The Metric of Mind

My friend Valmonte linked this fascinating article the other day:

Flashy 'dance' of two monster black holes captured by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope

It led me to a thought which I felt it was urgent to share with you.

First let’s summarize the article: astronomers have been recording incredibly bright flashes from one corner of the sky for the past 120 years. There’s a distant galaxy there with two gigantic black holes at its center. One of them has a mass 150 million times that of the sun. That’s the small one. It’s orbiting the big one, which has a mass 18 billion times that of the sun. These are numbers well beyond the comprehensible, on into the patently ridiculous.

Black holes suck in all kinds of dust and gas and whatnot, which flattens into a rotating plane of crap spiraling toward the black hole. In the case of this duo, the little black hole is not orbiting in the big one’s crap plane. So twice every orbit, it passes through the plane. That sets off the flash. The flash itself is as bright as a trillion or so stars.

Artist’s depiction of the flash resulting from passage of the smaller black hole through the accretion plane of the larger black hole, OJ 287 galaxy. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Because of the insane gravity involved, the orbit of the little black hole is not quite regular. So the timing of the flashes has been unpredictable. But teams of astronomers have worked together for a while now to model this gigantic system. They predicted a four-hour window within which the most recent flash would take place. And they got it right.

Still frame from animation of the orbit of the smaller black hole around its larger black hole companion in the OJ 287 galaxy. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

This is the urgent thought: it is a commonplace by now to acknowledge that Man is puny when measured against the immense scale of the universe. Historical inaccuracies inside, this has been the drift in thought since Galileo demoted Earth from the center of the solar system. We have gradually given up our grandiose estimate of ourselves.

We have given up our location in space. Our Earth is a small planet, orbiting a small star, in one corner of an unremarkable galaxy, in which there are billions of stars likely orbited by trillions of planets. And our galaxy is one of an innumerable multitude, scattered across a vast dim emptiness beyond our ability ever to reach.

We have given up our location in time. We are not the start and end of Being. We emerged one blink ago into a middle-aged universe which had carried on tremendous adventures before we arrived and will not note our passing.

We have given up our location in life. We have fallen from being the crowning achievement of a short and directed Creation to an afterthought in an immense and seemingly unintentional process.

By these metrics, of space, time, and life, we have demonstrated to our satisfaction that we are nothing. But these are not the only metrics available.

Consider the anecdote of the two black holes. Again we confront the raw immensity of nature: in scale and energy, we are vanishingly tiny before its grandeur. And yet, by application of our curiosity, we discover this system. Through ingenuity, we observe it. Through imagination, we picture what we cannot yet observe. And through the power of our reason, we predict what it will do. There is one metric in which we meet and exceed this system, and that is Mind.

The universe is not only stuff and the interactions of stuff. Because we know ourselves, we know indisputably that somehow, the universe encompasses mind as well. And in the invisible and immaterial terrain of mind, we are not less than the greatest of matter. In the metric of mind, the one for which we are uniquely well constructed, our majesty spans the firmament.