Of Paradox - Huxley's Islet

Pencil drawing of T. H. Huxley done by his daughter Marian Collier

(last updated 1 June 2025)

Here is the place where I explore the big picture—the nature of reality itself—the soil in which the roots of human philosophy, science, and theology have grown—the context that we live in and what it means.

What, in the final analysis, is it all really about?  What is at the root of our reality and existence?  I have a very simple answer. It’s not “42”, but it does boil down to one single word.

What word? Not some annoying philosophical jargon. Throughout human history the great thinkers in the tradition of Western Philosophy have coined ever-more-complicated words—and probably burned out millions of brain cells—trying to figure out what’s going on. Terms like ‘eschatology,’ ‘ontology,’ and ‘epistemology’ got invented and people agonized about ‘solipsism’ and ‘coherentism’ and ‘the anthropic principle.’ They endlessly agonize over the inherent conflict between any being or conception that is ‘necessary’ and our observed ‘contingent’ universe.

The simple answer is Paradox. Paradox with a capital “P”.

This is *not* a cop-out or a joke. I’m dead serious.

Paradox is what these deep thinkers incessantly bang their heads against in an effort to rationally explain our reality.  When will they finally realize that it is the truth they seek—the answer to the problem, not the ‘devastating contradiction’ that prevents them from finding an answer?

This is no call to abandon hope, no repudiation of the role of science or philosophy.  Rather it is a critical step in clarifying the work to be done, for it offers a far clearer perspective.  The perspective, and the tasks we face were wonderfully summarized by Thomas H. Huxley, who called himself "Darwin's Bulldog" when he wrote, in 1887:

“The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, …”

Think of Paradox as that infinite unknown.  We pick away at it, ever claiming more usable territory, a greater working understanding from it, and yet it remains infinite ("inexhaustible" as Freeman Dyson put it). And utterly aloof.

Think of Paradox as a great and powerful 'thing'—as a real physical object. Even as a place. Envision it as the ambience (the 'sanctuary') in which “the thing beyond which no greater thing can be conceived” is housed.

By its very nature, the 'Big P' Paradox plays this role perfectly. It is the something that nothing begat. It is the ultimate uncaused cause.

Paradox is the venue where all things contradictory converge and unify; and it is all around us. Physically, its operational realm is the simplest of things—nothing—a vacuum.  A vacuum is the one and only thing that must not exist in order for it to exist.  We can probe this enigma in much more detail thanks to quantum mechanics.  Science has found that an observable vacuum cannot ever be truly empty, yet current theory has been unable to offer a self-consistent description of it.  (More on this later.)  As implied a few lines above, the question “Where did the vacuum come from?” isn't even a valid question.  As the home of Big-P Paradox, the vacuum would be outside of time and space and absent of causality, free of both attributes and restrictions.  It lurks in its own true-false superposition until an observation attempts to interrogate/actualize it.  The best term I've found to accurately characterize the status of the vacuum is that it is Virtual—similar to a 'memory' but without any need for a conscious mind and without the element of time involved—“real but not actual, ideal but not abstract.”  A Virtual object can be (and obviously is) the source of things that are 'actual' (allowing the emergence of existence itself).  This virtual-actual perspective can be credited to the French thinker Gilles Deleuze from the second half of the 20th century, and people who subscribe to his concepts are called Deleuzians.  (I'm not making this stuff up!)

In the realm of the abstract (philosophically), Paradox is the Infinite Omnipotent God, who can make a mountain ('Sacred' from the point-of-view of non-Western thinkers) that is so big that He cannot ('must not') move it.  In 1981 philosophers coined the term “dialetheism,” which pretty much comes on board with this 'big P' concept—the statement that is at once both true and false.  Science is founded on the premise that reality is self-consistent, and Huxley's Islet could represent that realm of self-consistency, except for the fact that scientific investigations into processes and phenomena that appear superficially self-consistent often discover inconsistencies at their root.  This seems inevitable, given Gödel's famous incompleteness theorems from the realm of pure mathematics. (In simple terms, Gödel proved that any and all models we build [including all models of reality] are either inconsistent—creating statements that are both true and false—or else incomplete—creating true statements that cannot be proven).  In the physical world, black holes are a great example. Observed from the outside, nothing is capable of crossing the event horizon and entering the interior.  Everything 'freezes' (time appears to come to a stop) at that boundary.  And yet the interior obviously exists or there would be no way of creating the event horizon in the first place. Big P Paradox makes the assertion that self-consistency is *not* fundamental.  Any model we choose to describe our arc of realty is going to be a 'messy-around-the-fringes' product of a kind of 'ad hoc, good-enough rulebook', and perhaps also of some selective/willful ignorance (“Shut up and calculate”) on the part of its most diligent observers.

Put bluntly, Paradox sits in the position of unassailable primacy.  It is the attribute of reality with the deepest roots. Of course, any Sacred thing can be defiled.  Paradox is no exception to that; but what makes it exceptional is that the ways of Paradox (and by reference any of us who choose to 'believe' in its primacy) happily defile themselves (at once self-affirming and self-negating).  It's all part of the package.  Academicians continue parsing definitions and semantics, trying to establish a 'niche' for themselves (make a living at this game).  They will go on endlessly, scratching off pieces and creating sub-categories, or equivocating (check out their 'paraconsistent logic'), etc., making ever more complex and esoteric new rules (and new jargon) but the inexhaustible nature of this entity called Paradox continues to encompass and 'explain' all of that kind of activity.

Note well that reality can have no meaning without a mind, whatever that entails—i.e., a model-builder, a sensor, an observer, an entanglement. And therein lies the ultimate philosophical paradox. It is not possible to declare whether the mind creates reality or discovers it; and it is not possible to determine whether the mind emerges from a (subjective) reality or vice versa.'  All enquiry, all discourse boils down to one fundamental question: “How do you know?” (What, exactly, is 'knowing'?)

Returning to the concept of “the thing beyond which no greater thing can be conceived,” St. Anselm of Canterbury, in 1078 appears to have been the first Western thinker to write about that “greatest thing.”  He used the concept to argue for the existence of the Judeo-Christian God. His faith made him insist that this biggest-picture thing should think the way humans think. The Reader’s Digest version of his argument is that if the big guy can be conceived in the mind, then there's an even bigger guy who takes on physical form too. Therefore, God exists.

Well, maybe the short version of St. Anselm’s ontological argument doesn’t do it justice. But I think my buddy Paradox can do him one better. Can Paradox be conceived as the 'creator/progenitor' of all reality?  

Recall Huxley's analogy.  Paradox is that illimitable sea of inexplicability.  But it necessarily also includes all the stuff that we've managed to claim from it—our islet of apparently well-ordered (or at least familiar) stuff.  Here's where Huxley provides an unexpected, perhaps unintended inspiration.  The emergence of the Islet was simply an event that somehow took form within that greater sea.  It is the inexplicable realm that is more fundamental and all-encompassing.  Physicists have proposed that the explainable 'Islet' is little more than an overblown random fluctuation therein.  Don't think of the Islet as sitting on some kind of bedrock.  That illimitable ocean has no bottom.  Even the Islet's 'solid ground' seems to be largely made of quicksand.  (Don't struggle too hard, or you're likely to sink in and disappear!).  More optimistically, it could be likened to a grand 'Noah's Ark'.

Let's look a little more closely at what science can tell us about the vacuum—it's been called a restless 'foam' or 'froth.'  It seems to contain myriad virtual properties/entities that constantly create and destroy themselves and each other.  As a simple example, it is the 'I am/I am not' declared by a pair of virtual leptons (an electron and its anti-matter partner, a positron) that zip into the fringes of existence and then disappear again in the reference frame in which we exist.

Two electrons, both negatively charged, will repel each other.  They are depicted here, in what's called a Feynman diagram, by the two solid lines marked 'e(minus)' moving from the bottom of the picture toward the top.  This is just one example of virtually infinite ways that the vacuum interacts with this particular physical process. From our macroscopic point of view, we might imagine two little balls that approach one another and don't quite hit before 'magically' changing course and bouncing away from each other.  Think of the way magnets can repel each other without touching. What's actually happening deep down at the finest scale is that the two electrons zap each other with virtual light rays (the squiggly lines), and sometimes (in this simplest interaction with the Chaos) those light rays can spontaneously tangle with two more virtual charged particles, shown in the circle in the center. So, for a little while, we can have four particles and two light rays where only two simple electrons actually 'exist'.

So, the 'vacuum' is far from empty. Take away everything—all matter and all energy—and you're still left with that seething, restless, 'froth'—The Chaos—an entirely random and indifferent realm of dynamic events and processes ceaselessly churning just out of reach, gnawing at the very fringes of reality.  From what I understand, based on the disconnect between 'vacuum expectation values' from theory, and the measurements of actual properties of everything from individual fundamental particles like the Higgs Boson to galaxy clusters, the energy density of the tiny bit of this Chaos that interacts with the universe as a whole, as seen within our limited reference frame, is only one part in 10 to the 120th power of all the virtual stuff that's available to act on the smallest scales.  The Chaos is a potent force indeed.

A key property or attribute of this random indifferent Chaos is that localized, temporary self-organization can occur within it (such as the circle in the Feynman diagram above), and that self-organization is not prevented from becoming self-replicating and self-sustaining.  That little circle can, very, VERY rarely, become an entire universe.

Paradox has no law but the law that there is no law.  Its utter indifference means that it has no reason or desire to prevent a self-organizing 'tumor' from forming, replicating, and evolving within its belly.  Its complete lack of restriction means that the options at the disposal of said 'tumor' are as unlimited as the Chaos from which it emerged!

As a simple example, let's go from 10 to the 120th possible entities to just ten.  Imagine a random number generator that is pumping out an endless string of Arabic numerals, 0 through 9. Somewhere in that field there exists an arbitrarily long string of nothing but the number 5, as far as the eye can see.  (It's very unlikely, but it is possible; and anything that is possible will eventually happen, if you wait long enough.)

If we lived in that particular patch of 'space' where, even with our best telescopes, we could see nothing but 5's around us, then we would have to believe that there is an exquisite, mysterious order to the universe—an inexplicable 'fine tuning'.  This patch of 'all fives' is Huxley's Islet.

I could elaborate, but I think you get the idea: We are dependent on the realm of 'all fives'—the Islet—within which the completely indifferent, UNCARING Chaos has allowed meaning (the perfect 'five-ness' of our world) to emerge for us.  Furthermore, since we cannot tolerate the encroachment or appearance of 'fours' or 'sixes', which would corrupt our reality, it is in our best interest to do anything in our power to preserve and propagate the 'all fives.'  Thus, not only does (localized, temporary) meaning emerge from nothing (the primordial vacuum made of pure Paradox), but so does purpose.

Here's where I suggest a few extensions to Huxley's statement, quoted above.  If our goal is just to survive, we need to build a bulkhead around our island to make sure it doesn't erode.  The battering waves on the ocean of Chaos are always trying to reclaim the land.  If our goal is to thrive and improve our life for ourselves and future generations, then it makes sense to follow Huxley's advice to try to claim new territory.

But here's something far more visionary: We ought to be learning to swim.

The ocean of inexplicability is the ultimate source of everything we know.  Logic isn't always the best tool to make progress there.  It's a place where open-hearted patience, humility, and, yes, possibly even rote faith in the experience of those who have swum before, can avail us.  Sacred traditions/knowledge may ultimately be decoded by reductionist Western thinking; but waiting for that 'aha' moment is like standing on the shoreline of the Islet studying the waves.  Do not be afraid of the water.  Embrace the 'fours' and 'sixes'.  As Bruce Lee once said, “If you want to learn to swim, jump into the water.  On dry land no frame of mind is ever going to help you.”

Why seek to swim this ocean of the unexplained?  The human psyche craves it.  Our restless curiosity drives us to endlessly probe such mysteries.  We do not exist on reason alone.  If we immerse ourselves in the Chaos and learn something of the ways of the battering waves, we may better preserve our shores.

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"Paradox - The Essence of the Universe"
This is the first trucker cap I ever owned, embroidered by hand with my long-standing message back in the early 1970's.  This was a time when these caps were just beginning to get popular as every-day headwear (if those links go bad, I've saved screen shots and will post).

 

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In a series of supplementary posts, I've taken some dives into the enigmatic waters.  Below are links to discussion of specific aspects of the philosophical and physical 'truths' that I come back to report from my outpost on the wind-swept shore of a rocky promontory that juts far out into the Sea of Paradox.

1.  Just as our coherent, seemingly rock-solid reality emerges naturally from the Chaos, so does the abstract concept of morality, and all its basic tenets, as espoused by the great messengers such as Jesus and Buddha.  I've devoted a separate exploration of this subject here—Morality, as it emerges even in an uncaring universe.

2.  For a discussion of the most important physical process that I believe led to our particular (seemingly exquisitely fine-tuned) 'tumor in the belly of the Chaos'— 'Creation' as a scientifically studied physical process, which is almost surely more nuanced than the simple picture that physicists currently accept (which says that somehow our universe originated directly from the [spontaneous?] expansion of an unbelievably hot and absurdly tiny thing [the 'Big Bang'])—see the Universe Replication Cosmology post and its more flamboyant companion, the Firestorm in the Wilderness post.

3. More on 'How to make a universe', inspired by the 19 March 2025 release of new Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument results—analysis of millions of galaxies—which begins to suggest that Dark Energy is not constant, but decreasing with time.  The outside-the-box hypothesis that I propose solves four of the big mysteries in quantum physics and cosmology—it explains the 'Spooky Action at a Distance' demonstrated to be real by 2022 Nobel Prize winning Bell Test experiments.  It resolves the 'worst prediction in all of physics'—the 10-to-the-120th-power difference between the calculated vacuum energy density from quantum mechanics and the observed Cosmological Constant (the strength of Dark Energy).  It points to a way to explain the 'Measurement Problem' so famously popularized by the 'Schrödinger’s Cat' thought experiment—how the fuzzy probability of a quantum field state in which things have no definite location seems to 'magically' transform into a real physical state when a measurement is made.  And it explains why the (badly named) 'God Particle'—the Higgs Boson, has such a small mass—a mystery that physicists call the 'Hierarchy Problem'.

4.  Where do we stand, as a species, and where are we going?  How can we assure the survival of this grand experiment that is our modern technology-based civilization.  I discuss the big picture in a post called "Colonizing Space: Utopia or Bust"

5.  The deepest dive I've taken into that realm of the unknown is in the form of my 8500-word 'Epitaph,', which I keep regularly updated.  Its main purpose is to introduce and explore the dynamic currents that underpin a healthy existence.  It involves the always thrilling knife-edge tension between knowledge and hypothesis that science lives on, the daily battle for balance between control and chaos that rules a well-lived personal life, the great cosmic balance between the natural forces of our observed universe (Huxley's Islet) and the turbulent Vacuum that forever tries to destroy it, etc.  I call this always-in-motion process "The Great Stream" and the post is an 'out-there' visionary discussion of literally Everything, starting with the origin of our particular universe as a Vacuum fluctuation, a step-by-step sketch of its early development that takes its cues from what little physicists have been able to claim understanding of, and how that 'becoming' process fits into a MUCH bigger and broader picture, including an exploration of humanity's potential active role in shaping the universe.  See The Great Stream post.

6.  And for a better understanding of the deepest, most fundamental instruction book that we have available to us to guide us toward achieving that balance within our chaotic community of living things, see the Nature's Code post.

7.  Modern understanding (if you can call it that) of Quantum mechanics is just now (2025) coming to its 100th birthday, with the development of Matrix Mechanics and the Schrödinger equation.  The math is deep stuff, and a consensus on its physical interpretation has eluded scientists.  Using big-P Paradox as the starting point, however, the understanding falls into place.  I've boiled it down to seventeen words, introduced in these two posts (which are mostly just quick videos):  Quantum Mechanics in a Nutshell, Part 1, and Parts 2 and 3.

8.  For a good, pretty thorough examination of what the world's greatest thinkers from the late 20th and early 21st century have to say about the big picture (though with some unfortunate bias and extraneous content—especially where it comes to Western thought and, worse, Judeo-Christian Theology and even some occasional paranormal woo) the Closer to Truth PBS broadcast series (this link is to my review) is a good place for the layman to delve in.  The 'Cosmos' content is of greatest relevance here, but the other content provides a grounding in a wider range of thinking.

9.  Finally, with the help of Sue Monk Kidd, in my post entitled 'Feminism and the Paradox of Free Will', I summarize my thoughts about the vital role that each of us as individuals have in this grand enterprise that we call Reality.

My bottom line for now (version of 6 April 2025, reaffirmed 1 June 2025):  

There is no “bedrock”.  Our arc (“Ark”) of Reality developed through chance interactions in a froth of timeless, dimensionless, incoherent Chaos (‘Big P’ Paradox). Within it, each individual contributes, as the Venerable Communities shape the course—a collective “We” freely constructing and curating our World’s meaning: the Great Stream of existence.

May we all ...