Events and Processes
What is That About?

by Lloyd Harrison Whitling

Colligion views the entirety of existence as events in processes, in a hierarchy that builds to the highest levels accessible to our senses. This is the opposite direction to an understanding of our Universe from that which the Arabic and other religions take, that proposes an imaginary Supernatural in which exist denizens with magical powers. That description of existence is untenable because it describes a flow of events from the super-complex toward the smallest particles, an absurdity at best that requires belief that a super-complex system could exist before anything else. Science has uncovered no hint of an existent supernatural and, in spite of religion's claims to the contrary, each new discovery increases doubt about it.

Let us be careful with our words, and pay attention to the nuances of meaning so we can construct a carefully developed picture in our minds, that we can share with others. One of the wary word sets is related to 'exists'. Material exists, and material things have an existence. Stars exist. We exist. Aside from abstract items such as a system of numbers, values (rates, worth), morality, existence tends to concreteness, ¹that which directly accesses our senses and causes us to acknowledge it as there. Different from existence in such a way that existence responds to it, is that which 'persists'. Time persists, redness persists, light and darkness persist: those are conditions associated with existence. The difference is subtle, but awareness of it causes us to better understand some things.

Three conditions persist whether or not material is present. Those are time, space, and distance. Distance is measurable (or, describable) relative to time or space. We (humans) understand time as a linear, single-dimensional phenomenon whose entire distance is infinity. We typically understand space as a "globe" whose volume is also infinity, in spite of our attempts to enclose it (In what?), only a tiny portion of which we will ever get to experience.

Properly understood and envisioned, those descriptions must not in any way conflict with theories such as quantum, relativity, string, etc., in any way that they do not already conflict with each other, and especially in any way established scientific theories can be demonstrated and verified as factual. Those descriptions must be appropriately addressed and corrected where conflicts are found with established scientific theories, and refined and corrected in step with the advancement of science. Colligion must never be seen or described as an immutable philosophy, as that will lead to grave and uncorrectable errors.

The process of accretion by which material came into existence has been well described in Evolution, the purchase of which I recommend (Of course. I wrote it! I await your comments and arguments.) in its very low-priced eBook version. I shall not rewrite all that here.

The process of material development is generally recognized to be evolution and is a process of accretion (additive growth) which incorporates time, space, and distance into ongoing events that build upon each other in a progressive, interactive cause and effects manner wherein the large and complicated develops out of the small and simplified. Colligion is a mental process known as 'science' wherein humans strive to understand that, gather whatever facts time and effort will allow us to discover, so that hypotheses can be assembled, developed, tested and verified. Theories accrete from that process the same as existence accretes out of the process of evolution.

Evolution introduces emergence as an interactive part of accretion, wherein seemingly anomalous features called mutations appear as generations of any material or species arrive with the ²passing of time. In life, mutations produce adaptive changes that either pass or fail for the circumstances in which they appear. At the very lowest levels of the hierarchical structure, the development of complex materials could be considered as also being mutations. The hydrogen atom, for example, is unstable with only one electron and one proton, and will pair up with another hydrogen atom to gain stability. We could describe helium as a mutation of that, since it already owns two electrons and is stable on its own. Because hydrogen is unstable, it will combine with oxygen to form water and so, at the very lowest levels of atomic complexity we already have found something accessible to our senses of tangible existence, fire and water.

If helium can be allowed to parade as a mutation within the atoms family, the same must be true all the way up the atom chart to the most complex. If so, then the electrons, protons, neutrons are a metaphor for the genetic DNA ladder that serves to define the various forms of life. Unlike the gods, evolution does not work in strange and mysterious ways, but in ways that lend themselves to study and to human understanding.

All of what we have been attempting here is to describe the processes basic to existence. Each process results from the events that participate within it, in ways that nature duplicates time and again in myriad ways to build the worlds that make up the Universe. Just as in the process of cooking in a kitchen, variations within natural processes tend to produce variations in the results. Look at the people around you, and very seldom will you find two alike. The same is true of dogs and cats, sheep or rats, let alone rocks or stones or beaks or bones. Processes.

Events occur through time in space: While the cook stirs the batter and warms the range, the blender whirls and the skillet pops and sizzles. Those are the events we see in the overall process, but think about all those of which we take little notice: To produce the sizzle, gas flows through a pipe the where it can combine with oxygen to produce heat and a flame. Convection swirls beneath a pan as a result, and the heat gets transferred to the grease and food within the skillet. Air gets disturbed to make the sound we hear because it forms waves of vibrations that disturb our eardrums. Electrons flow through a system of nerves to our brain, which verifies the message with other information produced by the senses of smell and sight. all that, and more, takes place as events below our immediate level of cognizance to get a process going.

No wonder people like religion:  "A God said a word, and it all fell into place" makes a whole lot easier way to describe an event. Too bad it cannot be true. In real existence, events and their resulting processes are a lot more complex than that, as you have hopefully seen.

Now, think about this: How many volumes of books would it require to describe all the processes and events that add up in hierarchical fashion to produce one human being? Consider trying to describe every event beginning at the inception of the universe, about most of which we cannot ever directly know.

Go to Colligion

1. Rather than a truism, this statement covers only that which we can directly observe in our macro realm. Photons, for example, have zero mass and can only be indirectly observed. Strings have only a hypothetical existence, and yet can be described and demonstrated by mathematical processes.    [  Return ]

2. "the passing of time" is a metaphor that incorporates human perceptions according to our picture of how time functions as a sequential series of events. It has no bearing on the actual process beyond that.       [  Return ]

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"To deny a right to the experience of pleasure is immoral unless that denial can be justified by a valid presentation of how pain will result from that experience in an amount that would render the expected pleasure regrettable; or, if it can be shown that pain will be induced in others innocent of any involvement. The role of science in moral issues should be to test that, predict that, and find harmless ways to demonstrate that."

— L. H. Whitling in the eBook, Secular Morality —