Singularity

Another entry form my book in progress, What Happens Next

(Preface: I actually imagine this as being the final episode of the book. It’s an idea that’s been kicking about in my head for a while, the triangulation of a few things i’m interested in. I think I’ve got the broad strokes here, but I think it could be longer and more fleshed out in revision. I’m also starting to wonder if I’m pushing a little too hard in some ways, I often find myself pushing and reaching for the biggest and grandest stuff, and I’m starting to feel it’s a little too “loud” and I think with time, I’ll find a way to make my writing and pieces a little more spacious and dynamic, just so I’m not constantly hammering on the sublime, because I can see it getting to a point of getting tired. Either way, I’m mostly happy with the idea of this, the refinement will come with time.)

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Singularity

There’s a few big scientific theories about how the universe will end, but I have my own theory, too.

I’ll have the Eggplant Rollatini, and a merlot, thank you. I really shoulnd’t get the eggplant, I have trouble digesting it, but hey, life’s short, why not enjoy?

So, a few big cosmological theories. Everyone knows about the Big Bang, but what they’re not certain about is whether it’ll reverse or not— the Big Crunch, yeah, the red shift and the blue shift. I think for a while most of the math said that was the likely case. I don’t know if they said, but I wonder if time would run in reverse— or maybe not, maybe everything just gets crushed back together in space in the blink of an eye, pretty violent end. A lot of the Vedic ancient Indian scripture agrees with this picture. It’s like the whole universe is an exhale, and then there’ll be an inhale, and it just kind of goes on in loop like that forever. I like the idea that it’s preserved, safe, like it’s always there. That goes against the Buddhist idea of impermanence. Nietzsche had the idea of eternal recurrence, Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five said that all of time is just there, that’s the theory of eternalism. I like that better than impermanence. My friends and I got really into the idea of loops, back when we were doing a lot of acid and shrooms in college. Like, imagine when you die, the light you see is the light of you being born and leaving your mother’s womb. It makes me wonder how many times we’ve done this, but I don’t think there ever was a first time the way we think, no beginning or end. sometimes I like this theory, other times I don’t, it makes me feel trapped. That’s like the buddhist idea of samsara, it can feel struck, and to me it also just feels too small somehow.

I read about this other astrophysicist who’s also a jazz musician, and he had another idea, but similar: he said there could be a crunch, but when the universe expands again, it’ll do so differently, the variables in the math will change, maybe through quantum randomness. He equated the universe to like a jazz solo, an improvisation. There’ only twelve notes in the western musical scale, but those twelve notes lead to infinite novelty. I like that idea too, btu it doesn’t seem like you can have the freedom for new things to happen while also getting to keep safe all the things you love.

I’ll go to the bathroom too, good idea.

This looks great. I should’ve gotten mushroom risotto, that looks amazing.

Anyway, so the Big Crunch was a popular theory for a while, but then as instruments got better to measure what’s happening in space, they ran into a problem. So the universe is expanding, but it’s not doing so at a steady rate. Everything in the universe is moving away from each other faster and faster. They didn’t know why, but that’s how they cam eup with the theory of dark matter and dark energy, to try and explain the observations. The observations say that the rate of expansion is greater than any gravitational force , and there’s also 2nd law of thermonuclear dynamics, the law of entropy. It’s basically the law that epxlains why when you light a cigarette the smoke never goes back in, some people explain it as the arrow of time. So in this theory, the universe will expand forever. Galaxies will drift apart, the stars will all burn out, and black holes will evaporate via hawking radiation , and then over trillions of trillions of years all the usable energy energy will be evenly distributed into an ever more vast cold and dark emptiness and it’ll nbe impossible for any structured life to ever exist again. that’s only if dark energy remains a constant force, if it grew stronger, you could get what they call the Big Rip, where at some point the fabric of the universe gets pulled into infinite shreds—

Hey, can I get some more water? I’ve got to make sure not to drink too fast, sometimes I just sotp paying attention, and then—don’t worry, that’s going going to happen.

Yeah, so that’s the most likely theory, based on current evidence, the eat death. I really hate that theory. But that’s just based on the evidence we have now, and we keep learning new things.

But like I said, I have my own theory about the end of the universe. It’s not based on any science honestly, it’s just a speculation, I don’t even know how it occured to me, just a thought I really liked.

I call it Singularity, even though I know that word already has a lot of other definitions. It’s originally a way to describe the event horizons of black holes. It’s basically a point at which no information can escape, so it’s impossible to know what’s on the other side of it, if there is anything. This guy Ray Kurzweil used it to describe a similar thing happening with technology. He’s kmind of the epitome of a teach optimist. He think that technology will keep advancing faster and exponentially faster, ‘til we hit a point where, like with the black hole, it becomes impossible to predit what happens on the other side of the singularity. He think’s we’re going to become Gods in the next twenty years, so in our lifetime. It reminds me of this Isaac Asimov story, called The Last Question.

But anyway, my theory, ot let’s just call it a ‘what if’. It requires me starting from a certain assumption and theory about the nature of everything, one that actually has some precedence. Start off by assuming that consciousness is actually the basic constituent of the universe rather than being an emergent property of physical matter of the heightened complexity. Now, this next part is a little tricky, but bear with me. It consciousness is the base of all existence, what if every single conscious being and entity across all time and space, experience their lives simultaneously? SO it’s like everything and everyone is born and arises out of nothing at once, together?

I think of it like this. Picture a perfect sphere, and then pinch two poles, stretch them apart so that there’s two points at either end of the sphere, like an ornament. Imagine this ornament was made of a bunch of strings, an effectively infinite number of strings, all fine enough to sit right next to all the others. Those strings are each individual life, experience, whatever—

Listen I know it may not make a lot of rational sense, bugt to me, it’s like al these different lives and experiences across time and space, they’re all equivalent to each other, they arise at once together. Think about anyone from history you’ve ever admired, I don’t know, like Einstein. From this perspective, he’s actually living in parallel with us, born the same moment as us, and dying the same moment we do. I don’t know if I’m explaining this well.

For example, there’s a good handful of people I’ve admired, and I’ve wondered what it was like for them to die. Jimi Hendrix choked on his vomit in a hotel bed. Claude Debussy died of a rectal cancer. I mean, I watched the last hours of my parents in their beds, but I didn’t really know what it was like for them. What I’m trying to say is, in my model, if everything is born at once, together, what if there’s only one death, a single event, The Death? One event that we experience from all our different vantages, but is actually just one event, one convergence, like everything in the universe collapsing into a singularity?

So there’s no afterlife where ghosts and loved ones are waiting for us on the other side, we’re actually all getting there at the exact same moment. I picture laying on my deathbed one day and you know how time keeps speeding as you get older, everything happens faster and faster?

Imagine you’re in your death bed, and ahead, the faces of your loved ones are blurring past you, and you’re watching the sun rising out your window, faster and faster, flickering like a strobe until it’s like a roll of film and then you’re also seeing the trillions of years of the life of the universe, and everything and everyone in it making eye contact with you— I picture the whole universe, all time and space, swirling down this drain and seeing everyone form ancient history, your idols, everyone ever, and we’re all watching each other in moments where time itself is collapsing, and everyone’s arriving together at the same exact instant, no on has any clue what happens next, beyond the singularity, but we all find out together.

The rollatini is cold now. It’s fine, really.

I know why I like this idea. I like the idea that death is actually this kind of reunion, a regathering of everything and everyone we lost . I also like the idea that every life and every experience has an equivalence. I’ve spent so much of my life looking to the past examples of other lives I thought I ought to be like, or looking to the future to imagine some right way for everything to be. But in this way, you, me, and everyone else gets here and there and everywhere at the same time as Jesus and Buddha and every guru. It means we’re all on the same level, equally finding out, exploring, becoming only what we can be, which is ourselves. And we’re all doing that together.

Even thinking about all the sorrow and suffering we’ve visited on each other, victims and victimizers, imagine, you’ve murdered so many people, and then your time comes, and down the drain you see everyone you killed and hurt looking at you, maybe you even see yourself through all their eyes? ‘cause in a way, there’ no good people in heaven and bad people in Hell, all of us are going to the same place, and none of us know where that is. But I like the idea of it being all of us together, it’s the opposite of alone.

I know it doesn’t make any sense, of course, it’s filled with logical holes, there’s nothing scientific about it. I just hate the idea of the Heat Death of the Universe. I hate the idea that all we’re ever going to do for the rest of time in every moment is drift further and further away from each other into utter isolation and solipsism and loneliness, until there’ not even an idea of another, and then nothing.

Excuse me? Cna i Just get the whole bottle, of the merlot?"

It just hurts too much to consider that anyone and anything I ever care for will jsut drift further and further away from me in this kind of infinite loss. And fuck the Buddhist non-attachment bullshit, I’m alive, I’m attached to things that I care about, and I’ll be damned if I ever believe that’s a sin. I think it’s part of why I’ve been single for so long.

I understand when people say that’s al the more reason to savor and appreciate everything and everyone in your life, specifically because of that very likely possibility that in time all any of us will ever do is lose each other. The fact is that I’ve been yearning for something that I’m also terrified of, more than anything.

I think I was raised with the same story so many people were raised with about soul mates. I wonder where it came from, it’s an easy dream to understand, especially because everyone exists because of two other people. Why shouldn’t we have this dream, this desire, for a highest kind of love? We can rationalize and guard ourselves from it, but why shouldn’t we desire a true love? I think most of the us agree that it’s just a fantasy, it’s a story, also a small one, compared to all the other different love stories you hear about that aren’t just partners and biological children and marriage and monogamy. I’d be lying if i didn’t still dream of that.

Oh the rollatini is fine, here. I’ll get a to-go box for it though, I won’t let it go to waste. I’m glad you liked the risotto.

I’ve gotten comfortable being on my own, used to it, it’s safe. It’s so stupidly simple. I’ve psyched myself out of so many encounters, so many open doors, because I didn’t like that I couldn’t see where it was going, or if it’d be worth it. I just really struggle with the gamble of it all, the risk. When I think about what love has meant to me in the past, or how I felt like I knew it, it was always instinctual, it never felt like a choice.

I’ll take the check, this one’s on me, don’t worry about it. Don’t ask em about how I make my money! Just kidding. Sorry. I work at a bookstore. Thank you! I left a really nice tip, that girl was working really hard.

Which way is your car? I’ll walk you over. Jesus, it’s freezing.

Listen, I needed to pay for the meal because I know this must have been an awful date for you. I know I took up all the air in the room, oversharing doesn’t even begin to cover it, the complete self-involvement, and it makes it even worse that I’m aware at all, or even think I’m self-aware. I swear I’m not always like this, I’m pretty sure, anyway. But that’s the whole thing for me, probably for everyone, right? It’s so terrifying to be out in the world, to be yourself, whatever that is, this whole mysterious mess, when I don’t even really fully understand myself, but this is me, this is what comes out, and I’ve spent much of my life, even with such loving parents, such a loving environment, still nonetheless hiding myself away, afraid for anyone to see it, believing that I was unlovable. That what I really want ultimately from romance, love, whatever, is to be known, to be seen truly, but I also know I can’t expect someone else to give me that permission, that’s on me— and yet I hope you’ve had this happen to you, where you met someone or encountered something in the world that helped you discover something new in yourself you could never have known otherwise, something or someone that shattered or dissolved those borders and boundaries you draw up around yourself— have you ever met someone where you felt their exceptional individuality, such that it lighted that unique fire in you, such that together you blended into each other to become some synthesis of something neither of us could be alone.

I’m sorry, I’m just not interested in meeting anyone to date and lying anymore, what’s the point? This world is mad, but I have know sanity best when I have looked into the eyes of another and we have shared ourselves and konwn each other. And I don’t want to waste your time, but who’s to say what’s a waste of time, of where we’re going and what we want and need from each other? I have lost the people I love most in life, and I learned long ago that I will lose every last one of them. BU tI also want the Karma, the good Karma, I believe that we are all meant for each other, that we need each other, even out enemies, every single relationship. I want to look int your eyes and know that deep down we were meant for each other, fated in this eternally recurring loop, and that God made everything so we could find each other and birth beautiful and necessary infinities of love, that our love could be a work of art, an end in itself, the reason for everything, something that needs no meaning, that for its own sake, a love that redeems all suffering.

But I don’t know, all that’s just a thing in my head, and here you are in front of me, a reality, and when I look into the endless wells of your irises, the dark matter, in your eyes I see the mystery of mysteries. I see every potential outcome, though only one path will be realized which I cna’t see in advance. In your eyes I see the precipice of everything that had ever happened, in your eyes I see the door beyond the beyond, beyond anything I ever could know and I am filled to the brim, wanting know, terrified to know, to never know what happens next.

“Do you want to find out?”