I was chatting up a storm with my bunch of nerdy pals. We do not eschew any topics, including sensitive topics like politics and religion. Nothing is too sacred with us. Pun intended.
What started our conversation was the topic of consciousness. None of us have any erudition in this field. This is something that everybody seems to understand yet few could use concrete words to define. Perhaps we all have different words or interpretation or ideas for what consciousness is but we assume that everybody is on the same page. Is it awareness? Is it the mind? A feeling, a cognition, life itself, an introspection or is it the same thing as the soul? What is a soul by the way. Pilot of a plane caught on fire reports to the tower "we are declaring emergency and there are 109 souls on board", is that it?
Some of my friends would borrow from psychology to describe what consciousness is, while most would sweep it under the neural science category. I took a more pragmatic approach. I learned that all living things is nothing more than a factory churning out products, utilizing raw materials and sending signals to regulate the different stations. Life depends on energy exchange via the ATP cycle and nerve signals requiring action potentials to propagate. Hence we have specialized and differentiated cells to perform specific functions of absorption, immunity, visual, auditory, olfactory, reproductive functions. et cetera, et cetera. To put it bluntly, in my humble opinion, we are nothing but the result of trillions of test tubes pouring each other with chemicals. These chemicals form the infrastructures of our body and allow ion exchange to form electrical signals. Our sensory inputs perhaps elicit certain chemicals to be formed, i.e. dopamine, oxytocin, endorphin, and along with sensory signals form experiences that we perceive as real. To me, consciousness is the manifestation of chemicals and electricity. Whatever our consciousness conjures up, is just a summation of all of the above. I wonder if someday we are advance enough to send these packets of chemicals and electrical charges from one individual to another, could we share consciousness? Believing reality is real could be the biggest scam. Our dreams could be so vivid that we believe they are real, until we wake up that is. Oh yes some people called dreams the subconscious. So called "altered states" achieved by using drugs or biologicals (psilocybin for example) are just reactions to chemicals that disrupt our normal production and distribution of chemicals. So when I die, my chemical reactions come to a screeching halt, and my "reality" ceases to exist (except that my hair and nail would continue to grow for a day or two, creepy, right?), whereas just a few moments before I take my last breath, it was still real to me. So is consciousness merely a state of awareness, or does it also imply intelligence, reasoning, morality, ethics? Does the size of our brains have anything remotely to do with consciousness? Does an imbecile have less consciousness than a genius? Does consciousness include the ability to plot and manipulate and backstab others?
An interesting segue regarding the role played by chemicals in our body is that according to the famous psychologist Jordon Peterson, aggressive lobsters posses a higher level of serotonin. He also stipulated that serotonin endowed lobsters attain a higher status in the hierarchy of lobsters, and they strut a better body image i.e. more frequent raised claws. Serotonin by the way is a chemical that carries signals between nerve cells and is responsible for mediating the moods of a person, so we believe. A class of drugs called SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) of which Prozac is an example, works by propping up the level of serotonin in our bloodstream by delaying its metabolism back into the system.
Seeing a person go through puberty, watching animals in heat or simply witnessing the a person high on drugs definitely offers a strong argument of how chemicals shape life. Naysayers would say this is too simplistic. Something as abstract as consciousness surely cannot be defined by chemical terms. Well we are all aware that sunlight is made up of 7 colors. So how easy is it to mix the 7 colors to form the white color. I am not talking about painting the colors on a disc and spinning it to get the white color. That's cheating because we are exploiting the latency in our optic system to mix the colors in our brain. That latency is what fooled us into thinking the frames in a movie strip actually move smoothly. We know we are watching a movie, yet we cry, we laugh, we swear. Are we manufacturing our own reality? Is this consciousness?
It is impossible for us to mix the exact amount and intensity of the different colors to form a white color. Truth of the matter is that white is not a color, it is simply a state when all light are reflected and our brain perceive that as white. All "color" cause certain spectrum of light to be absorbed. Thus whatever "color" we choose to mix will always absorb some light and a total reflection i.e. white could never be achieved. Can the color white actually be not "real"?
The conversation naturally turned to whether afterlife exists. Whatever a person's religious belief, we all subscribe to the fact that all things decompose and breakdown when dead and all the ingredients of life are returned to earth. And if mother earth is a miniscule grain of stardust in one of those 30 trillions of galaxies then are we not all children of this vast universe, and not just earth. Unto dust thou shalt return has real secular meaning. The enormity of our universe is beyond comprehension. The Hubble telescope can see light from 10 billion years ago. James Webb does even better, about 13.5 billion years ago. In other words, someone from one of those far galaxies waved at us, and 13.5 billion years later, we see it.. It took light that long to traverse that distance. If this is not mind boggling, I don't know what is.
By this time, all the members in our nerd group had enlarged pupils, and our voices approaching the soprano tessitura. We all became very animated, saliva spouting from zeal and interjections. It was only natural to invoke the existence of other dimensions. The Outer Limits anthology was non-fiction as far as we were concerned.
When the topic of other dimensions were brought up, the String Theory took the limelight. String Theory came about when particle physics wasn't able to adequately describe nuclear force, gravitational force. Thus instead of particles we have strings that dance through space and depending on how they are vibrating, are able to confer mass and gravitational force by yielding different particles. Mind you we are talking about subatomic structures, before the existence of atoms. String Theory and black holes often seem inseparable. Anyways none of us in the group are physicists but the idea of the obscure "strings" is so "far out", to coin a sixties slang. What is especially "far out" and tantalizing is the fact that the String Theory necessitates additional dimensions to function. It's been suggested that there are 10, 11 dimensions. For me, anything more than 4 dimensions (length, width, height and time) is beyond my comprehension by my feeble brain, yet that notion of other dimensions and multiverse is so "far out".
The Outer Limits lived on for another day.
I might be misrepresenting or conflating about topics that I am not an expert in, but the reason that I am geeking out is that I find the topic so mystical and inspirational that I want to do a painting about "strings".
I painted the "strings" using some cheap gold acrylic hobby paint. I picked the roughest and stiffest brush I could find and I painted on gold speckled Xuan. The native gold speckles on the paper helped to set the stage of my cosmic background.
With that, I randomly tapped on the paper. Then I found the footprint of that brush to be a bit too big and not wriggly enough for my "strings". I found a very skinny brush, one with just a few bristles and that worked out nicely. The long thin bristles were flexible and twisted and turned freely facilitating a more string-like line.
In my mind this was the state just after the big bang. Matters as we know it hadn't been formed yet.
We had "strings". Through the interactions of the gravitational forces these strings impart, fingers nebulae began to form? These fingers were depicted as void spaces in my painting. I wrote them in using a regular round brush and my alum solution. I was hoping the alum solution would act as a masking fluid such that brushstrokes done with alum solution would remain clear of subsequent colorings.
In my mind, the strings would clump together like ripples and the resulting strands would propagate like fingers in a flames. So I fashioned a bunch of ripples and flames. The gold speckled Xuan took on the alum solution in a weird way. The trek appeared black, in reality it was just how the paper looked when wet.
After the alum solution dried, they were no longer visible on the paper, only my gold color "strings" were visible. My next step would be to reveal and expose my fingers nebulae.
