Humanity and the Breaking of Physics

When thinking of humanity and discussing what makes us unique, people often speak of our thumbs, walking upright, or our ability to use tools. Yet, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Many animals show these traits to varying degrees, and they certainly haven’t evolved societies as we have. They haven’t conquered their very planet and rebuilt it to suit their needs.

You might then think this makes the differentiating factor our brains. Is it that we are just smarter than any other creature? This may sound like a more solid argument. After all, we know of no other creature that is as remotely intelligent as we are. But what would we actually be if we were simply more intelligent than other creatures? Really good calculators?

This is one thing that makes this C+ event unique from the others that came before it. Humanity is the first C+ event that can no longer be measured by solely physical means. That is to say, while previous epochs were clearly caused by Q4P, the results of the C+ events could still be measured by physics.

To put this more simply, let’s consider a star. The science that caused fusion to occur was a result of the SuperFormula, but the result was something physics could adequately describe. A 118

big ball of hydrogen compressing on itself to trigger nuclear fusion really can fully describe what a star is.

This is not the case with humans. We are certainly supremely complex creatures, but what we are physically could be argued as maybe the least important part of us. We have morals, beliefs, we love and laugh, and we build machines of our own imaginings that can carry us from this planet into the stars.

So, humanity is where the physical sciences start to pretty much fall apart when describing the universe. It can’t adequately describe us. A scientist would step forward here and argue that morality and emotion aren’t real things, just thoughts. But, saying this makes no reasonable sense.

A common part of science is something called a “causal relationship”. A causal relationship is just a fancy way of saying that two events are related to one another, and that one event caused the other. This is as simple as saying if I drop a shoe, it will hit the floor. The first event is me releasing the shoe, the result is the second event – it hitting the floor.

This is all physics so far – I physically did something and that caused another event to physically happen. What happens if we put, say, human emotion or morality into this. Say I see someone on the street begging for change for food. To a physicist, my sense of morality or emotion is not a physical 119

thing. But what if I buy that person a meal because I sympathize with their plight? What is the causal event that made food get purchased for this person? In this case, it was something physics claims is not a part of the physical universe. Yet how does something not real cause a physical thing to occur?

This is the conundrum of trying to use physical science to explain humanity and its place in the universe. Humanity’s complexity defies simple physical description. In the universe, the SuperFormula has finally created something too complex for all of science to fully explain. We can see the evidence of this greater complexity in the physical effect it has in the universe, so it is definitely there. To find these elusive policies, we must now rely on metaphysics, a much bigger umbrella of knowledge and philosophy to deal with this much more complicated universe.

We’ll cover things which humanity has introduced to the universe as a whole.

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