I'm assuming you've never heard the old saw that the more you know, the more you know you don't know.
One way to go about it is to accept what you are striving for is to be a generalist, rather than a specialist.
As I like to put it, there are reasons why the people leading armies are called generals, while specialist is about one rank above private.
Walk out your door, or just open your eyes in the morning and you realize the degrees of detail very quickly go to infinity.
Given the world is overly populated with specialists of every kind, yet so often they are in conflict, like some planetary Tower of Babel, it might be more productive to try to figure out some of the proceses generating so much complexity and find ways to connect and make sense of them. Be a generalist. Though don't go all ADD, or they will medicate you, until your mind fits back into the box.
Observation 1; God was just a way to make people shut up and listen to the boss. Logically a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. The fact we are aware, than the details of which we are aware.
For the ancient "thought leaders," aka, priests and politicians, it was clever manipulation, but several millennia of philosophers should have figured out it's not such a smart idea to conflate ideals, which are aspirational, with the absolute, which is elemental. As people come to assume their aspirations are absolute and everyone not of their cult is a heretic. No live and let live.
Observation 2; Math is descriptive, while physics is explanatory. Map versus territory.
Consider that epicycles were pretty brilliant math and foundational to geometry, because they were effectively and accurately descriptive of our view of the cosmos. Though the crystalline spheres were lousy physics, as explanation. Theoretical physics is currently making the same mistake, as math is being treated as explanatory, rather than descriptive.
For example, as these mobile organisms, we require this sequential process of perception in order to navigate, then as humanity, we've build civilization out of narrative, sharing our experiences. So we think of time as the point of the present, moving past to future. Which physics codifies as measures of duration and correlates with measures of distance.
The reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events come and go.
There is no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
Making "spacetime" the modern equivalent of crystalline spheres.
Energy is "conserved," because it is present. It creates time. As well as temperature, pressure, color, sound. Frequencies and amplitudes. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.
Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature an pressure, but we don't call them the 5th and 6th dimensions of space, because they are only foundational to our emotions, bodily functions and environment, not the sequence of thought.
Energy, as process, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past.
With a wave, the energy is what drives it, while the fluctuations we sense rise and fall.
In a factory, the product goes start to finish, future to past, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product.
As lives go birth to death, while life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old.
Consciousness goes past to future, while perceptions, emotions and thoughts go future to past. With sugests consciousness is a sort of energy. Science has the same problem with energy, as with consciousness, in htat we can only quantify them in terms of the forms they express. So when it is assumed the only reality is what can be observed and measured, it misses half the reality.
It is our digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, while the central nervous system sorts through the patterns precipitating out. Resulting in this mental obsession with form over the dynamics driving it.
Observation 3; Three dimensions are really just the xyz coordinate system. A mapping device, like longitude, latitude and altitude. Descriptive, not explanatory.
If you remove all physical properties from space, it has the non-physical qualities of infinity and equilibrium. Infinity as there is nothing to bound it and equilibrium is implicit to Relativity, as the frame with the fastest clock and longest ruler would be closest to the equilibrium of the vacuum. The unmoving void of absolute zero.
So space is the absolute and the infinite. Zero to infinity.
What fills space is this energy and the forms it manifests. The energy radiates toward infinity, while the forms coalesce towards equilibrium. Both entropic. Resulting in these cosmic convection cycles we refer to as galaxies.
Given we evolved in a thermodynamic environment, it is useful to consider the feedback loops circling through everything, rather than just the linear goals our narrative based culture points us towards. For example, the social energies and desires driving social entities, versus the cultural and civil forms they coalesce into. Aka, liberalism and conservatism. Both thinking they are going somewhere else, rather than just propping up the other.
My brief online course.
Regards,
John Merryman
