has caused simple molecules on Earth to organize over
millions of years to be able to build cities, sing whalesongs, understand DNA,
and even to love a new baby.
OK, that’s it for now. I can’t write anymore….. I see my fingers moving as I type…. nerve cells firing…calcium ions.... the actin
and myosin molecules converting ATP into motion….. motion causing the electron
fields of the keyboard to repel……………. the electrical…………………………………
