Do I Have to Understand the Universe Before I Can Live in It?

On Philip K. Dick, runaway explanations, and the peculiar freedom of going outside

There is a moment in Philip K. Dick’s VALIS when Horselover Fat entertains the possibility that the creator of the universe is insane.

It’s a wonderfully disturbing proposition. What if the universe isn’t merely indifferent to our existence? What if the apparent disorder of things isn’t the consequence of some mysterious but ultimately rational process? What if the whole damn business is the product of a deranged mind?

Suddenly, everything makes a certain terrible sense.

The cruelty. The contradictions. The strange mixture of beauty and horror. The fact that a universe capable of producing Bach, butterflies, and the smell of fresh coffee can also produce genocide, parasites, and those little plastic packets that refuse to tear open along the dotted line.

Perhaps the creator is mad.

There. Explained.

Except, of course, nothing has been explained. We’ve simply moved the mystery one level further away and given it a personality disorder.

And yet, I understand the attraction.

In fact, I understand it rather too well.

I’ve spent a considerable portion of my life chasing explanations. Not necessarily scientific explanations, although I’ve certainly wandered down those corridors, but philosophical ones. Existential ones. The great, sprawling questions that begin innocently enough and then take possession of an entire afternoon.

Who am I? What is consciousness? What is reality? Why is there something rather than nothing? What does it mean to live a good life? Are we genuinely free, or merely acting out a script written by forces we barely understand?

And lately, with artificial intelligence entering the picture, another question has occupied my mind: what are we becoming?

One question opens into another, which opens into another, until the whole thing begins to resemble a house in which every room has three more doors.

I love that house.

I could spend the rest of my life wandering through it.

Which raises a slightly uncomfortable question.

Am I exploring the house, or am I hiding in it?

When an idea begins thinking you

In Stories With Doors In Them, I found myself circling a question that has become increasingly important to me: at what point does an idea begin thinking you?

We generally imagine ideas as things we possess. We have thoughts, entertain theories, adopt philosophical positions. The thinker is in charge, and the ideas are the furniture of the mind, available to be rearranged as circumstances require.

But anyone who has spent enough time with a compelling idea knows this isn’t always how it works.

Sometimes the idea takes over.

It begins organising your perceptions. It decides which details are significant and which can be ignored. It introduces you to other ideas that support its particular version of the world. It becomes a lens through which everything must pass before it can acquire meaning.

Eventually, you might find yourself living inside an explanation rather than experiencing the world the explanation was supposed to illuminate.

Horselover Fat is a fascinating companion for this sort of inquiry because he cannot leave the universe alone.

Everything is potentially significant. Every coincidence might be a message. Every anomaly might be evidence of another reality pressing against this one. He constructs elaborate explanatory systems, but whenever a contradiction appears, the system simply grows to accommodate it.

Nothing escapes.

Even the possibility that the creator is insane becomes another way of preserving the assumption that the universe must ultimately be explicable.

And perhaps that’s the real trap.

Not believing something strange about reality, but reaching the point where absolutely anything reality does can be made to confirm what you already believe.

Once an explanation can account for everything, including its own apparent failure, it’s difficult to imagine what could persuade you to abandon it.

The house has no exits.

Only more rooms.

Mudtown Lion demands another investigation

I can imagine Mudtown Lion sitting across from me in a café, surrounded by his usual collection of dog-eared notebooks, empty cups, and loose sheets covered in speculative diagrams.

He’s been thinking about the possibility that consciousness is not something generated by individual brains but something more fundamental, something in which individual minds participate.

He’s halfway through constructing a theory involving Jung’s collective unconscious, quantum physics, and a passage he vaguely remembers reading in a book about Gnosticism.

He’s also convinced that the woman at the next table, who has just mentioned a white rabbit, has somehow confirmed an observation he made yesterday.

“Coincidence?” he asks.

“Probably.”

“That’s what they want you to think.”

“Who’s they?”

“Excellent question.”

He opens another notebook.

I look at my watch.

The afternoon is slipping away. Outside the café window, people are going about their lives, apparently unconcerned with the metaphysical foundations of existence. A woman is struggling to fold a pushchair. Two teenagers are laughing at something on a phone. A man has stopped in the middle of the pavement to stare at a pigeon as if the bird has just said something personally offensive.

The world is happening.

Meanwhile, Mudtown Lion is explaining why we cannot possibly go outside until we’ve established whether the pigeon exists independently of the observer.

“Suppose,” I say, “we just go for a walk.”

“Without resolving the nature of reality?”

“Yes.”

“Reckless.”

“Possibly.”

He considers this.

“Can I bring my notebook?”

Of course he can bring his notebook.

I’m not proposing that we abandon inquiry. That would be absurd, and frankly, rather boring. Curiosity is one of the great pleasures of being alive. I have no desire to become someone who walks past a strange door without wondering what’s behind it.

But I am beginning to wonder whether I’ve sometimes confused the act of questioning life with the act of living it.

And whether the search for understanding has occasionally become a respectable way of postponing experience.

The waiting room of the self

For years, I’ve been fascinated by the question of identity.

Who am I, really?

It’s an innocent enough question, or so it seems.

But hidden inside it is a peculiar assumption: that somewhere beneath the accumulated habits, memories, roles, ambitions, disappointments, and stories there exists a definitive self waiting to be discovered.

Find that self, and everything else will fall into place.

You’ll know what to do with your life. You’ll understand your purpose. You’ll finally have the confidence to act because you’ll be acting in accordance with your true nature.

It’s a compelling proposition.

It’s also a marvellous way to spend several decades not quite beginning.

Because the self, inconveniently, keeps moving.

Every experience changes the person who is supposedly conducting the investigation. Every new discovery alters the terms of the question. You start out looking for the person you really are and end up examining the person you’ve become as a consequence of looking.

It’s rather like trying to photograph a river and then insisting that the photograph must reveal what the river truly is.

On 20 October, something in this lifelong inquiry shifted.

Not dramatically. There were no divine revelations, no pink beams of information, no cosmic messages delivered through the radio.

Just a recognition that felt almost embarrassingly simple.

I no longer need to find myself before I can get on with living.

More than that, I don’t necessarily need to find a fixed self at all.

There is a world out there.

There are streets I haven’t walked, books I haven’t read, conversations I haven’t had, places I haven’t seen, things I haven’t tried, and experiences I don’t yet possess the imagination to anticipate.

Why should I postpone any of that until I’ve resolved the question of who is doing the experiencing?

Perhaps identity is not something I must establish before setting off.

Perhaps it’s something that happens along the way.

Perhaps I can dispense with the idea of arriving at myself and simply get on with being alive.

The seductive dignity of preparation

Of course, it’s not only the search for identity that can become a form of postponement.

We humans have a remarkable capacity for turning preparation into a permanent occupation.

We research the places we want to visit until we’ve virtually exhausted them before leaving the house. We read books about writing instead of writing. We investigate meditation so thoroughly that we never quite find the time to sit quietly and meditate.

We plan the conditions under which we’ll finally begin living the lives we want to live.

And because preparation resembles purposeful activity, it can be difficult to recognise when we’ve stopped moving.

I know this territory.

There is something deeply satisfying about constructing a framework. A philosophy of life. A personal operating system. A theory that connects the scattered pieces of experience into something coherent.

It’s an intellectual pleasure, certainly, but it offers something else.

Protection.

As long as I’m developing my understanding, I can tell myself I’m making progress. As long as I’m refining the philosophy, I don’t have to test it against the unpredictable mess of actual life.

The map keeps improving.

The journey keeps getting postponed.

There is also the uncomfortable possibility that some questions are attractive precisely because they cannot be answered.

An unanswerable question can sustain an identity indefinitely.

I can be the seeker, the investigator, the philosopher standing at the threshold of some great revelation.

The search itself becomes the story of my life.

And abandoning the search, even temporarily, threatens that story.

Who am I if I’m no longer trying to discover who I am?

Well, perhaps I’m simply the bloke who has finished his coffee and decided to go for a walk.

It doesn’t sound particularly grand.

But it has possibilities.

Questions that open doors, questions that build walls

I don’t want to suggest that philosophical inquiry is somehow opposed to living. For me, the two have always been intimately connected.

An idea can transform an ordinary afternoon.

A passage in a book can alter how I see a familiar street. A conversation can make something I’ve encountered a thousand times suddenly appear strange and wonderful. A question can loosen assumptions I didn’t even know I was carrying.

This is one of the reasons I love writing in dialogue, both with other people and with artificial intelligence.

The right conversation doesn’t necessarily provide an answer. Sometimes it produces a better question, or introduces an unexpected connection, or reveals that the premises of the original inquiry were wrong.

It enlarges the territory.

And that’s what I want from philosophy.

Not a final explanation that closes the case, but a way of paying closer attention to the extraordinary business of being here.

So perhaps the distinction isn’t between questioning and living.

Perhaps it’s between questions that return me to the world and questions that withdraw me from it.

A question that makes me more curious about the people I encounter, more attentive to my surroundings, more willing to experiment with how I live—that’s a question worth following.

A question that demands I resolve one more theoretical difficulty before taking the next step may be doing something else.

It may be keeping me safely inside the house.

But even that distinction is slippery.

Sometimes withdrawal is necessary. Solitude, contemplation, and prolonged inquiry have their own value. Not every thought must generate an action. Not every philosophical exploration needs to produce a practical result.

I don’t want to replace the tyranny of explanation with the tyranny of experience.

There should still be room for an afternoon spent doing nothing but following a thought into increasingly bizarre territory.

Montaigne understood this. In his essay On Idleness, he described his mind as a runaway horse, racing down a hundred roads and producing strange chimeras without order or purpose.

I recognise that horse.

I’ve ridden it for most of my life.

I’m not proposing that we put it in a stable.

Only that occasionally we might ride it somewhere.

The danger of the new revelation

There is, however, another trap waiting here.

Mudtown Lion would be the first to point it out.

“You’re doing it again,” he says.

“Doing what?”

“Constructing a theory.”

“I’m writing an essay.”

“Precisely. You’ve discovered that searching for yourself was preventing you from living, and now you’re constructing an elaborate philosophical justification for having stopped searching.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing. Unless your new explanation becomes as difficult to question as the old one.”

Annoyingly, he has a point.

The declaration I’ve stopped searching has all the ingredients of another seductive story.

It offers resolution. It gives the previous decades a narrative shape. It turns uncertainty into wisdom and allows me to imagine that I’ve finally crossed some invisible threshold.

Before, I was searching.

Now, I am living.

There is a pleasing symmetry to it.

Perhaps too pleasing.

Life rarely arranges itself into such tidy chapters.

Tomorrow I may wake up questioning everything again. Next week I may encounter an idea that sends me back into the labyrinth. I might discover that what felt like liberation was simply a temporary change in mood, or that the search itself has transformed rather than ended.

I don’t want to become the man who insists he has transcended the need to understand himself.

That sounds suspiciously like another identity to maintain.

And maintaining an identity can become exhausting work, especially when the identity is that of someone who has supposedly stopped worrying about identity.

Perhaps the more useful recognition is not I’ve stopped searching, but I no longer have to wait for the search to end.

That’s a smaller claim.

A less heroic one.

It doesn’t require me to renounce anything. I can continue exploring the mysteries of consciousness, identity, and reality. I can wander through Philip K. Dick’s metaphysical conspiracies and follow Mudtown Lion into whatever absurd theory he’s developing this week.

I can entertain the possibility that the universe is a simulation, that consciousness is fundamental, that reality is stranger than anything our current theories can accommodate.

I can even wonder whether the creator is insane.

But none of these investigations requires me to put my life on hold.

The question can remain open.

And so can the door.

An unfinished universe

There’s a peculiar comfort in admitting that I may never understand the universe.

Not because understanding is impossible, necessarily, but because it may not be something that can ever be completed.

Every answer produces new questions. Every discovery opens another territory. Every framework reveals something while concealing something else.

Perhaps the universe is not a puzzle with a final piece.

Perhaps it’s more like a landscape.

You can explore it endlessly without exhausting its possibilities. You can learn its contours, recognise familiar landmarks, develop a deeper appreciation of its patterns and peculiarities, and still encounter something entirely unexpected around the next bend.

You don’t need a theory of the entire landscape before you can enjoy walking through it.

And you don’t have to stop thinking about the landscape while you walk.

This, I suspect, is closer to the sort of philosophical life I want to practise.

Not philosophy as the construction of an impregnable explanatory system, but philosophy as a form of companionship with experience.

A way of remaining curious without demanding certainty.

A willingness to be surprised.

A habit of noticing.

An openness to the possibility that my current understanding, however persuasive, might be hilariously wrong.

I want to read the books, follow the ideas, entertain the wild hypotheses, and conduct the occasional late-night investigation into the metaphysical architecture of existence.

But I also want to walk through unfamiliar towns, sit in cafés, watch strangers going about their lives, listen to music, laugh at absurd things, and follow the peculiar little invitations that an ordinary Tuesday might offer.

I don’t want one life devoted to understanding and another devoted to experience.

I want the two to mingle, interrupt, and occasionally contradict each other.

And when an idea becomes so absorbing that I begin to forget the world outside it, perhaps I need someone like Mudtown Lion to take it to its logical extreme until we both start laughing.

Or perhaps I need to do the simplest thing imaginable.

Close the notebook.

Finish the coffee.

Go outside.

---

Mudtown Lion is waiting by the door.

He’s holding a notebook under one arm and studying a peculiar formation of clouds.

“I’ve been thinking,” he says.

“Of course you have.”

“What if the universe doesn’t want to be understood?”

I look at him.

“Interesting question.”

“Or what if understanding is the universe’s way of experiencing itself?”

“Also interesting.”

“Or what if—”

“We’re going for a walk.”

He sighs, puts the notebook in his pocket, and follows me into the street.

We haven’t gone fifty yards before he stops.

“Did you notice that pigeon?”

I turn around.

And, against my better judgement, I look.