We are us and our circumstances

The first word in the Odyssey is “Andra”, which means man, human. In a previous post I already mentioned Prigogine's Tanner lecture "Only an Illusion" with reference to the problem of time and Homer´s works the Odyssey and the Iliad. 

The Odyssey can be viewed as a big ring composition when first Athena, a goddess, foresees Odysseus´ homecoming. For the gods, past and future are the same, and the two moments are together in Athena´s point of view. It is as if she was remembering Odysseus hardships. The main binary opposition in the poem is between mortality and immortality, how gods and humans see time. This ring composition strengthens the idea of endless time, of atemporality. 

Odysseus starts the poem in an island with the goddess Calypso, in a world that doesn´t change, apart from the human world, with no connections with it. In another previous post I mentioned the link between time and quantum entanglement, and I concluded that “time has no meaning outside the universe, and it is embedded in the relationship between its elements”. The relationships we establish with our environment determine what life is. We are us and our circumstances, as Ortega y Gasset said. 

Today I came across with an article where they explain how “The arrow of time is an arrow of increasing correlations”, as Seth Lloyd pointed out about 30 years ago. 

In another post I also mentioned how it has been proven that by using a definition of information stating which properties it should have, quantum mechanics can be derived from said properties. Seth Lloyd , by using an approach to quantum mechanics where information units are treated as the basic building blocks, ended up realizing that as the particles became increasingly entangled with one another, the information that originally described them would shift to describe the system of entangled particles as a whole. The particles gradually lost their individual autonomy and became pawns of the collective state. Eventually, the correlations contained all the information, and the individual particles contained none. At that point, Lloyd discovered, particles arrived at a state of equilibrium, and their states stopped changing. 

As Lloyd says, “the universe as a whole is in a pure state, but individual pieces of it, because they are entangled with the rest of the universe, are in mixtures.” So, does it mean that the Universe knows everything?

It is very interesting to see how physics slowly gets to the heart of the question of what means to be human. Our experience of time is intimately linked to the relationships we develop along our stay here. Physics is getting to the core of human experience, already sung by poets and philosophers.

Omar Khayyam

I know Omar Khayyam from his Rubáiyát, or poems with 4 verses. I found them very beautiful, although a little bit sad. I found very striking the way he expressed his thoughts in such a modern way. He lived in the XII century, and his thoughts about religion and life were very up-to-date. Take these examples: 

You know, my Friends, with what a brave Carouse 

I made a Second Marriage in my house; 

Divorced old barren Reason from my Bed 

And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse. 

I sent my Soul through the Invisible, 

Some letter of that After-life to spell: 

And by and by my Soul return'd to me, 

And answer'd "I Myself am Heav'n and Hell:" 

So, some years after reading his poems, I was talking to a friend, and he told me that Omar Khayyam was also a very important mathematician and astronomer. I found out that Persia in those days was a decadent empire, and the detachment from religious beliefs and the immersion in hedonism was a common escape for intellectuals. 

It can be that, the reason of such decadent verses, but I also think that his point of view as a scientist could have influenced his world view. The observation of stars, the regular movements of planets and the moon, can be thought of as a divine signature, but the study of logic can only lead to a point where no explanation can be found. You want to explain the final cause of everything but that cannot be found with observation or logic. So that's why he divorced from Reason, and married the Daughter of Vine. He couldn't explain why we are here, the meaning of life, and some of his verses show this inability to explain the most asked questions in human history. Questions we have no explanation even now.