mostly nothing

Matter is mostly nothing. Did you know that? Subatomic physics has from the beginning stated that most of the area in an atom is vacuum. Apart from its nucleus and electrons, which are both insignificantly small, an atom is really nothing at all. This state of things persisted for some time, but then we started to discover that the electrons aren’t really there, they aren’t really anywhere – more to the point, they are kind of everywhere until such time as you observe them to be in one place. It’s more of a probability shell than an actual object. Not too long after, the nucleus, once thought to be this reliable, massively dense centre of an atom, was discovered to wink in and out of existence from time to time, in its own sort of probability dance.

Most of what is… is not.

To further confound, nothing ever really truly touches anything else. An electron never touches its nucleus and an atom most certainly never touches another atom. There are always gravimetric or electrical or magnetic forces at work. What we perceive as touch is actually the sensation of non-touch – the sort of vibrating resistance of the Other. Thankfully this is one of the simpler ideas, but even it raises questions over how scattered particles can form a coherent object, or even more amazingly, a biological being.

So far as we can tell, consciousness has no explanation. We can explain brain function… that you use certain lobes and areas for certain tasks, but this is no explanation for why you are aware of thought. What is thought? Does it have volume? Mass? Perhaps thought is electrical impulse. Perhaps not. No one seriously states that consciousness is impossible, as is clearly not the case, but this doesn’t change the notion that none of our models or theories show how it should be.

How does thought interact with our body? Does it interact with things that are out of our body? How do our cells, each of them a life on its own, conspire to create us – a massively complicated entity?