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Yes, I’m aware that Jordan B Peterson has a chapter with the same or a similar title, I’ve got the book 12 Rules for Life, and I must admit that when I read that chapter it wasn’t what I was expecting, so this is my own take on petting cats.
The world is not an ideal place for life, just like the rest of the cosmos it’s incredibly hostile to it doing all that it can to rid itself of living things with its weather fronts, earthquakes, droughts and asteroid impacts, the most famous of which put an end to the dinosaurs. The Earth and the cosmos that supports it is incredibly hostile to existence, but “Life Finds a Way” as per the memorable quote uttered by Jeff Goldblum in the movie Jurassic Park.
This might sound pessimistic, but it is nevertheless true that the earth wants to be a sterile world, a dead world like Mars, the laws of physics mandate it, entropy chews away at everything, order gives way to disorder in direct opposition to the syntropy of living things. Entropy is perfect, ever present and relentless, it makes no mistakes, the life processes that oppose it are imperfect, prone to mutation and error, this is why nobody and nothing lives forever, making the material flourishing of man or cat a temporary glitch in the cosmos, one that will soon be forgotten about because the universe has no memory. All it takes is one little mistake and the end of existence is certain for any such creature caught red handed by the laws of physics. The clock of the cosmos runs ever downward and there will come a time when life is impossible not just here on planet Earth, but out there too in the greater cosmos. There is only one universe you may be forgiven for thinking, but where in nature does something only happen once?
This intriguing thought is the last and only comfort we can take from philosophical materialism, the root cause of nihilism. There is mounting evidence that our scant collection of stars, galaxies and superclusters may be one of an infinite number, making spacetime effectively endless as it plays out across myriad dimensions, all of which are filled with matter and void or perhaps not, their starting conditions being uncertain, meaning that in some of these alternative dimensions, an infinite number in fact, there’s equally infinite copies of you and all other people, places, histories and events. There’s only so many possible combinations of atoms that make up your physical form that can occupy the approximate one or two meters of cubic space that you occupy, wherever atoms are compelled to bind together they will eventually bind into a copy of you making you a pattern in the cosmos that is doomed to repeat over and over again in identical or divergent spaces. Your doppelgangers experience every possible choice, every possible alternate circumstance, some born moment or centuries before or after you, meaning that an unlimited number are right now reigning as Emperor of ancient Rome or the King of the world, in sharp contrast to your homeless duplicates rough sleeping under the railway arch. All things are possible across the multiverse, in some worlds you have a slightly different shade of hair colour, perhaps your eyes are just a little bit less blue, brown or green, in some worlds you may have more or less hair on your head, your skin a slightly different hue, but nevertheless they are all you. Eventually you come to the conclusion that in all of eternity no other beings are possible, everything that you encounter, every person that you meet are all divergent copies of you. There is nobody else in the room and that’s why consciousness feels the same for all of us. We are God fractured into many parts, a divine being, an unlimited being that at bottom of its awareness, deep within the subconscious mind, is present everywhere, in every time and knows all things. It’s within the subconscious mind that we can meet our some of other selves, it’s within the material world that we can meet some of our other selves, this is how an unlimited being experiences limitation, one life at a time.
In some worlds you are dying of a terminal illness, in others you are already dead or not yet born, indeed a case can be made to suggest that across the multiverse you are continuously dying in every way possible and at the same time being reborn in every way possible. Your material form is a mere arrangement of atoms doomed to repeat itself across eternity and that also applies to the cat in the street. In some worlds he’s a posh penthouse cat, in others completely wild or very badly abused, in yet others he’s been born late or died early, in medieval Italy he may even have been thrown of the roof a church as a renunciation of the devil. In yet others he may be sitting on your lap being stroked or being thrown alive into a pot of boiling oil in the Wuhan dog and cat eating festival.
Life is hard for all material beings in all realities, the vast majority of which are brutal, hard, stone age, near feudal, or completely uncivilised, and we know this because the modern era in which it’s been possible to open a can of cat food is surprisingly short lived when compared to the 150,000 years or so that modern humans have been around. In all such worlds, both you and the cat had to find your own food, you may even have eaten the cat and in some cases the cat may even have eaten you!
This is why I frequently take the position that all life is equally precious and at the same time equally worthless, the material world doesn’t care if you live or die or whether the lion eats the gazelle, it is so ordered that something else must die in order for you to live. That being said, there’s also a spiritual dimension to life that demands otherwise, there’s a part of the psyche that honestly believes that it’s going to be here not just tomorrow but forever because in a sense it is. It’s within this tension between the material world that consumes, destroys and forever changes and the idealistic world of the psyche that is permanent, perfect and unchanging that we human being exist, and I suspect that the same is true for animals, they are just copies of ourselves that are wildly divergent when it’s all said and done. When looked at through the lens of philosophical materialism, colloquially known as ‘science,’ we’re not anything special, but when looked at through the lens of philosophical idealism we’re incredibly special and that’s because mind creates matter, mind is prime, matter only secondary, mind and matter meet as experience to the idealists because the only real thing is the psyche. On their own both disciplines are correct. The world of matter and void makes one worthless, but the world of psyche, imagination, spirituality and creativity, the world of thoughts, feelings and emotions makes us spell bindingly unique and precious and that’s how we meet the world. We’re both material and psychic, matter and spirit, body and soul, the blending of two poles of reality, and there’s no reason to think that we human beings are unique in this, hence the need to pet a cat whenever you encounter one on the street. Just like you, the cat believes unquestionably that it will be here tomorrow, and just like you it’s uncertain as to whether it will be, at least in this thin sliver of the multiverse. You and cat are the same soul, just arranged differently. If the cat dies today, it’s still alive somewhere else, and this realisation should be our last source of both comfort and terror! In each and every passing moment of time we’re all being killed and reborn simultaneously across the multiverse, sometimes it’s a disease that gets us, at other times it’s old age, a terminal condition or the ill will of other beings, a sniper’s bullet, the knife of a street thug, a hand grenade thrown at us in Normandy, the fangs and claws of a sabretooth tiger, but as each life ceases, we’re born anew into an infinite number of circumstances, an unlimited amount are divergent, an equally endless number are identical to our present circumstances. There’s an indefinite number of you reading this right now. Perhaps that is what reincarnation is, who says that each life has to repeat again and again within the same universe, perhaps when you are gone you really will be gone forever from this material reality only to live again in another. This is reincarnation in the most material form possible. Within the infinite spans of time across multiple realities you are compelled to live, and that’s why you should pet a cat whenever you encounter one in the street, to share a moment of camaraderie not just once, but an infinite number of times, who knows how many times you’ve already done this, you beautiful, impossible things.
