I WAS STANDING at the kitchen sink the other day – an ageing Metro Man doing the washing up – and I was idly thinking about the causality of phenomena as a perception of reality.

Now, I must admit, the causality of phenomena as a perception of reality isn’t something I think about every day. But it represents a kind of milestone in my development from someone who had absolutely no idea such a thing existed, to the impassioned student and devotee of philosophy that I am today.

What I’m saying is that the moment I started thinking about the causality of phenomena as a perception of reality, I knew I was beginning at last to understand the key basics of philosophy. I was ready to elevate to the next level of philosophical consciousness – from white belt to brown belt, you might say. Or maybe khaki.   

Causality refers, of course, to the basic philosophical theory that everything has a cause. Or, to explain it a little less fundamentally: everything that exists, or happens, does so because something happened before to cause that something to happen. And before that. and before that, and so on, back down the immensely long line, or history, of causality. With philosophy demanding, as it does, why, why, why, why, why every step of the way, until the apocryphal starting point of all things is reached – the so-called Big Bang, or what the physicist Stephen Hawking calls the singularity, where commonsense tells us there was no prior cause at all. Phew!

After all, if we follow the reasoning of Hawking’s singularity, one moment there was absolutely nothing, and the next moment the Big Bang happened and launched everything we see for eons of light-years about us. But how can something happen when there is absolutely nothing to happen it?

A lot of people devoutly think that’s where God stepped in. But you have to believe in God to think that. Whatever the reason for it, it created a phenomenon that some physicists are now likening to an infinitely vast explosion of champagne bubbles, or the soap suds in the kitchen sink at which I’m standing, each containing a universe that may or may not be something like ours.

So, causality started with the Big Bang, but not before it — after it. But that assumes absolutely nothing existed beforehand to cause the Big Bang. And even this is now in some doubt as the quantum physicists peer down through deeper and deeper depths of sub-atomic matter.

They’re now generally convinced that the basic building block of everything – all matter, and even our thoughts – is electrodynamic – energy particles. They’re applying this theory to the one a lot of us are maybe far more familiar with – the butterfly and the tornado. A butterfly fluttering its wings to dry them in the jungle of Borneo ultimately, through a chain reaction of causality, sets a tornado raging through Texas.

The new theory of electrodynamic causality is that if a thought, and even information generally, is a unit of energy, it must go somewhere, and, through the same principle of causality, create or affect some idealistic or conceptual happening or thing somewhere else. But where? What? Why?

If thought and information are pure energy, it means we’d possibly do well to take a new look at the theory of the “Stream of Consciousness” – and one of the variations of that is absolutely wonderful, to my mind, because it suggests that, as we go through life, it’s our job to gather experience, knowledge and wisdom to contribute to this cosmic pool of intelligence when we die.

I’ve always thought that of all the intellectual reasons I can think of to live, that’s the ultimate. 

Moreover, the search is now on for the tiniest, most basic energy particle of all – the fundamental building block of all matter — and this search is bringing science to the considered opinion that it may be so infinitismal that it’s impossible to detect. Or, alternatively, it may not exist at all; there may be no such thing as the most fundamental particle.

And think, for a second, what this implies. That there may be no such thing as nothing.  And one of the immeasurable implications and consequences of this that occurs immediately to me is that we have to think again, if we haven’t already, about the absolute nothingness of death.

All this occurs to me as I stand at the kitchen sink, gloved hands working in the hot suds, my mind contemplating, as I’ve said, the causality of phenomena as a perception of reality. I know enough philosophy now to understand what the word phenomena refers to – it’s the phenomenal, or physical, or perceptual world about us that we can immediately experience through sight, sound, touch and smell.

It’s a world of matter, of physical objects arranged in time and space, and it includes me, the physical me, working at the kitchen sink in a dimension that I’ve been persuaded, as most people are, to regard as the only, true reality.

But if I accept both sides of the most classic philosophical debate, there is a phenomenal, or physical, world, on the one hand, and another world, the idealistic world, which contains our thoughts, ideas, concepts, beliefs and, most importantly, values – in fact, everything about us that we could call spiritual.

And the big question, the very crux of the debate is this: which of the two is the real, or sole, reality? Indeed, in its implication alone – the momentous visions and concepts that it presents us with – this must surely be the most crucial debate of all time.