Let There Be Light.. And Everything Else.
The first act of creation wasn’t just light, it was a repeating tendency of reality doing what it does best: creating.
“The universe gives birth to consciousness, and consciousness gives meaning to the universe.”
- John Archibald Wheeler
It seems to be a fundamental characteristic of the universe to create, or to allow for the possibility of construction and progression; to make something out of nothing and to make that something driven to become something more.
More complex, more intuitive, more capable.
But if you follow any chain of causality back through time, all the way from this very moment to the ultimate point of origin, you’ll naturally land in the deafening silence of some meaningless void.
It’s from within this dense nothingness that something emerges: an enactment - a command, a light out of the dark.
Whether a quantum vacuum fluctuation or the Word of God, something at this origin point emanates from zero, creating everything.
And as JWST is slowly pluralizing the Big Bang, we’re confirming that reality loves to habitually propagate meaning from the meaningless time and time again - that fertility and growth are cyclic cosmic archetypes as much as they are thermodynamic currencies.
There are a number of concepts through physics that can’t escape the premise that everything is caught in an expanding wave of becoming: Inflationary cosmology, Hawking’s Self-Creating universe, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
From thermodynamics to relativity, the universe’s expansion creates a direction to time and the function of entropy; like gravity, consciousness manages to clump together some order in an otherwise disordered world.
‘Nothing’ can’t ultimately exist, having to always be filled with ‘something’.
And within this process of ongoing creation, there’s an ability to play with possibility that’s grounded in the generation of meaning, allowing for greater ripples of influence.
As John Wheeler says, we create the ‘it’ from the ‘bit’, riding the currents of nature’s creationary force — and the input from our environment—to enact the kind of output we desire.
We navigate the indecipherable dark of reality through our rapidly adapting and evolving sensory networks; we consume and pattern information to help us better exponentiate our own presence through space and time.
Those who do it best get to progress themselves through lineage or legacy.
“The universe is an ongoing explosion of creation, a continuous act of becoming.”
— Paul Davies
It’s information that functions as the light to our existence, as everything in the pitch dark has little meaning until it can be sensed; when photons or sound waves bounce around our environment and soak into our interface, meaning becomes not only possible but desirable.
We can now read particles as letters in a universal code; light and sound act as the dual architects of reality and we ride their resonance to navigate the world more capably.
Sound leads to language and language to more effective forms of technical communication; consciousness erupts in its shared ability to navigate space and time.
We become better able to conceptualize and deify things like the Logos — “In the beginning was the Word…” — and pair them with quantum validations from macrocosmic or subatomic observations.
Technology amplifies our signaling.
But consciousness is what remains as our own unique substrate through the universe, allowing us to surf the currents of shared discovery towards ever greater horizons.
Our string theories and relativity models help to pattern the noise while our conscious discernment collapses probability into reality, pursuing knowledge, complexity and evolution.
As Brian Swimme once told me: “With consciousness, it’s not velocity, its not the increase in velocity that shows the increase in mass, its the increase in complexity. So you start off with atoms and then you build molecules and as things become more complex, the consciousness becomes more obvious…”
The creationary nature of our reality is seen everywhere - it’s fractal, from DNA coding to galaxy distributions.
The lack of stagnation amongst all forms of matter - animate and inanimate - is seldom appreciated, as is the thirst for more information.
As we leverage our insatiable curiosity to decipher the secrets of our environment, we become all the more able to play with the possibilities that we unlock.
If light and sound form the architecture of reality, then every spark and bang that we create chisels out more meaning from our surrounding world.
What starts as a simple interaction with small bits and inputs of information through the veins of shared experience in a probabilistic universe ultimately ends in the production of the most desired outcome possible: life.
