Somethings, nothings, everythings and chaos theory
Existence is a peculiar thing, and it is the only ‘thing’. Indeed, something either exists or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t exist, then it is nothing and by nothing, I mean it isn’t anything at all. This is all hypothetically speaking, of course, as to truly not exist, is to not have a physical presence, but also not to be thought of by anybody. The presence of ‘nothing’, diminishes its concept. Simply naming it as ‘nothing’ defeats the object of ‘nothing’. It has been given a name, and is hence ‘something’. It is now an idea, a concept. So if I am going to write about something that doesn’t exist, I am not going to acknowledge its’ existence, I am not going to think about it, and I am not going to mention it at all in this… whatever it is that I am writing. Which is good because I now have a lot of scope with which to explain whatever it is that doesn’t exist.
The very fact that we are living breathing organisms is enough to prove everybody’s importance. Every organism has its’ place, otherwise it wouldn’t have evolved (or come into being). There’s importance in everything. The very fact that it exists is a testament to that. It is able to exist, and it does. It is able to exist in its relatively negative entropy. At some point in existence, whether billions of years in the past or yesterday, energy was invested in the system you see. It could be a gnat, a spider, a virus, a stone, a piece of dust, a nebula, a Sega Saturn games console, a blue whale or a Take That Album. We people tag and label everything in one way or other, and I do not condemn this, I do this also, but in tagging things, we attach some sort of ‘importance value’ to it. We’ll deem something ‘common’ or ‘rare’.
‘The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world’, says the G-Man in the opening scene of Half-Life 2. Everybody in the world is important in their own way. In this context, I don’t mean that to come across in a philanthropic, ‘I-love-everybody’ way. Acknowledging something’s existence and its place in things doesn’t always mean we have to like it. I just said that everything has its importance, yet I am still discontent with general aspects of modern attitudes and values, and the shortcomings of society. Things are exactly as they were meant to be, as decided by prior forces (as I shall explain later), but this doesn’t mean that it is good. ‘Good’ is a relative concept, determined by perception and the position in space which you occupy. There is physical reality and then there is psychology. The physical reality of something is hard to dispute – so live with it. The psychology of how you deal with its existence is down to your mind and perhaps the external stimuli and experiences which have shaped your mind into what it is.
We are slaves to the stimuli bombarding us like shells at a trench. Our basic thoughts are influenced by external stimuli. It is external stimuli which ultimately make every living thing unique. Identical twins are natural clones. They have the same DNA and the same genetics yet they are different. Each occupies a different position in space. Therefore, they are subject to slightly different stimuli. They both experience different environmental factors and they think and perceive independently. Both could be standing next to each other, but because they occupy two different positions in space, the stimuli they receive are slightly different. The photons of light which enable them to see come from slightly different angles, the molecules in the air around them are different, and these (amongst thousands of other stimuli) are summated and amplified by a process explained by chaos theory (explained later).
We could have initially been exposed to a stimulus early in life or just this second, but it influences our thoughts. We may have a random thought – it seems random because we cannot pinpoint its stimulus. The stimulus could have been something apparently ‘insignificant’, something we barely registered in our conscience. You could have been walking in the street and a man in a red tie sneezed, momentarily diverting your attention for the slightest fraction. This could be enough to reside in your subconscious, and then rear its random head when you least expect it due to some unidentified plasticity event in your neurons. A mixture of unrelated ‘insignificant’ events could merge together to generate the most abstract, peculiar thought imaginable but it happens due to some distant object in existence, which you may have only walked past, or heard a stranger mention. A stranger may have seen a peculiarly shaped red-green rock which sounded like a constipated tortoise when she tickled it, and could have been conveying this peculiarity in the time space continuum to a friend. You may well have been on the phone to a friend who was in the near vicinity of these complete strangers and picked up the word ‘tortoise’ and ‘rock’, and suddenly they’re in your mind. Later you have a weird thought over dinner of tortoises and rocks in red ties, having a sneezing contest. The existence of this rock, somewhere in the universe, has been transmitted to you by a series of unconnected events to cause weird electrical activity in your brain while you indulge in a Dominoes pizza. Someone or something you believe is unimportant to you can make all the difference. It is an application of chaos theory.
Chaos theory is basically a very small event culminating in something altogether larger and near unpredictable. Like a snowball effect (or as it is more commonly known; The Butterfly Effect). A small alpine swift could be flying past a mountain, and the air currents formed from its’ wing beats could knock a single snowflake at the top of a mountain out of place, causing it to fall, knocking a few more snowflakes and clinging to them in the process. The tiny snowball dislodges other snowflakes, until so much snow is dislodged that an avalanche occurs, crashing down the mountainside destroying everything in its path and claiming the lives of some skiers on the slope. One of these skiers could have been running for the presidency of the nation he was from. His death resulted in him not going into power and instead, his rival gains office. His rival subsequently invades the neighbouring country which escalates into a world conflict culminating in a nuclear war. The single wing beat of this small bird caused a nuclear holocaust. This is an exaggerated hypothetical scenario of course, but it isn’t impossible. I haven’t invented magical beings. I have used existing entities such as birds, snow, people and nuclear bombs, and linked them together using standard physics into a story of bloodshed and apocalypse. But that is what chaos theory describes. Everything is influenced by big events and tiny, seemingly insignificant events which nobody knows about and probably never will, yet their legacy is just as large as the legacy of the memorable event itself. That swift may never have seen a human being before. Mankind may never have seen this swift. But this organism made an impact. We could extrapolate this even further backwards and determine what factors lead to the bird flying where it flew, and the circumstances in which it hatched and so on.
This could apply to anybody who feels hopelessly insignificant in life… on Planet Earth anyway. As we look at the grand scale of the universe, our impact diminishes. It probably diminishes exponentially as we get further away from our tiny area of space. Verily, the universe is just too expansive for most of us. Most people would rather not know. The universe is depressingly large. But for some reason, this only instils me with awe and wonder. However, as far as we’re concerned right here and right now, the right man in the wrong place can indeed make all the difference. And that is a comprehensive study of that thing which doesn’t exist.
Captain Nitrogen out.
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