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“And he sent forth his Spirit
among the Unknown Arts and fashioned Nature anew.”
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The title quote is from Ovid’s Metamorphoses VIII:188, from the year 8 CE. This massive ancient work is Ovid’s “Song of Everything.” Immanuel Kant produced one too: “A philosophical attempt to
work out a universal history according to a natural plan directed to achieving the
— Ninth Thesis in “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” 1784CE Here is your Comfortable Universe host and author, appearing the way he most likes to be: all bundled up in a comfortable cocoon in the sort of setting where his thinking is often most productive: “Close to the wild heart of Life” as James Joyce put it in his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This is an image of the younger man, though hardly a young man, taken in early January 2012, on a frigid winter day at Tinker Cliffs on the Appalachian Trail in central Virginia. |
This Comfortable Universe project is a journey of discovery for the host and author. I spend my days reading science and philosophy papers, watching videos, thinking and writing on this stuff, following paths that inspiration leads me.
The function of posting the work publicly is critical to the process, even though it is completely ‘ceremonial’ and does not attract the attention of the ‘intended audience’ of working and/or aspiring physicists, cosmologists and philosophers of quantum foundations. Even among that highly specialized group, the intended audience is a small subset of the experts who are conversant with the subjects being discussed here. In addition to having the understanding of the subjects, they would have to have a strong interest in an unusually broad contextual framework of the foundational questions being considered*. Few do. Few even consider this layer of context. They would need to have extraordinarily wide-ranging curiosity but perhaps most importantly, they would require the time and resources to devote thought to subjects that probably could never ‘earn a living’ for them. Few have that luxury.
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* Talking about the context in which we exist necessarily begins with the individual’s personal perspective—the unique “oneness” of the temporary and woefully imperfect minds that each and every one of us is endowed with.
(We can hope to get more general, perhaps usefully, perhaps not, by including the imputed perspective of those around us, and, far more generally, of things that can’t ‘talk’ but can be talked about as experiencing existence. This can include any definable object or entity, right down to the most fundamental particles, and/or even more fundamentally, right down to the presumably inexhaustible variety of [quantum] fields on which objects such as fundamental particles could “come out and play.”)
The argument that argument itself requires a perspective to actualize it (to make it ‘real’ or functional) could imply that ‘mind’ or ‘Spirit’ is actually the central focus of reality. That puts us squarely in the realm of Metaphysics. That’s a field that has acquired a somewhat tainted reputation in our modern times, dominated as these times are by the astounding successes wrought from hard, rigorous, objective analysis; and yet the context of the individual perspective in such analysis is completely and utterly unavoidable. Not one of us has access to anything more. Dreaming of something more objective and universal (such as an observer-independent perspective) is just that—dreaming—and it always will be.
Most philosophers interested in even the biggest picture of “what exists, how and why” (called Ontology) simply gloss over this contextual framework in order to get down to a physicalist agenda, and most physicists themselves couldn’t care less.
But if there is anything in this world that makes fundamental sense, it is the simplicity of an interaction between two entities. Picture the fundamental entity (something abstractly conceived) sitting alone in a void. It has no useful existence until it encounters something else. Only then can time and space acquire meaning. Only then can an observable event occur.
From there, right on up the complexity scale, it is the perspectives on interactions that define meaning, and meaning is the abstract partner that gives context to physical oneness. Without meaning, there’s just nothing to talk about.
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By posting these ‘Songs’ publicly, your host’s brain gets to switch into ‘Theory of Mind’ mode—able to more effectively imagine how the ideas might appear to readers with different levels of understanding and different perspectives. It is kind of like ‘teaching’—trying to effectively communicate—conveying the arguments (or at least the way the author is thinking at the moment) to a generic ‘audience’ or ‘class’. Your host finds that perspective super-helpful as an editing aid.
Also, super-important to my semi-hermit way of life is the pseudo-social interaction involved in this process. The public (meaning, specifically, the audience that the posts are intended to address) becomes my ‘sounding board’. I sense the presence of a generic ‘reader’ who is (ideally) receptive and infinitely patient, non-judgmental, and yet grounded in cultural norms and common sense that help constrain what I write.
I’d love for this ‘audience’ to be real. I’d love it if the ideas were getting someone’s attention …
… actually, NO, I wouldn’t. It would be an unwanted distraction.
As the old saying goes: “Be careful what you wish for!” I prefer that these posts don’t get much attention or notoriety for two reasons. First, there is the non-constructive negativity. Thoughtful critical evaluation is the lifeblood of any quest for new ideas. But too often these days people dismiss ideas that don’t fit their preconceptions and/or their worldview without actually thinking about them. Some instinctively want to push back. Knee-jerk tribalism (polarization) is becoming fashionable. More importantly, even lacking an irrational negative element to the feedback, the phenomenon of ‘social media positive feedback’ can lead to a sense of obligation to an audience, and experience has shown me that that can distract me from the directions I am most curious about and toward directions that ‘address the audience’. Sorry. These posts are not primarily designed to please. They are designed to dig deep—to explore (and then to clear and mark) pathways to new understanding.
“New” might only mean “new to me” for two reasons. First, because I can’t keep up with all the interesting new research papers being published (even experts in a specialization have this problem in today’s information-saturated environment). But second, because the goal is to travel down pathways that have never been explored before, which sometimes means directions that don’t seem productive to working experts—things that could never lead to research funding. I’m not after financial gain here. I’m driven only by curiosity and wonder. It’s blazing new paths through virgin territory that really gets my juices flowing.
The goal is always to be exploring ground that could be part of the true and real landscape experienced by observers who are embedded in our actual universe. But I also extrapolate rather boldly into realms such as ‘FLAT WORLD’ (where multiple universes interact), based on tantalizing real-world clues that science has provided (e.g., the likely existence of the Multiverse). We argue for scenarios that do not violate any known laws—they are within the realm of possibility—so, although they may appear to be fantasies, and exist in censored realms that observers in this universe can never verify, our goal is always to probe the most plausible—the most likely underlying patterns that fit with what we can observe.
Always remember that so much of what seemed like pure fantasy to Ovid and Kant has become today’s every-day reality.
Yes, I do hope the pathways that I’m clearing and marking in these posts will be useful to others in the long-view, such that the ideas eventually find their way (by gradual osmosis) into the mainstream of scientific thinking, even as the body of work of today’s scientific and philosophical thinkers has found its way into the fabric of these posts.
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| Your host, Dr. Pete, as he appears today (2026) |
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