A good article with an excellent question, Jonathan, and I am happy to tell you many already ventured on this path. One person to immediately mention is Gödel because he showed us (with math) that our starting out with a certain truth we know is absolutely true does not help us capture the big picture accurately. I am talking about his Incompleteness Theorems, and they point straight at the human brain thinking certain ways, just as you are pointing at ourselves with your excellent question.
An easy example to show Gödel’s work is to start out with a male, or a group of males, discovering truths and then not fully being able to apply those truths to all human beings. The detailed truths we find cannot bring us the big picture truth by themselves; the brain has to work it.
Gödel also declared something quite important about our universe in light of matter. Matter has two contradicting behaviors that cannot both be true and yet they are.
- Convergent behavior is seen at the 'local' level of a planet, a star, but also with a solar system and a galaxy in which matter became a single mass, or multiple masses are behaving according to a collective pattern.
- Divergent behavior is seen at the levels greater than galaxies. Matter either is divergent or not-connected at all at the largest universal level.
I hope you see how this informs the Incompleteness Theorems as well. A basic truth cannot get extrapolated to become an overall truth. How matter behaves in specifics is not how matter behaves at the overall level.
A big problem with the human mind is that we have organized ourselves in one rather peculiar way and this focuses us on our direct and immediate surroundings. We love to unify, for good reasons, because we benefit from being part of a collective. We speak the same language, we use the same money, we hold the same beliefs -- all the way until the boundaries of those that do not share our language, currency and faith are found. At these spots, we like to compete, because we want one reality in top, and all other realities rejected.
That human brain is not set up to understand the big picture well. As soon as it thinks big picture, the human brain places its favorite egg on that chair, therefore preventing it from seeing the big picture immediately.
Your question is excellent, but first we have to remove the eggs we have in our minds, break them to bake the omelets we desire to eat.
The heart of your question always ends up with Rubin's Vase (seeing a Vase, or seeing Two Faces). We have two options to view that larger reality and that is easy to explain: we are not everywhere in the universe, so we automatically have a 2D perspective on everything. Make sure to break that egg that says we have 3D information, and bake this omelet. We have a specific view available to us about the largest reality we exist in.
Take, for instance, the existence of matter. We are pretty sure that matter is a result and not the original state. We then have two options immediately because this is already a 2D reality at the big-picture level.
* Is matter the result of all that existed prior? (the Vase?)
* Is matter the result of only some of what existed prior? (the Two Faces?)
Philosophically, from a structural perspective, it would make little sense to have everything that existed prior (whatever that was) to become matter. It is illogical to expect 100% of a former reality to end up in a new reality and hang out there for more than 15 minutes before returning back to its original form. Seeing the Vase in matter has some problems. Seeing the Two Faces in matter appears far more logical.
The egg was broken to bake the omelet, but the broken egg was not the whole of what existed prior.
Let me try saying this more scientifically without making it complicated.
We know that Energy does not get lost. We also know that energy exists in a closed system. It is very easy to say that the total amount of energy in the entire universe is equal to 1. I told you I wasn't going to make it too complicated.
If we indeed accept that matter is a result and not the original, then we can establish the following equation.
1 + x = 1
With these two 1s, we have the total amount of energy as it existed before and as it existed after matter came about.
The x represents the change that we know took place without it changing the total amount of energy in the universe.
The equation is easy to fill out because x is 0.
1 + 0 = 1
We will have to make that 0 important and this requires our brains to work this out. Just like having nothing in your wallet is actually important information, we need an important 0 in a larger context.
The 0 represents a fundamental separation that did originally not exist with the first 1. We have a fundamental change (the egg got broken).
We can propose that the Vase did exist with the prior state of the universe, but that after the transformation occurred we now have the Two Faces as the overall state of the universe: a fundamental separation exists now in-between all matter, and therefore also in-between all energy.
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The question we should be asking is not how did matter come about, but how did the prior state end up creating a fundamental separation among itself? To make an omelet we have to break the egg first before we can talk about how the egg contents turned into that omelet.
In the Big Bang theory, scientists do not dare go there. Even when they agree that matter is a result and that Energy does not get lost, they are too afraid to let go of the egg inside their heads. They can't break it. They desire an ultimately unified theory for everything, and they cannot place a fundamental nothing/separation between the prior state and the current state. Their brains are unwilling; they hold on to a scientific belief and they cannot get rid of it.
The Big Bang theory says nothing about an internal conflict prior to reaching the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. From that darn singularity (read: egg) all the way to the CMBR, all energy is floating from one stage to another stage until maturation is reached at the CMBR. They do have change happening, but that change happens at the same time to all. It is very linear thinking. Their egg is never broken and goes from A transforming to B to C to D.
That is very much like having a toy wound up too much so it breaks and then seeing it disintegrate in front of our eyes to dust. Meaning: it is not a truly realistic model to have the reverse occur of energy somehow integrating into matter. There is no there there in this structure. Scientists came up with a model that fits the storybooks of five-year olds. They are not breaking the egg first.
What we see instead with the toy wound up too much is that the winding mechanism broke in a specific spot (never in the center) and that the release of tension broke parts of the toy right with the destructive pathway of the release. Not the entire toy broke and if one is lucky one can still play a little with it. It just won't do its special trick anymore.
First the egg got broken and only then do we have energy that ended up becoming matter. We have two different actions, related only in that one has to occur before the other can occur.
That means that the stage before matter is mature must contain a distinctive action that is truly not like the subsequent actions.
Here is an image to gnaw on. In the Big Whisper model there is indeed a setup that establishes distinctive parts before the materialization process gets on its way. The proposed inward motion automatically leads to damage among all, while not damaging all.
I'll stop here, Jonathan, because it is a long reply already. I'll find out if you desire more. No, I am not the first to have figured this out, and I am even claiming that those that built the pyramids (in Egypt, Nigeria, China, Meso-America) already had a good grip on the big picture. They all seem to work with an action in the prior state first and only then works with the consequences. They had of course less information than we have, but they figured out that egg inside their brains better than people today.
The Norse gods are but one example in which Odin is the All-Father who existed before any other god existed. This Odin wanted to understand it all and one of the ways he tried figuring it out involved hanging himself on the Tree of Life. Long story short: all Norse gods are in origin from Odin (in Russian, the word Odin means 1), who committed suicide and subsequently became ‘just’ the head of the group of gods (kind of like Zeus, first among many). The story tells it clear that the first action occurred just once and cannot be repeated.
The image I use for myself is a Native American image. You can see the four parts in the center, red, blue, green and yellow, while a large purple circle surrounds the parts. This is exactly the same that Gödel showed us with his Incompleteness Theorems. The parts are the parts, and the whole is the whole. While there is a clear connection among all, the truths of the parts are not automatically the truths of the other parts nor the truths of the whole. An interwoven disconnect exists among all.
