"What comes after Science? When?"

Questions? I don't ask questions. I ask answers, and then make up the questions as I see fit. I assemble vast collections of answers and while finding the questions, I make connections in the process. These connections are new answers, and depending on my mood and how much time I have at my disposal, I set about finding questions for them as well. Often, if not usually, the question I find is: "Why on earth am I wasting my time on this (project du jour)?" Once in a great while, I'll find that something I've cooked up in my multi-media cauldron "fits" just right — an appropriate gesture at a propitious moment, and it arrives with no explanation, no equation, no excuse, no reason, nothing- it just sits there — absolutely correct to itself in every possible way.

The paradigm of Question/Answer doesn't really work in my world as I've never really found Life, The Universe, and Everything (LU&E) and most (but not all) of its constituent parts and systems to be fundamentally amenable to it. From my research, I've come to a general conclusion that LU&E and most of its parts are fundamentally not knowable, or even humanly understandable in any linguistic or mathematical sense, except when framed in a more narrow set of terms, like "metaphor" or "pretend" or "just so".

A dear friend of mine once noted: "Nobody knows and you can't find out" and I largely agree with him. However, I can also say that, like being in the presence of a bucket of bricks, this is all more an experiential thing, more like a synchronistic aesthetic moment and less like a diachronistic or ahistorically definitive mathematical proposition or linguistically intelligible conclusion. So, one can't "know" it, nor can one "find out", but one can come to a sensibility that is convincing at the time and creatively informs one's behaviour and choices.

Hence, the only justice in this life is poetic, and everything else is just some tweaky form of petty revenge or (more typically in this life of entertainment and cultural anaesthesiology) dodging bullets while one waits for the big storm to blow over.

It can be infuriating (to me and most everyone else, it seems) when my work or research comes such conclusions, but since when has there been some big carved-in-stone guarantee that it's supposed to make sense in the first place? Isn't a rational conclusion a bit presumptuous and arrogant? From what I can gather it seems that the complete object of study fundamentally doesn't and shouldn't make sense (as sense seems to be a tiny subset surrounded by a vast multitude of complex forms of "nonsense"), and see that not as a shortcoming on the part of the Universe, as much as it is an indication of the limitations of human reason and the short time we get to spend on this planet.

But all this is probably not what you wanted to hear, so here's a good question that's been bugging me for years and if anyone wants to submit an answer, let me know - I'm all ears...

Mister Warwick asks:

"What comes after Science? When?"

Henry Warwick is an artist, composer, and scientist.