Even Stranger Things

My grandkids turned me on to what has become one of my go to TV series: Stranger Things. Central to this evolving story is a dimension of reality known as the Upside Down. 

The idea of a world like ours, but not like ours, yet somehow parallel to ours, pops up all through our species’ Intellectual History: from Homer’s Hades, Parmenides’ Aletheia, and the ‘other worlds’ of Klee, Miro and Kandinsky, to Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Hugh Everett’s Many Worlds,  and Lisa Randels’ Branes.

And why not? It’s a natural response to apparent incongruities in our maps of the phenomenal world. Zeno, for example, proved that real world phenomena are inconsistent with the rules of arithmetic; Godel proved that math and logic can at best provide an incomplete map of reality; and John Bell proved that real events are incompatible with Cartesian spacetime. 

Today, we seek to fill the gaps with concepts like Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Hidden Variables, and the Multiverse; yesterday, we relied on an all pervading aether and/or a cosmological constant. We are infinitely creative when it comes to rationalizing the absurd. Our God of the Gaps is Science!

“Life sucks and then you die.” Translation: Nothing works, at least not perfectly or completely, and then we get to the apparent futility of everything! “All the world’s a stage”, from London’s Globe to the 20th century’s Theatre of the Absurd. We are trapped somewhere between Shakespeare’s Tempest and Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. 

There are so many loose ends: Entropy, Quantum Uncertainty, Black Holes, Big Bang, Heat Death, Non-Locality, and my favorite, Personal Mortality – singularities where there shouldn’t be any. Stephen Hawking’s dream notwithstanding, no one has been able to construct a complete theory that accounts for all these anomalies. 

How come? Could it be that we are approaching the problem from the wrong end of the telescope? Consider this possibility: We are living in the Upside Down! We are the Upside Down!  Our so-called ‘world’ is the chaotic underside of a perfectly ordered reality.

Come again! Ok, think of an oriental rug, not today’s machine made variety, but an old-fashioned magic carpet, hand tied by an army of 5 year olds (sic). At 500 knots per square inch (KPSI), a skilled weaver might expect to complete an area 5” x 5” in one work day.

The obverse side of the carpet is beautiful in its own right. It combines a complex pattern, local symmetries, formal variety, and intense color. For our purposes it is paradigmatic Beauty and, as far as it goes, it suggests values like Truth and Justice as well. (“Beauty is Truth and Truth Beauty” – Keats).

The reverse side, on the other hand, is a complete mess. Think of a teenager’s bedroom and you’ve got the picture. The obverse side exhibits the maximum possible order but the reverse side exhibits the minimum. “It can’t get any worse than this,” literally. We are that reverse side; we live in that chaos. 

It is not epistemologically possible to deduce the details of the obverse pattern from the reverse jumble of knots. However, a detailed study of the spatial arrangement of those knots might be enough to persuade us that the reverse side’s apparent chaos somehow supports, and is necessarily related to, the obverse order: 

Can we deduce that a message from Andromeda is written in some sort of code even though we have no idea how to break that code? 

 If you are among those so persuaded, or if you are at least open to the possibility of being persuaded, then I can introduce you to the faculties of arts and sciences, especially the departments of philosophy and theology. These house our efforts, incomplete at best, to imagine what the obverse pattern might look like based on the arrangement of the knots. Our illuminati are working around the clock to decrypt the  ‘signatures of all things I am here to read’ (Joyce).

How are we doing? On the one hand, these efforts are in large part responsible for what we know today as ‘civilization’; but in certain ways, we’ve made very little progress over the past 2,500 years! Discounting for the moment the possibility of divine revelation or inspiration, our species is flying blind. Fortunately, remarkable folks have gone before us and lit the way for current and future generations. The world, or at least our understanding of it, stands on some giant turtle shells:

Moses, Soloman, and Jesus. John, Paul, (George and Ringo). Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle. Confucious, Lao-Tse, and the Buddha. Augustine, Aquinas and Nicholas of Cusa.  Maimonides,  the Baal Shem Tov, and Martin Buber. Kant, Hegel and Marx. Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. Einstein, Schrodinger, and Heisenberg. Joyce, Pound, and Eliot. Whitehead, Bell, and Penrose. If I missed you (or your favorite), sincerest apologies!

And that’s not to mention the innumerable painters, sculptors, and composers who have suggested new approaches to our conundrum. 

When the Psalmist (Psalm 23) laments that he is “walking in the shadow of the valley of death”, he is describing the Upside Down. As more knots are added, the obverse pattern becomes increasingly detailed while entropy steadily increases on the reverse side. Note: what scientists call entropy, we call Evil. The obverse pattern, in so far as it is beautiful, is what we call Good.

The problem of Evil is a problem of entropy. ur one Christian prayer runs, “Thy Kingdom (obverse) come (reverse), thy will (obverse) be done (reverse), on earth (reverse) as it is in heaven (obverse). Give us this day our daily bread (reverse ≈ obverse) and forgive us our trespasses (reverse) as we forgive (obverse) those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation (reverse) but deliver us (obverse) from evil (entropy). Amen!”

The Lord’s Prayer expresses our faith that God (obverse) is good and our hope that that goodness will somehow redeem our vale of tears (reverse), resolving the apparent contradictions of the phenomenal world in all-encompassing harmony.   

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