The Science of Individual Existence

It is the cornerstone of my and Schopenhauer's philosophy that causality is what allows us to understand and explain reality. And that causality is ultimately responsible for the separation of ourselves from the world and a source of perpetual strife. The a priori intuitions of space and time, as borrowed from Kant, are not absolute features of the universe but are the result of a sort of division of the world into subject and object. In conjunction with experience these intuitions form our notions of cause and effect; something precedes something else spatially in succession of time and occupies different space during the same time. And yet the world is fundamentally will, known to us through the internal sense of time.

If this all holds up, why exactly is the world like this? Unfortunately this question itself involves causal thinking, and it is a mistake to apply such thinking to existence itself. The division of subject and object, space and time, and cause and effect are the conditions for knowledge as such. Without them there isnt really philosophy at all.

But perhaps one can look to science, the study of material causality, to find out what about this particular universe is responsible for our experience of events. What gives order to our understand of the universe.

The scientific reason for why we exist as individuals and understand the world causally is because particles in this universe have rest mass, which means they cannot go faster than the speed of light.

Remember Einstein's famous equation E=MC^2? Mass energy equivalence means that the inertia of a body depends on its energy content (the title of Einstein's 1905 paper). An object in motion gaining kinetic energy also gains mass. Most of the mass of our atoms is energy, not the rest mass of the quarks. Nevertheless, these particles have rest mass (now just called mass).

Because these particles have rest mass, and photons do not, it takes energy to overcome that inertia. Meaning that it would take an infinite amount of energy to go the speed of light.

The first postulate of special relativity is that the laws of physics are the same for all observers. The reason for the strange effects when objects are accelerating at very fast speeds is precisely because they must obey the "cosmic speed limit". In accordance with that limit, time from their frame of reference must be slower as they approach the speed of light.

Photons do not have rest mass, and so everything for them happens in an instant. There isn't a before and after. There are only events. This is a fundamental constant of the universe. If anything went past the speed of light, there wouldn't be anything to "bump" into. Rather, what would probably happen is backwards time travel. Effects would become causes, thus destroying any notion of causality. Knowledge would be impossible.

Since particles have rest mass, they cannot go the speed of light because that would take an infinite amount of energy to overcome that "inherent" resistance. And so events occur causally; causes precede effects. It is as if things are weighed down. Some things have more mass than others and bend space, which is responsible for Gravity according to general relativity. Mass is equivalent to energy, and so bends space. This warping of space also affects time. But if it wasn't for the "inherent" mass of some particles, there wouldn't be any matter.

What all this means is that the reason why we experience the world as we do, as individuals separate from others in space and time greater and lesser than each other, is because of the rest mass of particles which prevent them from going the speed of light where events would be instantaneous. Memories wouldn't form identity as there would be no meaningful order of things that would inherently make more sense than any other.

A current explanation for why particles have mass is the proposed Higgs field, but that's beyond the purpose of this post. Take Brian Greene's summary to help think about it.

Mass is the resistance an object offers to having its speed changed. You take a baseball. When you throw it, your arm feels resistance. A shotput, you feel that resistance. The same way for particles. Where does the resistance come from? And the theory was put forward that perhaps space was filled with an invisible "stuff," an invisible molasses-like "stuff," and when the particles try to move through the molasses, they feel a resistance, a stickiness. It's that stickiness which is where their mass comes from.... That creates the mass....

... it's an elusive invisible stuff. You don't see it. You have to find some way to access it. And the proposal, which now seems to bear fruit, is if you slam protons together, other particles, at very, very high speeds, which is what happens at the Large Hadron Collider... you slam the particles together at very high speeds, you can sometimes jiggle the molasses and sometimes flick out a little speck of the molasses, which would be a Higgs particle. So people have looked for that little speck of a particle and now it looks like it's been found.

Also watch this video, though PBS Spacetime can be hard to follow for novices.

Summed up: for some reason fundamental particles of the universe which are responsible for the fundamental forces of the universe have rest mass. The philosophy that holds that space, time, and causality are only conscious representations of phenomena holds on its own. But it's always interesting to find intersections with current physical theories.

What is interesting to think about is that everything physical has sort of stored energy in it. And as we've seen with atomic bombs and reactors, there is a lot of energy in even the smallest things. Even if not quite the level of an atomic explosion. In our lives, ponder what could be done if we could harness this immense energy. What we could accomplish.