Constellations

When I think of prehistoric humans, and how much time they spent studying the sky, I remember what makes me love our species again. Because what they studied was only a random arrangement of lights moving regularly against a black background, but what we've seen there has included both metaphors for human existence and the very dimensions of our physical reality. We are capable of so much with so little because of the way we use patterns to think, the way we build and arrange them in our minds to predict the paths of light against the darkness.

We fall astray, however, when we forget that these patterns are tools of the mind, and instead come to believe that we have learned the "true" pattern to reality, that we have mastered its meaning. For whatever we may come to know in the course of our lives, all knowledge is created by humans, and therefore cut down to dimensions tolerable for a human mind; there is no good reason, however, to imagine that a truly objective reality should be comprehensible to us.

Still, the search will be forever carried on, as our people will never be short of minds incapable of imagining their own limits.

A growth of universes

Facts are much stranger than mysteries, much harder to explain as the province of a growth on a rock in an ocean of nothing. I've always wondered at the ease with which humans, frail and fleeting as we are, assume ourselves capable of knowing Anything.

But I think now I understand how humans in particular, framed as a race of storytellers, should be so prone to arrogance. Because we really Do understand the stories we make, really Do know everything there is to know about the relationships we imagine between things, and because most of our lives are spent moving each other around with these stories, most of our time is spent knowing everything there is to know about our subjects of interest.

Thus do we approach the natural world in the way we typically do each other: we offer it stories, see how it likes them, and wait for it to respond in kind. These are the ridiculous and nonsensical questions of meaning and purpose we'll never solve, being a demand for opinions from inert matter, but because we think in stories most of the time it's really hard to imagine an open-ended reality without beginnings, endings, and an established back-story.