What is chance?
A cause without a cause,
the incidence behind all coincidence?
The first creator?
An unbounded origin of possibility
and instigator of change?
The great explainer, needing no explanation
– a coin for the beggar of questions
– the ultimate “God” of the ultimate “gap”?
Mike Laidler
How does being come to be?
Does a physical ‘everything’ evolve
from a bedrock of causality
– being, in effect, the cause of itself
and the character of change
– to the shape of its burgeoning personality?
Let’s call a thought a different form of the physical.
Does that explain the difference?
Call it a physical process
– does it mean the process knows what it is doing
in order to think
– so to identify itself?
Mike Laidler
What concoction of contradictions
makes for a human mind?
A speck of the universe
set to look upon itself
– object into subject,
perceiving so much
yet so little,
with a will to defy
the very instinct for survival.
Silent, though full of noise;
dark, though radiant with light.
Desperately wanting to know
what it wants to know,
knowing it alone knows
that thoughts about its thingness
are not that thingness
– for if they were,
there would be nothing to think about.
Mike Laidler
At first there were the deities
who moved heaven and earth
and filled the firmament
with metaphysical meanings
as affirmed by ‘group think’.
Everything for a purpose
Nature anthropomorphised.
Then came the scientific method
with purpose translated into process
and meaning into verification
all within a material reality
as affirmed by ‘brain think’.
Humanity denuded
Nature atomised.
Mike Laidler
Is everything a fact of science?
Do scientific necessities tell us all there is to know
or is there more to knowledge than science can explain?
Can a “Theory of Everything” be more than a theory
or a scientific understanding amount to an omniscience?
Indeed, is science the only reality making us realistic
or is it really a philosophy that doesn’t recognise itself?
Mike Laidler
Is order the slave of chaos?
Is entropy the sole measure of change?
Or is there evidence
pointing in another direction
– an “open channel”
into dimensions of being
– conscious and meaningful
adumbrating the cosmic dust
with properties
otherwise absent
in the atoms alone?
Mike Laidler
What is this thing called death
– the presence of an absence
knowable by what it isn’t
– a nothingness to carry us away
into some ‘non-place’ of ‘not being’?
Ask yourself, is death as real as life is real?
Are they complete opposites
in a reality that exceeds language
in which life has yet to be explained?
Then how is death comprehensible
as a final return to nothing
when a greater truth has already cancelled nothingness?
Mike Laidler
I think I am thinking
but am “I” superfluous?
Is my brain the actual thinker
– objectively speaking?
Then is “my” brain the real me
– or am I deluding myself?
Yet, isn’t it the thought that counts,
and without a subjective aura
there would be no question to ask
and no answer to find
by looking somewhere else
in ways the brain alone cannot?
Mike Laidler
X = X
It’s obvious.
But obviously not:
X = Y.
So when can we say:
“a difference
makes no difference”?
Can our equations
express a new fact
by elimination
– by reducing the facts
“two into one”
– to restate the reality
and refute the obvious
(that “Y is not X”)
– as when we say:
“mind = brain”?
Mike Laidler
Is the real
more real
as one thing
or many?
And of the many,
is there one cause
more real
than the others?
Is time a factor
made of events
for events
to be and not to be?
Mike Laidler
Philosophy Alive 