I have a collection of short, disconnected thoughts that I wanted to post as a meditative potpourri.

1. Health Update: My latest cancer labs were back today and show that I’m still in remission from Multiple Myeloma, however one cancer marker (M-spike) has returned. That marker is hopefully a fluke. This was also my doctor’s last day at Island Hospital so I will be moving my care off-island this month as my specific chemo is no longer offered here.

• The Grand Enigma: I am still planning on doing a podcast series labeled, The Grand Enigma. If I ever wrote a non-fiction book again, and I won’t, The Grand Enigma would have been the title. But that book would require the research and intellectual fortitude of Yuval Noah Harari (the author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind). While I could match his research effort in time, I could never master his level of intelligence; he is clearly out of my league.

The Grand Enigma is the fact that we exist. This raises complex questions, for which ALL answers end up being implausible at some point. But I want to look at the first-tier philosophical questions and possible answers. These first or highest tier questions are of origin and meaning. Some people in philosophy would say that there is only one higher tier question and that is of origins, whose answers also address, by default, the meaning answers. I want to approach this important issue from a brutally honest perspective. If these lofty questions seem superfluous to everyday life, they are not. I assert they are key. Ethics and metaphysics (in this case the nature of reality) are intimately tied to those first-tier questions.

The reason we have depression, suicide, mass shootings, substance abuse, and other issues is complicated and multifactorial. For example, genetics can play a major role in depression along with life experiences. One of these many factors is the notion of meaning. I’ve heard that more than one mass shooter said that he did it to “make a name for himself.” Otherwise, give himself meaning. It appears to me that that in this late-post-modern age, there is a pandemic in the loss of meaning. What meaning is found (work, hobbies, sports, religion, family) is transient and impotent as compared to the possible enduring answers found within origins and meaning.

• An Excellent Science Lecture: Someone said they were surprised that I don’t listen to podcasts since I try to do them. But after the conversation, it dawned on me that was probably an issue of semantics. I listen/watch a ton of video lectures, probably 8 hours’ worth per week. Sometimes more. In general, the topic that I’m so enthralled with is science. I can’t stand listening to religious or even philosophical lectures anymore (although I’ve tried for sixty years) because they all seem like lovely–but meaningless–words tossed in a blender). I’ve always been a lover of science, but that love has been suppressed for years, mostly due to the subsistence requirement of studying medicine, to keep my clinical skills at their best (of course medicine is a page of science).

Without saying too much on this written form, I believe, one tenet the American Christian culture, and other religious systems, is the belief that you only find and relate to God via religious mysticism. However, my relationship with God is at its finest hour right now, having discovered him through the cosmos that he has made. Every day I feel (emotionally feel) that I’m sitting outside at a table with God, drinking coffee, and he is introducing me to the glorious Universe he has designed. This has nothing to do with having cancer, except being bolder sharing my thoughts as I see the horizen of my life. But religious people are often trying to tell me that I’m not a good person, or not a spiritual person, or don’t really know God. They want to convert me back to the religious approach to God, a wilderness in which I wasted a big part of my life. It is not my goal to convert anyone to my point of view, not the atheists, not the religious, but to offer some sense to those for whom everything, including relgion seems a farce.

My curiosity untethered since retirement, I spent a year studying archeology (my father was an archeologist), then astrophysicist, then anthropology for a year, then geology, astrophysics, and now physics.

While I studied a lot of physics in high school (took first place in physics at the East Tennessee Regional Science Fair) and more than my fair share in college, many of the concepts of quantum mechanics and the search for the unifying theory of physics, I never fully grasped. During a seven-hour chemo session in the hospital today, I discovered an incredible lecture that explains these concepts of phsicis better than the previous dozen or so. You can find that lecture here. But now I’m gaining on that goal of understanding it. I still say the native language of God is math. Math gives birth to music, music to art. It was those three, which gave me the confidence again, in the 1990’s, that there probably was a God.

• Quantum Physics and Mysticism: We are, once again, living in an irrational age. I blame late post-modernism for this as well as the loss of truth. For the Christian I ask again, who invented reason? The devil? Hmm, I think it would be God. However, this post-modern phase is not nearly as intense as the Dark Ages when the philosophical fad belief was a Christianized Platonic Dualism, where earthy reason was not of God, mystical spiritualism was. But in both periods, irrationalism and mysticism became the latest God-seeking fad. I’ve even met atheists who have found meaning in irrational mysticism. The term “spiritual” is now vogue within all groups.

As post-modernism was first taking root in America and was bringing many healthy things to society (1960s and 70s) there was a movement by some to try and claim that the “new physics,” namely realativity and quantum mechanics, was proof that we live in an irrational and mystical universe (see quantum mysticism here ). I propose that they were even more ignorant than I was about quantum mechanics.

Quantum mechanics and the life in the sub-atomic world is not mystical, in my opinion, but a mystery. There is a huge difference between the two. Many people say they find meaning in the irrational, the mystic. I say, “Good for them!” The cosmos is full of glorious mystery, but I am not a mystic nor do I have an aspiration to be one . . . ever. Spock is more of a hero to me than Yoda.

In quantum mechanics you may not know the location or behavior of a single particle at any given moment with certainty, you can know it with a probability that is at 12 decimal paces. These quantum movements are strange and not completey understood by our finite brains (at this juncture) but they are understandable, and predictable enough that the next great computers will use their characteristics to create comptuers of even much smaller size but greater reliablity. If the quantum world was of total choas and totally irrational, and mystic, such computers would make no sense.

I have said too much, written quickly and without proofing, and I need to sleep after a long, hard day.

As always, Peace.

Mike