My new book is progressing, and has come to its present point (much like universal events). It recounts the amazing string of happenstances which led to your living right now, including (Chapter 1) how events of the Big Bang and exploding stars gave rise to the blood flowing through you this moment, (Chapter 2) the basic structure of matter and the fundamental forces, and their parts in formation of the early universe, absent which there would be not much of anything, (Chapter 3) the stars and the formation of elements there, which elements you are now, (Chapter 4) the existence of good chemistry, carbon, water, etc., (Chapter 5) the Galactic Habitable Zone, (Chapter 6) the structure of our sun and solar system, and the seemingly chance events involved in their mutual characteristics,(Chapter 7) the start of the Earth and its Moon, and seemingly happenstance happenings involved in that, (Chapter 8) the fine elements present on Earth, photosynthesis and its dance with the Sun, (Chapter 9) our dependence on water and the water cycle, and (Chapter 10) what happened on Earth compared to Mars and Venus.
I am now up to Chapter 11, bound to be one of the more controversial, because it seeks to recount how every twist and turn of natural selection and evolution happened to wind around just so, just right, to allow you to be you right now (as witnessed by your looking in the mirror right now to observe, with your sentient brain, all that nature left you with.)
This is where I can use your help.
Below are two descriptive sections, including analogies, which argue what I am trying to argue. I would like folks to shoot down my arguments or tell me what is wrong with the analogies. It would be a very big help if people poke holes in my reasoning. Thank you.
Before we get to the descriptions and analogies, I need to put my usual disclaimer:
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ARGUMENTS FOR CHALLENGE 1 - Intro to the Chapter "You-volution"
This is life’s saga, told from the most personal of perspectives -
It chronicles the fine biological steps, the most precise twists and turns of evolution, that had to step and turn if you were to be you.
Since you are you (as I assume you agree) we are justified in concluding that each of those steps and turns were stepped and turned, all precisely and in a proper sequence, not one amiss - for otherwise we’d now be missing you.
Are we missing something if we overlook the supreme unlikelihood of the result, an outcome which you can confirm this moment, firsthand, just by breathing?
Seemingly, it need not have been so: Events could have turned a slight other way at any point, and the world would have moved on without you. Nonetheless, events never did.
In this chapter, I will recount but a tiny fraction of what had to happen along the tangled trail from earth life’s first conception, to your conception in your mother’s womb.
In doing so, I do not mean to challenge the fact of evolution, but I question whether its grand vista has been fully grasped. I simply wonder at all that needed to be in becoming what you came to be.
Is there something more to the rowdy game?
Obviously, the human species had potential to evolve since – we humans can verify – we did just that, the result of eons of nature’s experiments. Darwin surely had it right.
But did Darwin have it complete?
Does his theory need to evolve itself, into a wider explanation of how things worked out so well … at least from our perspective (yours and mine too)?
There is a missing link in natural selection: What is missing is clarification of how a random, violent and wild sequence ran along randomly, wildly, right to where you need it for you to be you. How did a meandering march set your own heart a’beating - not missing a beat along its way? What were the odds that every left and right turn and jump, bump and battle of life’s advance, without exception, would twist-turn-jump-and-bump just when and how all would need do to arrive at you (me too)?
No, my purpose is not to deny evolution. In fact, I celebrate it.
But let’s play a little game, just for fun:
All we will do in the game, in the coming pages, is pull out pieces, one by one. We shall ask just what bodily parts and abilities needed to evolve so precisely, what could not have been done without, in order to have the current result: your being alive and conscious of being “you.” We will ask whether even small alterations in evolution’s course would have prevented the present result of you.
I apologize for the game being, unavoidably, a little gruesome: However, we will cut away bits of you, remove internal organs, extract eyes and ears, dispose of limbs, shave away the lobes and hemispheres of your brain, drain blood, peel flesh and extract cells one by one until the possibility of human life will have vanished (that will happen quite quickly), until consciousness of being “you” could not be. Then, witnessing the fact of the evolution of each cell and whole organ, ounce of blood and inch of flesh, we will look at how lucky you were that it all went right, and evolved to fit together right for you.
The story will highlight both that (1) all aspects of the human body which needed to evolve, and to be passed on, in order to enable your life now did just that over time, and (2) the precise chain of your specific personal ancestors, their genetic mutations and subsequent divisions or matings to pass on those mutations, must have occurred in a very specific sequence with extremely precise timing to enable your conception and birth, all as proven by your life right now.
In other words, according to our present ways of understanding life reproduction, if a single ancestor or pair of ancestors in your familial line of heritage had failed to themselves be born, to mature, to carry a certain genetic coding, and to mate with highly specific timing so as to permit highly specific gametes to unite, even if in only a single generation contained within your personal ancestral lineage through hundreds of millions of generations across billions of years, then you would not be alive now to consider your lineage. Given our present conception of evolution and genetic heritage, if any one grandma and grandpa, from the earliest cellular organism, or in any generation of ocean life and land life, including mammalian life and all human generations, had failed to divide (for cells) or meet and mate in a most specific way, then you would not exist right now. Some other baby or other creatures might have been born instead, but seemingly not you. The fact that you do exist, however, thus implies either incredibly good evolutionary fortune or some aspect to the process which shortens the odds in a way not yet fully understood.
And that is the whole game.
Yes, it might just have happened to happen that way.
Yes, if some creature had to evolve, it might be you as much as another.
Yes, if nature had to come up with something, that something might as well have been vous et moi.
However, our lives are built upon a biological house of cards. Our place, perched upon the elaborate, layered stack, seems most fragile. Looking at the grand diversity that nature has brought forth on our planet (putting aside the good fortune that Earth hosts life and evolution at all), we see the innumerable directions that evolution can go: from single-cell life to worms and ants, to whales, plants and trees or bees. Species come and go, appearing, thriving for a bit, then extinct and gone. As we presently conceive of the system, there seems no particular reason that intelligent life had to manifest at all (the planet seemingly did fine without it for billions of years), no inevitability that homo sapiens had to be the intelligent species, that homo sapiens had to have all the bodily and mental forms and abilities that go into being homo sapiens (rather than homo neanderthalensis, homo erectus, or something more resembling the hippopotamus amphibius, a flying serinus canaria, crawling blattella germanica or sprouting and flowering aloe vera. One would think that the Earth could have gone with those species, or some others, or no others, without bothering with homo us!)
But it is good for homo you that homo sapiens did evolve this body and brain, for it is simply inconceivable that you could be you under much any other circumstances, even if a better swimmer or flyer, more fragrant or more lovely.
In the coming pages, let’s pull out cards, one-by-one, and watch the tower fall. We will think of the myriad steps … any single step … in the course of human evolution that could have prevented your being & thinking about this history …
… thinking of all that drifted your way since a first ancestor drifted in the bog.
OOZE
Somehow, stuff born of the Big Bang, shaped and reshaped in the interiors of countless stars, collected in prehistoric tidepools on our world – goop and ooze.
But not just any goop and ooze, mind you … and not just any tidepool. Somehow, there fell to earth and gathered the specific mix of substances that, with a little zap and a bit of a shake, bore the spark of life. .... [CONTINUED FROM HERE]
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ARGUMENTS FOR CHALLENGE 2 - Analogy of the King's Bed
Even so, you may feel unmoved by the unlikeness of your birth. After all, unlikely things happen all the time. Your life is just one more unlikely thing.
If we think about it, everything that happens in the world was once most unlikely. To realize so, one simply needs to imagine all that led from the beginning of time to anything at present, envisioning each and all of the a priori happenings required for its happening. All things were once incredible long shots.
Any life was improbable by such logic, all living outcomes were somehow implausible, and every human being’s being must have beaten incredible odds. We can project back in our minds, picturing any single moment over billions of years wherein events faced a cross-roads, leading toward you or away. (At any one point, mathematically, multitudes more courses pointed away for any one pointing toward.) Obviously, as you are here, events always headed your way even so, never once missing a twisty turn that would seal your doom. Nevertheless, the same might be said for every ant or anteater, star and starfish, pot hole or black hole .
Thus, the skeptic in you may shrug it off, feeling that, were you not alive right now to shrug, somebody else would be shrugging instead. Or nobody would be here to shrug, which is fine too. You may feel that either case would be about the same as your being here now, self-aware, that there is nothing special about you being you, for it might as well not have been.
Perhaps you are correct.
But if you feel so, please consider how you’d feel in this case:
Suppose that you wake up in bed one morning, in Buckingham Palace, next to the current monarch.[1] (For purposes of this thought experiment, we will assume that you are not actually connected to the British royals.) You have no memory of how you got there or what came before. All you remember is heading to bed some prior evening, in your own home in a country far on the other side of the world, not a thought in your mind of the king and his ‘king size’ bed. You have no recollection of events in between. Nonetheless, here you are suddenly, continents and oceans away, in London next to the king.
Many of us would feel surprise and demand explanation. However, despite the mystery of how you came to be with His Majesty, you feel no surprise. On reflection you conclude that, if you were not in the crowned bed, somebody else would be. Or nobody. As well, you reckon, everybody must be someplace, and all events are unlikely somehow. Thus, any other situation would be just the same as the current one. Anything that is possible might happen, even if implausible, and all things that do happen were once implausible. Thus, it is no surprise that, heading to bed in one country, you somehow find yourself across the planet, cuddling with the king. Obviously, because it happened, it was possible. No special explanation is required. (If you have not guessed by now, the analogy to waking in the king’s bed is meant to represent awakening as a self-aware being, mysteriously alive and aware in the middle of time and space. Your home across the world is the beginning of time, the mysterious gap holds events in between.)
In fact, you would be quite correct:
If events had been different, someone else might be wrapped in the regal embrace, or nobody at all. But you are you (as you seem to be), and because of that fact, you have to be somewhere. Were you not here with His Liege, you’d just be another place. And were there no you, then you’d be no place. The palace and your house across the world, and each other place, are all somewhere, so you might as well be spooning sovereigns here.
At this point in the analogy, let me add to the story:
You did not simply head to bed in your home, many nights before. Rather, you headed to bed in your own home, many nights before, wearing night shades and sturdy ear plugs (noisy neighbors). Then, for reasons yet undetermined (just as the cause of this universe is as yet undetermined), you suddenly began sleep walking, heading out your door in a dreamlike state, still blind as a brick and deaf as a post. You had no particular destination in mind, certainly not the king’s bed. However, one foot in front of the other, you kept going. (As you might guess, such scenario represents the setting off of events at the Big Bang that led to where you find yourself today. Let’s further assume that, unless you somehow had arrived at the king’s bed, at a most specific period of time, you would be dead. Either bed, time right on the head, or dead. Likewise, had universal events wandered off elsewhere, too early or late, you would not be you. As we now consider life, your life depends on your having arrived in a certain mother’s womb, at a certain moment, and no other mother or moment. That specific conception was more vital to you than any coronation throne.)
Because you were blindfolded, with plugged ears too and no conscious destination in mind, you wandered about here and there, stepping ahead, never really pausing, walking where the wind and whims blew you, sometimes forward or back, and sometimes turning. Of course, the world is a dangerous place! As you are walking and turning this way and that, you must pass through a maze of deadly obstacles. These included, to list but a few, busy streets and highways to cross (without looking or hearing), great rivers and other waterways to ford, electric fences and booby-trapped gates to slip through, dark jungles, mountain passes with perilous drops, dry deserts, nests of vipers, bands of bandits, and all the other perils that this planet can toss up. It is thus a trial of survival, and on your first serious encounter with a speeding truck, hungry tiger, poisonous viper or fall from a cliff, you would be dead in your tracks, quite literally.
End of the trail.
(This part of the analogy represents the process of “survival of the fittest,” and the amazing obstacle course of natural events and perils which your genetic ancestors needed to pass through unscathed for your existence today. In the analogy, the walk may have gone on for days or months while, in the case of your ancestors, it continued for billions of years.)
Of course, the fact that you now find yourself in the sovereign’s silk sheets indicates that you somehow made it.
Oh, you did get better at walking with time and experience, although still basically blind. Perhaps you learned to feel ahead with your toes and a stick, to sniff and sense danger with greater acuity. Perhaps your nose was drawn in certain directions by the scents of food or sex. Nonetheless, it still remained a wild walk, unpredictable, with dangers leaping out unseen, traps right and left. One could never know if doom awaits in the very next step. (This represents how we did evolve mechanisms to further our survival, but the world still remained a perilous and violent place, with life a role of the dice day after day, moment by moment.)
On and on you went, step by step. Now you find yourself warm and cozy in noble blankets.
At this point, trying to discount and shrug off the odds of your odd survival, you could point to a “selection effect,” the survivor’s illusion: One can only experience their head on an imperial pillow because their head is on an imperial pillow. If your head were not on the pillow, or were it somebody else’s head (or no head, or no pillow), you would not be experiencing its being so, and so without cause to ask questions about it. Had you fallen in a river, off a cliff or into the jaws of an angry bear, you would not be asking the question. You could not wonder about being there because there would be no “being there” to wonder about, and you can only wonder about it because you are there. Thus, it is no wonder at all. (Likewise, were you not currently alive in a universe and on a planet so suited to your life conditions, or had your ancestors not survived and mated as they did, or had everything else happened or not happened, you could not and, thus, would not wonder. You would just be incapable of any wonder, and anything at all, because no you at all.)
Let’s add other sleep walkers to the tale: Perhaps trillions upon trillions set out on similar courses in some zombie-like state. (These would represent all the actual and potential life forms along natural selection’s myriad trails of persist or perish.) Most would not make it, almost all a dead end, but certainly some would endure just by chance. At least one of those might end up in the king’s bed. So, it might as well be you by chance, no need for further inquiry.
Again, such assertions are correct.
Nonetheless, I believe that you should properly feel strange and doubtful about awakening amid such unusual conditions. Why?
Because it is not just anyone in this grand bed of your life. It is you. And for purposes of our game, that is where you had to be to be you. It is not some other survivor somewhere else, nor somebody else here, let alone the countless hoards who never made it. In our game, it could not be you somewhere else, for that would not be you if some other bed, womb, planet or time. It is you who finds themself in the ridiculously improbable situation.
Having so awoken, it would be naïve not to inquire about a possible back story, an explanation, a process having happened which explains your being so despite the seeming odds against it, even if you are not now sure what that might be. (Your having woken up as you this morning, even just in your own warm bed, a product of billions of years of obstacles, is so much stranger and more ridiculous than waking up instead with some King George after just a few weeks’ trek. Might there be grounds for special explanation? Some unseen help, stunt, necessity or kidnap of the blind man? Might there be an unknown phenomenon which shortened the odd odds?)
Next, we will explore some possible mechanisms that scientists, theologians, Zen masters and philosophers have proposed.
++++++++
I am now up to Chapter 11, bound to be one of the more controversial, because it seeks to recount how every twist and turn of natural selection and evolution happened to wind around just so, just right, to allow you to be you right now (as witnessed by your looking in the mirror right now to observe, with your sentient brain, all that nature left you with.)
This is where I can use your help.
Below are two descriptive sections, including analogies, which argue what I am trying to argue. I would like folks to shoot down my arguments or tell me what is wrong with the analogies. It would be a very big help if people poke holes in my reasoning. Thank you.
Before we get to the descriptions and analogies, I need to put my usual disclaimer:
Today’s ' Analogies to Shoot Down' post builds on my previous essays, entitled "Further Hunches" (LINK) and "Even Further Hunches" (LINK) and "Yet Even Further Hunches" (LINK), "Still Yet Even Further Hunches" (LINK), "Still Yet Even MORE Further Hunches" (LINK), "10 Amazing Lucky Breaks Leading to You" (LINK), "10 Hunches about Hunches" (LINK), "Hunches about Causes" (LINK) and "A New Notion of Karma & Rebirth'" (LINK). They follow on my original scribblings, entitled just "Hunches" (LINK). If you don't buy the wild notions I toss out there, you surely won't catch what I'm pitching today. The premises of those essays can be summarized as follows (you can read the rest at the foregoing links):
- There is something special, deserving special explanation, about the fact that, in a seemingly wild and largely random universe, you find yourself to be a self-aware being able now to imagine and contemplate any point in time in the history of this universe, beginning from a moment after the Big Bang, continuing on through 13.7 billion years to the moment of your conception when, according to our currently accepted notions of physics, chemistry, stellar and planetary development, biology and evolution, the intricate sequence of events headed in precisely a direction necessary for your eventual existence despite the seemingly far greater likelihood time-and-time again that any single event amid the ages-long unbroken chain could, it would be thought, have turned in another direction among the vast set of directions which would have foreclosed your eventual existence, all as proven by the simple fact that here you are, alive and pondering your existence and all it required.
- Although the same unlikelihood could be claimed for any sentient being, creature or thing that has come into existence at this now current moment of universal history, the fact that the contemplator is not just someone or some creature or something, but rather, you yourself now subjectively contemplating your own personal fortune is a special phenomenon deserving special explanation.
- You are not the winner of a single lottery (something not particularly amazing), but the always and each-and-every time winner after winner of a string of constant lotteries within lotteries, one after the other in sequence and often entwined in complex parallel, stretching through all time from cosmic expansion to sperm meets egg, which unbroken chain of a googol of wins resulted in you, no step skipped or tripped over, bar none, not a single miss as proven conclusively just by your present contemplation of the most personal outcome.
- This outcome, if more than brute fact, may point to a mechanism, as yet unknown but open to conjecture, which has served to weight nature’s dice, tilt the roulette wheel, limit the possible results, fix the game. If such a mechanism exists, it need not always remain unknown, its nature can be the subject of theory and, hopefully, testing and demonstration.
- Though beings identical to you, or extremely close, may have appeared time and again in an infinite universe or ensemble of universes where like circumstances endlessly happen, their existence would not explain your existence, here and now, in this place and timeline where you apparently need to find yourself to be this you right here and now. The others might be doppelgängers or twins, but that would be different from this very you which you need right now in order to be experiencing you.
- While Buddhism is generally not concerned with "where we all came from," being content in guiding us to Liberation here and now however we got here, Buddhism also does not forbid our investigating such matters. In fact, Buddhism is based on certain suppositions about reality, our deep connection and inter-identity with the universe, and even a "built in" system of ethics/Karma, which overlaps with many of my speculations
~ ~ ~
ARGUMENTS FOR CHALLENGE 1 - Intro to the Chapter "You-volution"
This is life’s saga, told from the most personal of perspectives -
It chronicles the fine biological steps, the most precise twists and turns of evolution, that had to step and turn if you were to be you.
Since you are you (as I assume you agree) we are justified in concluding that each of those steps and turns were stepped and turned, all precisely and in a proper sequence, not one amiss - for otherwise we’d now be missing you.
Are we missing something if we overlook the supreme unlikelihood of the result, an outcome which you can confirm this moment, firsthand, just by breathing?
Seemingly, it need not have been so: Events could have turned a slight other way at any point, and the world would have moved on without you. Nonetheless, events never did.
In this chapter, I will recount but a tiny fraction of what had to happen along the tangled trail from earth life’s first conception, to your conception in your mother’s womb.
In doing so, I do not mean to challenge the fact of evolution, but I question whether its grand vista has been fully grasped. I simply wonder at all that needed to be in becoming what you came to be.
Is there something more to the rowdy game?
Obviously, the human species had potential to evolve since – we humans can verify – we did just that, the result of eons of nature’s experiments. Darwin surely had it right.
But did Darwin have it complete?
Does his theory need to evolve itself, into a wider explanation of how things worked out so well … at least from our perspective (yours and mine too)?
There is a missing link in natural selection: What is missing is clarification of how a random, violent and wild sequence ran along randomly, wildly, right to where you need it for you to be you. How did a meandering march set your own heart a’beating - not missing a beat along its way? What were the odds that every left and right turn and jump, bump and battle of life’s advance, without exception, would twist-turn-jump-and-bump just when and how all would need do to arrive at you (me too)?
No, my purpose is not to deny evolution. In fact, I celebrate it.
But let’s play a little game, just for fun:
All we will do in the game, in the coming pages, is pull out pieces, one by one. We shall ask just what bodily parts and abilities needed to evolve so precisely, what could not have been done without, in order to have the current result: your being alive and conscious of being “you.” We will ask whether even small alterations in evolution’s course would have prevented the present result of you.
I apologize for the game being, unavoidably, a little gruesome: However, we will cut away bits of you, remove internal organs, extract eyes and ears, dispose of limbs, shave away the lobes and hemispheres of your brain, drain blood, peel flesh and extract cells one by one until the possibility of human life will have vanished (that will happen quite quickly), until consciousness of being “you” could not be. Then, witnessing the fact of the evolution of each cell and whole organ, ounce of blood and inch of flesh, we will look at how lucky you were that it all went right, and evolved to fit together right for you.
The story will highlight both that (1) all aspects of the human body which needed to evolve, and to be passed on, in order to enable your life now did just that over time, and (2) the precise chain of your specific personal ancestors, their genetic mutations and subsequent divisions or matings to pass on those mutations, must have occurred in a very specific sequence with extremely precise timing to enable your conception and birth, all as proven by your life right now.
In other words, according to our present ways of understanding life reproduction, if a single ancestor or pair of ancestors in your familial line of heritage had failed to themselves be born, to mature, to carry a certain genetic coding, and to mate with highly specific timing so as to permit highly specific gametes to unite, even if in only a single generation contained within your personal ancestral lineage through hundreds of millions of generations across billions of years, then you would not be alive now to consider your lineage. Given our present conception of evolution and genetic heritage, if any one grandma and grandpa, from the earliest cellular organism, or in any generation of ocean life and land life, including mammalian life and all human generations, had failed to divide (for cells) or meet and mate in a most specific way, then you would not exist right now. Some other baby or other creatures might have been born instead, but seemingly not you. The fact that you do exist, however, thus implies either incredibly good evolutionary fortune or some aspect to the process which shortens the odds in a way not yet fully understood.
And that is the whole game.
Yes, it might just have happened to happen that way.
Yes, if some creature had to evolve, it might be you as much as another.
Yes, if nature had to come up with something, that something might as well have been vous et moi.
However, our lives are built upon a biological house of cards. Our place, perched upon the elaborate, layered stack, seems most fragile. Looking at the grand diversity that nature has brought forth on our planet (putting aside the good fortune that Earth hosts life and evolution at all), we see the innumerable directions that evolution can go: from single-cell life to worms and ants, to whales, plants and trees or bees. Species come and go, appearing, thriving for a bit, then extinct and gone. As we presently conceive of the system, there seems no particular reason that intelligent life had to manifest at all (the planet seemingly did fine without it for billions of years), no inevitability that homo sapiens had to be the intelligent species, that homo sapiens had to have all the bodily and mental forms and abilities that go into being homo sapiens (rather than homo neanderthalensis, homo erectus, or something more resembling the hippopotamus amphibius, a flying serinus canaria, crawling blattella germanica or sprouting and flowering aloe vera. One would think that the Earth could have gone with those species, or some others, or no others, without bothering with homo us!)
But it is good for homo you that homo sapiens did evolve this body and brain, for it is simply inconceivable that you could be you under much any other circumstances, even if a better swimmer or flyer, more fragrant or more lovely.
In the coming pages, let’s pull out cards, one-by-one, and watch the tower fall. We will think of the myriad steps … any single step … in the course of human evolution that could have prevented your being & thinking about this history …
… thinking of all that drifted your way since a first ancestor drifted in the bog.
OOZE
Somehow, stuff born of the Big Bang, shaped and reshaped in the interiors of countless stars, collected in prehistoric tidepools on our world – goop and ooze.
But not just any goop and ooze, mind you … and not just any tidepool. Somehow, there fell to earth and gathered the specific mix of substances that, with a little zap and a bit of a shake, bore the spark of life. .... [CONTINUED FROM HERE]
.
~ ~ ~
ARGUMENTS FOR CHALLENGE 2 - Analogy of the King's Bed
Even so, you may feel unmoved by the unlikeness of your birth. After all, unlikely things happen all the time. Your life is just one more unlikely thing.
If we think about it, everything that happens in the world was once most unlikely. To realize so, one simply needs to imagine all that led from the beginning of time to anything at present, envisioning each and all of the a priori happenings required for its happening. All things were once incredible long shots.
Any life was improbable by such logic, all living outcomes were somehow implausible, and every human being’s being must have beaten incredible odds. We can project back in our minds, picturing any single moment over billions of years wherein events faced a cross-roads, leading toward you or away. (At any one point, mathematically, multitudes more courses pointed away for any one pointing toward.) Obviously, as you are here, events always headed your way even so, never once missing a twisty turn that would seal your doom. Nevertheless, the same might be said for every ant or anteater, star and starfish, pot hole or black hole .
Thus, the skeptic in you may shrug it off, feeling that, were you not alive right now to shrug, somebody else would be shrugging instead. Or nobody would be here to shrug, which is fine too. You may feel that either case would be about the same as your being here now, self-aware, that there is nothing special about you being you, for it might as well not have been.
Perhaps you are correct.
But if you feel so, please consider how you’d feel in this case:
Suppose that you wake up in bed one morning, in Buckingham Palace, next to the current monarch.[1] (For purposes of this thought experiment, we will assume that you are not actually connected to the British royals.) You have no memory of how you got there or what came before. All you remember is heading to bed some prior evening, in your own home in a country far on the other side of the world, not a thought in your mind of the king and his ‘king size’ bed. You have no recollection of events in between. Nonetheless, here you are suddenly, continents and oceans away, in London next to the king.
Many of us would feel surprise and demand explanation. However, despite the mystery of how you came to be with His Majesty, you feel no surprise. On reflection you conclude that, if you were not in the crowned bed, somebody else would be. Or nobody. As well, you reckon, everybody must be someplace, and all events are unlikely somehow. Thus, any other situation would be just the same as the current one. Anything that is possible might happen, even if implausible, and all things that do happen were once implausible. Thus, it is no surprise that, heading to bed in one country, you somehow find yourself across the planet, cuddling with the king. Obviously, because it happened, it was possible. No special explanation is required. (If you have not guessed by now, the analogy to waking in the king’s bed is meant to represent awakening as a self-aware being, mysteriously alive and aware in the middle of time and space. Your home across the world is the beginning of time, the mysterious gap holds events in between.)
In fact, you would be quite correct:
If events had been different, someone else might be wrapped in the regal embrace, or nobody at all. But you are you (as you seem to be), and because of that fact, you have to be somewhere. Were you not here with His Liege, you’d just be another place. And were there no you, then you’d be no place. The palace and your house across the world, and each other place, are all somewhere, so you might as well be spooning sovereigns here.
At this point in the analogy, let me add to the story:
You did not simply head to bed in your home, many nights before. Rather, you headed to bed in your own home, many nights before, wearing night shades and sturdy ear plugs (noisy neighbors). Then, for reasons yet undetermined (just as the cause of this universe is as yet undetermined), you suddenly began sleep walking, heading out your door in a dreamlike state, still blind as a brick and deaf as a post. You had no particular destination in mind, certainly not the king’s bed. However, one foot in front of the other, you kept going. (As you might guess, such scenario represents the setting off of events at the Big Bang that led to where you find yourself today. Let’s further assume that, unless you somehow had arrived at the king’s bed, at a most specific period of time, you would be dead. Either bed, time right on the head, or dead. Likewise, had universal events wandered off elsewhere, too early or late, you would not be you. As we now consider life, your life depends on your having arrived in a certain mother’s womb, at a certain moment, and no other mother or moment. That specific conception was more vital to you than any coronation throne.)
Because you were blindfolded, with plugged ears too and no conscious destination in mind, you wandered about here and there, stepping ahead, never really pausing, walking where the wind and whims blew you, sometimes forward or back, and sometimes turning. Of course, the world is a dangerous place! As you are walking and turning this way and that, you must pass through a maze of deadly obstacles. These included, to list but a few, busy streets and highways to cross (without looking or hearing), great rivers and other waterways to ford, electric fences and booby-trapped gates to slip through, dark jungles, mountain passes with perilous drops, dry deserts, nests of vipers, bands of bandits, and all the other perils that this planet can toss up. It is thus a trial of survival, and on your first serious encounter with a speeding truck, hungry tiger, poisonous viper or fall from a cliff, you would be dead in your tracks, quite literally.
End of the trail.
(This part of the analogy represents the process of “survival of the fittest,” and the amazing obstacle course of natural events and perils which your genetic ancestors needed to pass through unscathed for your existence today. In the analogy, the walk may have gone on for days or months while, in the case of your ancestors, it continued for billions of years.)
Of course, the fact that you now find yourself in the sovereign’s silk sheets indicates that you somehow made it.
Oh, you did get better at walking with time and experience, although still basically blind. Perhaps you learned to feel ahead with your toes and a stick, to sniff and sense danger with greater acuity. Perhaps your nose was drawn in certain directions by the scents of food or sex. Nonetheless, it still remained a wild walk, unpredictable, with dangers leaping out unseen, traps right and left. One could never know if doom awaits in the very next step. (This represents how we did evolve mechanisms to further our survival, but the world still remained a perilous and violent place, with life a role of the dice day after day, moment by moment.)
On and on you went, step by step. Now you find yourself warm and cozy in noble blankets.
At this point, trying to discount and shrug off the odds of your odd survival, you could point to a “selection effect,” the survivor’s illusion: One can only experience their head on an imperial pillow because their head is on an imperial pillow. If your head were not on the pillow, or were it somebody else’s head (or no head, or no pillow), you would not be experiencing its being so, and so without cause to ask questions about it. Had you fallen in a river, off a cliff or into the jaws of an angry bear, you would not be asking the question. You could not wonder about being there because there would be no “being there” to wonder about, and you can only wonder about it because you are there. Thus, it is no wonder at all. (Likewise, were you not currently alive in a universe and on a planet so suited to your life conditions, or had your ancestors not survived and mated as they did, or had everything else happened or not happened, you could not and, thus, would not wonder. You would just be incapable of any wonder, and anything at all, because no you at all.)
Let’s add other sleep walkers to the tale: Perhaps trillions upon trillions set out on similar courses in some zombie-like state. (These would represent all the actual and potential life forms along natural selection’s myriad trails of persist or perish.) Most would not make it, almost all a dead end, but certainly some would endure just by chance. At least one of those might end up in the king’s bed. So, it might as well be you by chance, no need for further inquiry.
Again, such assertions are correct.
Nonetheless, I believe that you should properly feel strange and doubtful about awakening amid such unusual conditions. Why?
Because it is not just anyone in this grand bed of your life. It is you. And for purposes of our game, that is where you had to be to be you. It is not some other survivor somewhere else, nor somebody else here, let alone the countless hoards who never made it. In our game, it could not be you somewhere else, for that would not be you if some other bed, womb, planet or time. It is you who finds themself in the ridiculously improbable situation.
Having so awoken, it would be naïve not to inquire about a possible back story, an explanation, a process having happened which explains your being so despite the seeming odds against it, even if you are not now sure what that might be. (Your having woken up as you this morning, even just in your own warm bed, a product of billions of years of obstacles, is so much stranger and more ridiculous than waking up instead with some King George after just a few weeks’ trek. Might there be grounds for special explanation? Some unseen help, stunt, necessity or kidnap of the blind man? Might there be an unknown phenomenon which shortened the odd odds?)
Next, we will explore some possible mechanisms that scientists, theologians, Zen masters and philosophers have proposed.
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) that would still let this Matt be this Matt, but not a radical repurposing of your molecules to let "Matt" be a monkey, mouse or kitchen table, while still identifiable and subjectively aware of being you. I believe that this particular self-aware you could pretty much only be more or less just as you find yourself now.
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