To recap: All of us process the things we confront each day, whether they are thoughts, events, behaviors, feelings and so forth, through a set of lenses that organize everything. I’d hazard that most people don’t think about this much, which is normal and not unreasonable. After all, we have enough to process without going through a thing we can call metacognition.

(Metacognition is a fancy word that really means we’re aware of our own thought processes. We kind of stand outside of the thinking and examine it. Just now, as I’m trying to consider an illustration, the image came to me of the stories some people relate of having “died” and becoming disembodied, rising above and looking down at everything going on … doctors running around, people crying, hospital machines shrieking. This gazing at one’s self is kind of like metacognition.)

While we don’t actually live consciously much of our time practicing metacognition, to the degree that we do, we’d discover that the worlds of thoughts and behaviors are really all about a thing we can call cause and effect. In a sense, the effects of actual thoughts and behaviors have real causes. They have roots in things like experience, knowledge and beliefs.

As touched upon previously, we behave as if a kind of computer program spit out how to apply our fundamental values in the form of guiding principles that will govern our behaviors. You input the fundamental values, press the button and, “whir,” out come guiding principles, the way we consciously and even unconsciously make choices about how to live our lives.

Which raises the question, “Where do our fundamental values come from?”

I may be kind of alone here, but this stuff really intrigues me.

Maybe it’s the curiosity of wondering if there is something behind the curtain really pulling the levers. Or, maybe it’s a bit like those little Russian doll sets where, if you open one, you find a smaller one inside, only to open that one to find an even smaller one and so on. Or even a third illustration: All of us learned math in school, whereby we were asked to reduce equations to their lowest common denominator, that place that was no longer divisible. It just stood solidly on its own. So, in our case, we can just ask, “where does it end?”

Given that I think a lot about this because I tend to geekiness in some matters (plus I’ve had significant academic training in the philosophy of knowledge), I’ve arrived at a place I consider the lowest common denominator.

At this, we must turn briefly to the related sciences of physics and a thing called cosmology, which is a term describing the study of the origin of the universe. (I seriously doubt that most people spend much time, if any, thinking about either physics or cosmology and that’s completely understandable! I apologize for this little detour.)

I bring this up because physics is really just applied mathematics, one of the greatest practitioners of all time being Albert Einstein, who famously found himself having to cross over into philosophy to help make sense of the implications of his findings. And, while physics seeks to explain how things fundamentally function in the realm of actual stuff (particles and energy and such), philosophy seeks to explain the fundamental nature of what it actually means … the essence, so to speak, of reality.

So, pure mathematics and pure philosophy are actually far more linked than most people would believe (including the fact that they both are absolutely dependent on logic). And it’s to both that we momentarily need to go to find what lies behind the curtain.

In a sense, it’s really quite similar to ask the question, “What is the true origin of the universe?” while at the same time asking the question, “What is at the root of why I think and behave a certain way?”

If this is new to you, please don’t shy away because it’s actually less complicated than it might seem (at least at the level we’re addressing).

Over the last century or so, really smart physicists have come to the conclusion, supported by overwhelming amounts of evidence, with zero evidence to the contrary, that this universe in which we live (the only one so far as we know), actually began with a thing called the Singularity, a point that was infinitely small (really, zero), yet proved to contain all of the matter and energy that now populates the entire universe. All. All of the hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with up to hundreds of billions of stars. That’s a total number that fries our brains. And, with the fact it all came from virtually nothing even fries our brains more, if we care to think about that.

(If any of you have more than a passing knowledge of this, we can get into the alternative explanations by some physicists of our universe’s origin … namely things like multiverses, string theory and aliens seeding lifeforms hither and yon. But, interestingly, neither of these address the same problem: What began it all?)

I said that there are only two fundamental worldviews and they come from this actual problem, a problem that occupies scientists, philosophers, theologians and all those who want to pull away the curtain to figure out really what’s what.

Here’s the problem: Was this Singularity random and non-rational or was it reasonable? Did the beginning of time and space and, ultimately, all life on earth, occur as a random process or was it the result of some rational thing that we can call a design?

Why is this important and what does it have to do with what guides our thinking and behavior? What truly lies behind the curtain or beneath the surface of our consciousness? What do physics and philosophy, mathematics, theology and psychology all have in common?

Let’s see.