Astronaut in a farm field
"Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering — and it’s all over much too soon."
-Woody Allen
Existential thoughts can accompany you while you’re all alone. One can easily switch off the context of time and space, and travel to the very mental fabric that keeps us in motion regardless of the fact that we are clinging on a hanging rock — a tiny spark in the midst of a vast, dark, endless, meaningless cosmos. I watched Annie Hall a few weeks ago, then I went on to look out for movie reviews — a usual ritual when I watch something I really like. I start with Roger Ebert, and then go to youtube and then starts my ride into the rabbit hole. A story junky, trying to connect an endless string of meaningless dots to tie it up and sum up a meta-story. As I went through the monologues, scenes, and interviews of Woody Allen, there’s a constant rumbling of existential musings in all of his work - rendered in a humorous and witty format. He is quite a personality and known for his dark comedy. This scene from the movie “Play it again Sam” has become one of my favorite comedy:
Allan:
That’s quite a lovely Jackson Pollack, isn’t it?
That’s quite a lovely Jackson Pollack, isn’t it?
Museum Girl:
Yes, it is.
Yes, it is.
Allan:
What does it say to you?
What does it say to you?
Museum Girl:
It restates the negativeness of the universe. The hideous lonely emptiness of existence. Nothingness. The predicament of Man forced to live in a barren, Godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror, and degradation, forming a useless bleak straitjacket in a black absurd cosmos.
It restates the negativeness of the universe. The hideous lonely emptiness of existence. Nothingness. The predicament of Man forced to live in a barren, Godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror, and degradation, forming a useless bleak straitjacket in a black absurd cosmos.
Allan:
What are you doing Saturday night?
What are you doing Saturday night?
Museum Girl:
Committing suicide.
Committing suicide.
Allan:
What about Friday night?
What about Friday night?
Another favorite sequence - monologue from the movie “Hannah and her sisters”
Mickey (V.O)
Millions of books written on every conceivable subject by all these great minds, and, and in the end, none of ’em knows anything more about the big questions of life than I do. Ss — I read Socrates. You know, n-n-n — , this guy used to knock off little Greek boys. What the hell’s he got to teach me?
And, and Nietzsche with his, with his Theory of Eternal Recurrence. He said that the life we live, we’re gonna live over and over again the exact same way for eternity. Great. That means I, uh, I’ll have to sit through the Ice Capades again. Tch. It’s not worth it.
The movie next cuts to a sunny day in Central Park. A male jogger, seen through some tree branches, runs by. The camera moves past him, revealing a pondering Mickey walking by the reservoir. He continues to talk over the screen.
Mickey (V.O)
And, and Freud, another great pessimist. Jeez, I was in analysis for years. Nothing happened. My poor analyst got so frustrated. The guy finally put in a salad bar.
Several joggers pass Mickey; he continues to ruminate.
Mickey (V.O)
Oh! Look at all these people jogging…trying to stave off the inevitable decay of the body. Boy (smacking his lips) it’s so sad what people go through with their-their stationary bike and their exercise and their…(glancing at a fat woman jogger in a red sweatsuit who runs by)…Oh! Look at this one! Poor thing. My God, she has to tote all that fat around. Maybe the poets are right. Maybe love is the only answer.
After this episode of drenching my self in the dark humor on nihilism for a few days which I think was quite entertaining, and food for thought. But the laughter and the lightheartedness got dried out, and left me with the quest for existential ‘answer’.
The last time I went on an existential episode was at 22 when I landed my first job, and felt like I hit a stone wall. Too early to call it a quarter-life crisis. My mom used to say that I was always a little ahead in my growth as a child. I started walking way earlier than other kids, but began to talk much later. Maybe life was kicking in early for me to be prepared for what’s to come. Then it slowly faded away, after some reading, some exploration, and a lot of rest and time.
This time when it hit me, it wasn’t as negative as it got me the first time. I didn’t face an existential crisis, but a lot more curiosity to look out for the meaning of existence crept in. From my previous episode, I came to closure as I realized that ‘Existence precedes essence’ and existential thoughts are a mere outcome of the evolution of the brain.
As I got hitched with neuroscience, and began to learn about the brain regions were consciousness sits, and that experiences such NDEs can be triggered in lab conditions, opened up a whole new area to explore, and postpone the run towards finding ultimate answer. Neuroscience became the near term answer that I thought would help me answer the other bigger questions.
"It now seems increasingly likely that the self is not a holistic property of the entire brain; it arises from the activity of specific sets of interlinked brain circuits. But we need to know which circuits are critically involved and what their functions might be. It is the “turning inward” aspect of the self — its recursiveness — that gives it its peculiar paradoxical quality."
- V.S. RAMACHANDRAN, a neuroscientist, is Director, Center for Brain and Cognition, University of California, San Diego
Recently I learned a concept of emergence, a natural phenomenon that is witnessed in all of nature. Emergence is a concept in which a system of simple entities form a larger more intelligent and complex system. A question arises, is consciousness an emergent property of the neurons in our brain?
As I read and ponder over these topics, I turned to science to look for answers. I’m glad I’m in 2019, and quite a number of people have already thought about this and conducted research to produce and preserve so many recorded materials. Understanding the age of the universe, and going across the several fateful events that led to what we call as human life if an amazing trip.
After getting a sense of the eternal length of time, and the scope of endless space in our cosmos. Having reached the microscopic end of quarks that are several billion times smaller — the particles that make up all of the universes, and to have gone to the macroscopic beginnings to the beginning of time and space. One can simply be mesmerized with the big history, and merely live with the awe feeling of being part of the bigger story, and learn some humility. Or one can gaze at the grandeur dance of the stardust, and personify the home planet — earth and cherish reading through the fortunate events that made this a home for life. And breeze through rising of civilizations, and history to where we are today.
This still leaves us with the question? the why ultimatum — Why does the universe exist?
Why does the universe exist?
For this question, we need to turn to reflective physicists.
Here’s a transcription of a talk by Jim Holt:
"We just see a little tiny part of reality that’s described by the laws of quantum field theory, but there are many, many other worlds, parts of reality that are described by vastly different theories that are different from ours in ways we can’t imagine, that are inconceivably exotic. So we have this vastly rich multiverse that encompasses every logical possibility.
We have sheer nothingness on one side, and we have this vision of a reality that encompasses every conceivable world at the other extreme: the fullest possible reality, nothingness, the simplest possible reality. Now, that’s in between these two extremes? There are all kinds of intermediate realities that include some things and leave out others. o one of these intermediate realities is, say, the most mathematically elegant reality, that leaves out the inelegant bits, the ugly asymmetries and so forth.
But what are we leaving out here? There’s also just the crummy, generic realities that aren’t special in any way, that are sort of random. They’re infinitely removed from nothingness, but they fall infinitely short of complete fullness. They’re a mixture of chaos and order, of mathematical elegance and ugliness. So I would describe these realities as an infinite, mediocre, incomplete mess, a generic reality, a kind of cosmic junk shot.
So I would like to propose that the resolution to the mystery of existence is that the reality we exist in is one of these generic realities. Reality has to turn out some way. It can either turn out to be nothing or everything or something in between. So if it has some special feature, like being really elegant or really full or really simple, like nothingness, that would require an explanation. But if it’s just one of these random, generic realities, there’s no further explanation for it.
And indeed, I would say that’s the reality we live in. That’s what science is telling us. At the beginning of the week, we got the exciting information that the theory of inflation, which predicts a big, infinite, messy, arbitrary, pointless reality, it’s like a big frothing champagne coming out of a bottle endlessly, a vast universe, mostly a wasteland with little pockets of charm and order and peace."
Okay, that does answer a lot of the questions about the universe in terms of physics. It does a very good job at explaining why the basic laws of physics occur, and the possibilities of different realities, and tied to strong scientific evidence, which gives us a feeling of some level of certainty or assurance as to this is what happened.
But why?
Here’s the answer to that from Jim Holt:
"Why do I exist? Why do you exist? you know, our existence would seem to be amazingly improbable, because there’s an enormous number of genetically possible humans, if you can compute it by looking at the number of the genes and the number of alleles and so forth, and a back-of-the-envelope calculation will tell you there are about 10 to the 10,000th possible humans, genetically. That’s between a googol and a googolplex. And the number of the actual humans that have existed is 100 billion, maybe 50 billion, an infinitesimal fraction, so all of us, we’ve won this amazing cosmic lottery. We’re here. Okay.
So what kind of reality do we want to live in? Do we want to live in a special reality? Or, what if we were living in the fullest possible reality? Well then our existence would be guaranteed, because every possible thing exists in that reality, but our choices would be meaningless. If I really struggle morally and agonize and I decide to do the right thing, what difference does it make, because there are an infinite number of versions of me also doing the right thing and an infinite number doing the wrong thing? So my choices are meaningless.
So we don’t want to live in that special reality. And as for the special reality of nothingness, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. So I think living in a generic reality that’s mediocre, there are nasty bits and nice bits and we could make the nice bits bigger and the nasty bits smaller and that gives us a kind of purpose in life. The universe is absurd, but we can still construct a purpose, and that’s a pretty good one, and the overall mediocrity of reality kind of resonates nicely with the mediocrity we all feel in the core of our being. And I know you feel it. I know you’re all special, but you’re still kind of secretly mediocre, don’t you think?"
We live in a mediocre reality, and we don’t have the pressure to live up to an elegant universe, or not at all exist in nothingness, or at the multi-branching multi-verse. I guess with the flaws, and foolishness, at an absurd random place in the realm of realities, and to know the fact that this version of existence is infinitely impossible that we are here and now — is a feel-good moment. I would say I’m satisfied with the answers so far, and now that I can go to normal life, and continue to live life as I know it, with a far more appreciation to the little things of every day. Until I’m being haunted by my next question.
Looking forward to the next big endeavor the humans will pursue, travel to Mars with plans to colonize the planet. To improve the chances of our survival, and become a multi-planetary species, as we predict that the earth will die in a billion years, and the sun, and every other star. With the universe ultimately closing down with all of the particles we know to be torn apart to the heat death, black holes evaporating and everything vanishes to a state from where it all started — nothingness.
Today, I’m here, alive, and being what I can, doing what I love. A beating heart, and a burning brain. Living my story at the speed of light, the speed of sound, and the speed of thought. Composed of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and many more — the same ones that make up the stars in the sky. With a little ego — an identity to hold up myself as an artist, an engineer, a hacker, an entrepreneur and a student of life.
So, I got this picture in my head, ‘an astronaut standing in the middle of a farm field’. As I was looking out for reference images, I found this stock image which was quite right, and it actually had ‘Houston’ in the board in his hand. I had changed it to Mars. And I haven’t mixed up and played with oil colors as much I devoured it in this painting. It’s a simple piece, but took me about 4 and a half hours to come to a satisfactory place. As you can see, the colors in this painting are very vibrant, and a little exaggeration of reality. Even the background mountains which are usually less saturated, and blurred are quite colorful. I really didn’t set out the color palette before I started, and just went with the flow. As I was painting the astronaut, I rambled with different shades for the shadows and the highlights. The Right side of his space suit has a bright orange tint, while the other half has a nice turquoise translucent glow, adding up more character to the image. I hope you found this post worthwhile and hope you also check out the time-lapse video below.
