The Significance Of Our Insignificance-Part 1

The Significance Of Our Insignificance-Part 1

The universe keeps me up at night. More specifically, it’s not the universe that is keeping me up, but our understanding of it. The universe is tangled up in all of our internal questions: who we are, what we are, why we are, and where we are? We have wrestled with these questions ever since we have been able to think about them. As I think about the universe, I seem to always come back to one inescapable conclusion: We simply cannot comprehend the whole of our reality, because it is outside of our scale of understanding and ability. Essentially, the limits of its size, both small and large, are inherently confined not by our observational abilities but our ability to comprehend those limits. Put another way, It is the significance of our insignificance that keeps me up at night. With that, I offer the following thoughts for your consideration and please keep in mind; I am not a scientist and my math skills are limited at best, so please read with that knowledge in mind.

Our intelligence as a species has out grown our visual capacity to observe. We have invented technology that is allowing us to see farther and farther, as well as smaller and smaller. It is an impressive and awe-inspiring feat that we have expanded the limits of our observation to what they are today. With that said, the sheer scale of the realm within which we exist is overwhelming that technology, as well as our ability to comprehend it. We are relying more and more on mathematical theories and scientific experimentation as our understanding and observational capabilities are stretched to their limits. The universe (s?), to put it bluntly, is beginning to appear as if it is simply too vast for human comprehension. Mathematical experimentation and exercise is yielding results that point to a universe or potential parallel and multi-universes that are simply beyond our scale of understanding. I want to be clear about that point. It’s not the size of the universe that is beyond our comprehension, it is the scale of it. Humanity has made great leaps forward in the effort and sheer compulsion to understand reality as we know it to exist, but that very reality is beginning to appear as if it has a limit that ultimately and perhaps infinitely-is unknowable. As you read this, keep in the back of your mind that in the vast fabric of our universe, humanity has, to date, never stepped on another planet. The farthest man has ever traveled from our home planet is to our moon which is 238,900 miles, and it took about three days.

The human species Homo sapiens diverged from the species Homo Neanderthal about 500,000 years ago. In other words, man became wise (sapience is derived from the Latin apientia, meaning "wisdom")…..a half a million years ago, or 498,000 years before the birth of Jesus. This is when, according to definitions and interpretations, humans began to interact with their environment with judgment. Humans transitioned from a species responding to simple sensation and need (hot, cold, hunger and biological function) to a species that applied intent, purpose and reason to those sensations and needs. To put it simply, humans began to use the tools in their evolutionary tool box. The most important tool in that tool box was the brain, and its capacity to process, analyze and utilize information received through the second most important tool in the tool box, the eyes. The eyes act as the conduit between the external environment and the internal world of the growing sapience of those early humans. Evolution has given the gift of sight to countless species, but few have been given intelligence to process and act on the information received through those eyes. Because of this, it is our sight, and our intelligence that have allowed us to evolve into a species that peers into the farthest regions of the universe analyzing distant galaxies, pondering the origin of the universe and the future of humanity. Perhaps most importantly, and maybe even unique to the human species, is the ability to ask questions. So I’ll ask one. What would the human reality be-if-humans evolved without the gift of eyes?

If humans evolved with all of the evolutionary tools we have today except the tool of eyesight, what would the human reality be? To be clear, there is a very good chance that humans, Homo sapiens would be an extinct species. Without the ability to see, the species very well might have never evolved to be at the very top of the food chain. But we are in the land of ifs….and the land of ifs allow us a lot of flexibility in this little thought experiment. Let’s say that humans, with no eyesight and the same capacity for intelligence that we currently have, adapted and overcame all the trials and tribulations of the environment and sightless humans still emerged as the dominant species of the earth.

A fictional human species, without vision (let’s call them Homo nonaspectus) would have to access the environment within which they exist, through the other senses-touch, taste, smell, and hear. If no other tool evolves to replace the tool of eyesight, then the knowledge and awareness of the reality through which they exist would be extremely limited. Intelligence is a powerful tool, even without eyesight, humans would learn and intelligence would no doubt increase. But it would increase at a much slower rate. Think of the eyes as conduits with an almost limitless bandwidth, and the other senses having an extremely limited bandwidth. The external information and data of the environment simply would take longer to reach the internal world of intelligence. The other senses would adapt and improve to compensate for the lack of the fifth sense, and my guess is that our auditory perception of the world around us would be quite different. But just imagine human beings first experiencing the edge of water, regardless of whether it’s a river, lake or ocean. A river and a lake they may be able to discern its limits and complexity through measurement and experience, but what about the ocean? Without vision and at that particular point in the evolution of the species, there is a very good chance that exploration would stop at that seemingly insurmountable hurdle. Also, without eyesight, the observational horizon of the species would be at worst, fixed and at best, quite limited. With intelligence, it is likely that there would be some awareness of the larger universe that contains their world, but it would almost certainly be smaller, if not much smaller than the universe that Homo sapiens are currently trying to comprehend.

So much of what we as Homo sapiens have learned about the whole of our reality within which we exist is dependent upon our ability to see. We use telescopes to see extremely far distances, and even back in time. We use microscopes to see the very small. Even the stuff that we can’t see, both large and distant, and extremely small and close, is inferred knowledge from what we can observe. Although possible, it’s hard to imagine that the intellectual gains we have achieved with our ability to see and observe would exist in a human species without vision. Their lack of vision severely limits their comprehension of reality, and conversely, reality is confined or limited by their scale of comprehension. Even if we give the Homo nonaspectus species the benefit of doubt, it would take thousands of years longer to reach our current intelligence level-and the current evolutionary state of Homo sapiens. The species of Homo nonaspectus simply would not have the right tools necessary to advance their intelligence as rapidly as Homo sapiens have. This leads to the inevitable comparison of our species to the fictional Homo nonaspectus. Do we as a species, have the right evolutionary tools to comprehend the reality within which we exist, and the physical realm that we observe and occupy?



.....To be continued.

RBP/ 2-9-2018