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preceded the stars around it?
Are we outside of the Universe, when we imagine the Universe, or are we the Universe imagining itself?
It would seem logical--according to our understanding of the development of biological life--to believe that we are part of the Universe, and that every faculty we possess, including thought and imagination, are part of the Universe. No part of us, including our thought, stands outside of the Universe. What then are we imagining when we imagine the Universe?
Presuming that we view the Universe much like we view Earth and its other critters--studying the Earth, other critters and ourselves scientifically, out of curiosity, and mythologizing as well--imagining, creating--the opposition between us and that which we observe, or use as an imaginative tool, seems definitive with secure boundaries. We take a blood sample from a chimpanzee and analyze it under a microscope and with other instruments, discovering, among things, that our DNA is very, very similar--something we also intuit in forming relationships with chimps (they are very like us)--or we focus a telescope or other instrument on the stars, and do the same--relate what is "out there" to ourselves, and our current understanding of things (gravity, distance, time), and discover things like black holes and weird properties of galaxies (the outside spinning at the same rate as the inside), and, indeed, not so long ago--1960s--discovered that there are other galaxies, jillions and jillions of them at unimaginable distances, all racing away from us at unimaginable speeds (or so we think). Prior to the 1960s, no one knew that, and I don't think anyone even guessed it--that there are unimaginable numbers of other galaxies, also filled with hundreds of millions of stars.
But something is wrong this, and I think it is scale. We are so very, very, very, VERY small. IT--the Cosmos-- is so very, very, very, umpteen magnitudes of VERY LARGE. How is it possible for our teeny tiny brains to encompass THAT, or gain even a remotely accurate notion of what it is and how it works. Think of an ant--if it had a brain like ours--in relationship to the Sun, or even to the earth. Can that small a brain, even if it is conscious, grasp that large a phenomenon? What can it observe? What can it intuit? What can it understand?
So, when human scientists posit, confirm, discover and finally see a black hole, and lay out its bizarre workings, according to what we know and can imagine here on Earth, and move from a theory that a sun collapses into a small superdense object that pulls other objects towards it--in a swirl, a galaxy--and ultimately eats everything up, including light, to a theory that a black hole precedes any such star and somehow creates the galaxy around itself, we should think of the sentient ant and imagine its theories about the Sun, from its small perspective, and how wrong it might be. Granting it cleverness, it could develop useful theories--even sundials and other measuring instruments--but if it was stuck for generations on a particular mountainside, it might never see the moon. Indeed, it might never see the Sun, and only be able to imply a source of heat and light. It is too small. Its instruments are too small. And its brain is too small. It cannot see, and likely cannot really understand, what, to us, is obvious (if we put our minds to it) because we can see it.
What can't we see of the distant Universe? What can't we see even in our own galaxy? What is beyond our instruments, and possibly beyond our brains, but that vastly influences us nevertheless, as the unseen and unseeable Sun would influence an ant?
We are looking too far, perhaps. Or what we think is very far is actually very close. We are perhaps in a loop of thought, or a loop of time, just as we imagine this loop of gravity that we call a "black hole." Gravity created by matter. Gravity creating matter. Which is it? It is too far and too big and too close, all at the same time. Is it within us? Are our brains, which are of the Universe, generating this black hole as we observe it, or as we think we are observing it? Is our ability to imagine no black hole, and no galaxy, and then...black hole...and then galaxy...a part of that very remote process?
When we think of the ant--a critter of absolutely no consequence (it would seem) to that gigantic entity, the Sun--trying to posit a sun, from the effects of heat and light, then we know where we stand, anyway. We are very, very, VERY small, in relationship to Everything Else, which we have only recently realized exists at all. We live always in the shadow of the mountain that prevents us from seeing the source of the heat and the light. We have just invented a sort of thermometer, to confirm our thesis that the trees generate the heat and light. And some other ant has just arrived, from miles away, after generation upon generation has slowly migrated over the top of the mountain, to tell us tales of an immense burning disc in the sky.
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