by Iona Miller, ©2011-2014
"Who looks outside, dreams… who looks inside, awakes.” --Carl Jung
On the "reversibility of time":
Ludwig Boltzmann observed that there was a peculiar relationship between "time" and thermodynamic systems i.e. Heat. He noted that there was a fundamental asymmetry within molecular heat activity, as thermodynamic systems have a "preferential direction" in that they approach thermal equilibrium as their final state. He observed that on the molecular level, molecules undergo diffusion, homogenizations and fluctuations which dampen the amplified fluctuations (invariance of the laws). These fluctuations at the molecular level of Heat activity creates a "fundamental asymmetry effect" between the "past" or the future" i.e. a molecular contradiction occurs on the molecular level, where a "reversibility" takes place in the direction of the observed state of happenings at the macroscopic level i.e. it's collective quantity (temperature or entropy) stays the same. This means that there is a reversing of the order of molecules, and this is asymmetric to the observed state which does not change (temperature). Meaning, there are processes going on in a sequential order in reverse on the molecular scale, while simultaneously, the macroscopic scale is going forward or not changing e.g. temperature stays constant. In this respect, observable phenomena appears unchanging, and this is why "time" becomes a container for events that happen within it. This is otherwise referred to as a "reversing of the order of the temporal sequence".
Or, the Deleuzian hypothesis; "...Chronos is an encasement, a coiling up of relative presents".
Tensegrity in a Cell - http://childrenshospital.org/cfapps/research/data_admin/Site3022/mainpageS3022P6.html
VIDEO: Tensegrity Architecture of Life - http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewmedia/10/architecture-of-life
VIDEO: Tensegrity Architecture of Life - http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewmedia/10/architecture-of-life
http://media.pfeiffer.edu/lridener/courses/WVTHEORY.HTML
Based on neurobiological data, modern concepts of self-organization and a careful rationale, the hypothesis is put forward that the fleeting, highly ordered patterns of electric and/or magnetic fields, generated by assemblies of dendritic trees of specialized neuronal networks, should be thought of as the end-product of chaotic, dynamically governed self-organization. Such patterns encode for subjective (conscious) experiences such as pain and pleasure, or perceiving colours. Because by quantum mechanical definition virtual photons are the theoretical constituents of electric and magnetic fields, the former hypothesis can be re-formulated as follows: it is the highly ordered patterns of virtual photons that encode for subjective (conscious) experiences. Arguments are then given that consciousness did not emerge during evolution only after neuronal networks had been formed able to generate electric and/or magnetic fields of sufficient complexity but, rather, that subjectivity already existed in a very elementary form as a fundamental property of the omnipresent virtual photons, i.e., of matter. The contribution of neuronal networks to consciousness was to generate highly ordered patterns of germs of subjectivity (virtual photons), so allowing complex subjective (conscious) experiences. Due to the omnipresence of virtual photons, it follows finally that the whole universe must be imbued with subjectivity. An experimental strategy is proposed to test the hypothesis. --Dr. H.J. Romijn, Netherlands Institute for Brain Research, http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jcs/2002/00000009/00000001/1249
A PHOTON JUMPS BETWEEN TWO ELECTRONS. To conform to the law of conservation of energy, the photon is of course a virtual photon. Two charge-carrying elementary fermions (in this case electrons) are mediated by a force-carrying elementary boson (in this case a photon.) Therefore its path is sealed within the image, between the electrons, in accordance with classic Feynman diagrams, which we've sketched in generically to keep things simple. So crucial to existence yet so hard to visualize.
Re: Reality Assertions vs. Consciousness Studies Posted by: "Christopher Holvenstot" [email protected] cholvenstot Thu Nov 17, 2011 11:51 pm (PST)
In order to produce an analysis science asserts a version of reality based on what science itself can do. One measures and tests phenomena with a predetermination that reality is described by that which can be measured and tested. It is a closed and infallible circle of logic. The investment in an empirical version of reality produces an empirical analysis and this circular analysis has a positive psychological side-effect; one gets to feel a sense of certainty and control over empirical phenomena. In the Western world prior to science the dominate worldview was deism and the pope and a clerical hierarchy interpreted the universe's will to us and for us. So, science had the additional benefit of replacing a manipulative out-of-control hierarchy with a democratically accessible version of reality. With the rise of a communal investment in empiricism any individual could look at a piece of matter or at a causal relationship and determine an analysis of reality on their own, without ceremony, dues, Hail Marys, indulgences, degradations, or decrees from on high – decrees from an annoyingly closed and infallible circle of logic that had started out fine but was beginning to repress humanities insatiable will toward progress rather than supporting the exploration of it. The deeply religious, and those who benefited from the status quo, could continue to enjoy the comforts of faith in the face of the rise of science by wearing blinders to the logic of empiricism (or by simply blinding the early empiricists with hot pokers). When science arose sufficiently to dominate the discussion about reality and rationality the faithful converted their deistic cosmology from a public truth to a symbolic interrelationship that could be quietly asserted in a more private version of prayer and devotion.
This dynamic of social change was essential for a new analysis to emerge as useful. Without a communal investment in empirical precepts the analysis empiricism produces would be pointless and meaningless. If matter and causal effects had continued to be interpreted as god's will we would not have enjoyed the technological and industrial progress (or the democratic social progress) which ensued as a result of the communal change of beliefs. Unfortunately, religion had long instilled in Western mankind a version of belief that was total. So, when science arose as a new description of reality it was taken on with the full force of faith, if only in order to replace the vacuum of faith left in the wake of religion's waning explanatory efficacy. Rather than just a new description, science became the new faith, the new portal of access to the universe's 'true' nature.
Unfortunately, this bungling of faith, the misuse of it to cover what is merely useful description, is the intellectual/ emotional communal/historical conundrum that must now be sorted out for us to progress with a useful analysis of consciousness. An analysis of consciousness requires we separate reality assertions (faith) from the task of creating useful descriptions. An exploration of consciousness requires we validate a context in which cognitive dynamics and characteristics show up as real, just as an exploration of the physical world required we validate a context in which physical dynamics and characteristics showed up as real.
And we must do this even if this entails contradicting and defying the empirical world-view and its adherents. Theirs is a closed circle of logic that deems itself infallible. Within the confines of the empirical circle of logic consciousness does not exist. The adherents of empiricism refuse (or are simply unable) to see anything beyond empiricism's limited scope of description despite the fact that they too must be in some way conscious, must be aware, must have percepts and intentions, must be having subjective experiences, must be as caught up in the vast non-physical/ unmeasurable/ un-testable webs of meanings and purposes as everyone else (for how else could they function as a living thing?).
By creating and investing in a context suitable for an exploration of cognitive dynamics and characteristics we can usher forth a new phase of the human adventure that will prove as interesting and transformative as did the rise of science. I am preaching to the converted here but despite our efforts thus far we continue to fail at forming a unified approach in part because we are still caught up in reality assertions (empirical, spiritual) rather than simply proceeding with a description of cognitive phenomena in terms that are relevant to cs. studies. Much like at the dawn of science, instead of accepting what is given we are obliged to create our own circle of logic to render a new and useful analysis. That is how analyses are formed, not by taking on the whole of reality but by choosing an area of phenomena that has both social and personal significance and then exploring it on its own terms, in a way that produces answers that work within a particular scope. This is how spiritual, material, cognitive, or any other type of phenomena, come to define their own paradigm. The real fun begins once the paradigm builds momentum, but this will not happen in cs. studies if no one understands what it is we have to do, or if everyone waits around for someone else to start in, or if we get derailed by arguments about reality.
In order to produce an analysis science asserts a version of reality based on what science itself can do. One measures and tests phenomena with a predetermination that reality is described by that which can be measured and tested. It is a closed and infallible circle of logic. The investment in an empirical version of reality produces an empirical analysis and this circular analysis has a positive psychological side-effect; one gets to feel a sense of certainty and control over empirical phenomena. In the Western world prior to science the dominate worldview was deism and the pope and a clerical hierarchy interpreted the universe's will to us and for us. So, science had the additional benefit of replacing a manipulative out-of-control hierarchy with a democratically accessible version of reality. With the rise of a communal investment in empiricism any individual could look at a piece of matter or at a causal relationship and determine an analysis of reality on their own, without ceremony, dues, Hail Marys, indulgences, degradations, or decrees from on high – decrees from an annoyingly closed and infallible circle of logic that had started out fine but was beginning to repress humanities insatiable will toward progress rather than supporting the exploration of it. The deeply religious, and those who benefited from the status quo, could continue to enjoy the comforts of faith in the face of the rise of science by wearing blinders to the logic of empiricism (or by simply blinding the early empiricists with hot pokers). When science arose sufficiently to dominate the discussion about reality and rationality the faithful converted their deistic cosmology from a public truth to a symbolic interrelationship that could be quietly asserted in a more private version of prayer and devotion.
This dynamic of social change was essential for a new analysis to emerge as useful. Without a communal investment in empirical precepts the analysis empiricism produces would be pointless and meaningless. If matter and causal effects had continued to be interpreted as god's will we would not have enjoyed the technological and industrial progress (or the democratic social progress) which ensued as a result of the communal change of beliefs. Unfortunately, religion had long instilled in Western mankind a version of belief that was total. So, when science arose as a new description of reality it was taken on with the full force of faith, if only in order to replace the vacuum of faith left in the wake of religion's waning explanatory efficacy. Rather than just a new description, science became the new faith, the new portal of access to the universe's 'true' nature.
Unfortunately, this bungling of faith, the misuse of it to cover what is merely useful description, is the intellectual/ emotional communal/historical conundrum that must now be sorted out for us to progress with a useful analysis of consciousness. An analysis of consciousness requires we separate reality assertions (faith) from the task of creating useful descriptions. An exploration of consciousness requires we validate a context in which cognitive dynamics and characteristics show up as real, just as an exploration of the physical world required we validate a context in which physical dynamics and characteristics showed up as real.
And we must do this even if this entails contradicting and defying the empirical world-view and its adherents. Theirs is a closed circle of logic that deems itself infallible. Within the confines of the empirical circle of logic consciousness does not exist. The adherents of empiricism refuse (or are simply unable) to see anything beyond empiricism's limited scope of description despite the fact that they too must be in some way conscious, must be aware, must have percepts and intentions, must be having subjective experiences, must be as caught up in the vast non-physical/ unmeasurable/ un-testable webs of meanings and purposes as everyone else (for how else could they function as a living thing?).
By creating and investing in a context suitable for an exploration of cognitive dynamics and characteristics we can usher forth a new phase of the human adventure that will prove as interesting and transformative as did the rise of science. I am preaching to the converted here but despite our efforts thus far we continue to fail at forming a unified approach in part because we are still caught up in reality assertions (empirical, spiritual) rather than simply proceeding with a description of cognitive phenomena in terms that are relevant to cs. studies. Much like at the dawn of science, instead of accepting what is given we are obliged to create our own circle of logic to render a new and useful analysis. That is how analyses are formed, not by taking on the whole of reality but by choosing an area of phenomena that has both social and personal significance and then exploring it on its own terms, in a way that produces answers that work within a particular scope. This is how spiritual, material, cognitive, or any other type of phenomena, come to define their own paradigm. The real fun begins once the paradigm builds momentum, but this will not happen in cs. studies if no one understands what it is we have to do, or if everyone waits around for someone else to start in, or if we get derailed by arguments about reality.
Our ideas change as we change who we think we are. The Gods call us and we recall the gods.
The brain is a highly creative entity, which is capable of dreaming up infinitely abstract concepts and presenting them to the world in such diverse forms as science and art, yet it is all response and creation with our inner universe. The concept of creativity, is one of these harder concepts to explain only in terms of the brain. Many would like to believe that it is the divine gift of a muse that it comes from some region far from us, and that the body is merely the vessel of its interpretation. But somewhere in the deep regions of the highly convoluted mass above the neck, there is a region from wherein stems our creativity. We contain the power in our brains to create creativity and invent gods to whom we can attribute such "gifts", all encompassed in behaviour.
The concept of self too, is more all encompassing than just the brain. Self is an awareness of who we are, and what we are doing here more than just filling up space. It is a sense of higher purpose, which is hardest to explain in terms of only the brain. We want to feel part of a complete web, and to fulfil some destiny, or else forge our own. We extend this imaginative abstract, including the ego, to the body which contains us and our personal space. We have an area around and within us, which we always hold secret, but how and why is hard to explain in terms of behaviour. Why are we self contained, why are made into one being ?
The collective unconscious too, is difficult to explain. The feeling of identity with a whole mass of people, and a group as a culture. The sense of belonging and being which is more than just interpersonal interaction but a sense of being right where one belongs. These are the inherited dreams of generations, which are more than genes but an important sense of identification with those who have gone before. Within this too there is the feeling of deja vu, which though not scientifically proven is still a part of us, the idea that we may have lived before and passed through other lives, and we carry the memories with us. Instinct is part of this collective unconscious. These are interior feelings which give us guidelines on how to survive, but yet the way in which we either choose to follow or deny our instincts is part of the reasoning which is behavior. http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bbutoi/indext.html
The brain is a highly creative entity, which is capable of dreaming up infinitely abstract concepts and presenting them to the world in such diverse forms as science and art, yet it is all response and creation with our inner universe. The concept of creativity, is one of these harder concepts to explain only in terms of the brain. Many would like to believe that it is the divine gift of a muse that it comes from some region far from us, and that the body is merely the vessel of its interpretation. But somewhere in the deep regions of the highly convoluted mass above the neck, there is a region from wherein stems our creativity. We contain the power in our brains to create creativity and invent gods to whom we can attribute such "gifts", all encompassed in behaviour.
The concept of self too, is more all encompassing than just the brain. Self is an awareness of who we are, and what we are doing here more than just filling up space. It is a sense of higher purpose, which is hardest to explain in terms of only the brain. We want to feel part of a complete web, and to fulfil some destiny, or else forge our own. We extend this imaginative abstract, including the ego, to the body which contains us and our personal space. We have an area around and within us, which we always hold secret, but how and why is hard to explain in terms of behaviour. Why are we self contained, why are made into one being ?
The collective unconscious too, is difficult to explain. The feeling of identity with a whole mass of people, and a group as a culture. The sense of belonging and being which is more than just interpersonal interaction but a sense of being right where one belongs. These are the inherited dreams of generations, which are more than genes but an important sense of identification with those who have gone before. Within this too there is the feeling of deja vu, which though not scientifically proven is still a part of us, the idea that we may have lived before and passed through other lives, and we carry the memories with us. Instinct is part of this collective unconscious. These are interior feelings which give us guidelines on how to survive, but yet the way in which we either choose to follow or deny our instincts is part of the reasoning which is behavior. http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bbutoi/indext.html
Iona Miller, ©2011
Scientific Archetypes
Generic mathematical models, such as those of general systems, dissipative structures, bifurcation, fractals, chaos, and singularity can be applied in many contexts, and can be considered high level archetypes. This means that they have considerable abstraction that spans a large rather than a small portion of space-time, and that incorporates many rather than few dimensions of existence. It follows that a truly unified theory across all realms would incorporate high-level archetypes. This might occur within the realm of physics and then be generalized, or it could come from the search for unities across disciplines.
Mind, consciousness, and awareness are so central to the process of reality, perhaps they are the very reason for reality. Concepts of matter, life, and mind have undergone major changes. Consciousness is not a material system and neither is Quantum Mechanics (QM), which reduces all information and energy down to its fundamental holographic nature. As energy flows, information is coherently organized into animated forms of information. Though we have assumptions and beliefs, we remain unsure of the primordial nature of reality.
Simply stated, it is impossible to take the 'meta' out of physics since it is impossible to take the observer out of physics. It is impossible to take the knower out of knowledge. All metaphysical discussions are inherently about the nature of the observer and the knower. There is no physical theory of the observer because consciousness cannot be explained physically. Everything our physical theories of the observable world describe is some physical thing observed by an observer.
The observer is inherent in our most basic scientific principles, like the principle of equivalence. All the scientific debate about the correct interpretation of quantum theory is about the nature of observation. Both physics and metaphysics place the observer at the center of this discussion. ...That physical world of images demands of us that we inquire into the nature of the consciousness of the observer present at that focal point of perception. ...The holographic nature of the world describes at the most fundamental level possible how all information and energy is encoded in the world. But what does that fundamental description of the world tell us about the fundamental nature of consciousness? What is the nature of the consciousness that perceives that holographic world?
The key insight of the holographic principle is that an accelerating frame of reference, with an observer present at the central point of view, can arise even within empty space. As the observer arises, an event horizon also arises, which is a far as the observer can see things in space due to the constancy of the speed of light (Penrose 2005, figure 27.16). Where does the point of view of the observer arise? Where does the two dimensional surface of the event horizon arise? They both arise in empty space. (Kowall)
Scientists have shown that the brain runs largely on autopilot; it acts first and asks questions later, often explaining behavior after the fact. If much of behavior is automatic, then how responsible are people for their actions? These are among the concerns of neuroscientist Dr. Michael S. Gazzaniga in his new book, Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain. The brain is a cacophony of competing voices. “The question, ultimately, was why?” Dr. Gazzaniga said. “Why, if we have these separate systems, is it that the brain has a sense of unity?”
Brain images are snapshots, for one thing; they capture a brain state at only one moment in time and say nothing about its function before or after. For another, the images vary widely among people with healthy brains -- that is, a “high” level of activity in one person may be normal in another. Can brain science tell exactly where automatic processes end and self-directed “responsible” ones end? Not now and not likely ever, Dr. Gazzaniga argues in his book. Social constructs like good judgment and free will are even further removed, and trying to define them in terms of biological processes is, in the end, a fool’s game. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/01/science/telling-the-story-of-the-brains-cacophony-of-competing-voices.html?pagewanted=4&_r=1
Science has its own archetypal fascinations, expressed in theories and models. There is no consensus in physics. The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (QM) competes with Quantum Electrodynamics (QED), Holographic, Monistic Idealism, Transactional, Post-Quantum, Scalar, Many Worlds (MWI), Topological Geometrodynamics (TGD), String and M-Theory, among others. The secret of Reality may lie in the reconciliation of quantum cosmology, aligning micro-and macroverses. Quantum chaos plays a crucial role in cosmology as chaos theory and complexity do in biological systems.
The idea of many worlds, many realities, many dreams appears already in Chinese and Indian texts. Everett cites the well know "garden of forking path" from Borges. It is an ancestral theme of humanity, which comes easily to the mind when you remember your dreams. To really know how the brain works, neuroanatomy is the best guide. Psychological descriptions got us started, but a fundamental map and understanding require a deeper biological foundation and questioning our assumed truths.
We remain immersed within the interface of psyche and matter ~ that point where psyche matters. As in chaos theory, all the creative action is at the boundary of any field, the creative threshold, the leading edge. All contemporary models [Transactional (quantum handshake), Many-Worlds (decoherence), M-Theory (strings), Copenhagen (wave-function collapse), Holographic (frequency domain; resolution), Implicate (hidden information), etc], E8, and Torsion Physics (Kozyrov) are essentially philosophical, or colored by the psyche and philosophy of their originators. Imagination has to cross the boundaries of disciplines to somehow find links between the observable and unknowable. With gravity, time and spin, matter and psyche are in a constant state of redefinition.
String theory is facing a high noon - the absence of evidence for supersymmetry in the LHC, where none of the expected evidence for it has been forthcoming to date. String theories began bosonic and then included fermions by citing supersymmetry. Thus all fermionic string theories appear to be supersymmetric. Supersymmetry perfectly balances the energy infinity of the bosons against the negative energy infinity of the fermions by claiming a fermion partner for each boson, but the standard model doesn't look anything like supersymmetric. An alternative is that there are different numbers and arrangements of fermions that still balance the numbers and arrangements of the bosons, but this is right outside the string theory orbit at present. (King, 2011)
Physicist Brian Greene, in a new PBS show "The Fabric of the Cosmos" on the nature of space, recently let us in on a secret: We've all been deceived. Our perceptions of time and space have led us astray. Much of what we thought we knew about our universe—that the past has already happened and the future is yet to be, that space is just an empty void, that our universe is the only universe that exists—just might be wrong. Greene reveals space as a dynamic fabric that can stretch, twist, warp, and ripple under the influence of gravity. Space, far from being empty, is filled with some of the deepest mysteries of our time. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/fabric-of-cosmos.html
The unexplored microcosm of the Ground-state, the universe of the subquantal domain, may be the key to higher consciousness.The vacuum of Absolute Space is the central ingredient of 21st-century physics. It is the space between particles, inside and outside the atom. You breathe air that carries the vacuum between its molecules. It is technically metaphysical (nonobservable) -- beyond the realm of physics because it is virtual, rather than manifest. Paradoxically, the vacuum is both the absence of matter and the universal substance.
We still don't know where consciousness fits in the big picture. There is no consensus among theories of what constitutes FIGURE and what constitutes the most fundamental GROUND, and it seems they share the same essential nature. Our perceived ‘content’ is not distinct from the ‘context’ in which it arises. It is one whole cloth of bubbling space-time. Nothing more, nor less. We have looked into the Abyss of spacetime and found it laughing back. The core task is answering "What is consciousness? ", and having that answer also fit with and support questions and developed answers (descriptions) on "What is matter?" and "What is energy?". Clearly, the task is to settle on a new common denominator that unites the other aspects and elements.
There is the subject which is conscious and then there is the object of consciousness. If there were no object of consciousness, would there be a consciousness? A consciousness of nothing? Arthur Kornberg discusses DNA in his book "DNA Replication" (pg.13). "The most important feature of the duplex model for DNA structure is the introduction of the principle of complimentarity. It provided the explanation for accurate replication of a very long chain. This inherent feature of DNA is the basis not only of its replication but also of its capacity to transmit information. Complementarity has come to explain transcription and translation and thus the entire sequence of events in the expression of genetic functions. It is also the basis for exchange of DNA segments between chromosomes in several forms of recombination." Does the rest of the body follows DNA? As a matter of fact is there anything which combines with anything without an entity bringing the pair together". (Mandel)
Archetypes are similar to the genetic code, in that they initially create a structural outline (as in morphogenetic fields and other attractors). The influences of environment and consciousness can then create considerable variation and
coloring to the essential structure. Our desires become our talents, our thoughts become our direction, and the power of our purposeful will become our destiny. The spiritual ideal is always there, becoming clearer to us in the later stages of development.
Pitkanin & Gariaev suggest, frequency coding would be natural for quantum antenna interactions between ordinary DNA and its dark variant and also between dark variants of DNA, RNA, tRNA, and amino-acids. The reason is that dark nucleons represent the genetic code by entanglement and it is not possible to reduce the codon to a sequence of letters.
Ervin Laszlo points out regarding the finest level of observation, that because of “the quantum vacuum, the energy sea that underlies all of spacetime, it is no longer warranted to view matter as primary and space as secondary. It is to space or rather, to the cosmically extended "Dirac-sea" of the vacuum that we should grant primary reality.” Virtual particles pop in and out of existence like quantum foam. Mass is the consequence of interactions in the depth of this universal field. There is only this absolute matter-generating subquantal field.
Physicist, David Bohm believed all matter is unfolded out of what he eventually described as a holomovement, which meant that matter could also enfold and so return into the holomovement. Bohm considered quantum mechanics to be a process of unfolding and enfolding. He imagined the universe as an infinite sea of space and energy out of which matter could be unfolded, which he called explicating, and enfolded which he called implicating, which, in Bohm’s words, “together are a flowing, undivided wholeness".
The whole universe of space and time is enfolded into each part. A fundamental order of potential energy enfolds space and time. There is hidden energy in these enfolded dimensions -- a unity of space, time and meaning potential. Scalars are time-reversed waves. The infolded (negative) time dimension of virtual photon flux (hyperspace) is zero-point. Time in physics can be interpreted as an archetype for all material objects. You can not grab a piece of time and hold it; it is everywhere but nowhere. Materiality in the physical world eventually unfolds and enfolds at all scales. Archetypes share this holographic enfolding and unfolding nature. At least, they can be modeled as such.
Scientific Archetypes
Generic mathematical models, such as those of general systems, dissipative structures, bifurcation, fractals, chaos, and singularity can be applied in many contexts, and can be considered high level archetypes. This means that they have considerable abstraction that spans a large rather than a small portion of space-time, and that incorporates many rather than few dimensions of existence. It follows that a truly unified theory across all realms would incorporate high-level archetypes. This might occur within the realm of physics and then be generalized, or it could come from the search for unities across disciplines.
Mind, consciousness, and awareness are so central to the process of reality, perhaps they are the very reason for reality. Concepts of matter, life, and mind have undergone major changes. Consciousness is not a material system and neither is Quantum Mechanics (QM), which reduces all information and energy down to its fundamental holographic nature. As energy flows, information is coherently organized into animated forms of information. Though we have assumptions and beliefs, we remain unsure of the primordial nature of reality.
Simply stated, it is impossible to take the 'meta' out of physics since it is impossible to take the observer out of physics. It is impossible to take the knower out of knowledge. All metaphysical discussions are inherently about the nature of the observer and the knower. There is no physical theory of the observer because consciousness cannot be explained physically. Everything our physical theories of the observable world describe is some physical thing observed by an observer.
The observer is inherent in our most basic scientific principles, like the principle of equivalence. All the scientific debate about the correct interpretation of quantum theory is about the nature of observation. Both physics and metaphysics place the observer at the center of this discussion. ...That physical world of images demands of us that we inquire into the nature of the consciousness of the observer present at that focal point of perception. ...The holographic nature of the world describes at the most fundamental level possible how all information and energy is encoded in the world. But what does that fundamental description of the world tell us about the fundamental nature of consciousness? What is the nature of the consciousness that perceives that holographic world?
The key insight of the holographic principle is that an accelerating frame of reference, with an observer present at the central point of view, can arise even within empty space. As the observer arises, an event horizon also arises, which is a far as the observer can see things in space due to the constancy of the speed of light (Penrose 2005, figure 27.16). Where does the point of view of the observer arise? Where does the two dimensional surface of the event horizon arise? They both arise in empty space. (Kowall)
Scientists have shown that the brain runs largely on autopilot; it acts first and asks questions later, often explaining behavior after the fact. If much of behavior is automatic, then how responsible are people for their actions? These are among the concerns of neuroscientist Dr. Michael S. Gazzaniga in his new book, Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain. The brain is a cacophony of competing voices. “The question, ultimately, was why?” Dr. Gazzaniga said. “Why, if we have these separate systems, is it that the brain has a sense of unity?”
Brain images are snapshots, for one thing; they capture a brain state at only one moment in time and say nothing about its function before or after. For another, the images vary widely among people with healthy brains -- that is, a “high” level of activity in one person may be normal in another. Can brain science tell exactly where automatic processes end and self-directed “responsible” ones end? Not now and not likely ever, Dr. Gazzaniga argues in his book. Social constructs like good judgment and free will are even further removed, and trying to define them in terms of biological processes is, in the end, a fool’s game. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/01/science/telling-the-story-of-the-brains-cacophony-of-competing-voices.html?pagewanted=4&_r=1
Science has its own archetypal fascinations, expressed in theories and models. There is no consensus in physics. The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (QM) competes with Quantum Electrodynamics (QED), Holographic, Monistic Idealism, Transactional, Post-Quantum, Scalar, Many Worlds (MWI), Topological Geometrodynamics (TGD), String and M-Theory, among others. The secret of Reality may lie in the reconciliation of quantum cosmology, aligning micro-and macroverses. Quantum chaos plays a crucial role in cosmology as chaos theory and complexity do in biological systems.
The idea of many worlds, many realities, many dreams appears already in Chinese and Indian texts. Everett cites the well know "garden of forking path" from Borges. It is an ancestral theme of humanity, which comes easily to the mind when you remember your dreams. To really know how the brain works, neuroanatomy is the best guide. Psychological descriptions got us started, but a fundamental map and understanding require a deeper biological foundation and questioning our assumed truths.
We remain immersed within the interface of psyche and matter ~ that point where psyche matters. As in chaos theory, all the creative action is at the boundary of any field, the creative threshold, the leading edge. All contemporary models [Transactional (quantum handshake), Many-Worlds (decoherence), M-Theory (strings), Copenhagen (wave-function collapse), Holographic (frequency domain; resolution), Implicate (hidden information), etc], E8, and Torsion Physics (Kozyrov) are essentially philosophical, or colored by the psyche and philosophy of their originators. Imagination has to cross the boundaries of disciplines to somehow find links between the observable and unknowable. With gravity, time and spin, matter and psyche are in a constant state of redefinition.
String theory is facing a high noon - the absence of evidence for supersymmetry in the LHC, where none of the expected evidence for it has been forthcoming to date. String theories began bosonic and then included fermions by citing supersymmetry. Thus all fermionic string theories appear to be supersymmetric. Supersymmetry perfectly balances the energy infinity of the bosons against the negative energy infinity of the fermions by claiming a fermion partner for each boson, but the standard model doesn't look anything like supersymmetric. An alternative is that there are different numbers and arrangements of fermions that still balance the numbers and arrangements of the bosons, but this is right outside the string theory orbit at present. (King, 2011)
Physicist Brian Greene, in a new PBS show "The Fabric of the Cosmos" on the nature of space, recently let us in on a secret: We've all been deceived. Our perceptions of time and space have led us astray. Much of what we thought we knew about our universe—that the past has already happened and the future is yet to be, that space is just an empty void, that our universe is the only universe that exists—just might be wrong. Greene reveals space as a dynamic fabric that can stretch, twist, warp, and ripple under the influence of gravity. Space, far from being empty, is filled with some of the deepest mysteries of our time. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/fabric-of-cosmos.html
The unexplored microcosm of the Ground-state, the universe of the subquantal domain, may be the key to higher consciousness.The vacuum of Absolute Space is the central ingredient of 21st-century physics. It is the space between particles, inside and outside the atom. You breathe air that carries the vacuum between its molecules. It is technically metaphysical (nonobservable) -- beyond the realm of physics because it is virtual, rather than manifest. Paradoxically, the vacuum is both the absence of matter and the universal substance.
We still don't know where consciousness fits in the big picture. There is no consensus among theories of what constitutes FIGURE and what constitutes the most fundamental GROUND, and it seems they share the same essential nature. Our perceived ‘content’ is not distinct from the ‘context’ in which it arises. It is one whole cloth of bubbling space-time. Nothing more, nor less. We have looked into the Abyss of spacetime and found it laughing back. The core task is answering "What is consciousness? ", and having that answer also fit with and support questions and developed answers (descriptions) on "What is matter?" and "What is energy?". Clearly, the task is to settle on a new common denominator that unites the other aspects and elements.
There is the subject which is conscious and then there is the object of consciousness. If there were no object of consciousness, would there be a consciousness? A consciousness of nothing? Arthur Kornberg discusses DNA in his book "DNA Replication" (pg.13). "The most important feature of the duplex model for DNA structure is the introduction of the principle of complimentarity. It provided the explanation for accurate replication of a very long chain. This inherent feature of DNA is the basis not only of its replication but also of its capacity to transmit information. Complementarity has come to explain transcription and translation and thus the entire sequence of events in the expression of genetic functions. It is also the basis for exchange of DNA segments between chromosomes in several forms of recombination." Does the rest of the body follows DNA? As a matter of fact is there anything which combines with anything without an entity bringing the pair together". (Mandel)
Archetypes are similar to the genetic code, in that they initially create a structural outline (as in morphogenetic fields and other attractors). The influences of environment and consciousness can then create considerable variation and
coloring to the essential structure. Our desires become our talents, our thoughts become our direction, and the power of our purposeful will become our destiny. The spiritual ideal is always there, becoming clearer to us in the later stages of development.
Pitkanin & Gariaev suggest, frequency coding would be natural for quantum antenna interactions between ordinary DNA and its dark variant and also between dark variants of DNA, RNA, tRNA, and amino-acids. The reason is that dark nucleons represent the genetic code by entanglement and it is not possible to reduce the codon to a sequence of letters.
Ervin Laszlo points out regarding the finest level of observation, that because of “the quantum vacuum, the energy sea that underlies all of spacetime, it is no longer warranted to view matter as primary and space as secondary. It is to space or rather, to the cosmically extended "Dirac-sea" of the vacuum that we should grant primary reality.” Virtual particles pop in and out of existence like quantum foam. Mass is the consequence of interactions in the depth of this universal field. There is only this absolute matter-generating subquantal field.
Physicist, David Bohm believed all matter is unfolded out of what he eventually described as a holomovement, which meant that matter could also enfold and so return into the holomovement. Bohm considered quantum mechanics to be a process of unfolding and enfolding. He imagined the universe as an infinite sea of space and energy out of which matter could be unfolded, which he called explicating, and enfolded which he called implicating, which, in Bohm’s words, “together are a flowing, undivided wholeness".
The whole universe of space and time is enfolded into each part. A fundamental order of potential energy enfolds space and time. There is hidden energy in these enfolded dimensions -- a unity of space, time and meaning potential. Scalars are time-reversed waves. The infolded (negative) time dimension of virtual photon flux (hyperspace) is zero-point. Time in physics can be interpreted as an archetype for all material objects. You can not grab a piece of time and hold it; it is everywhere but nowhere. Materiality in the physical world eventually unfolds and enfolds at all scales. Archetypes share this holographic enfolding and unfolding nature. At least, they can be modeled as such.
Psychological Archetypes
Jung's collective unconscious consists of archetypal infolded EM structures acting in common in an overall bio-quantum-potential for the entire species. The bio-potential in a single body is an overall quantum potential that links and joins all the atoms and cells of the body. The "spirit" of the biosystem, if you will, is its "living biopotential" - its living quantum potential. We already know that a potential is everywhere nonzero all the way out to infinity. So the spirit of the living system is - in the virtual state - everywhere and everywhen in the universe. The superhologram of spacetime means the entire universe is everywhere alive, with everything.
Archetypal forces operate under their own laws in various phases of human life and endeavors. The archetypes provide the potential form for experiences that are given individual content by the person’s actual experiences. They influence us on biochemical, personal, social, national and universal levels. They come in the ever-changing guises of phobias and Irrational fears, prejudices, complexes (interference by an archetype or group of archetypes with the conscious personality), and our runaway ego-trips. Complexes can be pathological, archetypes cannot, as entirely healthy expressions of nature The complex may form around any archetypal, that is, structurally important, component of the psyche.
Archetypes play through our self-narratives, culture in art, literature, and the movies we so frequently view and in the stories we love. Our souls are attuned to listening for the multiplicity of viewpoints that comprise situations and events, bridging unconscious and consciousness. Complexes need not be pathological. They are merely collections of psychological material that function most efficiently when they are together. They usually group together because they all relate to a single archetype.
When seen objectively in stories, we can identify with or despise them, but when their effects are subjective, we are entirely "carried away," "beside ourselves". Sometimes, we choose them to feel special and create drama or novelty in our otherwise listless lives - we mistake them for love, for destiny, for the voice of God, for supernatural "signs" in an unenlightened, even superstitious manner. They lie behind religiosity, pathology, and romantic vs. mature love.
Archetypes also lie behind fascinations, crusades, and enchantments of individuals and nations. They produce the phenomena of "love at first sight" and create fads and set trends or styles in the recreation and fashion worlds. They can be contagious as in the case of cults, or political and religious movements. The great attraction of sports is also archetypal in nature.
People will go to war and fight to the death as fanatical "true believers" to defend some political or religious principle. The belief system is influenced by the myth behind it. Charismatic leaders capture the projections of leadership through expressing the subconscious desires of the crown, or herd consciousness (like Adolph Hitler or Jim Jones). Activation of these archetypal powers opens the door for both good and evil, and creates an arena for the emergence of ethics and morals.
Irrational superstitious behavior goes hand in glove with errors of judgement and in some cases involves dissociation or personality disorders, including schizotypal, toxic narcissistic, and borderline personalities. Dissociation can be desirable, as in the case of flow, or pathological, as in dissociative identity disorder. Deeper reality is not remote in the physical sense but in a psychological sense. It is concealed by the very trance states and memes that compose it.
Often, we only recognize the trance state when it breaks, when the projection ends and we reassimilate that energy. The archetypal content should be respected and perhaps seen through various lenses, but it should never be dismissed as delusion or mere projection. If this happens then the whole cascade of chemistry that packs enormous energies and psychic forces can be prematurely deflated and turn into a self-destructive bomb in the bodymind of the awakener.
Psychic life depends on an unconscious infrastructure. Jung helped differentiate the inscape with his concept of archetypes which express the innate potentials of all dynamics beyond specific forms. Many of his ideas are central to understanding the human psyche or soul, and apply universally to all of mankind. What is of archetypal—that is, organizational and structural—importance to the personality will emerge.
Jung suggests the existence of a 3-layered psyche consisting of 1) the conscious (active part of the mind), 2) the personal unconscious (thinking over which we have little or no control), and 3) the collective unconscious (unevolved, animal-instinctive mental activity). Jung sees archetypes as unconscious regulators of psychic life that attempt to redress psychic imbalances. The unconscious interacts with consciousness in a compensatory way, which leads to intrapsychic self-regulation (Jung, 1966a).
In Myth and the Body, Keleman states: "Our creation myth is also the myth of our biological evolution...there is another aspect to the creation and evolution myth..myth is about the birth and evolution of the body's inner subjectivity... embyrogenesis is cosmogenesis; the birth of the body is the birth of the inner emotional cosmos...from the moment of our conception, the organizing of past somatic images is available to us as a guide for being in the world of the present....The different bodies of our history-personal and impersonal-are in our dreams. Myth presents us ...with the body images of various ages and eons. The complex of somatic images gives our present somatic image an organization and dimension, a structure that has duration...Mostly we are in touch with the surface body, because perception is mostly a surface phenomenon. That doesn't mean that the other bodies aren't there.”
Resonant Filters
Psyche is the unified field of material and immaterial dynamics, the physical and metaphysical. There are as many archetypes as there are situations in life and nature. A constant non-perceptual pattern remains concealed behind archetypal variants. Originating in the collective unconscious, archetypes are experiential catalysts, often likened to psychodynamic Platonic Forms or "spiritual" DNA. They are constraint-based domains. They are the forces of history. They are life's filters.
Archetypes, according to Jung, are "active living dispositions, ideas in the Platonic sense, that preform and continually influence our thoughts and feelings and actions." They are not inherited ideas, but rather, as Jung says elsewhere, "inherited possibilities of ideas." The exact nature of these archetypes has been much discussed both within and outside of Jungian circles. What matters for our present purposes is just that the underlying archetypes (which by definition are beyond or beneath consciousness) are expressed in powerful, fascinating and numinous conscious images called "archetypal images".What needs to be insisted on, however, it that there is something still deeper behind archetypal images, something itself unknown, which expresses itself in the psyche. (Granrose)
Archetype-figures also appear in the personal unconscious as "complexes". Archetypes tend to personify themselves, through the cooperation of the active imagination, in order to penetrate personal consciousness. The unconscious, form-determining (archetypal) components of the personality, and the complexes of ideation and affect that form around them seem to act like inductive magnets for certain events and affects to which they correspond (Jung, 1960, 1969c). Like strange attractors in chaos theory, they are self-organizing intrapsychic principles.
Archetypes express innate psychological dispositions, fundamental morphogenetic laws, which govern perception, and affective experience. They influence the formation of complexes, which develop around a particular archetypal (core) issue. The archetypes are the individual components or manifestations of the self; they determine particular intrapsychic structures. They manifest in the instinctual life of the body, its attractions, repulsions, fragmentations, and impasses, as well as ideas, "head trips," and spiritual urges. Archetypes give form to fertile chaos which functions as a multi-reined holographic control system. All of our experience is filtered through these conditioning "lenses." Nevertheless we aren't reducible to simple determinants.
We are embedded in a hologram of psychic dimensions. Interactive archetypal energies are embedded in and live through us, as biopsychosocial events. They represent our potentialities beyond time. But we think we are autonomous. In these state-specific altered realities we experience a qualitative range and subtlety of interconnectedness that would be frightening and crazy-making to our normal socio-conditioned repressed mode of being. We find the ground of being and interrelationship with mystery through mythic engagement.
Normally, we project our inner states out into the world. The mystic becomes emancipated from the persuasions of psychic content, while the schizophrenic becomes lost in them. Images arise from energy flux like biochemical resonant filters and harmonic levels of arousal, elevated energetic activation. Then we find synchronous information and events in the outer world to reinforce the energetic power of the archetypes we are preoccupied with. The shamanic journey consists of acute neurological events that evoke heavens and hells that lead to emergent self-organization.
To avoid spiraling into prolonged metabolic and cognitive chaos we must accept these new levels of awareness and physiological condition as coming from “us” and not from an alien entity or God. We must claim responsibility for our Self as it incarnates at an accelerated pace and not project the cause of our condition onto external people, entities or events. As an integrated human we can still "have" our story, but we must keep it in its place by running it through a progressively rational interpretation. For it is this rationalizing process that integrates the archetypal imaginal world (reptilian/old mammalian brain) into the 21st Century prefrontal lobes.
Consensus reality is a conditioned trance state. To be "normal", when this violates our inner nature, is itself a form of pathology. Disruption of ego's metaprogramming (habituated dissociation) is not regression, but merely the removal of adaptive/repressive functioning in the present. This creates an entirely new consciousness that does share features with primordial states. This loss of the sense of the known self (ego) is a desirable effect of transformation processes.
By differentiating from the images, symbols, myths, stories and personal identity that we were so involved in before, consciousness becomes separated from its contents. We deepen our own healing by remembering our own experience of trauma is simultaneously a microcosmic, personalized fractal reflecting the greater trauma resonating throughout the collective field. This realization allows us to not personalize the moment of feeling the trauma, or concretize ourselves as being traumatized, but allows us to give over to and embrace particularized experience.
Unless we are “affected” by the symbols, myths and archetypes that we use to give “story” to our lives, no psychic tension would arise to propel us out of “normal” consciousness. The foundations of myth arose in the trance states of early shamans and yogis, exploring the self-arising activity of the Central Nervous System. Intense concentration on the resting voltage of the CNS can lead to spontaneous realization of the meaning that pervades one's own biology. (Sansonese, The Body of Myth, p. 34-35).
Since these ZPE-originated fields are located everywhere (in the Planck false vacuum) and their ultimate radial extension is infinite — they interpenetrate each other in the vast sea of pulsating cosmic spacetime… And, together, constitute the basis of our holographic universe...
Note that all radiant electrodynamic fields, within any frequency spectrum phase order, must have a series of fractal harmonics extending throughout its entire spectral range, which also resonates with all other (higher and lower) phase order fields — and that all information is carried on such fields as modulated wave interference patterns — so that, once recorded, no information is ever lost.
Since all structural information is contained in the infinite spin-momentum (singularity) source of all (harmonic) fractal involved cosmic fields, along with all particle standing waves (as well as all their formative combination's and permutations) at different frequency phase orders... And since all information is transformed from field to field by phase conjugate adaptive resonance... The entire physical universe we experience (at the fourth lowest phase order of the third fractal involution of the cosmos) — is a hologram.
On our physical/material level or plane — this fundamental octave enfolded hyperspherical (toroidal) harmonic structure of all hyperspace and metric space/energy field/forms in total physical/material spacetime (originating from its own “singularity”--ref: General Relativity) — is the basis of all generation of ZPE fields radiating from the center of origin of all physical forms — beginning with the smallest sub-quantum particle and extending to the largest galaxy, as well as each human being (see illustrations referenced below)
All such fields are also electrodynamic in nature (Ref: Maxwell, Coulomb, Faraday, Ampere equations), Consequently, all structural, memory and mental information is carried as holographically encoded wave interference patterns on the surface of such fields… And transmitted, through descending hyperspace field phase orders to their common zero-point center of consciousness, by phase conjugate adaptive resonance processes.
Thus, Mind itself (in the case of human thought) is one of those hyperspace fields linked coenergetically (resonantly) with the brain’s radiant EM fields… With long term, archetypal, and species memory stored in adjacent higher order coenergetic hyperspace fields (ref: string theory).
At the first moment of cosmogenesis (“big bang” as science sees it) — the initial highest frequency/energy phase order (spiritual) triune fields of spacetime, fractally involve, and descend in orderly frequency-energy phase orders, stepping down from near infinite frequency spectrum’s to near zero — after emanating from the *singularity* of general relativity… Whose dual inherent qualities, at its zero-point center of origin (absolute space) — are both, *potential* subjective consciousness and *potential* objective *matter*. (Maurer)
This source of everything in our physical-phenomenal hyperspace and metric space-time is the timeless and dimensionless zero-point center and surrounding infinite spin momentum, (G-force or “spinergy*) of unconditioned and eternal Absolute SPACE. This primal space remains, ubiquitously, in our lower order physical/material spacetime, as the zero-point center of “spinergy” at the origin (singularity) of every radiant field, fundamental particle and physical form — up to the largest galaxy, quasar, black hole, etc. Einstein labelled this ubiquitous source of ZPE, “Aether” or ” total space.”
It is this Absolute SPACE that is both the creative force (conscious will) and the receptive womb (infinite spin momentum on triple perpendicular sets of infinite spherical axes) that constitutes the “cosmic eggs” out of which all subsequent universes, with their metaphysical hyperspace and physical metric space fields, fractal involve… And, after descending to the lowest order physical space (at the third fractal iteration) — subsequently evolve, simply and directly (by natural selection, possibly guided by morphogenetic fields (ref: Sheldrake) linked to fundamental consciousness along with stored memory of previous life forms)… With our cosmos being only one of those infinite “parallel” universes… With the same fundamental cyclic and electrodynamic laws, rooted in primal spin momentum, governing each of them.
Thus, everything (including all multidimensional space-time fields and all matter-energy forms) throughout all spherically manifest SPACE-TIME universes, are cyclic in nature, appear and disappear periodically, and their harmonic field involutions are essentially analogous and corresponding — in accord with holographic principles and the universal laws of electrodynamics… All, based on the ubiquitous fractal topological geometry and the fundamental spin momentum of every-zero-point “singularity” throughout “total space” (including “hyperspace” of string theory and metric spacetime of general relativity [GRT])…
Therefore, since consciousness is the fundamental quality of the zero-point center of spin momentum in absolute space — each such “singularity” is potentially conscious as is every zero-point center of all fractal involved information/energy fields radiating from it, ad infinitum.
Quantum Consciousness; Quantum Healing
It’s ALL in your mind, but not necessarily merely in your head. The universe is holisticaly contained within the mindbody and is the context of mindbody. Both physicists and mystics now tell us that there is noTHING “out there.” The Vedas said centuries ago that it’s all “mindstuff” and modern science is now confronting that.
There are several types of explanation of quantum state reduction, an occasion of experience: Copenhagen (conscious observation causes collapse), multiple worlds (each possibility branches off to form a new universe), decoherence (interaction with environment contaminates superposition - though it doesn’t really cause reduction), some objective threshold for reduction (objective reduction - OR), or quantum gravity.
Popular QM notions seem to fall into two categories:
Copenhagen-esque--"old school" explanations which dwell on quantum theory's non-intuitiveness and in fact seem to celebrate the "leap of logic" needed to accept the observer-based wave-function collapse postulate;
New Agey Utopian idealism--"quantum theory is strange, consciousness is strange, therefore, consciousness is explained by quantum theory", entanglement is proof that "all points in the universe are connected by some underlying ineffable thing, so can't we all just get along", etc.
Quantum theory will probably play a role in explaining consciousness and its relationship to the brain. The electrical activity of the brain makes a `model' of a self in the world and our understanding of physical reality requires this `model' to exist `in the dark'.
That `model' is an intellectual abstraction and in reality it is just spatial and temporal relationships between each piece of electrical activity. Every quanta is in the form of matter waves except at state reduction. The electromagnetic fields permeating neurons and synapses consist of real and virtual photons, in their wave states, and each of these are disturbances in the photon field.
Our experience of reality is based on mind and observation. Only our mental impressions, sensory filters, language categories, and concepts make us perceive things: things as separate from ourselves, the I and the not-I. But we are seamlessly welded to the Universe at the most fundamental levels. We cannot scientifically or spiritually distinguish ourselves from the subquantum ground of BEING, even if we feel separate or alienated.
But who among us has successfully abandoned the tendency to conceptualize observations as things, and compound that observation with qualitative attributions? We have experiences and later we say it was this or that. Some forms of meditation are based on disidentification from all aspects of existence and nominalism – neither this nor that.
But most of us still can’t wrap our quantum minds around it as a steady state of perception. Though science has extended our sight to the subquantal and cosmological levels, we still think provincially from the human scale of our natural senses. Our logic and metaphors are based in the senses. But our outer life comes from the invisible inner world, where we are literally in resonance with the Cosmos.
Concepts of matter, life, and mind have undergone major changes. Consciousness is not a material system and neither is Quantum Mechanics (QM). The world is quantum mechanical and we must learn to perceive it as such, but we don’t need to understand that to experience nonlocal healing, any more than we need to comprehend internal combustion to drive. Even physicists have a tough time reconciling what they know about the deep nature of reality with their mundane experience in the world of things.
So how does that mind and its underlying mechanisms relate to or produce consciousness? Is consciousness a quantum process, or does it underlie all process? Neurologists tell us it is a physical matter of wetware in the skull. However, the most we can say at the molecular level is that there are correlates of consciousness. The irreducible precursors of consciousness and matter are built into the universe. They just ARE, unified holistic process.
At the finest levels of observation, physicists contend the distinction between mind and matter becomes as paradoxical as the distinction between energy and matter, life and death (organic/inorganic). Quantum mechanics strongly suggests the Universe is mental. The substratum of everything, including our experience of being, has this mental character.
Healing theories, particularly nonlocal models, have drawn from theories in both new physics and consciousness studies, often compounding and confounding both disciplines. They mix levels of observation in theories which seem to be largely conditioned by the favoritism of pet projects; thus each theory is generally associated with only one or two “brand” names of researchers.
Healers have been quick to parrot many of these ideas that support what they feel they have observed in intentional healing acts, or what validates the tenets of their school of practice. Often their comprehension of the scientific basis of the argument is slim to none. But this attribution is used to “explain” the phenomenon, with enough misapprehension to preserve the Mystery. However, it isn’t this confusion that makes it so. Are the enigmatic qualities of the quantum realm actually the same as the unity, coherence and other enigmatic qualities of the conscious one? The jury is still out.
There is no consensus among theories of what constitutes FIGURE and what constitutes the most fundamental GROUND, and it seems they share the same essential nature. Our perceived ‘content’ is not distinct from the ‘context’ in which it arises. It is one whole cloth of bubbling spcetime. Nothing more, nor less. We have looked into the Abyss of spacetime and found it laughing back.
Ervin Laszlo points out regarding the finest level of observation, that because of “the quantum vacuum, the energy sea that underlies all of spacetime, it is no longer warranted to view matter as primary and space as secondary. It is to space or rather, to the cosmically extended "Dirac-sea" of the vacuum that we should grant primary reality.” Virtual particles pop in and out of existence like quantum foam.
Mass is the consequence of interactions in the depth of this universal field. There is only this absolute matter-generating energy field. This realization transforms our perception of life. Living systems constantly interact with the quantum vacuum, also called zero-point energy, vacuum fluctuation, or subspace. Wave-packets of matter are in a subtle interactive dance with the underlying vacuum field, a vast network of intimate interactions, extending into our biosphere and even Cosmos. Mind and matter both evolve from the cosmic womb of space.
According to Laszlo: “The interaction of our mind and consciousness with the quantum vacuum links us with other minds around us, as well as with the biosphere of the planet. It "opens" our mind to society, nature, and the universe. This openness has been known to mystics and sensitives, prophets and meta-physicians through the ages. But it has been denied by modern scientists and by those who took modern science to be the only way of comprehending reality.”
He goes on to propose a poetic metaphor: “Everything that goes on in our mind could leave its wave- traces in the quantum vacuum, and everything could be received by those who know how to "tune in" to the subtle patterns that propagate there.” In a mechanistic throwback, he likens it to an antenna picking up signals from a transmitter that contains the experience of the entire human race, reminding strongly of Carl Jung’s Collective Unconscious.
Worldviews color our perceptions of our Reality, even in science. Concepts are effective theories, useful not true. The universe is immaterial, mental and spiritual. The mind observes, but it doesn’t really observe “things”. It has a way of attributing certain qualities, subjective qualities and dynamics, to everything, even so-called “objective observation. This multisensory narrative becomes the content of our memories -- how we remember what happens.
Our minds have a tendency to come up with reasons, whys and wherefores, for things as they appear to us. It is part of our survival mechanisms. However, physics has proven, through relativity theory, the uncertainty principle, wave/particle duality, and Godel’s theorem, that there can be no objectivity, no order or creativity without chaos.
The mind produces narratives. Archetypal forces act as lenses that cause us to cherish certain beliefs, which lead to a class of thoughts, and patterns of emotions and behaviors. It doesn’t matter if you come down on the side of preferring order or chaos, nature has her way.
Ultimately, spontaneous or natural healing seems to by-pass this entire complex system, overriding our conscious perspectives in many cases. We may not “believe” in paradoxical healing, but it can still “work”, effecting psychophysical change at a deeper level through the emotional mind and through Mystery.
Healing is irrational. Perhaps the question we should really be asking is what causes us to imagine we are dissociated from a state of optimal health. This doesn’t mean our bodies will always work flawlessly. Chaos theory reveals that many systems in the body are self-organizing and regulated by stochastic processes that are naturally chaotic in nature. Chaos actually helps us reorganize, recalibrate our metabolism.
We can discuss it in terms of nested structured duality, superfluids, or an array of vortices, or a microtubule bank, or a dendritic cluster, or an entangled or collapsing wave function; still, we're merely talking about resonance between arrays -- patterns. This perspective leads to consideration of a Holographic concept of reality, the frequency domain, David Bohm’s implicate order.
Panpsychism aside, every bit of electrical activity is unaware of itself, is unaware of every other bit of electrical activity, and is unaware of all their relationships. This raises the question: why does consciousness exists at all and why is it a unity?
There are many plausible ways that quantum theory can help with these profound mysteries and it will be many decades before some understanding of the actual mechanisms are finalized. So, despite the pluses and minuses of existing quantum theories of mind, these kinds of theories should be encouraged. If consciousness is or is related to quantum effects then scientists will have to think in these directions to figure it out.
Most natural philosophers hold, and have held, that action at a distance across empty space is impossible-in other words, that matter cannot act where it is not, but only where it is. The question "where is it?" is a further question that may demand attention and require more than a superficial answer. Arguably, every atom of matter has a universal though nearly infinitesimal prevalence, and extends everywhere; since there is no definite sharp boundary or limiting periphery to the region disturbed by its existence. The lines of force of an isolated electric charge extend throughout illimitable space.
No ordinary matter is capable of transmitting the undulations or tremors that we call light. The speed at which they go, the kind of undulation, and the facility with which they go through vacuum, forbid this. So clearly and universally has it been perceived that waves must be waves of something, something distinct from ordinary matter.
Faraday conjectured that the same medium which is concerned in the propagation of light might also be the agent in electromagnetic phenomena, and he called it “the ether”. Now we speak of it as the zero-point domain of virtual photon fluctuation. Romantically, we refer to it as the plenum, since it is infinitely full of potential.
Some philosophers have reason to suppose that mind can act directly on mind without intervening mechanism, and sometimes that has been spoken of as genuine action at a distance. But, in the first place, no proper conception or physical model can be made of such a process.
Nor is it clear that space and distance have any particular meaning in the region of psychology. The links between mind and mind may be something quite other than physical proximity. Since we don’t know how it works, in denying action at a distance across empty space we are not telepathy or other activities of a non-physical kind. Brain disturbance or mindbody healing is certainly a physical correlate of mental action, whether of the sending or receiving variety.
It’s ALL in your mind, but not necessarily merely in your head. The universe is holisticaly contained within the mindbody and is the context of mindbody. Both physicists and mystics now tell us that there is noTHING “out there.” The Vedas said centuries ago that it’s all “mindstuff” and modern science is now confronting that.
There are several types of explanation of quantum state reduction, an occasion of experience: Copenhagen (conscious observation causes collapse), multiple worlds (each possibility branches off to form a new universe), decoherence (interaction with environment contaminates superposition - though it doesn’t really cause reduction), some objective threshold for reduction (objective reduction - OR), or quantum gravity.
Popular QM notions seem to fall into two categories:
Copenhagen-esque--"old school" explanations which dwell on quantum theory's non-intuitiveness and in fact seem to celebrate the "leap of logic" needed to accept the observer-based wave-function collapse postulate;
New Agey Utopian idealism--"quantum theory is strange, consciousness is strange, therefore, consciousness is explained by quantum theory", entanglement is proof that "all points in the universe are connected by some underlying ineffable thing, so can't we all just get along", etc.
Quantum theory will probably play a role in explaining consciousness and its relationship to the brain. The electrical activity of the brain makes a `model' of a self in the world and our understanding of physical reality requires this `model' to exist `in the dark'.
That `model' is an intellectual abstraction and in reality it is just spatial and temporal relationships between each piece of electrical activity. Every quanta is in the form of matter waves except at state reduction. The electromagnetic fields permeating neurons and synapses consist of real and virtual photons, in their wave states, and each of these are disturbances in the photon field.
Our experience of reality is based on mind and observation. Only our mental impressions, sensory filters, language categories, and concepts make us perceive things: things as separate from ourselves, the I and the not-I. But we are seamlessly welded to the Universe at the most fundamental levels. We cannot scientifically or spiritually distinguish ourselves from the subquantum ground of BEING, even if we feel separate or alienated.
But who among us has successfully abandoned the tendency to conceptualize observations as things, and compound that observation with qualitative attributions? We have experiences and later we say it was this or that. Some forms of meditation are based on disidentification from all aspects of existence and nominalism – neither this nor that.
But most of us still can’t wrap our quantum minds around it as a steady state of perception. Though science has extended our sight to the subquantal and cosmological levels, we still think provincially from the human scale of our natural senses. Our logic and metaphors are based in the senses. But our outer life comes from the invisible inner world, where we are literally in resonance with the Cosmos.
Concepts of matter, life, and mind have undergone major changes. Consciousness is not a material system and neither is Quantum Mechanics (QM). The world is quantum mechanical and we must learn to perceive it as such, but we don’t need to understand that to experience nonlocal healing, any more than we need to comprehend internal combustion to drive. Even physicists have a tough time reconciling what they know about the deep nature of reality with their mundane experience in the world of things.
So how does that mind and its underlying mechanisms relate to or produce consciousness? Is consciousness a quantum process, or does it underlie all process? Neurologists tell us it is a physical matter of wetware in the skull. However, the most we can say at the molecular level is that there are correlates of consciousness. The irreducible precursors of consciousness and matter are built into the universe. They just ARE, unified holistic process.
At the finest levels of observation, physicists contend the distinction between mind and matter becomes as paradoxical as the distinction between energy and matter, life and death (organic/inorganic). Quantum mechanics strongly suggests the Universe is mental. The substratum of everything, including our experience of being, has this mental character.
Healing theories, particularly nonlocal models, have drawn from theories in both new physics and consciousness studies, often compounding and confounding both disciplines. They mix levels of observation in theories which seem to be largely conditioned by the favoritism of pet projects; thus each theory is generally associated with only one or two “brand” names of researchers.
Healers have been quick to parrot many of these ideas that support what they feel they have observed in intentional healing acts, or what validates the tenets of their school of practice. Often their comprehension of the scientific basis of the argument is slim to none. But this attribution is used to “explain” the phenomenon, with enough misapprehension to preserve the Mystery. However, it isn’t this confusion that makes it so. Are the enigmatic qualities of the quantum realm actually the same as the unity, coherence and other enigmatic qualities of the conscious one? The jury is still out.
There is no consensus among theories of what constitutes FIGURE and what constitutes the most fundamental GROUND, and it seems they share the same essential nature. Our perceived ‘content’ is not distinct from the ‘context’ in which it arises. It is one whole cloth of bubbling spcetime. Nothing more, nor less. We have looked into the Abyss of spacetime and found it laughing back.
Ervin Laszlo points out regarding the finest level of observation, that because of “the quantum vacuum, the energy sea that underlies all of spacetime, it is no longer warranted to view matter as primary and space as secondary. It is to space or rather, to the cosmically extended "Dirac-sea" of the vacuum that we should grant primary reality.” Virtual particles pop in and out of existence like quantum foam.
Mass is the consequence of interactions in the depth of this universal field. There is only this absolute matter-generating energy field. This realization transforms our perception of life. Living systems constantly interact with the quantum vacuum, also called zero-point energy, vacuum fluctuation, or subspace. Wave-packets of matter are in a subtle interactive dance with the underlying vacuum field, a vast network of intimate interactions, extending into our biosphere and even Cosmos. Mind and matter both evolve from the cosmic womb of space.
According to Laszlo: “The interaction of our mind and consciousness with the quantum vacuum links us with other minds around us, as well as with the biosphere of the planet. It "opens" our mind to society, nature, and the universe. This openness has been known to mystics and sensitives, prophets and meta-physicians through the ages. But it has been denied by modern scientists and by those who took modern science to be the only way of comprehending reality.”
He goes on to propose a poetic metaphor: “Everything that goes on in our mind could leave its wave- traces in the quantum vacuum, and everything could be received by those who know how to "tune in" to the subtle patterns that propagate there.” In a mechanistic throwback, he likens it to an antenna picking up signals from a transmitter that contains the experience of the entire human race, reminding strongly of Carl Jung’s Collective Unconscious.
Worldviews color our perceptions of our Reality, even in science. Concepts are effective theories, useful not true. The universe is immaterial, mental and spiritual. The mind observes, but it doesn’t really observe “things”. It has a way of attributing certain qualities, subjective qualities and dynamics, to everything, even so-called “objective observation. This multisensory narrative becomes the content of our memories -- how we remember what happens.
Our minds have a tendency to come up with reasons, whys and wherefores, for things as they appear to us. It is part of our survival mechanisms. However, physics has proven, through relativity theory, the uncertainty principle, wave/particle duality, and Godel’s theorem, that there can be no objectivity, no order or creativity without chaos.
The mind produces narratives. Archetypal forces act as lenses that cause us to cherish certain beliefs, which lead to a class of thoughts, and patterns of emotions and behaviors. It doesn’t matter if you come down on the side of preferring order or chaos, nature has her way.
Ultimately, spontaneous or natural healing seems to by-pass this entire complex system, overriding our conscious perspectives in many cases. We may not “believe” in paradoxical healing, but it can still “work”, effecting psychophysical change at a deeper level through the emotional mind and through Mystery.
Healing is irrational. Perhaps the question we should really be asking is what causes us to imagine we are dissociated from a state of optimal health. This doesn’t mean our bodies will always work flawlessly. Chaos theory reveals that many systems in the body are self-organizing and regulated by stochastic processes that are naturally chaotic in nature. Chaos actually helps us reorganize, recalibrate our metabolism.
We can discuss it in terms of nested structured duality, superfluids, or an array of vortices, or a microtubule bank, or a dendritic cluster, or an entangled or collapsing wave function; still, we're merely talking about resonance between arrays -- patterns. This perspective leads to consideration of a Holographic concept of reality, the frequency domain, David Bohm’s implicate order.
Panpsychism aside, every bit of electrical activity is unaware of itself, is unaware of every other bit of electrical activity, and is unaware of all their relationships. This raises the question: why does consciousness exists at all and why is it a unity?
There are many plausible ways that quantum theory can help with these profound mysteries and it will be many decades before some understanding of the actual mechanisms are finalized. So, despite the pluses and minuses of existing quantum theories of mind, these kinds of theories should be encouraged. If consciousness is or is related to quantum effects then scientists will have to think in these directions to figure it out.
Most natural philosophers hold, and have held, that action at a distance across empty space is impossible-in other words, that matter cannot act where it is not, but only where it is. The question "where is it?" is a further question that may demand attention and require more than a superficial answer. Arguably, every atom of matter has a universal though nearly infinitesimal prevalence, and extends everywhere; since there is no definite sharp boundary or limiting periphery to the region disturbed by its existence. The lines of force of an isolated electric charge extend throughout illimitable space.
No ordinary matter is capable of transmitting the undulations or tremors that we call light. The speed at which they go, the kind of undulation, and the facility with which they go through vacuum, forbid this. So clearly and universally has it been perceived that waves must be waves of something, something distinct from ordinary matter.
Faraday conjectured that the same medium which is concerned in the propagation of light might also be the agent in electromagnetic phenomena, and he called it “the ether”. Now we speak of it as the zero-point domain of virtual photon fluctuation. Romantically, we refer to it as the plenum, since it is infinitely full of potential.
Some philosophers have reason to suppose that mind can act directly on mind without intervening mechanism, and sometimes that has been spoken of as genuine action at a distance. But, in the first place, no proper conception or physical model can be made of such a process.
Nor is it clear that space and distance have any particular meaning in the region of psychology. The links between mind and mind may be something quite other than physical proximity. Since we don’t know how it works, in denying action at a distance across empty space we are not telepathy or other activities of a non-physical kind. Brain disturbance or mindbody healing is certainly a physical correlate of mental action, whether of the sending or receiving variety.
Iona Miller, ©2012-2014
All Rights Reserved
Fair Use Notice
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
All Rights Reserved
Fair Use Notice
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.