Natural Philosophy
by Iona Miller, 2012
JCER, Vol. 3; Issue 3
“My soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak. I call you—are you there? I have returned. I am here again. I have shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet, and I have come to you again.”
--Jung, The Red Book, p. 232
"Those who regard philosophy as a soft and unscientific discipline in contrast to the hard and scientific field of mathematics and physics, have accepted a Big Lie. The ideas of mathematicians and physicists can be no more objective or certain than the philosophic ideas on which they depend. Philosophy is the discipline that tells us how to be objective and how to achieve certainty. Without a theory of knowledge, how would mathematicians or physicists know the relationship of their concepts and generalizations to reality? It is the inductive science of philosophy that teaches the hard scientist how to be scientific." --Leonard Peikoff in The Logical Leap by David Harriman
--Jung, The Red Book, p. 232
"Those who regard philosophy as a soft and unscientific discipline in contrast to the hard and scientific field of mathematics and physics, have accepted a Big Lie. The ideas of mathematicians and physicists can be no more objective or certain than the philosophic ideas on which they depend. Philosophy is the discipline that tells us how to be objective and how to achieve certainty. Without a theory of knowledge, how would mathematicians or physicists know the relationship of their concepts and generalizations to reality? It is the inductive science of philosophy that teaches the hard scientist how to be scientific." --Leonard Peikoff in The Logical Leap by David Harriman
"All things are implicated with one another, and the bond is holy; and there is hardly anything unconnected with any other things. For things have been coordinated, and they combine to make up the same universe. For there is one universe made up of all things, and one god who pervades all things, and one substance, and one law, and one reason." --Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations (7.9)
Beyond The Undulant Quiescence
"Nature is visible Spirit ; Spirit is invisible Nature"
- Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
Abstract: Like pandisciplinarian research, natural philosophy explores the cosmos by any means necessary to understand the universe. Such a model retains usefulness for comprehending our own nature in the environment, beyond yet integrated with the models of science. The hidden language of the archetypes of nature helps us translate the dynamics of our Being and Becoming. A multidisciplinary approach can present and explore a variety of theories and models without advocating them, ideally leading toward best practice. Complexity demonstrates a science of surprise that supersedes the boundaries of nature and culture, transcendental theorizing or unreflexive presumption.
How can we understand the various cooperative effects of systems, whether they belong to physics, physiology, psychology, biology, etc.? In contrast to the analytic reductionism of classical science, systems philosophy integrates theory and philosophy to foster reorganization of thinking and knowing perceived reality. Rather than explaining what things are, we explore and describe how things work. Metanarratives bind society and cultures together, integrating events and actions into meaningful patterns. The world of experience remains one of perceived reality and worldview.
Introduction
Philosophy, Integrated Science (Biology, Chemistry, and Physics), and Depth Psychology are ways of realization involving a transformation in our deep experience of the world. We are liberated from attributing reality to the plurality of objects in the universe of experience. Traditionally, we tend to answer big questions through stories as much as theories. Today we read sacred texts for archetypal insight and we can view our theories in the same way as the construction of powerful symbols and shared meanings, worthy of serious philosophical and empirical reflection on shared reality.
Chalmers points out that, “the epistemological gap between physical processes and consciousness goes along with an epistemic gap between physical processes and the self. If so, there might also be an epistemic gap to facts about the survival of the self.”
Consciousness Studies is not a single, integrated body of knowledge, so it demands that we transcend individual professional knowledge bases. Topical areas include neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, biology, biophysics. In a nutshell, physics is not beyond you. In the new model consciousness becomes as fundamental to the cosmos as space, time, energy and matter -- in some respects even more fundamental.
Natural philosophy returns in the “new” concept of mind, life and matter emerging from the nature of the quantum vacuum, the energy sea that underlies all of spacetime. Space is no longer secondary to matter. Absolute space of the vacuum is the primary reality. The things we know as matter (mass, with its associated properties of inertia and gravitation) appear as the consequence of interactions in the depth of this universal field. In the emerging concept there is no "absolute matter," only an absolute matter-generating energy field.
Natural Philosophy
"From this moment onward, I go forward into the Aion, and there, where time rests in stillness in the eternity of time, I will repose in silence." --The Luminous Gospels. The key point is that Aion is not an afterlife, another form of temporality that begins after we die, but end (or "fullness") of time itself as a structuring dimension of reality.
Eternity Within
Theories of the origins and nature of life are foundational to our self-understanding. They have been there since the beginning. The mystery of the nature of reality remains an unsolved puzzle, enigma or paradox, despite interdisciplinary progress on several fronts. No single scientific or spiritual view is complete.
No consensus model for either life or physics has emerged (Andrulis). Our search continues to find oneness, congruent with our awareness, embodied in our phenomenological reality.
Quantum theory may be true but its interpretations remain baffling. Hard science continues to deny the notion that experience is data yet still has not described the fundamental nature of matter, but merely measured and attempted to interpret it. Meaning needs context. There is both a philosophy of physics and a philosophy of psychology, which must be taken into account. The self, space and time are metaphysical manifestations.
There is also the philosophy of cognitive science, which deals with the traditional issues of cognition and transcendence. Phenomenology and philosophy provide constitutive explanations that describe the structural conditions of possibility of phenomena. Scientific models provide enabling accounts of the theoretical mechanisms required to generate and explain these phenomena. Although science does not directly provide constitutive explanation of transcendental foundations it can provide ground for revising philosophical theories about them. Both phenomenology and transcendental philosophy answer to naturalistic epistemological constraints. (Wheeler)
Anscombe contends, "we have a kind of spontaneous knowledge – knowledge that does not rest on observation or inference – not only of our own mental states, but of what we are doing, what is actually happening out there in the world. Another is that intentional action and its explanation by reasons resist assimilation to explanation by efficient causes or natural laws, the only kinds that are countenanced by natural science. There is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in the reductive naturalist’s philosophy." Kieran Setiya (Reasons Without Rationalism) feels, "If psychology needs to be reduced, it can be; if it can’t be, I am much more confident that it is real than that it needs to be reduced. " http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/what-anscombe-intended-other-puzzles/
Can we fathom the nature and depth of consciousness by direct experience? Noetics refers to the cognitive faculty that apprehends non-sensuous phenomena. Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell experienced the phenomenon dubbed the “Overview Effect” in February of 1971. He describes being completely engulfed by a profound sense of universal connectedness, overwhelming feelings of bliss, timelessness, and connectedness. He became instantly and profoundly aware that each of his constituent atoms were connected to the fragile planet he saw in the window and to every other atom in the Universe. He described experiencing an intense awareness that Earth, with its humans, other animal species, and systems were all one synergistic whole. He says the feeling that rushed over him was a sense of interconnected euphoria.
Other astronauts report the same “cosmic connection”, or acute awareness of all matter as synergistically connected. Rusty Schweikart experienced it on March 6, 1969 during a spacewalk outside his Apollo 9 vehicle: “When you go around the Earth in an hour and a half, you begin to recognize that your identity is with that whole thing. That makes a change…it comes through to you so powerfully that you’re the sensing element for Man.” Schweikart also describes intuitively sensing that everything is profoundly connected. These and other reports intrigued scientists who study the brain. www.overviewinstitute.org
Shaky Ground
Such unitive experiences are reported from deep meditation also. The experienced phenomenon of meditative quiescence include the “ground of becoming,” characterized as a relative vacuum state of consciousness, voided of all manner of mental activity. Perceptual systems able to symbolize themselves — self-referential minds — can’t be explained just by understanding the parts that compose them. Viewed as a symbol, consciousness is very much like many of the other grand ideas of science. Often we do not know what we are talking about, parroting old interpretations and memes.
An atom is not so much a thing as an idea, a symbol for matter’s ultimate constituents. But even our ideas of the nature of an atom may be faulty, according to physicist Alan Forrester, who argues that atoms are not mostly empty vacuum space. "That is a misconception based on a false view of what atoms are like. People imagine that atoms are like mini solar systems: the protons are like the sun and the electrons are like planets. This is completely false, as illustrated by the fact that atoms cannot penetrate one another. In addition, if an atom resembled a mini solar system, the electron would radiate away all its energy and fall into the nucleus in a fraction of a second, so no atoms would exist."
"So what's actually going on? Each electron exists in multiple instances that interact with one another and those instances are spread out over a region of space. The shape of the cloud of instances is determined by the other systems acting on it, mainly the nucleus, and its tendency to spread out in space if left on its own. No two electrons can have the same state, that's why atoms can't penetrate one another." FOR Digest, Mar 16, 2012
He alleges, "Reality is both digital and analog": "I argue that both digital and analog information are important in the foundations of quantum physics. If it is possible for information present in one system to become present in others without being erased in the original system I will say that this information can be copied. I argue that copying is important for understanding issues like causality and that all information that can be copied is digital. I then explain that analog information that cannot be copied can be understood in terms of decision theoretic probability." http://arxiv.org/abs/1102.2988
Gödel’s proof emerged from deep insights into the self-referential nature of mathematical statements. He showed how a system referring to itself creates paradoxes that cannot be logically resolved — and so certain questions cannot in principle be answered. At its core, consciousness is self-referential awareness, the self’s sense of its own existence. It is consciousness itself that is trying to explain consciousness.
Primordial consciousness may be regarded as an ultimate ground state of consciousness, ascertained non-dually through the cultivation of contemplative insight. The vacuum serves as the nondual source of creation of each person’s experienced-world-and-its-experiencer. Nonduality is philosophical, spiritual, and scientific understanding of intrinsic oneness, awareness, or consciousness. Reality is inherently free of the dualistic opposites, such as mind/matter, subject/object, reality/appearance, self/other, substance/attribute, essentialism/nihilism, past/future, here/there, truth/falsity, good/evil, and other pairs of opposites.
Pandisciplinary science is converging on the nondual, which unifies many models at the root of being. Cosmologists seek a first cause for the universe. Physicists look for the ultimate constituent of matter. Neurophysiologists attempt to correlate physiological observables with reported experiences of nonduality. Transpersonal psychologists investigate the effects of these experiences on human mental health. Deep ecologists explore the potential consequences of global health. Even mathematical insight has been likened to sacred communion.
Psychologically, nonduality is the numinous archetype of Self, much as Jung described it. "The nature of the Self" is explored from the perspective of modern science, ancient traditions, cosmology, neuroscience, metaphysics, cultural context, philosophy, phenomenology and direct experience. This self-generated symbol of the self operates only on the level of symbols. It has no access to the workings of nerve cells and neurotransmitters, the microscopic electrochemical machinery of neurobiological life. The symbols that consciousness contemplates don’t look much like the real thing. Awareness shifts from the activities of mind to the eternal presence of being. Quantum Field theory, complexity and emergence can model microcosmic dynamics emerging at the macroscopic scale in the form of very mysterious and spectacular phenomena. http://www.scienceandnonduality.com/index.shtml
In science, nonduality is an exploration of the nature of awareness, the essence of life from which all arises and subsides. Modern physics describes the world as a self-moving, self-designing pattern, an undivided wholeness. Such ultimate vacuum states of consciousness correlate with the relative and absolute vacuum states of space presented in contemporary physics (Wallace). The vacuum potential is a virtual background energy that exists throughout space, even when no matter is present.
Lore & Order
Nonduality is traditionally associated with meditative states. Recently meditation has been correlated with a positive thickening of the cerebral cortex and increased cortical gyrification, convolutions on the exterior of the brain. "Folding" of the cortex facilitates faster information processing. The brain changes to create narrow furrows and folds called sulci and gyri, which enhance neural processing.
Luders (2012) found a direct correlation between the amount of regional insular gyrification and the number of meditation practice years, highlighting the brain's neuroplasticity, or ability to adapt to environmental changes. Presumably, the more folding that occurs, the better the brain is at processing information, making decisions, forming memories, etc. Heightened levels of gyrification predominated across a wide swath of the cortex, including the left precentral gyrus, the left and right anterior dorsal insula, the right fusiform gyrus and the right cuneus.
"The insula has been suggested to function as a hub for autonomic, affective and cognitive integration," said Luders. "Meditators are known to be masters in introspection and awareness as well as emotional control and self-regulation, so the findings make sense that the longer someone has meditated, the higher the degree of folding in the insula."
Concentration leads to absorption of various depths in which desire, anxiety, pain, and trauma of temporal uncertainty are attentuated. Orderly global harmonic cascades of alpha and theta waves cover the cortex, modulating beta-endorphin. Brain entrainment links the meditator with the Schumann Resonance (quasi-standing electromagnetic waves, resonating at about 7.83 Hz), Earth's universal driving signal of the biosphere (Miller). Brain wave frequencies are not confined to the brain, but cascade via harmonic wave motion into every cell and atom in the body (Oschmann). Energy and information embedded in the zero point field transfer their potential through this primal language of frequencies, including wave genetics (Gariaev).
Stuart Hammeroff suggests a fractal nature for human consciousness. The brain constitutes not only networks of neurons, but also hierarchical layers, with self-similar information patterns represented at various different scales, i.e. fractal-like organization. The brain has fractal-like structure, known as small-world networks, with a very few large, and very many small, hubs. Pribram, Bieberich, Bohm, and others have said for many years that memory and content of consciousness may be fractal, or holographic, and many have described altered states of consciousness as fractal, or scale-free.
A study in the journal Science (1990) suggested that genes may contribute as much as 50 percent to individual differences in religiosity. Lars Farde found that the number of receptors for the nerve transmitter serotonin in the brain correlates with "spirituality", (Nov. 2003 American Journal of Psychiatry). The serotonin system helps regulate our perception and the variety of stimuli reaching our awareness. The investigators found that the number of serotonin receptors correlated significantly and inversely with subjects’ scores for self-transcendence—the higher the score on self-transcendence, the fewer the number of receptors in all brain areas scrutinized, indicating a genetically "weak sensory filter".
Neurotheology describes how calming the chatter of the higher functions turns some areas of the brain offline in meditation. The parietal lobes are associated with the orientation of the body in space and processing information about time and space (Persinger). More specifically, the left superior parietal lobe creates the perception of the physical body boundaries. The right superior parietal lobe creates the perception of the physical space outside of the body.
Blocked off from neuronal activity, the parietal lobe cannot create a sensation of boundary between the physical body and the outside world, which may explain a meditator's sense of oneness with the Universe. Since the parietal lobes are also unable to perform their usual task of creating linear perception of time, meditators achieve a sensation of infinity and timelessness.
In the journal Nature, Dr. Olaf Blanke implicates the angular gyrus, (an area on the surface of the brain involved in perception of our own bodies and metaphorical perception) in out of body experiences. Ramachandran suggests OBEs are metaphors that can be taken literally and so 'feed' the concept of being able to 'escape' the body. The angular gyrus is thought to play a role in the way the brain analyzes sensory information that allow us to perceive our bodies. When it misfires, they suggest, the result can be a sense of floating, and seeing the world from outside of the body. There may be a widely-distributed set of pathways, including oxygen deprivation and pain-reducing endorphin production.
Like a switchboard operator, after gathering information from particular senses, the thalamus shoots the signals along specific nerve fibers, connecting the right signal to the right part of the brain’s wrinkly cortex and the cortex signals back. The thalamus receives information directly from the outside world, and information from other parts of the brain. Instead of being a driver, the thalamus may be a consciousness gauge, perhaps modulating overloads of synchrony.
Absorption in the Light
By witnessing our thoughts through the attenuating process of thought, neural and emotional response, we witness the entire stream of the thinking process. All thoughts pass. Absorption reaches its culmination when the mind is free even of thoughtlessness, of all seeds of potential thought, beyond meditations on no-thingness and non-perception.
With nothing to cognize, pure luminous awareness ceases to be "embodied", and ceases to be mind. The myriad universe drops away, time stands still, and individual consciousness merges in the Self, the Universal Consciousness. The process of meditation and attenuation of habitual feedback loops deliberately cultivates a single thought-wave, which intensified through repeated practice, takes the form of the whole mind. Swallowing all other distracting thought-waves, it itself becomes quelled -- beyond the undulant quiescence of vacuum fluctuation. Innate radiance, crystal clear Light arises. Light is energy, information, transformation and creation.
Wallace describes the relative vacuum or ground state of consciousness: "All phenomena appearing to sensory and mental perception are imbued with the clarity of this substrate consciousness. Like the reflections of the planets and stars in a pool of limpid, clear water, so do the appearances of the entire phenomenal world appear within this empty, clear substrate consciousness. Contemplatives who have penetrated to this state of consciousness describe it as “an unfluctuating state, in which one experiences bliss like the warmth of a fire, luminosity like the dawn, and
nonconceptuality like an ocean unmoved by waves.”
He suggests, "The experiential realization of [absolute space] by primordial consciousness transcends all distinctions of subject and object, mind and matter, indeed, all words and concepts. Such insight does not entail the meeting of a subjective mode of consciousness with an objective space, but rather the nondual realization of the intrinsic unity of absolute space and primordial consciousness."
Absolute space and primordial consciousness are coterminous, nonlocal, and atemporal. Pure potential of absolute space is the fundamental nature of the experienced world. Primordial consciousness is the fundamental nature of the mind. This absolute vacuum is fathomed while letting consciousness come to rest in a state of nonduality, open to the entire universe. Devoid of all internal structure, it embodies a unique, absolute symmetry that transcends relative space, time, mind, and matter. The vacuum in itself is shapeless, but it may assume specific shapes. In doing so, it becomes a physical reality, a "real world".
Essentially, matter is "frozen" light, manifest light essence. Organisms are formed and regulated by biophotons. In physics, the energy of a photon is taken up by matter (electrons) through the absorption of electromagnetic radiation. The electromagnetic energy is transformed to other forms of energy, for example, to heat. The absorption of light during wave propagation is often called attenuation, loss of signal over distance. Usually, the absorption of waves does not depend on their intensity (linear absorption), although in certain conditions (usually, in optics), the medium changes its transparency dependently on the intensity of waves going through, and the saturable absorption (or nonlinear absorption) occurs.
Fractal Vortex Potential
Promising geometric models of fractal vortex potential, founded on the gyre, vortex, spiral, whorl, rotation, vector equilibrium, or spin have been proposed for the origins of life and the physical universe (Anrulis; Hu & Wu; Maurer, Haramein & Rauscher, Kozyrov, Fuller, etc.).
Vortex theory is an appealing notion with a long theoretical pedigree, including Democritus, Copernicus, Descartes, and Maxwell. It is an archetype of the core dynamical process. Vortex crystals is one name in use for the subject of vortex patterns that move without change of shape or size. The vortex is a perennial theme and broadly applicable model, as M.-L. von Franz suggests in Projection and Recollection in Jungian Psychology.
"The old way of picturing energy lived on in the alchemistic tradition in the idea of Mercurius as a "hidden fire" or fiery life-breath or a kind of life-spirit inherent in all things...This fire-spirit imagines everything in nature; he is a creation spirit who contains in himself "the image of all creatures." In the alchemical opus he must be liberated from his imprisonment in matter and then he begins to rotate in himself, vortex-fashion; at the same time he reveals himself as an immortal component of the alchemist's psyche. By way of the different stages of the so-called phlogiston theory this archetypal image gradually developed into the energy concept of modern physics. There is therefore no concept fundamental to modern physics that is not in one degree or another a differentiated form of some primordial archetypal idea."
Eternity Within
Theories of the origins and nature of life are foundational to our self-understanding. They have been there since the beginning. The mystery of the nature of reality remains an unsolved puzzle, enigma or paradox, despite interdisciplinary progress on several fronts. No single scientific or spiritual view is complete.
No consensus model for either life or physics has emerged (Andrulis). Our search continues to find oneness, congruent with our awareness, embodied in our phenomenological reality.
Quantum theory may be true but its interpretations remain baffling. Hard science continues to deny the notion that experience is data yet still has not described the fundamental nature of matter, but merely measured and attempted to interpret it. Meaning needs context. There is both a philosophy of physics and a philosophy of psychology, which must be taken into account. The self, space and time are metaphysical manifestations.
There is also the philosophy of cognitive science, which deals with the traditional issues of cognition and transcendence. Phenomenology and philosophy provide constitutive explanations that describe the structural conditions of possibility of phenomena. Scientific models provide enabling accounts of the theoretical mechanisms required to generate and explain these phenomena. Although science does not directly provide constitutive explanation of transcendental foundations it can provide ground for revising philosophical theories about them. Both phenomenology and transcendental philosophy answer to naturalistic epistemological constraints. (Wheeler)
Anscombe contends, "we have a kind of spontaneous knowledge – knowledge that does not rest on observation or inference – not only of our own mental states, but of what we are doing, what is actually happening out there in the world. Another is that intentional action and its explanation by reasons resist assimilation to explanation by efficient causes or natural laws, the only kinds that are countenanced by natural science. There is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in the reductive naturalist’s philosophy." Kieran Setiya (Reasons Without Rationalism) feels, "If psychology needs to be reduced, it can be; if it can’t be, I am much more confident that it is real than that it needs to be reduced. " http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/what-anscombe-intended-other-puzzles/
Can we fathom the nature and depth of consciousness by direct experience? Noetics refers to the cognitive faculty that apprehends non-sensuous phenomena. Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell experienced the phenomenon dubbed the “Overview Effect” in February of 1971. He describes being completely engulfed by a profound sense of universal connectedness, overwhelming feelings of bliss, timelessness, and connectedness. He became instantly and profoundly aware that each of his constituent atoms were connected to the fragile planet he saw in the window and to every other atom in the Universe. He described experiencing an intense awareness that Earth, with its humans, other animal species, and systems were all one synergistic whole. He says the feeling that rushed over him was a sense of interconnected euphoria.
Other astronauts report the same “cosmic connection”, or acute awareness of all matter as synergistically connected. Rusty Schweikart experienced it on March 6, 1969 during a spacewalk outside his Apollo 9 vehicle: “When you go around the Earth in an hour and a half, you begin to recognize that your identity is with that whole thing. That makes a change…it comes through to you so powerfully that you’re the sensing element for Man.” Schweikart also describes intuitively sensing that everything is profoundly connected. These and other reports intrigued scientists who study the brain. www.overviewinstitute.org
Shaky Ground
Such unitive experiences are reported from deep meditation also. The experienced phenomenon of meditative quiescence include the “ground of becoming,” characterized as a relative vacuum state of consciousness, voided of all manner of mental activity. Perceptual systems able to symbolize themselves — self-referential minds — can’t be explained just by understanding the parts that compose them. Viewed as a symbol, consciousness is very much like many of the other grand ideas of science. Often we do not know what we are talking about, parroting old interpretations and memes.
An atom is not so much a thing as an idea, a symbol for matter’s ultimate constituents. But even our ideas of the nature of an atom may be faulty, according to physicist Alan Forrester, who argues that atoms are not mostly empty vacuum space. "That is a misconception based on a false view of what atoms are like. People imagine that atoms are like mini solar systems: the protons are like the sun and the electrons are like planets. This is completely false, as illustrated by the fact that atoms cannot penetrate one another. In addition, if an atom resembled a mini solar system, the electron would radiate away all its energy and fall into the nucleus in a fraction of a second, so no atoms would exist."
"So what's actually going on? Each electron exists in multiple instances that interact with one another and those instances are spread out over a region of space. The shape of the cloud of instances is determined by the other systems acting on it, mainly the nucleus, and its tendency to spread out in space if left on its own. No two electrons can have the same state, that's why atoms can't penetrate one another." FOR Digest, Mar 16, 2012
He alleges, "Reality is both digital and analog": "I argue that both digital and analog information are important in the foundations of quantum physics. If it is possible for information present in one system to become present in others without being erased in the original system I will say that this information can be copied. I argue that copying is important for understanding issues like causality and that all information that can be copied is digital. I then explain that analog information that cannot be copied can be understood in terms of decision theoretic probability." http://arxiv.org/abs/1102.2988
Gödel’s proof emerged from deep insights into the self-referential nature of mathematical statements. He showed how a system referring to itself creates paradoxes that cannot be logically resolved — and so certain questions cannot in principle be answered. At its core, consciousness is self-referential awareness, the self’s sense of its own existence. It is consciousness itself that is trying to explain consciousness.
Primordial consciousness may be regarded as an ultimate ground state of consciousness, ascertained non-dually through the cultivation of contemplative insight. The vacuum serves as the nondual source of creation of each person’s experienced-world-and-its-experiencer. Nonduality is philosophical, spiritual, and scientific understanding of intrinsic oneness, awareness, or consciousness. Reality is inherently free of the dualistic opposites, such as mind/matter, subject/object, reality/appearance, self/other, substance/attribute, essentialism/nihilism, past/future, here/there, truth/falsity, good/evil, and other pairs of opposites.
Pandisciplinary science is converging on the nondual, which unifies many models at the root of being. Cosmologists seek a first cause for the universe. Physicists look for the ultimate constituent of matter. Neurophysiologists attempt to correlate physiological observables with reported experiences of nonduality. Transpersonal psychologists investigate the effects of these experiences on human mental health. Deep ecologists explore the potential consequences of global health. Even mathematical insight has been likened to sacred communion.
Psychologically, nonduality is the numinous archetype of Self, much as Jung described it. "The nature of the Self" is explored from the perspective of modern science, ancient traditions, cosmology, neuroscience, metaphysics, cultural context, philosophy, phenomenology and direct experience. This self-generated symbol of the self operates only on the level of symbols. It has no access to the workings of nerve cells and neurotransmitters, the microscopic electrochemical machinery of neurobiological life. The symbols that consciousness contemplates don’t look much like the real thing. Awareness shifts from the activities of mind to the eternal presence of being. Quantum Field theory, complexity and emergence can model microcosmic dynamics emerging at the macroscopic scale in the form of very mysterious and spectacular phenomena. http://www.scienceandnonduality.com/index.shtml
In science, nonduality is an exploration of the nature of awareness, the essence of life from which all arises and subsides. Modern physics describes the world as a self-moving, self-designing pattern, an undivided wholeness. Such ultimate vacuum states of consciousness correlate with the relative and absolute vacuum states of space presented in contemporary physics (Wallace). The vacuum potential is a virtual background energy that exists throughout space, even when no matter is present.
Lore & Order
Nonduality is traditionally associated with meditative states. Recently meditation has been correlated with a positive thickening of the cerebral cortex and increased cortical gyrification, convolutions on the exterior of the brain. "Folding" of the cortex facilitates faster information processing. The brain changes to create narrow furrows and folds called sulci and gyri, which enhance neural processing.
Luders (2012) found a direct correlation between the amount of regional insular gyrification and the number of meditation practice years, highlighting the brain's neuroplasticity, or ability to adapt to environmental changes. Presumably, the more folding that occurs, the better the brain is at processing information, making decisions, forming memories, etc. Heightened levels of gyrification predominated across a wide swath of the cortex, including the left precentral gyrus, the left and right anterior dorsal insula, the right fusiform gyrus and the right cuneus.
"The insula has been suggested to function as a hub for autonomic, affective and cognitive integration," said Luders. "Meditators are known to be masters in introspection and awareness as well as emotional control and self-regulation, so the findings make sense that the longer someone has meditated, the higher the degree of folding in the insula."
Concentration leads to absorption of various depths in which desire, anxiety, pain, and trauma of temporal uncertainty are attentuated. Orderly global harmonic cascades of alpha and theta waves cover the cortex, modulating beta-endorphin. Brain entrainment links the meditator with the Schumann Resonance (quasi-standing electromagnetic waves, resonating at about 7.83 Hz), Earth's universal driving signal of the biosphere (Miller). Brain wave frequencies are not confined to the brain, but cascade via harmonic wave motion into every cell and atom in the body (Oschmann). Energy and information embedded in the zero point field transfer their potential through this primal language of frequencies, including wave genetics (Gariaev).
Stuart Hammeroff suggests a fractal nature for human consciousness. The brain constitutes not only networks of neurons, but also hierarchical layers, with self-similar information patterns represented at various different scales, i.e. fractal-like organization. The brain has fractal-like structure, known as small-world networks, with a very few large, and very many small, hubs. Pribram, Bieberich, Bohm, and others have said for many years that memory and content of consciousness may be fractal, or holographic, and many have described altered states of consciousness as fractal, or scale-free.
A study in the journal Science (1990) suggested that genes may contribute as much as 50 percent to individual differences in religiosity. Lars Farde found that the number of receptors for the nerve transmitter serotonin in the brain correlates with "spirituality", (Nov. 2003 American Journal of Psychiatry). The serotonin system helps regulate our perception and the variety of stimuli reaching our awareness. The investigators found that the number of serotonin receptors correlated significantly and inversely with subjects’ scores for self-transcendence—the higher the score on self-transcendence, the fewer the number of receptors in all brain areas scrutinized, indicating a genetically "weak sensory filter".
Neurotheology describes how calming the chatter of the higher functions turns some areas of the brain offline in meditation. The parietal lobes are associated with the orientation of the body in space and processing information about time and space (Persinger). More specifically, the left superior parietal lobe creates the perception of the physical body boundaries. The right superior parietal lobe creates the perception of the physical space outside of the body.
Blocked off from neuronal activity, the parietal lobe cannot create a sensation of boundary between the physical body and the outside world, which may explain a meditator's sense of oneness with the Universe. Since the parietal lobes are also unable to perform their usual task of creating linear perception of time, meditators achieve a sensation of infinity and timelessness.
In the journal Nature, Dr. Olaf Blanke implicates the angular gyrus, (an area on the surface of the brain involved in perception of our own bodies and metaphorical perception) in out of body experiences. Ramachandran suggests OBEs are metaphors that can be taken literally and so 'feed' the concept of being able to 'escape' the body. The angular gyrus is thought to play a role in the way the brain analyzes sensory information that allow us to perceive our bodies. When it misfires, they suggest, the result can be a sense of floating, and seeing the world from outside of the body. There may be a widely-distributed set of pathways, including oxygen deprivation and pain-reducing endorphin production.
Like a switchboard operator, after gathering information from particular senses, the thalamus shoots the signals along specific nerve fibers, connecting the right signal to the right part of the brain’s wrinkly cortex and the cortex signals back. The thalamus receives information directly from the outside world, and information from other parts of the brain. Instead of being a driver, the thalamus may be a consciousness gauge, perhaps modulating overloads of synchrony.
Absorption in the Light
By witnessing our thoughts through the attenuating process of thought, neural and emotional response, we witness the entire stream of the thinking process. All thoughts pass. Absorption reaches its culmination when the mind is free even of thoughtlessness, of all seeds of potential thought, beyond meditations on no-thingness and non-perception.
With nothing to cognize, pure luminous awareness ceases to be "embodied", and ceases to be mind. The myriad universe drops away, time stands still, and individual consciousness merges in the Self, the Universal Consciousness. The process of meditation and attenuation of habitual feedback loops deliberately cultivates a single thought-wave, which intensified through repeated practice, takes the form of the whole mind. Swallowing all other distracting thought-waves, it itself becomes quelled -- beyond the undulant quiescence of vacuum fluctuation. Innate radiance, crystal clear Light arises. Light is energy, information, transformation and creation.
Wallace describes the relative vacuum or ground state of consciousness: "All phenomena appearing to sensory and mental perception are imbued with the clarity of this substrate consciousness. Like the reflections of the planets and stars in a pool of limpid, clear water, so do the appearances of the entire phenomenal world appear within this empty, clear substrate consciousness. Contemplatives who have penetrated to this state of consciousness describe it as “an unfluctuating state, in which one experiences bliss like the warmth of a fire, luminosity like the dawn, and
nonconceptuality like an ocean unmoved by waves.”
He suggests, "The experiential realization of [absolute space] by primordial consciousness transcends all distinctions of subject and object, mind and matter, indeed, all words and concepts. Such insight does not entail the meeting of a subjective mode of consciousness with an objective space, but rather the nondual realization of the intrinsic unity of absolute space and primordial consciousness."
Absolute space and primordial consciousness are coterminous, nonlocal, and atemporal. Pure potential of absolute space is the fundamental nature of the experienced world. Primordial consciousness is the fundamental nature of the mind. This absolute vacuum is fathomed while letting consciousness come to rest in a state of nonduality, open to the entire universe. Devoid of all internal structure, it embodies a unique, absolute symmetry that transcends relative space, time, mind, and matter. The vacuum in itself is shapeless, but it may assume specific shapes. In doing so, it becomes a physical reality, a "real world".
Essentially, matter is "frozen" light, manifest light essence. Organisms are formed and regulated by biophotons. In physics, the energy of a photon is taken up by matter (electrons) through the absorption of electromagnetic radiation. The electromagnetic energy is transformed to other forms of energy, for example, to heat. The absorption of light during wave propagation is often called attenuation, loss of signal over distance. Usually, the absorption of waves does not depend on their intensity (linear absorption), although in certain conditions (usually, in optics), the medium changes its transparency dependently on the intensity of waves going through, and the saturable absorption (or nonlinear absorption) occurs.
Fractal Vortex Potential
Promising geometric models of fractal vortex potential, founded on the gyre, vortex, spiral, whorl, rotation, vector equilibrium, or spin have been proposed for the origins of life and the physical universe (Anrulis; Hu & Wu; Maurer, Haramein & Rauscher, Kozyrov, Fuller, etc.).
Vortex theory is an appealing notion with a long theoretical pedigree, including Democritus, Copernicus, Descartes, and Maxwell. It is an archetype of the core dynamical process. Vortex crystals is one name in use for the subject of vortex patterns that move without change of shape or size. The vortex is a perennial theme and broadly applicable model, as M.-L. von Franz suggests in Projection and Recollection in Jungian Psychology.
"The old way of picturing energy lived on in the alchemistic tradition in the idea of Mercurius as a "hidden fire" or fiery life-breath or a kind of life-spirit inherent in all things...This fire-spirit imagines everything in nature; he is a creation spirit who contains in himself "the image of all creatures." In the alchemical opus he must be liberated from his imprisonment in matter and then he begins to rotate in himself, vortex-fashion; at the same time he reveals himself as an immortal component of the alchemist's psyche. By way of the different stages of the so-called phlogiston theory this archetypal image gradually developed into the energy concept of modern physics. There is therefore no concept fundamental to modern physics that is not in one degree or another a differentiated form of some primordial archetypal idea."
Natural philosophy or the philosophy of nature was the study of nature and the physical universe predominant before the development of modern science. It is considered the precursor of natural sciences such as physics, optics and mathematics. Forms of science historically developed out of philosophy or, more specifically, natural philosophy. At older universities, long-established Chairs of Natural Philosophy are now occupied mainly by physics professors.
But the aesthetic paradigms of philosophy, psychology and physics still feed into our explanations and understanding of Nature and Reality. All worldviews are based on certain metaphysical assumptions about existence. Myths were the first explanations of the universe, which then became allegories for philosophical or spiritual concepts as we disenchanted nature. Culture deviated from nature. Religion takes mythology literally, whereas psychology sees the interior domain metaphorically or even regressively (romanticism, "back to nature"). First philosophy criticized mythology; now it critiques science.
Once our relationship with nature was sacred, but we lost awareness of our primordial symbiotic relatedness to materialism. We conceptually erased interiority. The brain is constantly sensing external vibrational energies which is how we have evolved our five senses over time. Throughout evolution the brain led the body to form organs to amplify these external frequencies (waveforms). Externally viewed, the natural world is analyzed as "its" with externally observable functions.
Interiority, Perception and Imagination
Is it possible that regaining our own interiority correlates with rediscovering infolded dimensions of nature and time? Interiority and exteriority are basic components in philosophy. Reflection is a metaphor for the continuum of the subject-object in the mirror-of-the-mind and the interiority of perception and its illusion of projected exteriority. Interior domains include naturalism's aesthetics, intersubjectivity, and consciousness (Zimmerman).
Psychology is the discipline of interiority. Identity includes both psychological interiority and physical expression. An intensification of interest in psychological interiority, particularly the nature of consciousness, and its relation to the body occured in the nineteenth century. But neither empiricism nor idealism, pure physiology nor pure psychology, has provided adequate explanations.
Understanding of the dualistic constraints and continuity of inner and psychological life (interiority) and the material world (exteriority) has broad implications for philosophy, the physical and human sciences. The inner self refers to an interiority that is not spatial but a psychological realism -- our impressions, inner feelings, thoughts or states.
But it also refers to our physical interiority, the primordial psychophysical ground of our being that we share with cosmos. As Derrida argued, that excluded middle predates all binary terms. A symbolical image from alchemy, the uroboros is exquisitely figurative of psychological interiority -- what we elsewhere call "the zero with a thousand faces".
When we try to observe our own consciousness we never find a mere interiority, or just "ourself". We never find consciousness but only what we are conscious of. Consciousness precisely consists of its myriad contents or forms, that something ubiquitous is there. Consequently, “inner” and “outer” phenomena do not exist side by side but the so-called inner phenomena are nothing but the phenomenal manifestation (the phenomenality) of the outer.
Not all objects that manifest themselves in consciousness are “really there”. Many are “only subjective,” and in this sense we can of course distinguish between inner and outer phenomena.This is not a distinction between consciousness and outer object but one within the realm of objects;. "Objectivity" is coordinated by intraphenomenal relations (a coordination of “inner” experiences). In this way there are “inner” and “outer” phenomena. However, consciousness is not an inner phenomenon but the "being-there" -- the arising of phenomena, whether inner or outer.
Therefore, phenomenology does not view consciousness as an inner region in contrast to an external world. They are not distinct realms of being but two inseparable aspects of one and the same. The phenomenological distinction between immanence and transcendence actually means the difference between ... that which appears and its coming to appearance, or between what is present and its being-present (its presence).
With regard to this immanence the subject in the sense of an innerworldly thing (the only sense contemporary philosophy of mind knows) is already something transcendent, as a subject substantialized in this way is no less something apperceptively constituted than any outer object, and thereby owes itself to the taking-place of manifestation as such that hence is prior to itself. Phenomenological immanence is nothing other than the opening-up of exteriority as such, which, in a certain sense, is more “interior” to consciousness in the phenomenological sense than the “psychological” interiority of a substantialized subject.
Thus the phenomenologically understood consciousness is no interiority, and for this reason exactly has no exteriority. That is why Husserl claims against Descartes that the true question is not how to infer the external world from my interiority but “whether with regard to the egological sphere an ‘outside’ has any meaning at all.” With this denial of an outside of consciousness, phenomenology can be labeled as an “idealism.” It is a phenomenological idealism that does not deny that there are things outside of the subject (insofar there is no substantial “inside” of transcendental subjectivity at all) yet can be seen as the reflection on the fact that any reality we ever refer to is a reality that appears in one way or another. (Fasching)
Fields Within Fields
Defying materialism as measure and reaching beyond metaphoric conceptualization, Sheldrake suggests “actual invisible connections” are the substance of the connectedness between patterned and patented memories, a resonance which is inherent in the socio-biological nature of the Universe, of our biology, psychology and sociology. Resonance is "dynamic similarity".
Sheldrake, therefore, gravitates to Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious, Kuhn’s changeable paradigms of reality in time and history, and Gestalt psychology. He attempts to demonstrate to science that communications produce sustainable, duplicative patterns. Shapes and designs do occur with and/or without any sensory avenues as patterns of information. (Malek)
In The Science Delusion (2012), Sheldrake extends his critique of scientific dogma, orthodoxy, and assumptions -- the belief that science already understands the nature of reality. Are the fundamental questions answered, leaving only the details to be filled in? The 'scientific worldview' has become a belief system in which all reality is material or physical. But the world is not a machine, made up of dead matter. Nature may or may not be purposeless, but it is self-organizing.
Consciousness may conceal mysteries beyond the physical activity of the brain. But Shekdrake's ideas are colored by his own mysticism. Several scientists have explored the possibility of a connection between physics and transcendence (Capra; Zukov; Bohm; Muses; Wolf; McTaggert). Quantum science has revealed the presence of the zero point field with all its virtual subatomic particles and photons that jump into existence from apparently nowhere to return to oblivion nanoseconds later. Virtual particles may travel faster than light, but macroscopically these fluctuations average out to the speed of light. Therefore, this does not imply the possibility of superluminal information transmission.
Virtual photons are common, partly because a photon is its own antiparticle. But there is still is no reasonable explanation as to how and why particles and photons can appear and disappear just like that. In Heisenberg's uncertainty principle we find that the lifetime of a given zero-point photon, viewed as a wave, corresponds to an average distance traveled of only a fraction of its wavelength. Such a wave ”fragment” is somewhat different than an ordinary plane wave and it is difficult to know how to interpret this.
As we search for "meaning," "pattern," and "cause," in the swirling vortices of quantum field theory and vibrating string theory, we encounter scientists who borrow the language of philosophy, psychology and theology to talk about the physical universe. Myth, religion, and philosophy compete with physics for our belief. There are four classic definitions of existence: Experiential, Empirical, Material and Mathematical. Physicists including Newton, Einstein and Pauli expressed lifelong interest in the nuances of alchemy, looking toward the ancient intuitive science for inspiration. Some ideas have universal reach, while other guiding theories do not.
David Deutsch suggests that judging the reach of an explanation does not involve conjecturing a second theory. The reach of an explanation is an inherent property of it. It is determined by the fact that the explanation becomes a bad explanation if its domain of applicability were restricted or extended outside a certain range. Moreover, the better the explanation, the narrower that range is, as discussed in The Beginning of Infinity, (pp26-29). According to Deutsch: we are subject only to the laws of physics, and they impose no upper boundary to what we can eventually understand, control, and achieve. A good explanation is universal when assuming any smaller domain of applicability would make it a bad explanation.
But the aesthetic paradigms of philosophy, psychology and physics still feed into our explanations and understanding of Nature and Reality. All worldviews are based on certain metaphysical assumptions about existence. Myths were the first explanations of the universe, which then became allegories for philosophical or spiritual concepts as we disenchanted nature. Culture deviated from nature. Religion takes mythology literally, whereas psychology sees the interior domain metaphorically or even regressively (romanticism, "back to nature"). First philosophy criticized mythology; now it critiques science.
Once our relationship with nature was sacred, but we lost awareness of our primordial symbiotic relatedness to materialism. We conceptually erased interiority. The brain is constantly sensing external vibrational energies which is how we have evolved our five senses over time. Throughout evolution the brain led the body to form organs to amplify these external frequencies (waveforms). Externally viewed, the natural world is analyzed as "its" with externally observable functions.
Interiority, Perception and Imagination
Is it possible that regaining our own interiority correlates with rediscovering infolded dimensions of nature and time? Interiority and exteriority are basic components in philosophy. Reflection is a metaphor for the continuum of the subject-object in the mirror-of-the-mind and the interiority of perception and its illusion of projected exteriority. Interior domains include naturalism's aesthetics, intersubjectivity, and consciousness (Zimmerman).
Psychology is the discipline of interiority. Identity includes both psychological interiority and physical expression. An intensification of interest in psychological interiority, particularly the nature of consciousness, and its relation to the body occured in the nineteenth century. But neither empiricism nor idealism, pure physiology nor pure psychology, has provided adequate explanations.
Understanding of the dualistic constraints and continuity of inner and psychological life (interiority) and the material world (exteriority) has broad implications for philosophy, the physical and human sciences. The inner self refers to an interiority that is not spatial but a psychological realism -- our impressions, inner feelings, thoughts or states.
But it also refers to our physical interiority, the primordial psychophysical ground of our being that we share with cosmos. As Derrida argued, that excluded middle predates all binary terms. A symbolical image from alchemy, the uroboros is exquisitely figurative of psychological interiority -- what we elsewhere call "the zero with a thousand faces".
When we try to observe our own consciousness we never find a mere interiority, or just "ourself". We never find consciousness but only what we are conscious of. Consciousness precisely consists of its myriad contents or forms, that something ubiquitous is there. Consequently, “inner” and “outer” phenomena do not exist side by side but the so-called inner phenomena are nothing but the phenomenal manifestation (the phenomenality) of the outer.
Not all objects that manifest themselves in consciousness are “really there”. Many are “only subjective,” and in this sense we can of course distinguish between inner and outer phenomena.This is not a distinction between consciousness and outer object but one within the realm of objects;. "Objectivity" is coordinated by intraphenomenal relations (a coordination of “inner” experiences). In this way there are “inner” and “outer” phenomena. However, consciousness is not an inner phenomenon but the "being-there" -- the arising of phenomena, whether inner or outer.
Therefore, phenomenology does not view consciousness as an inner region in contrast to an external world. They are not distinct realms of being but two inseparable aspects of one and the same. The phenomenological distinction between immanence and transcendence actually means the difference between ... that which appears and its coming to appearance, or between what is present and its being-present (its presence).
With regard to this immanence the subject in the sense of an innerworldly thing (the only sense contemporary philosophy of mind knows) is already something transcendent, as a subject substantialized in this way is no less something apperceptively constituted than any outer object, and thereby owes itself to the taking-place of manifestation as such that hence is prior to itself. Phenomenological immanence is nothing other than the opening-up of exteriority as such, which, in a certain sense, is more “interior” to consciousness in the phenomenological sense than the “psychological” interiority of a substantialized subject.
Thus the phenomenologically understood consciousness is no interiority, and for this reason exactly has no exteriority. That is why Husserl claims against Descartes that the true question is not how to infer the external world from my interiority but “whether with regard to the egological sphere an ‘outside’ has any meaning at all.” With this denial of an outside of consciousness, phenomenology can be labeled as an “idealism.” It is a phenomenological idealism that does not deny that there are things outside of the subject (insofar there is no substantial “inside” of transcendental subjectivity at all) yet can be seen as the reflection on the fact that any reality we ever refer to is a reality that appears in one way or another. (Fasching)
Fields Within Fields
Defying materialism as measure and reaching beyond metaphoric conceptualization, Sheldrake suggests “actual invisible connections” are the substance of the connectedness between patterned and patented memories, a resonance which is inherent in the socio-biological nature of the Universe, of our biology, psychology and sociology. Resonance is "dynamic similarity".
Sheldrake, therefore, gravitates to Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious, Kuhn’s changeable paradigms of reality in time and history, and Gestalt psychology. He attempts to demonstrate to science that communications produce sustainable, duplicative patterns. Shapes and designs do occur with and/or without any sensory avenues as patterns of information. (Malek)
In The Science Delusion (2012), Sheldrake extends his critique of scientific dogma, orthodoxy, and assumptions -- the belief that science already understands the nature of reality. Are the fundamental questions answered, leaving only the details to be filled in? The 'scientific worldview' has become a belief system in which all reality is material or physical. But the world is not a machine, made up of dead matter. Nature may or may not be purposeless, but it is self-organizing.
Consciousness may conceal mysteries beyond the physical activity of the brain. But Shekdrake's ideas are colored by his own mysticism. Several scientists have explored the possibility of a connection between physics and transcendence (Capra; Zukov; Bohm; Muses; Wolf; McTaggert). Quantum science has revealed the presence of the zero point field with all its virtual subatomic particles and photons that jump into existence from apparently nowhere to return to oblivion nanoseconds later. Virtual particles may travel faster than light, but macroscopically these fluctuations average out to the speed of light. Therefore, this does not imply the possibility of superluminal information transmission.
Virtual photons are common, partly because a photon is its own antiparticle. But there is still is no reasonable explanation as to how and why particles and photons can appear and disappear just like that. In Heisenberg's uncertainty principle we find that the lifetime of a given zero-point photon, viewed as a wave, corresponds to an average distance traveled of only a fraction of its wavelength. Such a wave ”fragment” is somewhat different than an ordinary plane wave and it is difficult to know how to interpret this.
As we search for "meaning," "pattern," and "cause," in the swirling vortices of quantum field theory and vibrating string theory, we encounter scientists who borrow the language of philosophy, psychology and theology to talk about the physical universe. Myth, religion, and philosophy compete with physics for our belief. There are four classic definitions of existence: Experiential, Empirical, Material and Mathematical. Physicists including Newton, Einstein and Pauli expressed lifelong interest in the nuances of alchemy, looking toward the ancient intuitive science for inspiration. Some ideas have universal reach, while other guiding theories do not.
David Deutsch suggests that judging the reach of an explanation does not involve conjecturing a second theory. The reach of an explanation is an inherent property of it. It is determined by the fact that the explanation becomes a bad explanation if its domain of applicability were restricted or extended outside a certain range. Moreover, the better the explanation, the narrower that range is, as discussed in The Beginning of Infinity, (pp26-29). According to Deutsch: we are subject only to the laws of physics, and they impose no upper boundary to what we can eventually understand, control, and achieve. A good explanation is universal when assuming any smaller domain of applicability would make it a bad explanation.
Creative Observer
Our "view" is crucial to questions of ontology and epistemology -- the nature of being and how we know what we know. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the origins, structure, methods, and validity of knowledge. Epistemological metaphors and analogies are used to discuss the structure and validity of knowledge. Even while informing us, both physics and psychology have fostered alienation from nature. Popper suggested the empirical basis of objective science has nothing 'absolute' about it. Science does not rest upon rock-bottom foundations.
Natural science was based strictly on cognition, observation and knowledge, whereas science uses experimental control, isolating and measuring things. But the "pure" science of theoretical physics is still considered philosophy. The philosophy of physics studies the fundamental philosophical questions underlying modern physics, the study of matter and energy and how they interact. The philosophy of physics begins by reflecting on the basic metaphysical and epistemological questions posed by physics: causality, determinism, and the nature of physical law.
Centuries ago, the study of causality, the fundamental nature of space, time, matter, and the universe were part of metaphysics. Today the philosophy of physics is essentially a part of the philosophy of science. Physicists use the scientific method to delineate the universals and constants governing physical phenomena, and the philosophy of physics reflects on the results of this empirical research.
Quantum mechanics describes two kinds of reality. One of the regular properties of particles is that they have a fixed position in space, while waves can occupy more than one place as they are vibrations not things. When relativity combines these two ideas we get the Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.
Physicists treat an unobserved object not as a real thing but as a probability wave, not as an actual happening but only as a bundle of vibratory possibilities. Yet, when an object is observed (measured), it always manifests at one particular place, with one particular spin and velocity, instead of a smeared-out range of physical properties. All other potentials evaporate.
With that mysterious quantum jump, "things" became an artifact of reality-nostalgia. QM left the crude materialism of the clockwork universe behind for the potential of a variety of philosophical roots, including Idealist Panpsychism, focusing on such issues as consciousness, quantum mind, free will, and the mindbody link, reflecting the holistic spirit of the age and its relatively sensuous cosmos.
Since no measurement can explain what the unmeasured world is like, the world of mind and consciousness remains a conceptual black hole. Nick Herbert suggests, "mind is not a rare phenomenon associated with certain complex biological systems but is everywhere, universal in nature, a fundamental quantum effect more akin to superconductors and laser tubes than to computer circuitry."
"Quantum animism" implies consciousness is an integral part of the physical world, not an emergent property of special biological or computational systems. "As the cornerstone of holistic physics, I [Herbert] assume that every quantum system has both an "inside" and an "outside", and that consciousness in humans as well as in other sentient beings is identical to the inner experience of some quantum system. A quantum system's outside behavior is described by quantum theory, its inside experience is the subject matter of a new "inner physics" yet to be developed."
"This quantum model of mind offers a new perspective on conscious experience which could lead to a new "quantum psychology" linking our internal experiences in a testable way to the objective external behavior of certain (so far unidentified) brain-resident quantum systems. The problems of human perception, emotion and personality as well as the mysterious extra-physical origin of quantum jumps may well yield to a disciplined marriage of keen introspection and quantum biology. Moving beyond quantum psychology, the realization that behind every visible quantum process lies an invisible psychic extension will result in a new kind of physics." Herbert calls it "quantum tantra"-- in which human awareness becomes an essential component of every experiment.
Persistent Unity of Organization
Panpsychism argues that the fundamental level of reality undergirds even completed physics, and is entirely experiential and self-organizing. Therefore, physics can't deal with the ultimate nature of reality. Under this hypothesis we must accept the closest approach we can make in any epoch. A scientific revolution occurs, according to Kuhn, when scientists encounter anomalies unexplainable by the universally accepted paradigm. The paradigm, in Kuhn's view, is not simply the current theory, but the entire worldview in which it exists, and all of the implications which come with it.
"Solid ground" foundations have yielded to coherence metaphors, braiding many belief threads together. What matters is not the strength of a particular proposition, but its connections with numerous other propositions, as if the number and interconnection of beliefs is what makes them justified. In physics, metaphors come and go often in relation to our technological perspective. Scientific revolutions and paradigm shift. Thus we've seen the hydraulic, computer, emergence and holographic models exclusive to their own eras. Each has been applied to both universe and psyche.
Panpsychism points to flaws in quantum theory that suggest it is out of synch with reality even while making successful predictions useful for "work". Not all theories of quantum mind are panpsychic but many are. Such arguments around assumed truths and disharmony among theories are usually ignored by popular physics enthusiasts or New Age proponents. Is quantum spirituality more of a quest for meaning beyond the search for absolutes?
Can a less true model predict better than a truer one? The Humanities adopts an array of stances, and so does physics. It calls them theories, which explain basic facts yet remain open to interpretation. But a theory can always be made to fit with the available empirical data. Confirmation holism, developed by W.V. Quine, states that empirical data are not sufficient to make a judgment between theories.
Panpsychism is the view that all things, living and nonliving, possess some mind like quality. Ellis lists six predictions of panpsychism characterizing fundamental physics:
1. The behavior of an elementary entity depends on the detailed configuration of all other entities in its environment.
2. Fundamental physics is information-theoretical in character.
3. Elemental entities can amalgamate to form indecomposable compound entities.
4. Fundamental physics is likely inextricably bound up with consciousness.
5. Fundamental physics will have difficulty describing a coherent ontology. Copenhagen is an epistemology; the mystery of QM is lack of an ontology.
6. In any given environment, elementary entities show an irreducible spontaneity of behavior.
According to Kuhn, a paradigm shift occurs when a significant number of observational anomalies in the old paradigm have made the new paradigm more useful. That is, the choice of a new paradigm is based on observations, even though those observations are made against the background of the old paradigm. A new paradigm is chosen because it does a better job of solving scientific problems than the old one.
Mental and Fundamental
Physicalists argue that evidence shows that the emergence of the mind is from synchronous activity of cerebral-cortical-pyramidal cells that give rise to consciousness, emotion and memory. These mind entities fuel a processing cascade yielding cognition (understanding) and decision-making for the initiation of behaviors and generation of speech content. Components of the MIND emerge to produce consciousness, emotion, cognition and decision making. Evidence shows that the emergence of the MIND is from synchronous activity of cerebral-cortical- pyramidal cells that give rise to consciousness, emotion and memory. These MIND entities fuel a processing cascade yielding cognition (understanding) and decision-making for the initiation of behaviors and generation of speech content."
An understanding of MIND begins to emerge when we separate hard-wired brain reflexes and programmed behaviors from volitional actions that are initiated by contemplations selecting programs for behaviors. The fundamental components of the MIND include 1) consciousness with memory storage and recall, 2) emotion generation with their association to memories, 3) cognition as frameworks of understanding, and 4) decision-making for initiation of programmed behavioral actions and speech content. Together, these components of the MIND emerge as our personality and define our intellect.
The basis of mind is consciousness rising out-of sensory inputs that lead to memory storage. Emotional events and values are captured by the mind and associated with sensory inputs and memories. The integration of emotional memories into cognition yields the basis for value generation, understanding (cognition) and intellect. The ultimate capacity of the mind is in decision-making for defining attention to specific sensory modalities and in initiating willful behaviors that include generation of speech content. Mind-directed values and actions are represented in each individual’s behaviors during life and are held in the mind of others as the individual's soul. Action-values in life engender a spirit that inspires others into action. .http://mindoverbrain.com/index.php
It can be argued that physicalism, which fails to account for nonlocality, entails panpsychism. Is physical reality being constantly computed or is time an illusion? We don't know what kind of consciousness "goes all the way down." We have to participate in a "participative cosmos" even to research it fully. Although the omnipresence of the mental is a hallmark feature of panpsychism, some versions of the doctrine make mind a relatively rare and exceptional feature of the universe. The recalcitrance of the mind and consciousness to fit smoothly into the scientific picture suggests we at least consider panpsychism among other possibilities. Arguments for it are made in terms of metaphor, analogy, genetics, and intrinsic nature.
Psyche In Nature
From the beginning, psychology was concerned with the questions and problems of consciousness. Carl Jung, known for his idea of collective unconscious, wrote that "psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another", and it is probable that "psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing". Is that the same as "universal consciousness"? This could be interpreted as panpsychism of the neutral monism variety.
Such science-philosophers tend to be pandisciplinarian. Jung, a vocal protagonist of universal interconnectedness through his concepts of the collective unconscious and archetypes, predicted this synthesis. In Aion (1951), he prophetically states that "sooner or later nuclear physics and the psychology of the unconscious will draw closer together as both of them, independently of one another and from opposite directions, push forward into transcendental territory, the one with the concept of the atom, the other with that of the archetype" (9: Part II: 412).
As the most advanced mental structure, the Self resists ordinary articulation so completely that, according to Jung, it is the primary object of mysticism. An experience of the Self also constitutes one of Reality, because the two reflect each other, providing para-psychological knowledge of and influence over Reality. Jung considers the Self as repository of all archetypes -- a meta-archetype.
Archetypal psychologist James Hillman suggested, "the return of psychological subjectivity to the outer, non-human world, including the world of nature." All psyche, all living soul-qualities, must be withdrawn from nature in order for the modern self, psychology's self, Jung's self, our selves, to subsist. A relationship that was once a sacred one, an animistic interaction through which soul was "in" the natural world as well as "in" the subjective self, could not continue. Animistic projections on nature were withdrawn and the world lost soul - Anima Mundi.
The post-Jungians encourage an ensouled approach in which we imaginally reside in her, rather than she in us. Psyche is manifesting itself once more in the outer world. There is no psyche in nature without projection and animation. The process for reenchanting the world is though a return of sacredness and the recognition of the survival value of animism as a way of nurturing the human soul and protecting the soul of the world. Hillman removed the Jungian concept of the archetype as objective inherited pattern and replaced this with the archetypal image as existent within the natural world.
In Hillman's 1982 article on the return of the soul to the world, he says. . . that cataclysm, that pathologized image of the world destroyed, is awakening again a recognition of the soul in the world. The anima mundi stirs our hearts to respond: we are at last, in extremis , concerned about the world; love for it arising, material things again lovable. For where there is pathology there is psyche, and where psyche, eros. The things of the world again become precious, desirable, even pitiable in their millennial suffering from Western humanity's hubristic insult to material things. He emphasizes, for one thing, that "the more we confine interiority to within the individual, the more we lose the sense of soul as a psychic reality . . . within all things.."http://www.chasclifton.com/friends/noel.html
Such approaches come down to choosing what quality of consciousness you experience. Which existential experience you perceive depends on the filters of your options (environment), beliefs and values. Belief systems are like reality wormholes into the past. Part of us can live in the 14th, 17th, or 19th century, depending on eclectic spiritual ideas we have embraced or gotten stuck in. The same individual, such as a religious scientist, can embrace conflicting beliefs from different centuries. Compartmentalization is the only way to deny this cognitive dissonance.
Each researcher take a different approach to the concept of universal consciousness, rather like the different types of pantheism. Some are world-denying, others are world-affirming, suggesting that a shared consciousness forms and changes our phenomenal world. Defenses of panpsychism have redefined the supposed 'hard problem' of how to reconcile the 'qualia' of experience with the physicality of the brain, placing the real debate on which is the underlying causative factor. The gulf between neural tissue and phenomenology remains. http://www.lightouch.com/conscious.htm
Panpsychism and emergentism are alternative ways to bridge extreme reductionism and crude holism. The concept of universal consciousness finds its way into a variety of theories of mind. Even though the major theories differ over monism or dualism, idealism or phenomenalism, supporters of panpsychism have developed in nearly every camp. Panpsychism differs from emergentism. In panpsychism even the smallest physical particles have mental characteristics. Emergentism claims that though the particles are mindless, some systems formed by them, and by nothing but them, do possess mental attributes. The human brain is a case in point. (Wikipedia)
Nagel explicitly links panpsychism to a necessary failure of emergentism, namely that emergentism cannot rise to the status of a metaphysical relation. Nagel says: “there are no truly emergent properties of complex systems. All properties of complex systems that are not relations between it and something else derive from the properties of its constituents and their effects on each other when so combined” (p. 182). Thus the only coherent form of emergentism is an epistemological doctrine about the limits of our understanding of the behavior of complex systems. The link to panpsychism appears with Nagel's denial of reductionism, which precludes simply identifying mental properties with complex physical properties. Then, since, as Nagel says, we can build an enminded system out of “any matter”, mind must be associated with matter in general and in its most fundamental forms (whatever these may be as eventually revealed by physics).[9] The argument appears to suffer from the lack of a clear proof that a more radical form of emergentism than the epistemological variety countenanced by Nagel is impossible. (Nagel 1979) http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/#4.1
Two of the religious precepts that embrace universal consciousness are pantheism and panentheism. Pantheism is the belief that the universe and nature are divine. It equates God with the forces and laws of the universe. Most of the Eastern disciplines have one of the many forms of pantheism at their core. Panentheism is related to pantheism, but takes the process one step further. Panentheists believe that God is present in the sensible universe, but also extends beyond it. This is a common belief in many of the Western religions, including Judaism and Christianity. Both classic pantheism and panentheism have been practiced, voiced and celebrated within the religions and philosophies of society from its earliest foundations. http://www.lightouch.com/conscious.htm
Rooted in the common ground of all transcendental or idealist religions, pantheism has flowered in every era. Every religion has had its pantheists and people in every religion have seen God in nature. Pantheism has many varieties and divisions, each expressed in the practices or writings of a particular group. Some are world-affirming, believing that the material world is identical with God, therefore good. Some are world-denying, believing that the phenomenal world is a mere illusion. There are further subdivisions of monism and dualism, as well as other distinguishing characteristics of various pantheistic practices. Rather than dwell on the differences between these varieties, it is important to capture the essence of their underlying theme of unity. http://www.lightouch.com/conscious.htm
The Holographic paradigm brings new meaning to the term whole, one hinted at by the world's religions, the schools of mysticism, various philosophies and a broad range of sciences. From this holistic perspective, the universe is a living, conscious entity, and every aspect of it is inseparable. This concept can be observed in miniature on earth.
The Light of Nature
The study of natural philosophy seeks to explore the cosmos by any means necessary to understand the universe. Regrettably, the inductive principle of natural philosophy has been dismissed in the 'mob rule' culture of science today. And modern philosophy may be the culprit. The corruption in philosophy seems to have spread from Immanuel Kant's 18th century philosophy that led to 'positivism,' which limits the goals of science to merely describing regularities in the behavior of appearances.
Multidisciplinary studies herald the return of the natural philosopher. For example, Jungian psychology with its alchemical metaphors and dynamics provides comprehensive models for uniting psyche and physics, psyche and matter, and demonstrating the indissoluble weld that binds them. It radically revisions the mind/body split, healing that which should never have been torn asunder.
In our inquiries when we go beyond a certain depth in psychology or physics, we enter the realm of the ultimate mysteries of life. The mystic veil of the starry firmament parts revealing the underlying matrix of creation, the luminous ground of the virtual vacuum -- the void created by the zero point radiative fluctuation of matter and antimatter, the void that gives birth to all images and form.
In the modem scientific age, science and humanity is in search of ultimate truth. Sustained efforts are being made from both the ends of the spectrum but such efforts are still unfolding. Science and humanity seek to achieve ultimate truth with their limited knowledge of mind and matter i.e. the ordinary consciousness: states of waking and sleep. Ultimate truth is not matter nor is it material -- it is closer to the quintessence, formerly called Spirit. It can be realized by entering into altered or higher states of consciousness, but permeates daily life, as well.
Understanding the hidden language of archetypes helps us translate the dynamics of our Being and Becoming. It is this inner "kernel" or "seed" of Life that informs us we are really after. Quantum mechanics reveals stunning secrets of nature, but it is a science of frozen frames, snapshots of measurement, rather than a process-oriented science that shows how they fit seamlessly together. Physical Science and Depth Psychology are ways of realization involving a transformation in our deep experience of the world that liberates us from attributing reality to the plurality of objects in the universe of experience. In a nutshell, physics is not beyond you.
Ultraholism
"What it means to be human is still a mystery and various folks have given their guesses - Freud emphasized Sex, Jung emphasized Myth and Reich emphasized Body." --Nick Herbert, Physicist
Alpha & Omega
Things are not what they seem -- just space and wave motions. The universe floats on a vast sea of light, whose invisible power provides the resistance that gives matter its dynamics and feeling of solidity. All matter is interconnected by quantum waves, a dynamic coherent whole in-formation.
There is evidence for the holographic nature of nonstandard fields that have been proposed in recent years -- the zero-point field (a candidate for the unified field), the psi field of psychic phenomena, Ervin Laszlo's Akashic field, and the morphic field proposed by Rupert Sheldrake.
The notion of resonance has been proposed for individual tuning to Jung's collective unconscious. If a holographic image has many different holograms embedded within it, shining a laser of a specific frequency upon it will cause only those holograms made with lasers of the same frequency to stand out. That's because things with the same vibration naturally resonate and reinforce one another -- just as two musical strings at the same pitch resonate with one another. Resonance may also explain how each of us interact with psi or Akashic fields... picking up only that with which we personally "resonate."
Fields of Meaning
When physicist Wolfgang Pauli collaborated with Jung, he encouraged us to find “a neutral, or unitarian language in which every concept we use is applicable as well to the unconscious as to matter, in order to overcome this wrong view that the unconscious psyche and matter are two things.” Psyche and soma are indissolubly wed in nature and our nature, and must be considered in an adequate account of reality.
Is the co-occurrence of events within the same field of meaning a fundamental reason why things tend to happen? Does each individual's resonant frequency, determined by their life experience, physical body, and energy body, limit what they can perceive? Such models may just eventually be shown to be belief systems of our era, whose roots we recognize from Theosophy. Jung almost never championed one set of archetypal claims at the expense of another, though he was an uncanny intuitive trendspotter.
Jung felt that the task of individuation involved resisting these collective forces and developing a critical response to them. Any collective movement which identifies with an archetypal process is, virtually by definition, not going to accord with Jungian taste, which is based on the ethics and aesthetics of individuation. Jung's attack on what he called "identification with the collective psyche" is conveniently and deliberately ignored by all those New Age therapists, consultants, advocates, and shamans who like to freely celebrate and even "worship" the contemporary version of constellated archetypal contents.
If the New Age appears Jungian it is not because it has used Jung, but because it draws its life from and incessantly parades a particularly strong archetypal current that maps this psychospiritual territory. The same subjective evaluations and claims have been made for esoterics such as astrology, depth psychology, and for the Standard Model in physics. People claim they use them because "they work." Archetypal correlations, a heightened level of communication between unconscious and conscious coordination, are radically participatory in nature, shaped by relevant circumstantial factors and human response.
The precise nature of such resonance, frequency or vibration has not been scientifically described, but merely suggested as jargon for what we don't and perhaps cannot know. The hypothesis is that different emotions and therefore attitudes have different frequencies. This is not to say that disease and other psychobiological process do not share an electromagnetic signature, but it is far from a total description. But the simple feedback process of self-reflection can perhaps be more directly effective at modulating behavior and experience.
Such mimetic notions are popular because they "confirm" certain belief sets, which include personal and collective memes. They are part of the self-confirmatory search that reassures us we not only comprehend our experience, but are somehow "blessed" within that process, which may just be self-delusion. We continue to reach toward Truth, toward wholeness, both as Quest and palliative, still "placating" the gods.
Nevertheless, speculative models may point us in the right direction -- toward ever-more primordial subquantal levels of observation, beyond the kaleidoscope of the "content" of our consciousness toward its fundamental nature. Nevertheless, such narratives are being constructed in heterodox physics and enjoy wide acceptance from people who comprehend them or not. Artists are often inspired by concepts from physics. At least they open our speculative thinking, taking us from the known toward the Unknown. We turn to the Void for our answers.
Autonomous Psychic Contents
Such models have been applied to healing and disease processes and linked to placebo effect and the meaning of disease. Jung made the strong statement that "the gods [archetypes] have become diseases" due to their relativization in society. The fundamentally psychosomatic nature of disease manifests in both the psyche (mind) and soma (body). Jung's idea of spiritual authority rests on individual experience, on the need for cultural transformation, and unorthodox ways of achieving unity with the Cosmos.
“We think we can congratulate ourselves on having already reached such a pinnacle of clarity, imagining that we have left all these phantasmal gods far behind. But what we have left behind are only verbal spectres, not the psychic facts that were responsible for the birth of the gods. We are still as much possessed by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting room, or disorders of the brains of politicians and journalists who unwillingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world.” (Jung, Cw 13, par. 54)
A physical or psychological breakdown allows us to leave the track of production and social obligation to focus on healing. Hillman clarified by suggesting, "Soul enters only via symptoms, via outcast phenomena like the imagination of artists or alchemy or “primitives,” or of course, disguised as psychopathology. That’s what Jung meant when he said the Gods have become diseases: the only way back for them in a Christian world is via the outcast." Do we have to be broken before we heed the call of our spiritual center, the holistic field of the imaginal?
Perhaps this is analogous to Jung's realization in his Red Book era in the statement the "entanglement is your madness." The personality disorders should be included in his notion of conversion. Operating beyond our consciousness, the gods return confounded with the shadow as pathologies, through the syzygy as relational problems, and with the self as overblown metaphysical notions and literalized pseudo-scientific theories. "Concretization" is an even more difficult problem at the collective than individual level. It is the root of intractable fundamentalism, in fact, all -isms.
The main difference between depth psychologies and quantum physics [as well as esoterics] is that psychologists base their approach in the metaphorical rather than literal nature of reality. To take such material literally is considered a gross error, a misnavigation of the imaginal. This is an often overlooked but major difference in worldview and approach to phenomenological experience.
Systems philosopher and integral theorist Dr. Ervin Laszlo says the universe is an information field which is not only ‘the original source of all things’ in time and space but is also ‘the constant and enduring memory of the universe’. An interconnecting cosmic field links man and matter and continually affects everything and everyone. ‘It literally conveys all the information of life itself.’
Past, present and future flow together in the zero-point energy field. Linear time is an artifact of our nervous system. Healer Edgar Cayce believed the Akashic Records contained a history of every soul from the dawn of creation, connecting us to each other. The records are impressed or encoded into energy/information. Our choices continually rewrite them, modulating thoughts and emotion. The Akashic records (information domain) not only store everything in the past of an individual but also contain all the future possibilities and potentials for our lives. Einstein put it concisely: "Space and time are modes in which we think, not conditions in which we live."
Meta-Nexus
"We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work." -- Richard Feynman in his Nobel Lecture, 1966
"Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown; that there is only one thing and that what seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception." --Schrödinger
“This feeling for the infinite can be attained only if we are bounded to the utmost. In knowing ourselves to be ultimately limited we possess also the capacity for becoming conscious of the infinite. But only then!” ~ C. G. Jung
Thinking Big requires a new approach to the way we pursue knowledge about our universe, our lives, and our species. The history of the universe is our history. We are in the midst of what we might call a generational shift in the way the world works.
We're still asking life's Big Questions and tackling humanity's Big Problems, but in the context of Big History -- a revisionist blend of cosmology, physics, chemistry, geology, biology, anthropology, psychology, sociology, and history. Such a meta-disciplinary approach attempts a single, unifying, compelling narrative that continues unfolding meaning, purpose, and insight.
But, all we ever really talk about is ourselves and our own processes. Pioneered by William James, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Gustav Jung, Depth Psychology is the study of how we dialogue with the Unconscious via symbols, dreams, myth, art, nature. A symbol is something which can have many meanings at once. By paying attention to the messages that show up from beyond our conscious egos, we can be guide to greater understanding, transformation, and integration with the world around us, inner and outer.
Ultimately, "explanations" fail as paradigms of human behavior, being only approximate models and theories that shift with time and related sciences. But our drive to do so remains. No matter what we call them, archetypes, gods and demons still exist as "real" in the human mind, in all their grandeur and monstrosity. The idea that all life or all consciousness is interconnected is one of the most enduring spiritual traditions. Objective evidence of this fantastic notion has only surfaced in recent decades. But evidence-based truth is undergird with self-evident truth often expressed in metaphors.
Our historically-conditioned culture is undergoing a collective transformation process. Countries, regions and continents have their own unique "mindscapes." Cultures can have complexes. Cultural complex theory itself mediates between the particularity of place and the universality of archetypal patterns, which can be explored in crosscultural settings. The notion of a "cultural complex" is a synthetic idea, springing from analytical psychology. It draws on different strands of that tradition to build a new idea for the purpose of understanding the psychology of group conflict.
The collective persona has broken down utterly, shattering the social mask that covered the denial, weaknesses and corruption of the collective shadow, which is now undeniably revealed. It reveals an underlying alchemical process, whose first manifestation is the collective nigredo, manifest in the 21st century Depression, economic and otherwise.
Will this Depression be the driving force that moves the global death/rebirth process forward, as it does in individuation? Will it help us take a quantum leap into a more meaningful future of mankind? In this collective "ego death," the dead void disappears once we connect with the fertile void of the dynamic ground, the formless state of pure potential. First we must endure the overwhelming sensations created by contact with this powerful source. The missing transformative information lies in the very heart of chaos.
There is a generic process in nature and consciousness which dissolves and regenerates all forms. The essence of this transformative, morphological process is chaotic -- purposeful yet inherently unpredictable holistic repatterning. It implies a flowing state of consciousness, "liquification" of consciousness, a return to the womb for rebirth, a baptism or healing immersion in the vast ocean of deep consciousness. It facilitates feedback via creative regression: de-structuring, or destratification by immersion in the flow of psychic imagery through identification with more and more primal forms or patterns -- an expanded state.
As mythologist Joseph Campbell described, "[Heroes have] moved out of the society that would have protected them, and into the dark forest, into the world of fire, of original experience. Original experience has not been interpreted for you, and so you’ve got to work out your life for yourself. Either you can take it or you can’t. You don’t have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience—that is the hero’s deed."
Campbell also suggests, "It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure." And, "One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that. " "The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature." These have become societal goals of our collective awakening from materialism, not just individual ones.
Social Alchemy
Plutocracy is unravelling. Underlying all our problems, the preeminent issue of our age, is human awareness. From one perspective, the ancient version of human awareness limited by fear, anger, greed, reproductive drives, tribal affiliations, ignorance and self-centeredness is the greatest destructive force on Earth. It is no longer adaptive as it was in the Stone Age.
On the other hand, a collective of potentiated humans who embody even a little of the new awareness, an awakened, relaxed and observant big picture awareness, has the potential to be the greatest healing and creative force on Earth. Is an awakening collection of embodied, present-centered people who are enjoying the transformative effects of this new awareness our solution? What are the gaps between where we are as an emergent culture and where we should be?
Many wish to connect with others in an effort to preserve civilization, all life on Earth and to propel humanity to its next evolutionary step in the face of overwhelming disaster and calamity. Can we break our identification with totalitarian society or will the dream of awakening remain a meme? Has complexity shed new light on cultural and organizational change?
A July 2011 article from ‘Science Daily’ entitled “Brain Co-opts The Body to Promote Moral Behavior,” considers the work of Mary Helen Immordino-Yang of the USC Brain and Creativity Institute. According to Yang, “The human brain may simulate physical sensations to prompt introspection, capitalizing on moments of high emotion to promote moral behavior.” The article explains, “… individuals who were told stories designed to evoke compassion and admiration for virtue sometimes reported that they felt a physical sensation in response. These psycho-physical ‘pangs’ of emotion are very real -- they're detectable with brain scans -- and may be evidence that pro-social behavior is part of human survival.”
Yang continues, "These emotions are foundational for morality and social learning. They have the power to change the course of your very life… Our very biology is a social one. For centuries poets have described so-called gut feelings during social emotions. Now we are uncovering the biological evidence."
But if our brains are naturally wired for cooperation, where does the breakdown occur? Some research shows the answermay lie in damaged or suppressed emotional centers in the brains of some individuals. Does that mean civilizations is cursed by the rulership of high-risk emotional invalids and market processes -- survival of the damaged in a perpetual war with the ethically-motivated?
Is a species-wide biopsychosocial spiritual awakening on the horizon, a some claim? Is a new state of identity forming, based on the collective repulsion of the dominant paradigms and accelerated by social media-technology? You are life, I am life, the cosmos is life (evolving, responsive, self-referential, self-organizing stuff) bringing forth evermore life.
2012 is a year in which the individual forecasts point to a new generational reality and a redefinition of how the world works, but it is not the final stage of the transformation process. Clearly, the Post-Cold War world has come to an end, replaced by changed players and changed dynamics.
Civilizations and eras need a myth to live and that myth may define our collective fate. Futuring includes six synergetic aspects: 1) mapping acceleration, 2) anticipating, 3) timing and 4) deepening the future, 5) creating alternatives to the present and 6) transformation. Aspirational futuring and analysis includes environmental scanning, forecasts, scenarios, visions, audacious goals and understanding change and strategic issues.
Trends identify key forces shaping the future. Environmental scanning includes global, local, political, economic, technological, environmental and social trends. Roadmaps help us visualize strategies and collaborative foresight. Paradigms underpin the assumed truths of our logic.
Obviously, we cannot figure out the Mystery of life with intellect or social science alone. Though "the map is not the territory", the only consciousness maps we have are those left over from our ancestors -- mostly esoteric systems describing the cartography of the human condition. Modern researchers, such as Stan Grof, Ken Wilber, and John Curtis Gowan have attempted to map the mindscape and relationship between the numinous and the ego with some success, at least in broad conceptual strokes. http://www.csun.edu/edpsy/Gowan/
Our attempts to ignore or obliterate the Self are an attempt to wipe out that awareness -- to deaden or destroy any connection with it, and the pain of struggling with our higher and primordial selves, godhead, consciousness or whatever we choose to call the "divine" or sacred dimension and forms. Synthesis echoes the alchemical coagula, attempting to counter the fragmentation of the ego, to put the pieces back together in an increasingly chaotic world devoid of the in-dwelling sacred.
Realizing our separateness from the whole is a privilege given to gods. When our separateness realizes its divinity, it realizes that the microcosm is truly the macrocosm, "as above so below". Ego has been characterized as sinful since we realized our nakedness. Without such separation, which Jung termed "individuation", nothing can be achieved in the name of the Great Work.
Our feelings, thoughts, and needs, as well as our inherent beliefs and spiritual essence are composed of energy. The reintegration of the earthly and spiritual aspects of being in the alchemical marriage reunites us with Cosmos. The light of the soul is the barometer of being, reflecting our humility and inflations, our compassion for our fellows and our hubris. Literally and metaphorically, we ceaselessly yearn for more light - sunlight, torchlight, incandescent light, illumination. Light is a metaphor for energy, life, and knowledge. When you head into the light be sure to pack your sunscreen.
Cosmic pattern recognition is the root of shamanic human culture from Paleolithic and Neolithic times. Humans have always pursued cosmology (the linking field), seeing cosmic patterns at work. Perhaps the greatest ancient discovery was the Precession of the Equinoxes, a recurrent 26,000 year cycle, leading to the model of astrological Ages and the mytheme of Eternal Return and The Great Year. Jung took an interest in astrology because he found it archetypally predictive, including the wheel of time and opposites.
Existential Shockwave; Worldview Warfare
The change of Age, to one of "information" such as we face now, was always considered a challenging time of crisis and chaos as old ways die while new forms emerge. Images permeate our inner and outer life. Therefore, today we find the mindscape riddled with the transitional, messianic, and apocalyptic memes of "2012", the Rapture, and Ascensionism. Or, is "borgification" the shape of things to come, as encoded in the "Singularity" archetype or meme? In the New Media electronic info-culture we've all become cyborgs with machine-extended senses. Will machines become more conscious than we are by 2050, and begin self-replicating throughout the universe? This is a macro version of the world destroying "grey-goo theory" prompted by nanotech proliferation nightmares in the mid-1980s.
A crisis can be a blessing when it gets us to the devastating point where the pain of letting go is less than the pain of hanging on to a self-system that is so undeniably wounding. Not just the world, but "psyche" is in a time of crisis. The modern apocalyptic imagination, the economics of the spiritual marketplace, the commodification of countercultural values, and the cult of celebrity reign supreme. We must acknowledge the variety of manifest emotional and active responses globally to the onslaught of crises facing humanity and the centrality of psyche in articulating, holding and acting on these concerns, in a fragile world in turmoil.
The Physics of Creation
Our universe and everything we know always seems to eventually lead us to the conclusion that we live in a holographic reality. From cosmology to quantum physics, our scientists today are truly having a troublesome time trying to explain the nature of our reality. How can we draw the extreme conclusion that our world is only an illusion and what does that mean when we want to know our place in the cosmos?
We’ve always wanted to understand our origins, going right back to creation stories or creation myths. Physics connects the largest and smallest things in the Cosmos: "As Above; So Below". It is our common story because, for the first time, humans have an origin story that transcends our regional, religious, and tribal differences. That is, at least in theory. The flip side is that there is no consensus in physics, behind rather desperate attempts to rescue the Standard Theory from oblivion and the proliferation of orthodox and heterodox models. What may be closer is that we have a fantasy about how we think this has revolutionized our world.
The narratives of the past were as clear as the grossly limited understandings, beliefs, superstitions and power structures of their times allowed them to be. Chasing an ancient past that we are ill-equipped to understand in its original context is a sure path to detour or derailment in all conclusions resulting from it , if we take it literally. Old ideas are rediscovered, and succeeding generations find new applications for these ideas, valid and illusory. People identify with their beliefs, and they identify with their own self-image most strongly and enthusiastically -- even desperately. Both "official culture" and denial can lead to tunnel vision, medieval and older mindsets.
We need to differentiate between lies and truth not only “out there”, but more importantly in ourselves. Most people can’t face the lies “out there” because they can’t face the many lies in themselves, which make up part of their existence, from popular held beliefs about politics, government, religion, education, family, etc., up to more subtle lies we tell ourselves to make our lives more “comfortable” and justified. Ideology and culture intersect in explanatory power that has real effects, regardless of the truth value of those explanations.
Questioned on any of the mass-accepted beliefs we may have to reevaluate our own lives and realize we may have been largely living a lie. Truth is not always pleasant. However, there is no judgment in truth. It only IS, neither “good” nor “bad”. Because of the identification with certain beliefs that make up their whole life and existence, people tend to ignore truth and/or the lies they tell themselves. We tend to build buffers, excuses and all forms of denial to keep our “world view” intact. Ultimately we defend and argue limitations and the prison we are in to defend false ego states. We defend our tragic social systems the same way.
This is why Jung noted, “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to stop from facing their souls.” And he goes on to say, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
In short, if people can’t face the lies within themselves, they will never be able to face the lies in the world and find truth within and without. Their whole life just becomes way of shutting oneself out from anything that may be a “threat” to their beliefs and way of life. As the Russian mystic Gurdjieff wrote: “In order to understand the interrelation of truth and falsehood in life, a man must understand falsehood in himself, the constant incessant lies he tells himself.” Hence, the most important aspect in life is to Know Thyself.
In “States of Denial”, (Cambridge), Stanley Cohen remarks that “the scientific discourse misses the fact that the ability to deny is an amazing human phenomenon [...] a product of sheer complexity of our emotional, linguistic, moral and intellectual lives.” He writes that Denial is a complex “unconscious defense mechanism for coping with guilt, anxiety and other disturbing emotions aroused by reality.“ Even skepticism and solipsistic arguments – including epistemological relativism – about the existence of objective truth, are generally a social construction.
Much of the value of studying these 'Holy Grail-type' notions, in science, psychology and philosophy, comes from making connections across disciplines and ultimately building up our intellectual muscle power -- conceptual background. Learning different perspectives from our own is a primary source of human creativity. It can also be fallacious. To the extent such ideas spark insight they may help us move forward, but new ideas in reductionistic form can stall progress, too.
We know more than previous generations and have caused more problems than previous generations. The future we craft together depends on transformational dialogue and sharing worldviews. Exponential growth must be curbed to avoid catastrophic consequences. Decisions made now have effects over a very long period.
There is a hidden revolution in science today. Instead of focus on a part, focus has moved to relationships. A psyche capable of manipulating forms can create logical relationships, but logic remains a limited tool. Imaginal images have enabled interaction, projection and cultural expansion. The human capacity itself is an extension of nature.
Images and symbols, like language, can be ambiguous. Piantadosi et al (2011) have shown that all efficient communication systems will be ambiguous, assuming that context is informative about meaning. They also argue that ambiguity allows for greater ease of processing by permitting efficient linguistic units to be re-used. We can imagine the same is true for symbols. Theoretical analysis suggests that ambiguity is a functional property of language that allows for greater communicative efficiency.
So, instead of what something is, we look instead toward what something is doing and its non-deterministic effects on whole systems. The solutions lie not in the past but the future-perfect tense. Still, the near future is unlikely to be perfect. Furthermore, the nature of that future is a wide-open field, subject to endless confabulation -- personal and collective delusion. The ability to shift approaches with agility and speed is the essence of future adaptation.
We sense we are ending and yet just beginning because both are simultaneously and timelessly true. Humanity's race is against time toward the great Unknown. The perennial question remains, "What is wrong with the world and why is it that way?" Neither religion, philosophy, nor systems theory has been able to do more than balance out the negative, much like Yin and Yang. Transcendental religions seek to escape time and its dichotomies altogether.
The treasures of cultural history and spontaneous renewal reside within this living field, our connection with the primal source of life and parallel phenomena. The history of the world emerges from the multidimensional field of possibilities. Somehow life works despite infinite deviations. Viability can be anticipated if not planned. But we've outgrown Earth's carrying capacity.
Though barely aware of them, we are tied together by deep processes. We can learn to consciously understand and apply, rather than destructively act out these eternal patterns. We must learn to recognize what is being revealed even though it is always open to interpretation. We are also subject to delusions and misperceptions, so we need to learn discernment. We need to focus on our own dynamic process, not just its finite contents, personalistic signs and symbols.
Archetypes of Nature and the Nature of Archetypes
Jung reduced archetypes to a select few that mostly matched up with ancient godforms that described human behavior sets and transformational forces. But archetypes are not limited to that in any way. The forces of nature and the elements have always been considered archetypal -- floods, hurricanes, volcanoes, tornadoes, earthquakes, fire, ocean, river, mountain, cave, stars, lightning, voidspace -- the abyss of the transcendent imagination. Nietzsche famously claimed, "And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
The Unconscious Mind is not unconscious at all. Only the conscious mind is unconscious of the consciousness of the Unconscious Mind. There are archetypes emerging in science that have an ancient history in symbolism with meaningful messages that resound through the ages: "Turning and turning within the widening gyre..." They have been resurrected in scientific forms to explain even the mathematical mysteries of the microcosm and the macrocosm: vortex, gyre, spiral, solitons, toroids, entanglement, spin, singularity, black holes, flower of life, fractal iteration, interference patterns, and more. http://www.tetras-consult.gr/resources/Resources/Archetypes%20%20Mythology/The%20Emergence%20of%20Archetypes%20in%20Present.pdf
Interference Patterns
Is reality an enormous interference pattern? It has become increasingly plausible that the energy that powers the universe, which some call the unified or zero point field and others call God, is consciousness. It is this consciousness projected through the interference pattern of energy waves that gives rise to us, all that we perceive and that which we do not. Even what we perceive as solid objects are all manifestations of wave energy forms.
Scientific notions can be viewed metaphorically, noting particularly their similarities and differences. Is an attractor basin and a gravity well essentially the same metaphor? Space is never empty, since it is full of virtual pairs. Black holes draw everything into their sphere. Near a black hole the negative virtual particle is drawn into the black hole, while the positive radiates away (Hawking radiation). A binary black hole merger replicates the form of the inspiraling double helix, seen in DNA, at the macrocosmic level, creating enormous singularities at the event horizon. Fiat Lux. Such massive jets create shockwaves - gravity waves. http://www.tpi.uni-jena.de/gravity/Showcase/EH.shtml
http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1crNZF/www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/02/strange-microscopic-carbon-spheres-found-orbiting-xx-ophiuchi-a-pair-of-stars-6500-light-years-from-.html
Is there a hierarchy of singularities in light fields? If we live in a holographic universe, and the principle of "As Above, So Below" prevails, then the nature and intensities of interference patterns is crucial. Interference is another name for wave propagation. It is this interference pattern that is imprinted on the recording medium in a hologram. According to diffraction theory, each point in the object acts as a point source of light. Is interference itself, cycling between interference, entanglement and interference, more than a metaphor? There is primordial darkness in the light as well as radiant effulgence.
Photon interference among distant quantum emitters is a promising method to generate large scale quantum networks. Interference is best achieved when photons show long coherence times. For the nitrogen-vacancy defect center in diamond we measure the coherence times of photons via optically induced Rabi oscillations. Experiments reveal a close to Fourier-transform (i.e., lifetime) limited width of photons emitted even when averaged over minutes. The projected contrast of two-photon interference (0.8) is high enough to envisage applications in quantum information processing. http://www.iqis.org/~amacrae/Papers/Nov26/PhysRevLett.100.077401.pdf
Perhaps even sterile theories can be mined for metaphorical gold, prospecting for data. We can make a psychological axiom, that when the parallels in physics are strong, the results are useful. One of the classic metaphors is that "light" can also mean perception or consciousness. It brings to mind the the significance of signal-to-noise ratios and a variety of other possible transformations that can be applied to the human scale. Is it more than compensatory to think that perhaps the symbolic nature of the unconscious is the natural and fuller state of things -- a reflection of fuller consciousness?
During this writing, a synchronistic communication occurred mirroring such ideas, unearthing the mythic life: "the symbolic nature of the unconscious is the natural state of things". precisely. C. G. Carus and Schelling affirmed that in 1940- the symbolic language of the unconscious (Traumbildsprache) is the language of Nature. The unconscious is Nature in us. Hence, from the point of view of the human psyche, everything is symbolic. (the Centaur in Pasolini's Medea says so in a beautiful way). Yet questions remain. If projection is attributing unconscious contents to the object of observation, now when we try to observe our unconscious terrains... we can detect some projections in our feedback, but what is the reason that although this projection tells us about unconscious materials, it is not equal to the observed ones?
The universe is the sum of the interaction of all waves that are correlated. Interference usually refers to the interaction of waves that are correlated or are in phase, and destructive interference when they are half a cycle out of phase. The use of two-photon interference allows entanglement. Cabrillo et al suggest creation of entangled states of different atoms by interference.
Does the fine structure of light have something to do with focusing? Diffraction patterns are wave dislocations or line singularities. A polarized wavefield is an even finer structure of singularities. The singularities of geometrical optics are systematized by catastrophe theory. Partial decoherence comes from rays with widely differing paths of differences. (John Nye, Natural Focusing and Fine Structure of Light: Caustics and Wave Dislocations)
Caustics dissolve into intricate interference patterns which catastrophe theory describes as emergent semiclassical phenomena called diffraction catastrophes. In spectral universality, if we consider quantum systems whose classical mechanical treatment is chaotic, we find that the statistics of the spectra of all such systems is the same. Spectral universality is nonclassical, because it is a property of discrete energy levels, and it is semiclassically emergent because the number of levels increases in the classical limit.. As we generalize to a deeper theory, the singularities of the old theory are dissolved and replaced by new ones. http://www.counterbalance.org/ctns-vo/berry-body.html
When is a rainbow a catastrophe? In optics."Catastrophes" are at the heart of many fascinating optical phenomena.
The bright side of the rainbow (below the primary bow) shows a delicate interference pattern. Catastrophe optics describes the wave properties of ray singularities. In the hierarchy of physical concepts, wave optics refines and embraces ray optics, and quantum optics rules above wave optics. So, what would be the quantum effects of wave catastrophes [6]? First, what are quantum catastrophes? It might be a good idea to begin with an example, the black hole [7]. When a star collapses to a black hole an event horizon is formed, cutting space into two disconnected regions. Seen from an outside observer, time stands still at the horizon, freezing all motion. A light wave would freeze as well, propagating with ever-shrinking wavelength. Potential quantum effects of such a wave singularity are effects of the quantum vacuum. The gravitational collapse [7] of the star into the black hole has swept along the vacuum. The vacuum thus shares the fate of an inward-falling observer. Yet such an observer would not notice anything unusual at the event horizon. http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~ulf/catastrophe.html
Singularities, chaos and order depend on our perspective or level of observation: there is a problematic relation between the presence of chaos in classical mechanics and its absence in quantum mechanics. If classical mechanics is the limit of quantum mechanics when Planck’s constant h can be ignored, why does a system appear nonchaotic according to quantum mechanics and yet chaotic when we set h = 0? Moreover, if all systems obey quantum mechanics, including macroscopic ones like the moon, why do they evolve chaotically? This problem is located within a larger one: namely the mathematical reduction of one theory to another. His claim is that many of the problems associated with reduction arise because of singular limits, which both obstruct the smooth reduction of theories and point to rich “borderland physics” between theories. The limit h _ 0 is one such singular limit, and this fact sheds light on the problem of reduction in several ways. First of all, nonclassical phenomena will emerge as h _ 0. Secondly, the limit of long times (t _ ñ), which are required for chaos to emerge in classical mechanics, and the limit h _ 0, do not commute, creating further difficulties. To illustrate the role of singularities in the semiclassical limit, first consider a simple example: two incident beams of coherent light. Quantum mechanics predicts interference fringes, and these fringes persist as h _ 0 due to the singularity in the quantum treatment. But in the geometrical-optics form of classical physics (where the wave-like nature of light is ignored) there are no fringes, only the simple addition of two light sources. To regain the correspondence principle between classical and quantum mechanics we must first average over phase-scrambling effects due to the influence of the physical environment in a process called “decoherence.” (Michael Berry)
In optics, a caustic or caustic network is the envelope of light rays reflected or refracted by a curved surface or object, or the projection of that envelope of rays on another surface. There is a parallel between the physics of optical caustics and protein-folding. How does energy from diverse small sources drive a complex molecule to a unique state? Perhaps that the missing factor is in the geometry.
A putative underlying physical link between caustics and folding is a torsion wave of non-constant wave speed, propagating on the dihedral angles and found in an analytical model of the molecule.The translation of genetic information, which is encoded in the DNA, into uniquely folded proteins defines a central mechanism in all living cells. The first stages of the process, entailing the translation of the information into an amino acid sequence in the protein, have been understood for a long time. The final step, the folding of the protein into a unique native state, remains an intensely active research field.
The optical field, including the caustic, is an interference pattern which requires no additional energy to form. There are only a finite number of caustics that can be uniquely characterized geometrically. Also, the formation of caustics is strikingly insensitive to perturbations. The theory of caustics entails the application of mathematics to the propagation of electromagnetic waves subject to various boundary conditions. One of researchers' motivations for comparing caustics and folding is the appearance of waves and solitons in an analytic molecular model. One issue is that caustics are a wave phenomenon (although geometric optics also gives a complete picture of caustics). Do torsion waves on the molecule backbone, disrupted by heterogeneities in the arrangement of amino acids, form singular points which direct the folding into elementary geometric catastrophes in short segments? Does bond formation subsequently alter the shape? (Simmons & Weiner). http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1108/1108.2740.pdf
In a new discovery, scientists using the Spitzer Infrared Space Telescope detected tiny specks of matter, or particles,consisting of stacked buckyballs. They found the particles around a pair of stars called "XXOphiuchi," 6,500 light-years from Earth, and detected enough to fill the equivalent in volume to 10,000 Mount Everests. These exotic particles (image below) were detected definitively in space for the first time by Spitzer in 2010. Spitzer later identified the molecules in a host of different cosmic environments. It even found them in staggering quantities, the equivalent in mass to 15 Earth moons, in a nearby galaxy called the Small Magellanic Cloud.
"This exciting result suggests that buckyballs are even more widespread in space than the earlier Spitzer results showed," said Mike Werner, project scientist for Spitzer at NASA's Jet PropulsionLaboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "They may be an important form of carbon, an essential buildingblock for life, throughout the cosmos." http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1crNZF/www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/02/strange-microscopic-carbon-spheres-found-orbiting-xx-ophiuchi-a-pair-of-stars-6500-light-years-from-.html
The archetypal nature of such translatable models is highlighted by a recent paper ("Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life", Andrulis, 2012), first released as "scientific" then retracted from peer-review because no one can understand it. It is based entirely on a non-mathematical model of the gyre to explain all domains of existence and information morphology. It claims to unite atomic and cosmic realms.This paper highlights the apparent stranglehold archetypes have on the nature of our thinking and conceptualization. That is, if the notion of archetypes themselves holds up. Right or wrong, it shows the power of primordial symbols to attract and fascinate us.
A quantum approach may be clearer: We are pieced together out of atoms. Atoms are made from protons, neutrons, and electrons. Protons and neutrons are made of quarks. Quarks and electrons, as far as we know, are elementary particles, with nothing smaller inside. The gyre is the caged electron. Science thinks of the electron as something that circles so fast around a center proton so as to have the properties of a cloud around the proton with varying strengths here and there. But in the microtubule there is no proton to cloud around. It is not the case where the cloud behavior of the electron is sometimes associated with the beta molecule and then it jumps over to the other molecule as most seem to imagine.
The caged electron has no proton to center around and forms a gyre or tornado or vortice or cyclotron orbit instead.
The gyre or electron cloud is forced to form by the van der wall forces between the opposing repelling molecules.
Sometimes the flow of vibrations from one molecule excites the gyre and sometimes the flow from both molecules excite the electron gyre. The gyre can be squeezed or expanded. The gyre has a singularity which is made of photons emitted during the excitation of the gyre or electron cloud in cyclotron orbit. The brain recreates the behavior of the gyre. Life is delayed entropy and what delays the entropy is the incomplete dissipation of information in the singularity held by the gyre.
Vortex-motion has been suggested from pre-history to account for creation, and is with us today in other modern theories of black hole singularities at the core of all matter. Heterodox theories often show more archetypal influence than conventional theories, as they tend to be idiosyncratic. This one is based on the premis that any cycle that exists in nature—in physical, chemical, or biological systems—may be viewed as a gyre. The ground state is the base of the gyre. Gyre collapse occurs by two extreme means: overcontraction or overexpansion.
Because it is so unabashedly archetypal in nature, it illustrates the point that conventional and heterodox theories, in general, are archetypally molded. The gyre is suggested as a basic and concrete model of broad applicability, a profound heuristic, and an unchanging form that changes. Further, nested gyres evidently fulfill many of the modeling requirements of complexity, emergence, chaos, systems, information, and evolutionary theory.
Andrulis claims his theory organizes scales across all domains by feedforward and feedback between, among, and within nested gyrosystems, and that all physical systems, particles, and phenomena in the microcosmic and macrocosmic realms obey a vortical trajectory. He claims to demonstrate that, "that each gyrosystem singularity represents the origin of that gyrosystem. In other words, the singularity is the beginning and the end, the thermodynamic source and the sink of each cycle."
His metaphysics reflects a conceptual surety of an "elegant solution to the origin, evolution, and nature of life in the cosmos.": "The gyre models the living universe perfectly. I have been unable to find one system, particle, event, or process—at any point or stage leading up to or during the origin of life—that does not consent to modeling onto the gyre form. In other words, there is no “before” or “after” the gyre in a spacetime sense; the gyre is evolutionarily and existentially omnipresent. This theory proves that the gyre is the long-sought invisible and inevitable metaphysical element of the universe, fulfilling a philosophical goal that dates to ancient Greece..."
The central idea of this theory is that all physical reality, stretching from the so-called inanimate into the animate realm and from micro- to meso- to macrocosmic scales, can be interpreted and modeled as manifestations of a single geometric entity, the gyre. This entity is attractive because it has life-like characteristics, undergoes morphogenesis, and is
responsive to environmental conditions. The gyromodel depicts the spatiotemporal behavior and properties of elementary particles, celestial bodies, atoms, chemicals, molecules, and systems as quantized packets of information, energy, and/or matter that oscillate between excited and ground states around a singularity. The singularity, in turn, modulates these states by alternating attractive and repulsive forces. The singularity itself is modeled as a gyre, thus evincing a thermodynamic, fractal, and nested organization of the gyromodel. In fitting the scientific evidence from quantum gravity to cell division, this theory arrives at an understanding of life that questions traditional beliefs
and definitions.
The gyromodel depicts the spatiotemporal behavior and properties of elementary particles, celestial bodies, atoms, chemicals, molecules, and systems as quantized packets of information, energy, and/or matter that oscillate between excited and ground states around a singularity. The singularity, in turn, modulates these states by alternating attractive and repulsive forces. The singularity itself is modeled as a gyre, thus evincing a thermodynamic, fractal, and nested organization of the gyromodel. In fitting the scientific evidence from quantum gravity to cell division, this theory arrives at an understanding of life that questions traditional beliefs and definitions (Andrulis). http://io9.com/5880786/biochemist-publishes-a-unified-theory-of-life-but-no-one-understands-it
Natural Laws & Ordering Principles
These primordial forms, geometries, and pre-geometrical dynamics are the archetypes of nature, at levels more fundamental than those of personification. As our penetration of our own depths and those of nature deepens, we become cognizant of the primordial nature of such symbols in our personal and collective life.
Personified archetypes were well-covered in the 20th century, but in the 21st we need to revision our view of archetypes and what is archetypal to include the raw nature of archetypes, not just the archetypes of nature. Energy has shape…and that shape emerges from the vacuum potential.
As the Heart Sutra implies, form is not other than void and void is not other than form. In this sense, all of manifestation is archetypal. Smethan (2012) claims, "the reason that the apparent solidity of the apparently material universe comes into being is because the universe is nothing more than an enormous and multitudinous ultimately immaterial epiontic information exchange which takes place within the quantum ‘dream stuff is made of.’"
The "pregnant void" evokes the sense of its infinite energy density, pregnant with boundless possibility. The void is not devoid but naturally manifest paradoxical luminous emptiness. The universe is bootstrapped from Nothing, from cosmic chaos. Engineer Tom Bearden describes the vacuum as a virtual plenum, elsewhere called a "pregnant zero" by mathematician Chris King (2012).
"The vacuum is an observable emptiness that is a virtual plenum. It is spacetime, massless charge, electrostatic scalar potential, broken bits (subquantal) of energy, pure virtual particle flux, zero-vector wave flux, multilevel, structured, patterned. It is all things and contains all things in potential state. It is not, in that it is not observable. But from it comes all observables. It is both ordered and disordered, simultaneously. The vacuum is the absence of charged spinning particles of observable mass.
In the presence of a spinning charged particle, in a del-phi which contains electron-vortex-holes to mesh with, the charged particle attaches itself to the moving del-phi flux gradient, moving itself with the river. This produces an Ë field. The Ë-field CONSISTS OF the smeared electron, it does not CAUSE THE MOVEMENT of the electron. It is an effect, not a cause. The conventional equation for del-phi equals E is correct for matter waves in electron gases; it is not correct in vacuum itself. A spinning charged particle, when it hooks to a spin-hole in a del-phi river, MOVES ITSELF.
Electromagnetic waves in vacuum are scalar longitudinal waves of alternate compression and rarefaction of the vacuum virtual particle flux. That is, they are waves of electrostatic potential. They are zero-vector waves. They are internally structured and patterned. They usually contain electron "spin holes" unless made in a fashion so as to make opposing spin holes that cancel each other. Since they are pure phi-waves, they need not be limited in velocity to the speed of light. They are hyperspatial waves. They are waves in the virtual state itself.
Both poles in the virtual substructure remain as a translated scalar magnetic field. There's a virtual flux to and from each observable particle of charged mass in the observable state. Accelerated portions -- atoms with electrons in whirling orbit, spinning electrons, protons, etc. -- possess nonzero ordinary vector magnetic fields by translation. There are successive interlocking levels of reality, all the way from deep in the virtual state into interlocking levels in the observable state." (Bearden)
Matter conceptually arises from our perception of the universe. In the computational analogy the universe is a virtual reality - it is 'made' of computation and information. Only through virtual senses does it seem to be 'solid'. Existence is a field of consciousness, our personal consciousness is an aspect of the cosmic consciousness and with a focused awareness we participate in that field. By interacting with the underlying energy and information we may influence it, then when our senses perceive the situation it seems that 'matter' has been influenced - but that matter is just the underlying energy and information as it appears to our senses.
Rumi, the 13th-century Sufi mystic poet said, “The nature of reality is this: It is hidden, and it is hidden, and it is hidden."
Physical reality is not absolute. Science has tried to find the fundamental building blocks of matter, but has been stymied. It simply depends on the assumptions and theory you use with the level of observation: cosmological, molecular, atomic or subatomic. Now the quark (theoretically point-sized), long thought the smallest unit discernable, is giving way to finer distinctions -- a whole new level of the makeup of matter.
In The Quantum Brain, Jeffrey Satinover describes, “a world in which one can comfortably argue the dynamics of interference among multiple universes both forward and backward in time; can ask seriously, as did Feynman and Wheeler, whether every electron in the universe is the same one, just reappearing through multiple loops in time.”
Lee Smolin is not a fan of Many Worlds Interpretation, (MWI), but he describes its anomaly: “only an observer who lived outside the universe who had somehow the same relation to the whole universe that we may have towards some atoms of gas in a container, could observe this quantum state of the universe. . .it is only such an observer who could know all of reality.”
Creation may come from nothingness (ex nihilo), but it doesn’t travel very far from it when closely examined. It only and ever manifests as quantum potentiality, though it appears particle-like. This includes both the so-called organic and inorganic matter. The universe is more like a dream than concrete.
In fact, there is no such thing as solid matter at all, no hordes of tiny particles. All manifestations are reduced to probability waves in quantum mechanics. We have suggested elsewhere (see “Helix to Hologram”, Nexus) that the so-called material world is a projection of a frequency domain, fields within fields, tuned with resonance, light and sound. This holographic concept of reality requires the unperceived information background as its basis. Both particle and field exist only in the implicate order.
Light is even more ephemeral. As Wolf (2000) describes, “When we see light, we really don’t see light at all; we see an effect appearing as a result of light pushing and pulling on the matter making up our sensory bodies. We see matter moving. Light itself is really out of this world and, as far as I can tell, out of any parallel world we wish to think about.”
The most theories provide is the best explanation. Explanation not prediction is the point of science. We explain the world in terms of embedded hierarchies of substructures and superstructures. Each appears as a thing in itself with specialized functions and dynamics. Physics determines what can be computed, including the information capabilities of matter and energy underlying physical dynamics and deeper sub-quantal levels.
Reality consists of continually diverging and converging waves unfolding from the information level, but that is another story, as is the physics of consciousness. The mind arises from the laws of matter. While some scientists are trying to describe matter as consciousness others are trying to reduce consciousness to matter.
A thought of a thing is not that thing, but it is not nothing either. Our thoughts about the ultimate nature of reality affect that reality at the metaphysical level. As intuitive Jorge Luis Borges said, “Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.” All that can happen, must happen. The outdated notion of our universe is an idea, not a reality. As an idea it has been proven obsolete.
Re-creating the Wheel
Do we have to imagine our end to find a new beginning, to reinvent civilization? Change starts with the questions we ask because they have the potential to shift our awareness. What is inconceivable one day may not be the next. The tipping point could come at any juncture. Reality is neither structure nor chaos, but a process in which structure and chaos dance between form and formlessness. This is the eternal cycle of death and renewal.
Just what is the universe at the tiniest scales -- dots, strings, consciousness -- nothing at all? Abrams and Primack write: "if we were to possess a transnationally shared, believable picture of the cosmos, including a mythic-quality story of its origins and our origins -- a picture recognized as equally true for everyone on this planet -- we humans would see our problems in an entirely new light, and we would almost certainly solve them." Is this the meaning of today's crises rooted in the changing Age? Do we need to recreate the cosmic Wheel? Or is their premise just wrong - utopian?
Our ancestors may have had as much native intelligence as we do, but being dead doesn't make you smarter, so in retrieving their "wisdom" we may bog ourselves down in the undertow of outmoded thinking, swayed by emotional draw to archetypal fascinations, stereotypical superstitions, and magnetic symbolism. Something was missing from ancient science that does not lead to universal harmony through its practice. Yet, each person cleaves to their limited interpretations, conceptions, and overdrawn conclusions like a jealous lover. Our theories of self, others and world are constrained by the limitations of our individual minds.
Consciousness doesn't mistake itself for a god; people do. Some cultures are still locked in worshiping their version of God, while others have reduced god to the personalistic level, wishing to be that through such memes as co-creation, LOA, and "intentionality". The later is thinly disguised ego-aggrandizement. Whether that is possible in any sense or not, it is hubris, or spiritual pride, an addictive state of the ego that opens the door to self-deception, even in science. Does spiritual innovation and natural discovery trump religious belief? Despite our efforts, existence remains an enigma.
Consensual reality is not a single objective reality, but many entangled worlds that share information with each other, each defined on its own viewing screen, and each observed from its own point of view. The self-concept is understood in terms of the encoding of information on the viewing screen, and the expression of personal will and universal will is understood in the sense of the flow of energy. The nature of the Self is understood as a presence of consciousness that arises at a focal point of perception, while the perceivable world arises on a viewing screen. In a nondual sense, the Source of any such world, and the Source of any individual consciousness, is understood as a void of undifferentiated consciousness. (James Kowall) http://scigod.com/index.php/sgj/article/view/155/186
Cognitive science indicates that much of our mental lives is not available to introspection (e.g. Nisbett and Wilson, 1977; Gopnik, 1993; Wegner, 2002). People presume introspective access to their mental events. There are two dimensions of introspective access: (i) the power of access, i.e. whether people believe they can unfailingly or only typically introspect mental events; and (ii) the domain of access, i.e. what types of mental events people believe they are able to introspect. Beliefs about introspection fall on these dimensions. IWhile people do not presume universal introspective access, they overestimate the amount of access they actually have, particularly in the case of decisions. http://ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jcs/2011/00000018/F0020011/art00006 Awareness of Unawareness Folk Psychology and Introspective Transparency Authors: Kozuch, Benjamin; Nichols, S., JCS
Big Questions will always remain as our understanding is necessarily limited. We are receivers of revelatory downloads in symbolic and cognitive form that can change the paradigm. But we lack the capacity to "know" it all, which is reserved to the archetypal domain. Thus, the unified theory, which would be more than theory because it actually describes reality, remains elusive.
Leon Maurer suggested this new paradigm would start with the reasonable fundamental propositions (some already presumed as aspects of advanced physics) that: (1) Unconditioned pre-cosmic space is the ground of all reality; (2) Such absolute (0°K) space is inherently potentially conscious as well as potentially infinitely energetic -- in the form of abstract cyclic motion or zero-point angular spin momentum; (3) Such zero-points of both consciousness and infinite potential mass-energy, located everywhere in total cosmic space-time, necessarily contains the infinite structural information of the entire cosmos -- which could, logically, only be the conserved memory of all previous cyclic manifestations and evolutions of the cosmos.
If such a worldview can only appear as a consequence of far-reaching changes to the conceptual foundations of science, changes which science proper cannot initiate for itself. A legitimate contemporary philosophy of nature complements the methods and aims of science. It remains for the archetype concept in psychology, and its extension to other areas of science to be established. Criticisms and misperceptions about the nature of archetypes remain to be addressed and corrected, changing the present meaning of the concept of archetype. If successful, such a transformation at a very deep level of our understanding of nature will change our place in it.
"Through haste and increased willing and action we want to escape from emptiness and also from evil. But the right way is that we accept emptiness, destroy the image of the form within us, negate the God, and descend into the abyss and awfulness of matter. The God as our work stands outside us and no longer needs our help. He is created and remains left to his own devices." ~Carl Jung, Red Book, Page 288
"Thus your soul is your own self in the spiritual world. As the abode of the spirits, however, the spiritual world is also an outer world. Just as you are also not alone in the visible world, but are surrounded by objects that belong to you and obey only you, you also have thoughts that belong to you and obey only you. But just as you are surrounded in the visible world by things and beings that neither belong to you nor obey you, you are also surrounded in the spiritual world by thoughts and beings of thought that neither obey you nor belong to you. Just as you engender or bear your physical children, and just as they grow up and separate themselves from you to live their own fate, you also produce or give birth to beings of thought which separate themselves from you and live their own lives. Just as we leave our children when we grow old and give our body back to the earth, I separate myself from my God, the sun, and sink into the emptiness of matter and obliterate the image of my child in me. This happens in that I accept the nature of matter and allow the force of my form to flow into emptiness. Just as I gave birth anew to the sick God through my engendering force, I henceforth animate the emptiness of matter from which the formation of evil grows."~Carl Jung, Red Book, Page 288
Though theories abound, many phenomenological questions remain unanswered:
1) anomalous cognition and phenomena (ESP, NDE, ghosts, ufos, channelling).
2) Personal identity, the soul, the self, mind-matter, the psyche, reincarnation
3) Physical and mental health/illness, why are genetic factors triggered.
4) Time, space, origin of the universe,
5) Perception
Professor Russell Stannard offers unanswerable questions that include:
“The brain is a physical object and many people liken it to an elaborate computer. But unlike a computer the brain is conscious.” What is consciousness?
Free will versus determinism: “Will a scientist be able to to predict what anyone does in the future? That doesn’t match with our decision to make a choice – it is the free will versus determinism question”.
“Why is there a world in the first place? Why is there something rather than nothing?”
“If the world was chaotic, there’s nothing to explain. Certain things happen and other things cannot happen because of the Laws of Nature. But why are there any laws at all?”
Is mathematics something human beings invented or something we discovered?
For all of us to be here, many many conditions had to be satisfied. The chance of life happening on earth, and satisfying those conditions were “practically zero”. We find ourselves in one of these freak universes.
How do you prove that there are universes other than our own?
Cosmologists are able to describe the tiniest fraction of a second after the Big Bang. There was neither space nor time before the Big Bang. Some theories do not require nor include a Big Bang at all, making it's "cause" meaningless.
Does the universe go on forever? Where is its border and where does it stop?
No one knows what the smallest unit of distance or time is, or the length of a "string".
http://news.techeye.net/science/science-is-grinding-to-a-halt#ixzz1fb1MqE7U
Doom or Bloom?
"You can't predict what a myth is going to be any more than you can predict what you're going to dream tonight. Myths and dream come from the same place. They come from realizations of some kind that have then to find expression in symbolic form. And the only myth that's going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future is one that is talking about the planet, not the city, not these people, but the planet and everybody on it. That's my main thought for what the future of myth is going to be." --Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers
"The fantasy we call 'current events,' that which is taking place outside the historical field, is a reflection of an eternal mythological experience... .Nothing can be revealed by a newspaper, by the world's chronique scandaleuse, unless the essence is described from within through an archetypal pattern. The archetype provides the basis for uniting those incommensurables, fact and meaning." --James HIllman, "An Aspect of the Psychological & Historical Present"
Doom or Bloom
We are appropriating for our own consumption a large and increasing fraction of the biological productivity of the entire earth. This is why we need to figure out quickly how to transition out of the current period of worldwide human inflationary growth as gently and justly as possible. Psychic repression depends on social oppression. All context is important, including popular culture. Not all archetypal significance is evolutionary, therefore archetypal psychology, for example, honors the pathological, as well.
Campbell claimed, “Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.” What we seek is within us. Can we use the principles of character transformation to change the character of our society? Surely it raises more questions than answers, as the later are necessarily as-yet-unknown. What are the new Rites of Passage for our civilization? What do we need to collectively manifest Aristotle's definition of happiness? "The exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a life affording them scope." Is it not the [molecular] archetypes [neurotransmitters] that in some way color, limit and potentiate the spectrum of our emotions and their complex interactions?
Can any image be universal? Can they be passed on genetically, emerge instinctually, or transform over time with language, culture and history? Do we unconsciously rework the archetypes of previous ages and discover archetypes that can only emerge in our own? Maybe not entirely, but certainly metaphorically, and often it is more than a metphor, leading to tangible effects in the real world, where the mindbody lives in its material context.
In the parietal lobe, the angular gyrus is partly responsible for the human ability to understand metaphor. For those with damage to the angular gyrus region of their brains, metaphors are confusing. The angular gyrus is strategically located at the crossroads of areas specialized for processing touch, hearing and vision. The left angular gyrus deals with cross-modal metaphors (“loud shirt”), while the right angular gyrus deals with spatial metaphors.
Metaphor feeds the imagination. Metaphor unites the dual themes of creativity - coarse semantic coding and hyperconnective sensory, emotional and conceptual areas of the brain. Metaphor helps us project structure across categories to establish new connections and organization of meaning. Metaphor springs from and interprets the core of our corporeal experience. Metaphors expand meaning by transcending the literal and structural interpretation.
Tibertan masters claim, the root of our material-mental universe is this self-existent pristine cognitiveness, a point instant virtual singularity. Its facticity is open-dimensioned and not discernable as any concrete thing. The meaning-saturated field of pristine cognitivenessis am intrinsically radiant field of this open dimension -- the sheer lucency of quantum potentiality.
With meaning awareness, insight can be extended to the cosmos as a whole. Universe itself emerges from a quantum ground of pure undiluted meaningfulness which explodes into the infinite play of the meanings of the experiential world. Bohm concludes that meaning‘ can be considered to be the ultimate constituent of the process of the universe because it enfolds‘ the other primary aspects of matter‘ and energy‘. The universe can be considered to be a self-referential, self-creating process within which infinite meaningful acts of internal cognition create a multitudinous field of dualistic experience within an overall field of pure undifferentiated meaning, which we may identify with the quantum ground.
In The Power of Myth, Campbell states, “People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances without own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
He points out that, “Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.” (Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor).
Archetypes are more than just socially constructed symbols. Jung did not subscribe to genetically-driven behavior, per se, and today's Jungians certainly do not. Archetypes arise from emotionally-charged aspects of our being. An archetypal understanding of events immediately changes our perception of them and ourselves. History repeats because it is an expression of human nature, which includes the mythic dimension.
As mediators archetypes help us deal with our enormous individual and global problems, the irrational and unconscious. We are given the age-old task of gaining wisdom without losing our potential. We have to remain open to chance and change, and the dance of opposites. It helps us deal with individual, social and cultural trauma, inflicted by events and media. Can they help us move through our protracted adolescence?
When "inner" and "outer" distinctions dissolve, the world become transparent. Is our universe is populated by simple, recursive, self-similar structures of consciousness at arbitrarily small scales? Fractals may be a much larger part of our subconscious than we realize; somehow they provide a link, or a bridge, to a larger universe; a Greater Reality. We know the Universe itself has a fractal nature, that can be measured and observed. Does consciousness itself adhere to the same fractal relationship? Does consciousness also split into parts and observe itself in each state of self-similarity? This is the flow which appears to move through the infinity of potential universes or connections.
The notion of ontological "emptiness," or more meaningfully, "nonbeing-ness" of physical things follows from the "Axiom of Transcendence." "Being" (in the metaphysical ontological sense of the word) may be taken as absolute at hypothetical point of zero- singularity convergence of manifold. Given, however, the fact of the "no-zero-point axiom," the realm of what we call "physical" becomes the realm of virtual phenomena. In the interplay of form and motion, all matter takes form based upon an infinite fractal scale.
Correlation of an inner observer to parts of a fractal structure inevitably entails a correlation to the whole, thereby preserving the undividedness of the self. Researchers suggest molecular mechanisms for the generation of a fractal structure in a neural network. This self-similarity is suggestive of human consciousness. Level is just a matter of resolution of boundaries between self and universe.
“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.” -Ervin Laszlo
Can cosmology help – by providing a model for this seemingly insurmountable task? The ossified old age (senex) is dying and the next one (puer) is only beginning to emerge. Can archetypes encode and offer a model of a cyclic cosmos that might help motivate people to change enough, fast enough? Can such an approach help us hold the tension of the opposites, and restore meaning to the post-postmodern world?
Despite the acceleration of vast areas of knowledge, grey areas of understanding and the unknown outweigh our self-knowledge. We have only begun to explore the ramifications of the electromagnetic field, much less the groundstate from which it and ourselves arise. Quantum Chaos, dynamic systems, and holographic studies have opened new dimensions to our comprehension of nature's way and our perception of the universal framework. Multidisciplinary explorations seek coordinated explanations that span all branches of science.
Metatheory
Abrams and Primack argue that for the human race to take responsible and meaningful action, we must first agree on a common creation story. http://bigthink.com/ideas/41338
The problem, however, is compounded by lack of consensus in physics about the true nature of the "Reality" we experience. Theoretical physicists and mathematicians are loath to accept that their physicalist constructs are in themselves “beliefs” not radically different from classical-symbolic or sentential-logic representations, leading to belief-type theological “propositions, but the philosophy of science suggests it.
We have models that "work", but the Unified Theory that is consistent with our actual universe, rather than merely mathematical, remains elusive. Ultimately, beliefs are the result of unconscious genetic and subconscious memetic processing of bottom-up inputs (from internal and external objects or events) into neuronal network representations.
The superposition of all possible states can be applied equally to notions of the cosmos, and Jung's concepts of "archetypes" and the Self, as the totality of archetypes in potential. Such an exploration works toward Jung's expressed desire for a language that unites psyche and physics -- our inner subjective and outer "objective" experiences.
We don't have to take such analogies literally to creatively explore juxtapositions from different disciplines. Open-ended conclusions may not be "right", yet may be fruitful in moving our intuitions forward. It might help us realize our as-yet-unknown potential. The Absolute or Unborn exists eternally and is always and already the case whether there is manifestation or not. Only our conceptions of such an unborn potential change.
Absolute space is forever outside the cycle of birth and death or the play of matter and energy. Accordingly, Space is synonymous with the sense (or awareness) of hearing or rather listening -- the voice of the silence is the basis of all sounds, forms etc. Drums beat, trumpets blast, bells ring, thunder rolls, and the Word continuously becomes light and flesh.
Mystics pursue direct experience of the primordial field and what it feels like to realize ourselves as the Unborn. It may be as close as we can ever get, conceptually and experientially, to Reality. Each of us in our way, through natural discovery rather than only religious belief, continues to reach toward the absolute. Our exploration will have more questions than answers. The complexity of the brain itself (and chaos) does not allow us to foresee all the consequences and implications.
Points of View
Dr. Angell de la Sierra suggests the search for meaning is to be found with the aid of language and sentential or symbolic logic representations, making possible the cogeneration of self-consciousness and the associated emotional mental state, corresponding to the particular judgment/event. The interactivity relation between the sense-phenomenal (internal/external) input, genetic/memetic memory input, and their associated emotional mental state is critical.
This strongly echoes Jung's notion of archetypes, irreducible quanta of our experience. There are three dominant ''levels'' – virtual, intensive, and actual. In practice, holes and possibilities of breakthrough emerge through which new pathways and territories can be generated -- even if only temporarily.
Sociologically, when socio-political reality becomes more and more difficult to inhabit, many are driven into mythic, magical and superstitious thinking as an escape into a mirage of control. Perhaps the real hope there is a personal or collective miracle, so the disenchanted world is reconceived in terms of such unlikely possibilities, which comes off more like an onslaught of alien selves, compulsive weirdness and reliance on the supernatural or wishful thinking. Madness, passion and hubris fuse in the redirection of drives and violence, without any critical self-awareness or self-critique. Idiosyncratic "content" triumphs over meta-views. Delirious discourse, a dialogue of unreason and "certitude", is mistaken for true or balanced discourse.
Interiority is reduced to a defense against inferiority, and an age of "normaliens". Denial of psychopathology makes it difficult to discuss one's own psychological difficulties. Empty places become haunted. Transgression becomes regression. Is it an attempt to return to a "zero point", prior to the establishment of science, where madness and reason become indistinguishable? Utopianism becomes the omnipotent denial of finitude. Eschatology re-emerges as the desire to reach the Absolute all at once at the limits of being.
The measurement problem shows us each atom is spread out in a smear until observed and measured. Scientists associated the tenth of a second with the "perceptual moment", the speed of thought. It is also close to the limit of perception for smooth animation. Moment to moment perception facilitates the integration of sensory experience into perceptual ‘time-slots’. In other words, perception is a kind of ‘windowing’ operation, which presents and updates our representation of the external environment. The updating occurs by virtue of timing mechanisms: perceptual moments, which hold at all levels of neurological processing, and which range from thousandths of a second in duration to an outer limit of around three seconds.
It is these timing mechanisms which form the basis of our experience of time. In the visual cortex, the dominant rhythm, the alpha rhythm, has a frequency of around 10 pulses per second. It is neurological activity in the brain, innate ‘timing mechanisms’, which give rise to perceptual moments, and thus are in large part responsible for what we perceive. This rhythm is linked to the Earth frequency of Schumann Resonance to which our organism is tied.
The basis of temporal experience is ‘between the ears’ rather than ‘between the stars’. Time is internal rather than external. While time is not a physical thing, something that is objectively ‘out there’ which can be perceived in the same way that objects in space can be, it is nevertheless a real experience. Our awareness of time emerges from the process of perceiving, and from the properties of our perceptual apparatus.
Time is a duration of consciousness and an infolded form of energy. We now have the "measurement" that we are one tenth of a second from whatever we think we're experiencing ... and it took the universe a good deal less time to expand. The world we live in lives within us, a universe removed from reality by enough time for another universe to appear. There is no time, locality, or solidity, just the reality our brain manufactures. There is no separation of electrons or people; individuality is an illusion. Yet, we cannot perceive at the ultimately level of reality, which appears to be empty.
So, in the past we hallucinated the Big Bang theory to give substance to our being. According to scenarios imagined by modern theorists, "the universe originated in a cosmic fluctuation, in which pure energy condensed into matter. Sometime around 10-14_ second after time zero, a soup of elementary particles and antiparticles condensed out of this energized void, like water droplets condensing out of humid air as the temperature falls. These particles and antiparticles then began annihilating, so the theory goes, until only one in a billion was left, and that happened to be matter rather than antimatter. Perhaps the universe began with this one-part-in-a-billion excess of matter over antimatter, and what's left over from the furious annihilation is our universe..."
Divine Explosion
Both the perceptual, bottom-up and the conceptual, top-down processes are severely limited in their capacity of resolution in our human species. Thus, when making judgment about optimal adaptive spatiotemporal responses to important contingencies, we can no longer have certainty about the truth-value of our input or output content or meaning, respectively; we only have probabilities. We have no choice but to satisfy that human innate curiosity about origins and destiny, and make mental representations of that micro sub-Planckian and macro cosmological invisibilities with the aid of metaphysical epistemological logic tools and cross our fingers, according to Dr. de la Sierra.
Understanding and sensibility are both subserved by the faculty of modeling with a hybrid epistemic-ontological approach, which I had promised myself to develop. Thus, incomplete in the absolute sense, the practical reason that Kant defended must be now reinterpreted to include evolving explanations on the structure/function of the invisible, non-existential reality that includes theological and physicalist faiths. The cognitive processing undertaken by the rational faculty depends on the quality of the bottom-up information to produce the logical inferences underlying our top-down modal judgments, hopefully consistent and coherent, within the context of our biopsychosocial existential reality.
It is clear that the self-conscious affirmation of one’s existence, the “I” as actor and observer, is situated at the executive vortex where all relevant perceptual/conceptual representations converge as the synthesis of the several semantic constituents of that cognition into the high-order cognitive singularity of a cortical premotor attractor space ready to be consciously chosen to activate the corresponding muscles or glands into action. How these primitive neural representations become further represented in the form of a priori logical constructs, assembled within the existential circumstance and ongoing mental state of the subject, and made available for free will access and choice may be outside the reach of rational tools.
Many of us out there whose hobby is to model reality have to always keep in focus that our most serious brainstorm pronouncements are necessarily inferences on representations and never descriptions of observable reality. In the bottom-up phase, our brains represent inner and outer objects and events as inputs for linguistic processing into other types of metaphysical logic representations; the top-down outputs are only inferences representing a mediate cognition of that original object/event.
Our particular judgment on a given situation, i.e., our opinion, is thereby the resultant of representations of previous representations until one final concept binds many representations, and worse, many concepts may comprise a single representation. Our judgments, far from being objective, are inferential and utterly subjective. This is the best our species can offer in matters of cognitive certainty.
Sensibility to the body-proper internal and the environmental external, as a bottom-up process, would now include not only sense-phenomenal interoceptors, exteroceptors, and proprioceptors but also quantum electromagnetic energy absorbers and emission (biophotons). The top-down process of understanding meaning entails the possible emergence of self-consciousness with the help of an inner proto-language, generated as a symbolic, imaginal forerunner of language processing. Again, Jung's concepts resonate.
Solutions to age-old questions need to embrace the physical ontological and metaphysical epistemological, and fuse them together with the quasi-deterministic glue of quantum theory, maybe leaving room for free will and a credible explanation for self-consciousness. Such contemporary solutions to eternal questions of finite existence share a metaphorical resonance with the alchemical notion of the Universal Solvent -- the Philosopher's Stone.
Entanglement
"The entanglement is your madness...the sword is the overcoming of madness." --C.G. Jung, Red Book
“It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed” ―Thomas Moore
Every particle in the universe is connected to every other particle, so that nanosecond to nanosecond they interact and are coupled across the vast distances of space. This leads to the central idea that we are living in a "synchronized universe," one layer of which we see and interact with and are synchronized with. This means every particle, every atom that we see as "real" is synchronized with the other atoms and particles in what we call the "real" universe. Other universes, with a different synchronization, can coexist with our own and yet they can pass right through each other. --Claude Swanson, Lifeforce
Entangled Consciousness
The fundamentally interconnected medium of reality is revealed by modern physics. It suggests some remarkable human potentials. Separated particles or people (bioentanglement) remain instantaneously connected regardless of distance. Entanglement has been suggested as an explanation of anomalous cognition and psi. Quantum mechanics shows entanglement between particles exists everywhere, all the time, and affects our macrocosmic world. Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance."
In a nutshell, quantum theory tells us that two entangled particles behave as a single physical object, no matter how far apart they are. If a measurement is performed on one of these particles, the state of its distant twin is instantaneously modified. Cabrillo, et al suggest driving two (or more) atoms with a weak laser pulse, so that the probability that two atoms are excited is negligible. If the subsequent spontaneous emission is detected, the entangled state is created. http://pra.aps.org/abstract/PRA/v59/i2/p1025_1
This effect leads to quantum nonlocality, the fact that the correlation between results of local measurements performed on these particles are so strong, that they could not have been obtained from any pair of classical systems, such as two computers. To cut a long story short, it is as if quantum particles live outside space-time – and experiments confirm this. The key commonality in entangled particles is that they share a single quantum state.
Understanding this phenomenon of quantum inseparability, arguably the most counter-intuitive feature of the theory, represents a major challenge of modern physics. A key point is that inseparability appears under various forms in quantum mechanics. Understanding precisely the relation between these various forms is a long-sought-after goal.
Cosmologists speculate the quantum vacuum is filled with entangled particles. Entanglement is the basis of quantum cosmology. At the micro- level, the nature of the wave particle duality points to a different reality of the cosmos than is currently described by either the particle or the wave schools of thinking.In standing wave patterns, destructive interference can be made to "stand still." The standing wave interference can be seen in two synchronous sources of vibration.
We know that mass has a vector quantity from other observations and experiments and that mass is entangled with quantum gravity and virtual to real to virtual manifestations. The fact of "self-interference" from these experiments suggests that at any moment, defined by Planck time as 10-43 sec. half of the cosmos for all intents and purpose is canceled out and invisible to the senses, no matter how measured. The missing part not described here must then be partly made up of virtual particles and photons. The part that we see and inhabit is only a small percent of the cosmos and this part can behave weirdly.
Quantum Entanglement (QE) is thought to be the working mechanism of the Higgs boson or the God particle, because it’s so fundamental. Quantum Entanglement is at the heart of understanding how significant events across the universe operate at the macro- and micro- level in split-second synchronicity despite considerable distance between them. Quantum Entanglement suggests that information is exchanged faster between Quantum Entangled particles than the speed of light, which was deemed impossible per Einstein's special theory of relativity proposed in 1905.
The cosmos behaves in an entangled and in a quantized individualistic state. The well known double slit experiment and single photon interference is something that most practicing and aspiring physicists are aware of. It presents one of the most puzzling aspects of the particle wave duality of the cosmos. Recent experiments have shown that electrons, neutrons, whole atoms and more can behave in the same manner as photons of light when passed through double slits one at a time. In all cases, there is every indication of "self interference" that is characteristic of what we perceive as wave interference patterns.
This "self-interference" is an important consideration in the idea of entanglement, otherwise known as the non-local reality. "Self-interference" can help to explain why some mass is missing in the cosmos, but it is not the whole answer. Yet, a curious co-existence between entangled states and non-entangled state appears to be the reality in the cosmos, when we look at the foundation of it in the quantum level. Whereas entangled states represent the unity in the cosmos, non-entanglement allows for individuality and apparent separateness and duality.
Entanglement is the apparent means by which Extra Sensory Perception (ESP) like information is instantaneously channeled and non-entangled states gives each one of us the sense of separate identity and the idea that intuition is nothing more than a flight of fancy. The non-entangled state is the realm of chance and uncertainty and on the human personal level, the sense of ego identity. This combination places us in a position where the cosmos can look strange indeed, from time to time. One can suggest that one state represents objective reality and the other subjective reality.
The cosmos was born out of an initial fireball that set the initial differentials so necessary for the evolution of all following complex processes. In addition, the ongoing feedback between the virtual and manifest conditions of the cosmos keeps the whole process in a constant flux of change. This change incorporates ever increasing orders of complexity until we arrive at you and me, who are intimately connected in the entangled sense, but have a strong sense of individuality and separateness in our day to day lives. Where astrology enters the picture is insofar as the entanglement of states of all physical and energetic entities in the cosmos upon all others. In other words, there is a distinct connection between all the planets, their energies and positions upon each and every one of us in a unique way. Each unique combination also contributes to each of our unique characteristics. When the planetary relationships change, so do individuals born in that cosmic environment, differ from others who were born in a different cosmic environment. Hence individuality arises through the change in planetary relationships. Stated in more traditional terms, timing is important in the analysis of an individual from the planetary perspective. It is this in the local sense that gives us the feeling and appearance of separateness, so necessary in the complex evolution of states. The arguments and tenets of astrology have a basis in fact in the entangled and non-entangled states of the quantum.
The mystery of individualization in the cosmos that is also entangled at the fundamental level, does not however, address the question of individual consciousness. From the point of quantum individualization in the non-entangled state, we must then take another step to describe how individual consciousness arises out of the primordial complex quantum matrix. What can be said at this point is that consciousness, like anything else in the cosmos, arises from the quantum. This must by implication, suggest that the fundamental units that build and change the cosmos on a continual basis, are conscious. That consciousness can only exist where observation can occur with something else. Here we have a type of quantum relativity insofar as that one thing can only be described in terms of something else. To have consciousness, a sense of separateness in the non-entangled state must exist as a precondition. Therefore, in the entangled state, there also exists a kind of collective conscious (some would say collective unconscious), which acts as a kind of reference for the rest. This then describes why things can get downright weird. This is especially true under extreme conditions.
http://syzygyastro.hubpages.com/hub/Entanglement-Missing-Mass-Interference-and-Individuality
Fractal Consciousness
Is there a fractal edge to undifferentiated consciousness? If so, is this how human awareness merges with universal consciousness? When trying to measure fluctuations in gravitational waves sensitive laser equipment was always picking up a “fuzzy” noise from the universe. In the 1990's, University of Florida physicist Charles Thorn theorized that our Universe is a hologram that gets it's information from an encoded area (event horizon) from where the universe was created. The information is this fuzzy noise that permeates everything that exists in the Universe. It is a sort of vibrational wave form information that we as conscious humans interpret into a three dimensional world. The fundamentals of both Fractal Geometry and a hologram show us that we are all smaller representations of the whole picture.
In "IMAGE PROCESSING:THE FRACTAL NATURE OF EMERGENT CONSCIOUSNESS (1993), Iona Miller suggested that the essence of this transformative process is revealed in the fractal nature of imagery and symbols--i.e. their ability to encode, enfold, or compress the informational content of the whole. Strange attractors condition and govern the transformative process through the complexity of information in dynamic flow. Emergent consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of the brain. Rather it is the transformational process of non-manifest, undifferentiated consciousness emerging into manifestation. http://www.asklepia.org/chaosophy/chaosophy23.html
In "Fractal Neurodyamics and Quantum Chaos: Resolving the Mind-Brain Paradox Through Novel Biophysics", mathematician Chris King suggests a fractal link between neurodynamical chaos and quantum uncertainty, revealed by transactional wave collapse. Despite these conceptual advances, the principles by which the brain generates mind remain mysterious. http://www.dhushara.com/book/paps/consc/brcons1.htm
The intractability of this central unresolved problem in science suggests its principles run deeper than the conventional biochemical description, requiring novel biophysical principles. His paper develops such a model based on linkage between the fractal aspect of chaotic neurodynamics and quantum non-locality, giving brain science a cosmological status at the foundations of physical description. The term quantum chaos has been used to describe a variety of quantum systems which have analogous dynamics to classically chaotic systems.
Stuart Hammeroff also suggests a fractal nature for human consciousness. The brain constitutes not only networks of neurons, but also hierarchical layers, with self-similar information patterns represented at various different scales, i.e. fractal-like organization.
The brain has fractal-like structure, known as small-world networks, with a very few large, and very many small, hubs (like airports, and the internet). Pribram, Bieberich and others have said for many years that memory and content of consciousness may be fractal, or holographic, and many have described altered states of consciousness as fractal, or scale-free.
Neuroscientists (e.g. He and Raichle, Bullmore, vandeVille) have found scale-free, or fractal dynamics in electrophysiological recordings, from slow, large scale default mode network switching (0.1 Hz), to 40 Hz gamma synchrony EEG (about 2.6 orders of magnitude).
In an abstract for the upcoming Tucson conference Toward a Science of Consciousness www.consciousness. arizona.edu, he suggesta that a fractal brain hierarchy extends downward in scale, from network and neuronal levels, to faster (and smaller in local scale) levels. Namely, the fractal brain hierarchy extends smaller and faster into microtubule dynamics, shown to involve a series of resonances from kilohertz to megahertz (Sahu et al, Nature Materials, in press).
Applying Penrose-Hameroff Orch OR, consciousness occurs whenever E=h/t (see abstract), and that can happen at any of these various scales.
This suggests consciousness can move up and down the fractal hierarchy, like music changing octaves. Going deeper in scale (smaller, faster) into, say, microtubule- based megahertz consciousness would involve more intense experience, more overall brain involvement, and quantum coherence. As consciousness goes deeper (e.g. into quantum level stochastic resonance), membranes rest and energy requirements are minimized.
From the network standpoint, it is as if airline passengers shifted from nearly all passenger being on large, long distance flights between major hubs, to them all transferring to many, many small, short flights between local airports (all perfectly synchronized) . The large hubs would be quiet, like they are in the brain on psilocybin.
These deeper layers in the brain, according to Orch OR at least, would be connected by gap junctions and utilize quantum effects for non-local coherence and interactmore intense levels described in Eastern philosophical traditions. As the Beatles said, The deeper you go, the higher you fly. The higher you fly, the deeper you go.
Fractal, or scale-free structure and dynamics imply systems with self-similar information patterns occurring across many spatial and temporal scales. Such systems are found widely in nature, including the brain. 1) Structure: neuronal dendrites (and their internal cytoskeleton) have fractal geometry, neurons connect in nested hierarchies of small-world fractal networks [1], and grid cells in layers of entorhinal cortex represent spatial environment at different fractal scales. 2) Mental representation: memory is distributed "holographically" [2], and visual imagery in altered states is often
described as fractal. 3) Temporal dynamics: Electrophysiology by He and Raichle [3] and others has shown self-similar dynamic patterns repeating at spatiotemporal scales, e.g. default mode switching (0.1 Hz) and more rapid EEG (10 to 100 Hz), separated by 2 to 3 orders of magnitude. What about smaller, even faster scales? Underlying neuronal and synaptic
functions, cytoskeletal microtubules have a series of resonant frequencies, e.g. roughly 10 kilohertz and 10 megahertz [4], and gigahertz and terahertz resonances are proposed. Self-similar dynamics and information processing in these 6 discrete levels (EEG through microtubule resonances), each separated by 2 to 3 orders of magnitude, may comprise a fractal brain hierarchy in which a process supporting consciousness occurs and moves, akin to musical notes moving through different scales and octaves. What process? Penrose-Hameroff Orch OR [5] is the only theory proposing
a specific process resulting in consciousness: quantum computations in microtubules, each terminated by quantum state (objective) reduction by E=h/t. E is the degree of quantum superpositioned matter (microtubule tubulin subunits), h is Plancks constant/2 pi, and t the time at which reduction and moments of consciousness occur. Recent demonstration of quantum-like conductance, condensation and resonance in single microtubules at ambient temperature [4] strengthens the biological case for Orch OR immensely. E=h/t, and consciousness, can occur at any layer in a fractal brain hierarchy. At the layer of gamma synchrony EEG at 40 hertz, t equals 25 milliseconds, 40 conscious moments occur per second, and E involves superposition of a billion or so microtubule tubulin subunits (0.0000000001 of total brain tubulins). E=h/t can also occur at deeper levels, with higher frequency, greater experiential intensity, and more
microtubule/ brain involvement. At 10 kilohertz microtubule resonance, E would involve 0.0000001 of brain tubulins, and at 10 megahertz, E would involve 0.0001 of brain tubulins, nearing brain capacity. Meditation, peak experience and altered states may involve consciousness (by E=h/t) moving to deeper, faster, more intense levels in a fractal brain hierarchy. [1] Bieberich (2002) Biosystems 66(3):145-164; [2] Pribram (1971) Languages of the brain, Prentice-Hall; [3] He and Raichle (2009) TICS, [4] Sahu et al (2012) Nature Materials (in press), [5] Penrose and Hameroff (2011) J Cosmology 14 http://www.quantumc onsciousness. org/Cosmology160 .html
Instantaneous Communication
Everything we perceive of as our reality is a consciousness hologram, 'entangled' within the matrix of creation. The cosmos behaves in an entangled and in a quantized individualistic state. Some suggest a mini-black hole lies at the core of each nano particle of our being - our very own cosmic subspace, always there, always eternally the same, the very core of our being, and a direct link to subspace and therefore the Cosmos.
It did take a long time to prove that Quantum Entanglement truly existed. It wasn’t until the 1980s that it was clearly demonstrated. But it has been shown without doubt that this is the case. In 1982, at the university of Paris, a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. The problem with this discovery is that it violates Einstein’s long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light.
Quantum measurements do not fit with the idea of an objective reality. John Bell showed, in his profound and simple proof, that NO CONCEIVABLE LOCAL REALITY CAN UNDERLIE THE LOCAL QUANTUM FACTS. Bell proved, in short, that reality is non-local. In other words, even though all the quantum facts are local, these facts cannot be simulated by an underlying local reality. Any reality that fits the facts must be non-local and entangled. http://quantumtantra.com/bell2.html
CONSCIOUSNESS: is the Presence in all things-by which each thing is conscious in the degree in which it is conscious as what or of what it is or does. As a word it is the adjective "conscious" developed into a noun by the suffix "ness." It is a word unique in language; it has no synonyms, and its meaning extends beyond human comprehension. Consciousness is beginningless, and endless; it is indivisible, without parts, qualities, states, attributes or limitations. Yet, everything, from the least to the greatest, in and beyond time and space is dependent on it, to be and to do. Its presence in every unit of nature and beyond nature enables all things and beings to be conscious as what or of what they are, and are to do, to be aware and conscious of all other things and beings, and to progress in continuing higher degrees of being conscious towards the only one ultimate Reality-Consciousness. --
Harold W Percival, Thinking And Destiny, 1946
Consciousness is the greatest and most profound of all mysteries. The word Consciousness is a unique coined English word. Its equivalent does not appear in other languages. Consciousness is the ultimate, the final Reality, that by the presence of which all things are conscious. Mystery of all mysteries, it is beyond comprehension. Without it nothing can be conscious; no one could think; no being, no entity, no force, no unit, could perform any function. Yet Consciousness itself performs no function: it does not act in any way. Because of its presence all things are conscious in whatever degree they are conscious.
Consciousness is not a cause. It cannot be moved or used or in any way affected by anything. Consciousness is not the result of anything, nor does it depend on anything. It does not increase or diminish, expand, extend, contract, or change; or vary in any way. Although there are countless degrees in being conscious, there are no degrees of Consciousness: no planes, no states; no grades, divisions, or variations of any sort; it is the same everywhere, and in all things. Consciousness has no properties, no qualities, no attributes; it does not possess; it cannot be possessed. Consciousness never began; it cannot cease to be. Consciousness IS.
Quantum entanglement is the nature of coherent organization of information. Coherent organization arises as bits of information tend to align together. Spin networks explain how this is possible. Spin angular momentum tends to combine together due to entangled spin states. As spin combines together, the spin variables tend to align together like little magnets. Alignment of information allows information to become coherently organized on a viewing screen, and makes the viewing screen holographic in nature. Alignment of information also allows for correlation of information between different viewing screens -- a light-like boundary like a gravitational horizon, as explained below.
We now have to face the possibility that there is nothing inherently real about the properties of an object that we measure, which brings them into existence. Rather than passively observing it, we in fact create reality from a superposition of probabilities. Physics doesn't tell us how nature is, it only tells us what we can say about nature.
This raises deep concerns for theories attempting to unify the universe. General relativity, Einstein's theory of gravity, is fully realistic -- it relies on things existing independent of measurements. So the search for a theory of everything, which involves uniting quantum physics with general relativity, may be even more difficult than we thought. String theory is getting nowhere, so the answer lies elsewhere, perhaps within absolute space itself, which may be a dynamic rather than inert primordial background to the cosmic panoply. Einstein suggested decades ago, entanglement could be the key. We need to radically revision our basic physical concepts before we can make the next big breakthrough in physics.
Physicist David Deutsch at the University of Oxford warns that even re-examining entanglement might not help us find the path to a theory of everything. According to Deutsch, we are blocked by something even more fundamental than that. Entanglement is real, he says, but it tells us more about how information can be extracted from quantum systems than the nature of the physical universe. "All the philosophical hand-wringing over entanglement is based on the delusion that we have a basic grasp on quantum theory". All Deutsch says of a theory of everything is that it is likely to come from uniting quantum theory and relativity at a more fundamental level than current entanglement experiments allow.
The idea that we live in a hologram is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and has a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard ‘t Hooft suggested, after others since the 1970s <http://www.emergentmind.org/MillerWebbI3a.htm>, that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole.
Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface. Such a physical theory, the Holographic Principle has been modeled by Leonard Susskind. He essentially claims we are holograms projected from the edge of the universe. His theory is tied to string theory, so it may or may not eventually gain traction. Holographic universes can be modeled in other theories, as well. http://www.scribd.com/doc/15765052/Our-World-May-Be-a-Giant-Hologram
Holography demonstrates that consensual reality is composed of multiple entangled worlds, each defined on its own viewing screen, and each observed from its own point of view. Both a world defined on a viewing screen and an observer present at a point of view arise from, and within, empty space. The expenditure of energy that animates the images of that world, as displayed on the viewing screen, is inherent in the accelerating frame of reference of the observer.
My Own Private Neurophilosophy
We each experience our reality utterly subjectively. No two observers exist within the same world, but their information states are entangled. Each observer's world is defined on its own viewing screen. What appears to happen in either world is only correlated with what appears to happen in the other world due to quantum entanglement of bits of information on different viewing screens that define those different worlds, each of which is observed from a different point of view.
A viewing screen defines a state of information that is entangled with other states of information. Only those worlds that become entangled, and interfere with each other, can share information. Different worlds that do not become entangled, and do not interfere with each other, do not share information.
Emotional mental states play a role in self-consciousness -- our ability to dig deep into the abstract representational world in search of ideas to correlate with the situation being analyzed and identify the best alternatives to choose from. How can we integrate data from inherited genetic DNA memory, perceptual sensory input, acquired memetic memory, conceptual inferential input (based on language processing), and the associated emotional mind state, all into one comprehensive hybrid biopsychosocial physical/metaphysical package?
What about the nature of consciousness? Is the nature of consciousness a part of the same world we perceive with our observations of the world? If we assume that consciousness arises within the same world with the things perceived within that world, that assumption is a paradox of self-reference, and leads to logical inconsistency, since it implicitly identifies consciousness with something that consciousness perceives within that world.
How can the nature of consciousness be identical to something that consciousness perceives within the world? Science has no answer to this question, since the scientific method is based on observation, and assumes the existence of consciousness. But consciousness cannot be measured externally. It is impossible to discuss any physical theory of any physical world without mentioning the observer of that world. Simply stated, without the observer of that world, there is no physical world.
Both physics and metaphysics place the observer at the center of this discussion. Quantum physics cannot give us metaphysical information; metaphysical claims supported by quantum physics are at best an irrelevant distraction. 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. Our physical theories of the observable world only describe some physical thing observed by an observer. The observer is inherent in our most basic scientific principles. Furthermore, those observations are conditioned by filters -- by archetypes which condition or pre-dispose our observations.
At the exclusively human level, where psychosocial considerations become part of the human species survival equation, we have to resort to brain representations of the chaos of sensations, and access an innate language faculty to classify, sort, combine, permute, and parse to extract the meaning of an otherwise atemporal, acausal, and asymmetric reality in se. Genetic and memetic memories of past and present provide the bottom-up input of coded representations.
Holographic Mind Body
Does a mind arise from a body, or is a body somehow dependent on a mind? Neuroscience implicitly assumes that a mind arises from a body, but that assumption has never been verified. The problem with this assumption is that it assumes matter and energy exist within some pre-existing space and time. The body is assumed to be composed of matter and energy that exist within space and time, and somehow the mind is assumed to arise from the body. We know from the holographic principle that this assumption is incorrect. The other problem with this assumption is that it is too limited to explain the mind.
It is impossible to explain the nature of the mind with this assumption of a a mental model of the world, or a mental concept that arises in a mind. The content of the mind is information content. Behavior and emotional expression arises with the flow of energy through the world. This mental concept of the world can never explain the nature of consciousness that perceives information and energy in that world.
All concepts can be reduced to the way information is encoded in the world, and the way that information becomes coherently organized into form, as energy flows through the world. The consciousness that perceives and recognizes those coherently organized forms of information can never be reduced to a form of information it perceives. A presence of consciousness is always outside that world of form, as it perceives and recognizes those forms of information.
The mind displays an entire world that includes the body. How can the mind arise within that world? How can consciousness arise in the same world the body arises within, since consciousness perceives the entire world that the mind displays? That world includes the body. A mind displays an entire world that includes the central form of a body. The brain is part of that body. The entire world the mind displays is perceived by a presence of consciousness.
As the event horizon arises in empty space, the observer arises at a point of view. All the information in the brain of a person is defined on the viewing screen. Consciousness cannot arise inside a brain. The brain is defined on the viewing screen, like everything else in that world. Consciousness is outside, present at a point of view in empty space. The undifferentiated consciousness that is the source of all actions in the world, and the source of any individual presence of consciousness, exists as empty space.
In the holographic principle, all the fundamental bits of information for the world are defined on the surface of an event horizon, which defines a state of information for an entire world that includes the body. The mind displays an entire world that includes the body.
The form of a body is an image on a viewing screen. The form of the body is the central image, and all external sensory perceptions of the world are relayed through that central image, in the same way that all internal emotional perceptions of the body, or body feelings, are relayed through the central image. Consciousness perceives the entire world that the mind displays. Consciousness recognizes itself in all of its actions, since all of its actions arise from its true nature.
The void is the source of all information and energy. The void is the source of the universe, and everything in the world. The void is a state of zero energy and no information, which physicists call the vacuum state. In this sense, the void is the 'stateless state', since all states of information and energy, and all states of the world, are defined on surfaces of quantized space-time. The stateless state is the most stable state, since it is the unchanging ground state. That empty background space is the 'ground of being', in the sense that it is the source of all things that appear to exist in the world. It is the primordial nature of existence. Everything in the world arises from that 'ground'.
This way of understanding the nature of the void, as the empty background space, vacuum state, or ground state from which all excited states of information and energy arise, is not controversial within mainstream theoretical physics. All unified theories, like string theory, and all theories of the creation of the universe, like inflationary cosmology, assume the existence of the void, and understand the nature of the void in this way.
The void is the source of consciousness that perceives the form of everything in that holographic world. The principle of equivalence tells us that in a state of free fall through empty space the effects of all forces disappear, the event horizon disappears, all forms disappear, and that world disappears. Ultimately, nothing exists, there is no separation, no self, and no other. The void is 'all-one' and alone. There is no intentionality in the void, only potentiality. Intentionality is only about actuality. Intentionality only arises with the flow of energy through the world, the organization of information into the form of a body, and the emotional actions of a body.
Cognitive/Affective Balance
A key aspect of the development of coherent organization and memory in a mind is the development of a self-concept. In some sense, the self-concept is mentally constructed as a meta-stable state of high potential energy, which is characterized by a potential barrier. In some sense, that potential barrier is the expression of self-defensiveness. These emotional expressions inherently defend body survival, and allow for development of a body-based self-image that is emotionally held in mental imagination.
Simply stated, it is not possible to have a self-concept without the self-replication of such a body-based self-image. A self-concept only arises as that body-based self-image is emotionally related to the images of other things held in memory (Damasio 1999, 169). The nature of those emotional relationships are body feelings, which represent the flow of emotional energy through the body. This process occurs on a moment-by-moment basis, and only depends on short-term memory of events (Damasio 1999, 112). Damasio calls this process core self-consciousness. If there are also long-term, or autobiographical memories, then there is also a sense of an autobiographical self (Damasio 1999, 174).
The mental construction of a self-concept only arises as an emotional projection to past or future events, as a body-based self-image is emotionally held in mental imagination, and is related to the images of other things held in mental imagination (Damasio 1999, 133). Holding of images in mental imagination is the nature of what we call memory and anticipation of events, and is inherently emotional in nature. The holding of a body-based self-image in mental imagination is inherently self-defensive in nature. The construction of any mental concept is emotional in nature, as an image is emotionally held in mental imagination and related to other images.
There are two kinds of emotional expressions that are inherently related. The first kind of expression is an emotional attachment, and the second kind is a self-defensive expression. They are related since self-defensive expressions only arise with emotional attachments. It only makes sense to defend attachments. Without an attachment to something, there is nothing to defend. Attachments come first, followed by self-defensive expressions.
The participation of the amygdala, hippocampus, thalamus, and limbic system in the formulation and synthesis of the representations (in harmony with natural law) into cortical phase spaces has to be detailed and remains a great challenge to cage into a credible formulation. The materialist/physicalist need not be challenged by a hybrid epistemic-ontological model of reality. Kant admonished, conceptual thoughts without perceptual meaningful content (“intensions”) are empty, just as pure physical ontology without metaphysical epistemology is blind.
The indelible complementary/supplementary and semantic interactivity of the perceptual and conceptual (ontological and epistemological) is essential for an existential cognitive act to take place, because neither senses can conceptualize, nor rationality can sense. Yet, there may be conceptual meanings without rational underpinnings (intuitions) or perceptual experiences that resist expression as logical constructs (revelations). We unavoidably come to the conclusion that, beyond sensory phenomena, a complex structured reality “exists” that resists being reduced to logical representations.
Archetypes appear as images. The images of a physical world appear within space, encoded in terms of bits on information on the boundary surface of that space. In this sense, that bounding surface acts just like a holographic viewing screen that projects perceivable images to a focal point of perception (Bousso 2002, 28). If that bounding surface is a sphere, then that focal point of perception is at the central point of view of that sphere.
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. Things can always be deconstructed into the nature of information and energy, reducing all information and energy down to its fundamental holographic nature. The holographic nature of the world describes at the most fundamental level possible how all information and energy is encoded in the world. All unified theories are inherently holographic in nature.
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? What is the screen? The nature of the 'observable world' as observed from the central point of view of that accelerating frame of reference. The holographic principle implies both system and environment are defined on the "screen".
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. The event horizon is a two dimensional surface that is as far as the observer present at that central point of view can see things in space due to the constancy of the speed of light. Both observer and event horizon arise in empty space. In this sense, the propagation of a light wave is like the projection of an image from the viewing screen to the central point of view. The nature of time arises as images are animated over a sequence of events, like the frames of a movie.
What or Who is Conscious?
If our experience consists solely of images, does that mean it consists solely of archetypes? In the sense that archetypes appear solely as images, a viable argument can be made for that notion. At least we can explore it in a variety of ways, based on both physics and psychology.
The source of intelligence is more complicated than brute computational power, David Deutsch conjectures. What matters for knowledge creation, Deutsch says, is creativity. New ideas that provide good explanations for phenomena require out side the box thinking as the unknown is not easily predicted from past experience.
Deutsch sees quantum superpositions as evidence for his many worlds quantum multiverse, where everything physically possible occurs in an infinite branching of alternate histories. Deutsch argues that a great deal of fiction is close to a fact somewhere in the multiverse. Deutsch extols the usefulness of the concept of fungibilty in quantum transactions, his universes and the particles they contain are fungible in their interactions across the multiverse structure. Deutsch explains that interference offers evidence for this multiverse phenomenom where alternate histories affect one another without allowing the passage of information, as they fungibly intertwine again shortly after experiencing alternate events. According to Deutsch, our perspective on any object we detect with our senses is just a single universe slice of a much larger quantum multiverse object. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beginning_of_Infinity
Quantum theory does not express the fundamental nature of consciousness. The fundamental nature of quantum theory is the uncertainty principle, which describes how something is created from nothing, as virtual particle-antiparticle pairs spontaneously arise from the vacuum state. Virtual pairs appear to separate at an event horizon, as observed by the observer present at the central point of view. That separation of matter from antimatter, called Hawking radiation, is the essence of the holographic principle (Penrose 2005, 30.7). http://scigod.com/index.php/sgj/article/view/155/186
Inflationary cosmology tells us the total energy of the universe is zero, since the universe arises from the vacuum state as a spontaneous eruption of energy, due to the virtual creation of particle-antiparticle pairs. Those virtual pairs are created out of nothing and normally annihilate back into nothing, with a total energy that adds up to zero. Virtual pairs appear to separate at the cosmic event horizon, as the antiparticle appears to cross the horizon. That separation is how a universe of matter is created.
How can the total energy of a universe of matter add up to zero? The answer is gravitational attraction. The negative potential energy of gravitational attraction cancels out all forms of positive energy, like mass energy and kinetic energy. Even the dark energy that is responsible for the exponential expansion of the universe is canceled out by gravity. Everything ultimately adds up to zero.
The holographic principle explains how all the information for the universe is encoded on the surface of the event horizon. That encoding of information is inherently related to the separation of matter from antimatter at the horizon. The holographic principle is the only known way to unify relativity theory with quantum theory, and unify the equivalence principle with the uncertainty principle. The probability factors embody the uncertainty principle.The principle of equivalence tells us there is no way to distinguish the effects of a gravitational field from an accelerating frame of reference.
Quantum field amplitudes are calculated with a sum over all possible particle paths. The path of least action is the most likely path in the sense of quantum probability. We measure a particle-like behavior of the point particle when we measure its position at some moment of time (Susskind 2008, 80). Quantum field amplitudes also exhibit wave-like behaviors due to the sum over all possible paths. Those wave-like behaviors include phenomena like interference patterns. We measure a wave-like behavior when we measure the interference pattern (Susskind 2008, 78).
All the debate about the correct interpretation of quantum theory is about the nature of observation. The only way to take the meta out of physics is to take the observer out of physics, which is impossible. The only other option is to explain the nature of the observer with a physical theory, but that is equally impossible. Such a physical theory of the observer would give a physical explanation of the nature of consciousness, but no such physical explanation is possible. That is what the incompleteness theorems prove.
The many world interpretation is seen as the natural interpretation by those that accept it. Those that hold onto the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics see the flaws of that interpretation, and don't like it, but consider the many world interpretation as too far-fetched and too radical an idea. But there is no natural way to understand the holographic principle without it. The holographic principle explains the subjective nature of reality. There is no such thing as objective reality.
If reality was objective in nature, information in 3+1 dimensional space-time could be encoded on a three dimensional lattice of quantized space, referred to as voxels (Susskind 2008, 295). But information is not encoded in three dimensional space. Information is pixilated, and is encoded on the two dimensional surface of an event horizon, as observed by the observer present at the central point of view of that surface.
The encoding of information arises purely from the principle of equivalence, which expresses the equivalence of all points of view in empty space, and the uncertainty principle, which explains how something is created from nothing as virtual particle-antiparticle pairs appear to separate at a horizon. Simply stated, without the observer of that world, there would be no observable world. The key idea is that an event is a decision point where the path branches. The quantum state of potentiality includes all possible paths.
Besides physics, there are many mutidisciplinary approaches to the self-assembly an self-organization of nature, each of which contributes a partial view of different domains and complex systems of organization. Transpersonal psychology refers to disciplined inquiry into human experiences in which an individual’s sense of identity extends beyond its ordinary limits to encompass wider, broader, or deeper aspects of life (Krippner, 1998, p. ix).
Simply put, one’s sense of identity is extended beyond its ordinary limits, giving him or her the impression that "reality" has been encountered more completely. Ultimately, both mathematically-induced propositions and transpersonally-induced beliefs are ultimately inferences about an invisible world. Enter a conceptual ‘time,’ this time as an ‘emergent’ phenomenon. We do this by manipulating tensor space mathematics to cancel the effects of the temporal asymmetry nature tries to impose on us.
Truth is a goal to be achieved as we travel the sinuous path along an evanescent asymptotic line. Consequently, we can only have opinions on the probable value of our representations of an invisible reality, and this is as close as we can go about knowing the truth of our reality.
Our "view" is crucial to questions of ontology and epistemology -- the nature of being and how we know what we know. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the origins, structure, methods, and validity of knowledge. Epistemological metaphors and analogies are used to discuss the structure and validity of knowledge. Even while informing us, both physics and psychology have fostered alienation from nature. Popper suggested the empirical basis of objective science has nothing 'absolute' about it. Science does not rest upon rock-bottom foundations.
Natural science was based strictly on cognition, observation and knowledge, whereas science uses experimental control, isolating and measuring things. But the "pure" science of theoretical physics is still considered philosophy. The philosophy of physics studies the fundamental philosophical questions underlying modern physics, the study of matter and energy and how they interact. The philosophy of physics begins by reflecting on the basic metaphysical and epistemological questions posed by physics: causality, determinism, and the nature of physical law.
Centuries ago, the study of causality, the fundamental nature of space, time, matter, and the universe were part of metaphysics. Today the philosophy of physics is essentially a part of the philosophy of science. Physicists use the scientific method to delineate the universals and constants governing physical phenomena, and the philosophy of physics reflects on the results of this empirical research.
Quantum mechanics describes two kinds of reality. One of the regular properties of particles is that they have a fixed position in space, while waves can occupy more than one place as they are vibrations not things. When relativity combines these two ideas we get the Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.
Physicists treat an unobserved object not as a real thing but as a probability wave, not as an actual happening but only as a bundle of vibratory possibilities. Yet, when an object is observed (measured), it always manifests at one particular place, with one particular spin and velocity, instead of a smeared-out range of physical properties. All other potentials evaporate.
With that mysterious quantum jump, "things" became an artifact of reality-nostalgia. QM left the crude materialism of the clockwork universe behind for the potential of a variety of philosophical roots, including Idealist Panpsychism, focusing on such issues as consciousness, quantum mind, free will, and the mindbody link, reflecting the holistic spirit of the age and its relatively sensuous cosmos.
Since no measurement can explain what the unmeasured world is like, the world of mind and consciousness remains a conceptual black hole. Nick Herbert suggests, "mind is not a rare phenomenon associated with certain complex biological systems but is everywhere, universal in nature, a fundamental quantum effect more akin to superconductors and laser tubes than to computer circuitry."
"Quantum animism" implies consciousness is an integral part of the physical world, not an emergent property of special biological or computational systems. "As the cornerstone of holistic physics, I [Herbert] assume that every quantum system has both an "inside" and an "outside", and that consciousness in humans as well as in other sentient beings is identical to the inner experience of some quantum system. A quantum system's outside behavior is described by quantum theory, its inside experience is the subject matter of a new "inner physics" yet to be developed."
"This quantum model of mind offers a new perspective on conscious experience which could lead to a new "quantum psychology" linking our internal experiences in a testable way to the objective external behavior of certain (so far unidentified) brain-resident quantum systems. The problems of human perception, emotion and personality as well as the mysterious extra-physical origin of quantum jumps may well yield to a disciplined marriage of keen introspection and quantum biology. Moving beyond quantum psychology, the realization that behind every visible quantum process lies an invisible psychic extension will result in a new kind of physics." Herbert calls it "quantum tantra"-- in which human awareness becomes an essential component of every experiment.
Persistent Unity of Organization
Panpsychism argues that the fundamental level of reality undergirds even completed physics, and is entirely experiential and self-organizing. Therefore, physics can't deal with the ultimate nature of reality. Under this hypothesis we must accept the closest approach we can make in any epoch. A scientific revolution occurs, according to Kuhn, when scientists encounter anomalies unexplainable by the universally accepted paradigm. The paradigm, in Kuhn's view, is not simply the current theory, but the entire worldview in which it exists, and all of the implications which come with it.
"Solid ground" foundations have yielded to coherence metaphors, braiding many belief threads together. What matters is not the strength of a particular proposition, but its connections with numerous other propositions, as if the number and interconnection of beliefs is what makes them justified. In physics, metaphors come and go often in relation to our technological perspective. Scientific revolutions and paradigm shift. Thus we've seen the hydraulic, computer, emergence and holographic models exclusive to their own eras. Each has been applied to both universe and psyche.
Panpsychism points to flaws in quantum theory that suggest it is out of synch with reality even while making successful predictions useful for "work". Not all theories of quantum mind are panpsychic but many are. Such arguments around assumed truths and disharmony among theories are usually ignored by popular physics enthusiasts or New Age proponents. Is quantum spirituality more of a quest for meaning beyond the search for absolutes?
Can a less true model predict better than a truer one? The Humanities adopts an array of stances, and so does physics. It calls them theories, which explain basic facts yet remain open to interpretation. But a theory can always be made to fit with the available empirical data. Confirmation holism, developed by W.V. Quine, states that empirical data are not sufficient to make a judgment between theories.
Panpsychism is the view that all things, living and nonliving, possess some mind like quality. Ellis lists six predictions of panpsychism characterizing fundamental physics:
1. The behavior of an elementary entity depends on the detailed configuration of all other entities in its environment.
2. Fundamental physics is information-theoretical in character.
3. Elemental entities can amalgamate to form indecomposable compound entities.
4. Fundamental physics is likely inextricably bound up with consciousness.
5. Fundamental physics will have difficulty describing a coherent ontology. Copenhagen is an epistemology; the mystery of QM is lack of an ontology.
6. In any given environment, elementary entities show an irreducible spontaneity of behavior.
According to Kuhn, a paradigm shift occurs when a significant number of observational anomalies in the old paradigm have made the new paradigm more useful. That is, the choice of a new paradigm is based on observations, even though those observations are made against the background of the old paradigm. A new paradigm is chosen because it does a better job of solving scientific problems than the old one.
Mental and Fundamental
Physicalists argue that evidence shows that the emergence of the mind is from synchronous activity of cerebral-cortical-pyramidal cells that give rise to consciousness, emotion and memory. These mind entities fuel a processing cascade yielding cognition (understanding) and decision-making for the initiation of behaviors and generation of speech content. Components of the MIND emerge to produce consciousness, emotion, cognition and decision making. Evidence shows that the emergence of the MIND is from synchronous activity of cerebral-cortical- pyramidal cells that give rise to consciousness, emotion and memory. These MIND entities fuel a processing cascade yielding cognition (understanding) and decision-making for the initiation of behaviors and generation of speech content."
An understanding of MIND begins to emerge when we separate hard-wired brain reflexes and programmed behaviors from volitional actions that are initiated by contemplations selecting programs for behaviors. The fundamental components of the MIND include 1) consciousness with memory storage and recall, 2) emotion generation with their association to memories, 3) cognition as frameworks of understanding, and 4) decision-making for initiation of programmed behavioral actions and speech content. Together, these components of the MIND emerge as our personality and define our intellect.
The basis of mind is consciousness rising out-of sensory inputs that lead to memory storage. Emotional events and values are captured by the mind and associated with sensory inputs and memories. The integration of emotional memories into cognition yields the basis for value generation, understanding (cognition) and intellect. The ultimate capacity of the mind is in decision-making for defining attention to specific sensory modalities and in initiating willful behaviors that include generation of speech content. Mind-directed values and actions are represented in each individual’s behaviors during life and are held in the mind of others as the individual's soul. Action-values in life engender a spirit that inspires others into action. .http://mindoverbrain.com/index.php
It can be argued that physicalism, which fails to account for nonlocality, entails panpsychism. Is physical reality being constantly computed or is time an illusion? We don't know what kind of consciousness "goes all the way down." We have to participate in a "participative cosmos" even to research it fully. Although the omnipresence of the mental is a hallmark feature of panpsychism, some versions of the doctrine make mind a relatively rare and exceptional feature of the universe. The recalcitrance of the mind and consciousness to fit smoothly into the scientific picture suggests we at least consider panpsychism among other possibilities. Arguments for it are made in terms of metaphor, analogy, genetics, and intrinsic nature.
Psyche In Nature
From the beginning, psychology was concerned with the questions and problems of consciousness. Carl Jung, known for his idea of collective unconscious, wrote that "psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another", and it is probable that "psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing". Is that the same as "universal consciousness"? This could be interpreted as panpsychism of the neutral monism variety.
Such science-philosophers tend to be pandisciplinarian. Jung, a vocal protagonist of universal interconnectedness through his concepts of the collective unconscious and archetypes, predicted this synthesis. In Aion (1951), he prophetically states that "sooner or later nuclear physics and the psychology of the unconscious will draw closer together as both of them, independently of one another and from opposite directions, push forward into transcendental territory, the one with the concept of the atom, the other with that of the archetype" (9: Part II: 412).
As the most advanced mental structure, the Self resists ordinary articulation so completely that, according to Jung, it is the primary object of mysticism. An experience of the Self also constitutes one of Reality, because the two reflect each other, providing para-psychological knowledge of and influence over Reality. Jung considers the Self as repository of all archetypes -- a meta-archetype.
Archetypal psychologist James Hillman suggested, "the return of psychological subjectivity to the outer, non-human world, including the world of nature." All psyche, all living soul-qualities, must be withdrawn from nature in order for the modern self, psychology's self, Jung's self, our selves, to subsist. A relationship that was once a sacred one, an animistic interaction through which soul was "in" the natural world as well as "in" the subjective self, could not continue. Animistic projections on nature were withdrawn and the world lost soul - Anima Mundi.
The post-Jungians encourage an ensouled approach in which we imaginally reside in her, rather than she in us. Psyche is manifesting itself once more in the outer world. There is no psyche in nature without projection and animation. The process for reenchanting the world is though a return of sacredness and the recognition of the survival value of animism as a way of nurturing the human soul and protecting the soul of the world. Hillman removed the Jungian concept of the archetype as objective inherited pattern and replaced this with the archetypal image as existent within the natural world.
In Hillman's 1982 article on the return of the soul to the world, he says. . . that cataclysm, that pathologized image of the world destroyed, is awakening again a recognition of the soul in the world. The anima mundi stirs our hearts to respond: we are at last, in extremis , concerned about the world; love for it arising, material things again lovable. For where there is pathology there is psyche, and where psyche, eros. The things of the world again become precious, desirable, even pitiable in their millennial suffering from Western humanity's hubristic insult to material things. He emphasizes, for one thing, that "the more we confine interiority to within the individual, the more we lose the sense of soul as a psychic reality . . . within all things.."http://www.chasclifton.com/friends/noel.html
Such approaches come down to choosing what quality of consciousness you experience. Which existential experience you perceive depends on the filters of your options (environment), beliefs and values. Belief systems are like reality wormholes into the past. Part of us can live in the 14th, 17th, or 19th century, depending on eclectic spiritual ideas we have embraced or gotten stuck in. The same individual, such as a religious scientist, can embrace conflicting beliefs from different centuries. Compartmentalization is the only way to deny this cognitive dissonance.
Each researcher take a different approach to the concept of universal consciousness, rather like the different types of pantheism. Some are world-denying, others are world-affirming, suggesting that a shared consciousness forms and changes our phenomenal world. Defenses of panpsychism have redefined the supposed 'hard problem' of how to reconcile the 'qualia' of experience with the physicality of the brain, placing the real debate on which is the underlying causative factor. The gulf between neural tissue and phenomenology remains. http://www.lightouch.com/conscious.htm
Panpsychism and emergentism are alternative ways to bridge extreme reductionism and crude holism. The concept of universal consciousness finds its way into a variety of theories of mind. Even though the major theories differ over monism or dualism, idealism or phenomenalism, supporters of panpsychism have developed in nearly every camp. Panpsychism differs from emergentism. In panpsychism even the smallest physical particles have mental characteristics. Emergentism claims that though the particles are mindless, some systems formed by them, and by nothing but them, do possess mental attributes. The human brain is a case in point. (Wikipedia)
Nagel explicitly links panpsychism to a necessary failure of emergentism, namely that emergentism cannot rise to the status of a metaphysical relation. Nagel says: “there are no truly emergent properties of complex systems. All properties of complex systems that are not relations between it and something else derive from the properties of its constituents and their effects on each other when so combined” (p. 182). Thus the only coherent form of emergentism is an epistemological doctrine about the limits of our understanding of the behavior of complex systems. The link to panpsychism appears with Nagel's denial of reductionism, which precludes simply identifying mental properties with complex physical properties. Then, since, as Nagel says, we can build an enminded system out of “any matter”, mind must be associated with matter in general and in its most fundamental forms (whatever these may be as eventually revealed by physics).[9] The argument appears to suffer from the lack of a clear proof that a more radical form of emergentism than the epistemological variety countenanced by Nagel is impossible. (Nagel 1979) http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/#4.1
Two of the religious precepts that embrace universal consciousness are pantheism and panentheism. Pantheism is the belief that the universe and nature are divine. It equates God with the forces and laws of the universe. Most of the Eastern disciplines have one of the many forms of pantheism at their core. Panentheism is related to pantheism, but takes the process one step further. Panentheists believe that God is present in the sensible universe, but also extends beyond it. This is a common belief in many of the Western religions, including Judaism and Christianity. Both classic pantheism and panentheism have been practiced, voiced and celebrated within the religions and philosophies of society from its earliest foundations. http://www.lightouch.com/conscious.htm
Rooted in the common ground of all transcendental or idealist religions, pantheism has flowered in every era. Every religion has had its pantheists and people in every religion have seen God in nature. Pantheism has many varieties and divisions, each expressed in the practices or writings of a particular group. Some are world-affirming, believing that the material world is identical with God, therefore good. Some are world-denying, believing that the phenomenal world is a mere illusion. There are further subdivisions of monism and dualism, as well as other distinguishing characteristics of various pantheistic practices. Rather than dwell on the differences between these varieties, it is important to capture the essence of their underlying theme of unity. http://www.lightouch.com/conscious.htm
The Holographic paradigm brings new meaning to the term whole, one hinted at by the world's religions, the schools of mysticism, various philosophies and a broad range of sciences. From this holistic perspective, the universe is a living, conscious entity, and every aspect of it is inseparable. This concept can be observed in miniature on earth.
The Light of Nature
The study of natural philosophy seeks to explore the cosmos by any means necessary to understand the universe. Regrettably, the inductive principle of natural philosophy has been dismissed in the 'mob rule' culture of science today. And modern philosophy may be the culprit. The corruption in philosophy seems to have spread from Immanuel Kant's 18th century philosophy that led to 'positivism,' which limits the goals of science to merely describing regularities in the behavior of appearances.
Multidisciplinary studies herald the return of the natural philosopher. For example, Jungian psychology with its alchemical metaphors and dynamics provides comprehensive models for uniting psyche and physics, psyche and matter, and demonstrating the indissoluble weld that binds them. It radically revisions the mind/body split, healing that which should never have been torn asunder.
In our inquiries when we go beyond a certain depth in psychology or physics, we enter the realm of the ultimate mysteries of life. The mystic veil of the starry firmament parts revealing the underlying matrix of creation, the luminous ground of the virtual vacuum -- the void created by the zero point radiative fluctuation of matter and antimatter, the void that gives birth to all images and form.
In the modem scientific age, science and humanity is in search of ultimate truth. Sustained efforts are being made from both the ends of the spectrum but such efforts are still unfolding. Science and humanity seek to achieve ultimate truth with their limited knowledge of mind and matter i.e. the ordinary consciousness: states of waking and sleep. Ultimate truth is not matter nor is it material -- it is closer to the quintessence, formerly called Spirit. It can be realized by entering into altered or higher states of consciousness, but permeates daily life, as well.
Understanding the hidden language of archetypes helps us translate the dynamics of our Being and Becoming. It is this inner "kernel" or "seed" of Life that informs us we are really after. Quantum mechanics reveals stunning secrets of nature, but it is a science of frozen frames, snapshots of measurement, rather than a process-oriented science that shows how they fit seamlessly together. Physical Science and Depth Psychology are ways of realization involving a transformation in our deep experience of the world that liberates us from attributing reality to the plurality of objects in the universe of experience. In a nutshell, physics is not beyond you.
Ultraholism
"What it means to be human is still a mystery and various folks have given their guesses - Freud emphasized Sex, Jung emphasized Myth and Reich emphasized Body." --Nick Herbert, Physicist
Alpha & Omega
Things are not what they seem -- just space and wave motions. The universe floats on a vast sea of light, whose invisible power provides the resistance that gives matter its dynamics and feeling of solidity. All matter is interconnected by quantum waves, a dynamic coherent whole in-formation.
There is evidence for the holographic nature of nonstandard fields that have been proposed in recent years -- the zero-point field (a candidate for the unified field), the psi field of psychic phenomena, Ervin Laszlo's Akashic field, and the morphic field proposed by Rupert Sheldrake.
The notion of resonance has been proposed for individual tuning to Jung's collective unconscious. If a holographic image has many different holograms embedded within it, shining a laser of a specific frequency upon it will cause only those holograms made with lasers of the same frequency to stand out. That's because things with the same vibration naturally resonate and reinforce one another -- just as two musical strings at the same pitch resonate with one another. Resonance may also explain how each of us interact with psi or Akashic fields... picking up only that with which we personally "resonate."
Fields of Meaning
When physicist Wolfgang Pauli collaborated with Jung, he encouraged us to find “a neutral, or unitarian language in which every concept we use is applicable as well to the unconscious as to matter, in order to overcome this wrong view that the unconscious psyche and matter are two things.” Psyche and soma are indissolubly wed in nature and our nature, and must be considered in an adequate account of reality.
Is the co-occurrence of events within the same field of meaning a fundamental reason why things tend to happen? Does each individual's resonant frequency, determined by their life experience, physical body, and energy body, limit what they can perceive? Such models may just eventually be shown to be belief systems of our era, whose roots we recognize from Theosophy. Jung almost never championed one set of archetypal claims at the expense of another, though he was an uncanny intuitive trendspotter.
Jung felt that the task of individuation involved resisting these collective forces and developing a critical response to them. Any collective movement which identifies with an archetypal process is, virtually by definition, not going to accord with Jungian taste, which is based on the ethics and aesthetics of individuation. Jung's attack on what he called "identification with the collective psyche" is conveniently and deliberately ignored by all those New Age therapists, consultants, advocates, and shamans who like to freely celebrate and even "worship" the contemporary version of constellated archetypal contents.
If the New Age appears Jungian it is not because it has used Jung, but because it draws its life from and incessantly parades a particularly strong archetypal current that maps this psychospiritual territory. The same subjective evaluations and claims have been made for esoterics such as astrology, depth psychology, and for the Standard Model in physics. People claim they use them because "they work." Archetypal correlations, a heightened level of communication between unconscious and conscious coordination, are radically participatory in nature, shaped by relevant circumstantial factors and human response.
The precise nature of such resonance, frequency or vibration has not been scientifically described, but merely suggested as jargon for what we don't and perhaps cannot know. The hypothesis is that different emotions and therefore attitudes have different frequencies. This is not to say that disease and other psychobiological process do not share an electromagnetic signature, but it is far from a total description. But the simple feedback process of self-reflection can perhaps be more directly effective at modulating behavior and experience.
Such mimetic notions are popular because they "confirm" certain belief sets, which include personal and collective memes. They are part of the self-confirmatory search that reassures us we not only comprehend our experience, but are somehow "blessed" within that process, which may just be self-delusion. We continue to reach toward Truth, toward wholeness, both as Quest and palliative, still "placating" the gods.
Nevertheless, speculative models may point us in the right direction -- toward ever-more primordial subquantal levels of observation, beyond the kaleidoscope of the "content" of our consciousness toward its fundamental nature. Nevertheless, such narratives are being constructed in heterodox physics and enjoy wide acceptance from people who comprehend them or not. Artists are often inspired by concepts from physics. At least they open our speculative thinking, taking us from the known toward the Unknown. We turn to the Void for our answers.
Autonomous Psychic Contents
Such models have been applied to healing and disease processes and linked to placebo effect and the meaning of disease. Jung made the strong statement that "the gods [archetypes] have become diseases" due to their relativization in society. The fundamentally psychosomatic nature of disease manifests in both the psyche (mind) and soma (body). Jung's idea of spiritual authority rests on individual experience, on the need for cultural transformation, and unorthodox ways of achieving unity with the Cosmos.
“We think we can congratulate ourselves on having already reached such a pinnacle of clarity, imagining that we have left all these phantasmal gods far behind. But what we have left behind are only verbal spectres, not the psychic facts that were responsible for the birth of the gods. We are still as much possessed by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting room, or disorders of the brains of politicians and journalists who unwillingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world.” (Jung, Cw 13, par. 54)
A physical or psychological breakdown allows us to leave the track of production and social obligation to focus on healing. Hillman clarified by suggesting, "Soul enters only via symptoms, via outcast phenomena like the imagination of artists or alchemy or “primitives,” or of course, disguised as psychopathology. That’s what Jung meant when he said the Gods have become diseases: the only way back for them in a Christian world is via the outcast." Do we have to be broken before we heed the call of our spiritual center, the holistic field of the imaginal?
Perhaps this is analogous to Jung's realization in his Red Book era in the statement the "entanglement is your madness." The personality disorders should be included in his notion of conversion. Operating beyond our consciousness, the gods return confounded with the shadow as pathologies, through the syzygy as relational problems, and with the self as overblown metaphysical notions and literalized pseudo-scientific theories. "Concretization" is an even more difficult problem at the collective than individual level. It is the root of intractable fundamentalism, in fact, all -isms.
The main difference between depth psychologies and quantum physics [as well as esoterics] is that psychologists base their approach in the metaphorical rather than literal nature of reality. To take such material literally is considered a gross error, a misnavigation of the imaginal. This is an often overlooked but major difference in worldview and approach to phenomenological experience.
Systems philosopher and integral theorist Dr. Ervin Laszlo says the universe is an information field which is not only ‘the original source of all things’ in time and space but is also ‘the constant and enduring memory of the universe’. An interconnecting cosmic field links man and matter and continually affects everything and everyone. ‘It literally conveys all the information of life itself.’
Past, present and future flow together in the zero-point energy field. Linear time is an artifact of our nervous system. Healer Edgar Cayce believed the Akashic Records contained a history of every soul from the dawn of creation, connecting us to each other. The records are impressed or encoded into energy/information. Our choices continually rewrite them, modulating thoughts and emotion. The Akashic records (information domain) not only store everything in the past of an individual but also contain all the future possibilities and potentials for our lives. Einstein put it concisely: "Space and time are modes in which we think, not conditions in which we live."
Meta-Nexus
"We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work." -- Richard Feynman in his Nobel Lecture, 1966
"Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown; that there is only one thing and that what seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception." --Schrödinger
“This feeling for the infinite can be attained only if we are bounded to the utmost. In knowing ourselves to be ultimately limited we possess also the capacity for becoming conscious of the infinite. But only then!” ~ C. G. Jung
Thinking Big requires a new approach to the way we pursue knowledge about our universe, our lives, and our species. The history of the universe is our history. We are in the midst of what we might call a generational shift in the way the world works.
We're still asking life's Big Questions and tackling humanity's Big Problems, but in the context of Big History -- a revisionist blend of cosmology, physics, chemistry, geology, biology, anthropology, psychology, sociology, and history. Such a meta-disciplinary approach attempts a single, unifying, compelling narrative that continues unfolding meaning, purpose, and insight.
But, all we ever really talk about is ourselves and our own processes. Pioneered by William James, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Gustav Jung, Depth Psychology is the study of how we dialogue with the Unconscious via symbols, dreams, myth, art, nature. A symbol is something which can have many meanings at once. By paying attention to the messages that show up from beyond our conscious egos, we can be guide to greater understanding, transformation, and integration with the world around us, inner and outer.
Ultimately, "explanations" fail as paradigms of human behavior, being only approximate models and theories that shift with time and related sciences. But our drive to do so remains. No matter what we call them, archetypes, gods and demons still exist as "real" in the human mind, in all their grandeur and monstrosity. The idea that all life or all consciousness is interconnected is one of the most enduring spiritual traditions. Objective evidence of this fantastic notion has only surfaced in recent decades. But evidence-based truth is undergird with self-evident truth often expressed in metaphors.
Our historically-conditioned culture is undergoing a collective transformation process. Countries, regions and continents have their own unique "mindscapes." Cultures can have complexes. Cultural complex theory itself mediates between the particularity of place and the universality of archetypal patterns, which can be explored in crosscultural settings. The notion of a "cultural complex" is a synthetic idea, springing from analytical psychology. It draws on different strands of that tradition to build a new idea for the purpose of understanding the psychology of group conflict.
The collective persona has broken down utterly, shattering the social mask that covered the denial, weaknesses and corruption of the collective shadow, which is now undeniably revealed. It reveals an underlying alchemical process, whose first manifestation is the collective nigredo, manifest in the 21st century Depression, economic and otherwise.
Will this Depression be the driving force that moves the global death/rebirth process forward, as it does in individuation? Will it help us take a quantum leap into a more meaningful future of mankind? In this collective "ego death," the dead void disappears once we connect with the fertile void of the dynamic ground, the formless state of pure potential. First we must endure the overwhelming sensations created by contact with this powerful source. The missing transformative information lies in the very heart of chaos.
There is a generic process in nature and consciousness which dissolves and regenerates all forms. The essence of this transformative, morphological process is chaotic -- purposeful yet inherently unpredictable holistic repatterning. It implies a flowing state of consciousness, "liquification" of consciousness, a return to the womb for rebirth, a baptism or healing immersion in the vast ocean of deep consciousness. It facilitates feedback via creative regression: de-structuring, or destratification by immersion in the flow of psychic imagery through identification with more and more primal forms or patterns -- an expanded state.
As mythologist Joseph Campbell described, "[Heroes have] moved out of the society that would have protected them, and into the dark forest, into the world of fire, of original experience. Original experience has not been interpreted for you, and so you’ve got to work out your life for yourself. Either you can take it or you can’t. You don’t have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience—that is the hero’s deed."
Campbell also suggests, "It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure." And, "One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that. " "The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature." These have become societal goals of our collective awakening from materialism, not just individual ones.
Social Alchemy
Plutocracy is unravelling. Underlying all our problems, the preeminent issue of our age, is human awareness. From one perspective, the ancient version of human awareness limited by fear, anger, greed, reproductive drives, tribal affiliations, ignorance and self-centeredness is the greatest destructive force on Earth. It is no longer adaptive as it was in the Stone Age.
On the other hand, a collective of potentiated humans who embody even a little of the new awareness, an awakened, relaxed and observant big picture awareness, has the potential to be the greatest healing and creative force on Earth. Is an awakening collection of embodied, present-centered people who are enjoying the transformative effects of this new awareness our solution? What are the gaps between where we are as an emergent culture and where we should be?
Many wish to connect with others in an effort to preserve civilization, all life on Earth and to propel humanity to its next evolutionary step in the face of overwhelming disaster and calamity. Can we break our identification with totalitarian society or will the dream of awakening remain a meme? Has complexity shed new light on cultural and organizational change?
A July 2011 article from ‘Science Daily’ entitled “Brain Co-opts The Body to Promote Moral Behavior,” considers the work of Mary Helen Immordino-Yang of the USC Brain and Creativity Institute. According to Yang, “The human brain may simulate physical sensations to prompt introspection, capitalizing on moments of high emotion to promote moral behavior.” The article explains, “… individuals who were told stories designed to evoke compassion and admiration for virtue sometimes reported that they felt a physical sensation in response. These psycho-physical ‘pangs’ of emotion are very real -- they're detectable with brain scans -- and may be evidence that pro-social behavior is part of human survival.”
Yang continues, "These emotions are foundational for morality and social learning. They have the power to change the course of your very life… Our very biology is a social one. For centuries poets have described so-called gut feelings during social emotions. Now we are uncovering the biological evidence."
But if our brains are naturally wired for cooperation, where does the breakdown occur? Some research shows the answermay lie in damaged or suppressed emotional centers in the brains of some individuals. Does that mean civilizations is cursed by the rulership of high-risk emotional invalids and market processes -- survival of the damaged in a perpetual war with the ethically-motivated?
Is a species-wide biopsychosocial spiritual awakening on the horizon, a some claim? Is a new state of identity forming, based on the collective repulsion of the dominant paradigms and accelerated by social media-technology? You are life, I am life, the cosmos is life (evolving, responsive, self-referential, self-organizing stuff) bringing forth evermore life.
2012 is a year in which the individual forecasts point to a new generational reality and a redefinition of how the world works, but it is not the final stage of the transformation process. Clearly, the Post-Cold War world has come to an end, replaced by changed players and changed dynamics.
Civilizations and eras need a myth to live and that myth may define our collective fate. Futuring includes six synergetic aspects: 1) mapping acceleration, 2) anticipating, 3) timing and 4) deepening the future, 5) creating alternatives to the present and 6) transformation. Aspirational futuring and analysis includes environmental scanning, forecasts, scenarios, visions, audacious goals and understanding change and strategic issues.
Trends identify key forces shaping the future. Environmental scanning includes global, local, political, economic, technological, environmental and social trends. Roadmaps help us visualize strategies and collaborative foresight. Paradigms underpin the assumed truths of our logic.
Obviously, we cannot figure out the Mystery of life with intellect or social science alone. Though "the map is not the territory", the only consciousness maps we have are those left over from our ancestors -- mostly esoteric systems describing the cartography of the human condition. Modern researchers, such as Stan Grof, Ken Wilber, and John Curtis Gowan have attempted to map the mindscape and relationship between the numinous and the ego with some success, at least in broad conceptual strokes. http://www.csun.edu/edpsy/Gowan/
Our attempts to ignore or obliterate the Self are an attempt to wipe out that awareness -- to deaden or destroy any connection with it, and the pain of struggling with our higher and primordial selves, godhead, consciousness or whatever we choose to call the "divine" or sacred dimension and forms. Synthesis echoes the alchemical coagula, attempting to counter the fragmentation of the ego, to put the pieces back together in an increasingly chaotic world devoid of the in-dwelling sacred.
Realizing our separateness from the whole is a privilege given to gods. When our separateness realizes its divinity, it realizes that the microcosm is truly the macrocosm, "as above so below". Ego has been characterized as sinful since we realized our nakedness. Without such separation, which Jung termed "individuation", nothing can be achieved in the name of the Great Work.
Our feelings, thoughts, and needs, as well as our inherent beliefs and spiritual essence are composed of energy. The reintegration of the earthly and spiritual aspects of being in the alchemical marriage reunites us with Cosmos. The light of the soul is the barometer of being, reflecting our humility and inflations, our compassion for our fellows and our hubris. Literally and metaphorically, we ceaselessly yearn for more light - sunlight, torchlight, incandescent light, illumination. Light is a metaphor for energy, life, and knowledge. When you head into the light be sure to pack your sunscreen.
Cosmic pattern recognition is the root of shamanic human culture from Paleolithic and Neolithic times. Humans have always pursued cosmology (the linking field), seeing cosmic patterns at work. Perhaps the greatest ancient discovery was the Precession of the Equinoxes, a recurrent 26,000 year cycle, leading to the model of astrological Ages and the mytheme of Eternal Return and The Great Year. Jung took an interest in astrology because he found it archetypally predictive, including the wheel of time and opposites.
Existential Shockwave; Worldview Warfare
The change of Age, to one of "information" such as we face now, was always considered a challenging time of crisis and chaos as old ways die while new forms emerge. Images permeate our inner and outer life. Therefore, today we find the mindscape riddled with the transitional, messianic, and apocalyptic memes of "2012", the Rapture, and Ascensionism. Or, is "borgification" the shape of things to come, as encoded in the "Singularity" archetype or meme? In the New Media electronic info-culture we've all become cyborgs with machine-extended senses. Will machines become more conscious than we are by 2050, and begin self-replicating throughout the universe? This is a macro version of the world destroying "grey-goo theory" prompted by nanotech proliferation nightmares in the mid-1980s.
A crisis can be a blessing when it gets us to the devastating point where the pain of letting go is less than the pain of hanging on to a self-system that is so undeniably wounding. Not just the world, but "psyche" is in a time of crisis. The modern apocalyptic imagination, the economics of the spiritual marketplace, the commodification of countercultural values, and the cult of celebrity reign supreme. We must acknowledge the variety of manifest emotional and active responses globally to the onslaught of crises facing humanity and the centrality of psyche in articulating, holding and acting on these concerns, in a fragile world in turmoil.
The Physics of Creation
Our universe and everything we know always seems to eventually lead us to the conclusion that we live in a holographic reality. From cosmology to quantum physics, our scientists today are truly having a troublesome time trying to explain the nature of our reality. How can we draw the extreme conclusion that our world is only an illusion and what does that mean when we want to know our place in the cosmos?
We’ve always wanted to understand our origins, going right back to creation stories or creation myths. Physics connects the largest and smallest things in the Cosmos: "As Above; So Below". It is our common story because, for the first time, humans have an origin story that transcends our regional, religious, and tribal differences. That is, at least in theory. The flip side is that there is no consensus in physics, behind rather desperate attempts to rescue the Standard Theory from oblivion and the proliferation of orthodox and heterodox models. What may be closer is that we have a fantasy about how we think this has revolutionized our world.
The narratives of the past were as clear as the grossly limited understandings, beliefs, superstitions and power structures of their times allowed them to be. Chasing an ancient past that we are ill-equipped to understand in its original context is a sure path to detour or derailment in all conclusions resulting from it , if we take it literally. Old ideas are rediscovered, and succeeding generations find new applications for these ideas, valid and illusory. People identify with their beliefs, and they identify with their own self-image most strongly and enthusiastically -- even desperately. Both "official culture" and denial can lead to tunnel vision, medieval and older mindsets.
We need to differentiate between lies and truth not only “out there”, but more importantly in ourselves. Most people can’t face the lies “out there” because they can’t face the many lies in themselves, which make up part of their existence, from popular held beliefs about politics, government, religion, education, family, etc., up to more subtle lies we tell ourselves to make our lives more “comfortable” and justified. Ideology and culture intersect in explanatory power that has real effects, regardless of the truth value of those explanations.
Questioned on any of the mass-accepted beliefs we may have to reevaluate our own lives and realize we may have been largely living a lie. Truth is not always pleasant. However, there is no judgment in truth. It only IS, neither “good” nor “bad”. Because of the identification with certain beliefs that make up their whole life and existence, people tend to ignore truth and/or the lies they tell themselves. We tend to build buffers, excuses and all forms of denial to keep our “world view” intact. Ultimately we defend and argue limitations and the prison we are in to defend false ego states. We defend our tragic social systems the same way.
This is why Jung noted, “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to stop from facing their souls.” And he goes on to say, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
In short, if people can’t face the lies within themselves, they will never be able to face the lies in the world and find truth within and without. Their whole life just becomes way of shutting oneself out from anything that may be a “threat” to their beliefs and way of life. As the Russian mystic Gurdjieff wrote: “In order to understand the interrelation of truth and falsehood in life, a man must understand falsehood in himself, the constant incessant lies he tells himself.” Hence, the most important aspect in life is to Know Thyself.
In “States of Denial”, (Cambridge), Stanley Cohen remarks that “the scientific discourse misses the fact that the ability to deny is an amazing human phenomenon [...] a product of sheer complexity of our emotional, linguistic, moral and intellectual lives.” He writes that Denial is a complex “unconscious defense mechanism for coping with guilt, anxiety and other disturbing emotions aroused by reality.“ Even skepticism and solipsistic arguments – including epistemological relativism – about the existence of objective truth, are generally a social construction.
Much of the value of studying these 'Holy Grail-type' notions, in science, psychology and philosophy, comes from making connections across disciplines and ultimately building up our intellectual muscle power -- conceptual background. Learning different perspectives from our own is a primary source of human creativity. It can also be fallacious. To the extent such ideas spark insight they may help us move forward, but new ideas in reductionistic form can stall progress, too.
We know more than previous generations and have caused more problems than previous generations. The future we craft together depends on transformational dialogue and sharing worldviews. Exponential growth must be curbed to avoid catastrophic consequences. Decisions made now have effects over a very long period.
There is a hidden revolution in science today. Instead of focus on a part, focus has moved to relationships. A psyche capable of manipulating forms can create logical relationships, but logic remains a limited tool. Imaginal images have enabled interaction, projection and cultural expansion. The human capacity itself is an extension of nature.
Images and symbols, like language, can be ambiguous. Piantadosi et al (2011) have shown that all efficient communication systems will be ambiguous, assuming that context is informative about meaning. They also argue that ambiguity allows for greater ease of processing by permitting efficient linguistic units to be re-used. We can imagine the same is true for symbols. Theoretical analysis suggests that ambiguity is a functional property of language that allows for greater communicative efficiency.
So, instead of what something is, we look instead toward what something is doing and its non-deterministic effects on whole systems. The solutions lie not in the past but the future-perfect tense. Still, the near future is unlikely to be perfect. Furthermore, the nature of that future is a wide-open field, subject to endless confabulation -- personal and collective delusion. The ability to shift approaches with agility and speed is the essence of future adaptation.
We sense we are ending and yet just beginning because both are simultaneously and timelessly true. Humanity's race is against time toward the great Unknown. The perennial question remains, "What is wrong with the world and why is it that way?" Neither religion, philosophy, nor systems theory has been able to do more than balance out the negative, much like Yin and Yang. Transcendental religions seek to escape time and its dichotomies altogether.
The treasures of cultural history and spontaneous renewal reside within this living field, our connection with the primal source of life and parallel phenomena. The history of the world emerges from the multidimensional field of possibilities. Somehow life works despite infinite deviations. Viability can be anticipated if not planned. But we've outgrown Earth's carrying capacity.
Though barely aware of them, we are tied together by deep processes. We can learn to consciously understand and apply, rather than destructively act out these eternal patterns. We must learn to recognize what is being revealed even though it is always open to interpretation. We are also subject to delusions and misperceptions, so we need to learn discernment. We need to focus on our own dynamic process, not just its finite contents, personalistic signs and symbols.
Archetypes of Nature and the Nature of Archetypes
Jung reduced archetypes to a select few that mostly matched up with ancient godforms that described human behavior sets and transformational forces. But archetypes are not limited to that in any way. The forces of nature and the elements have always been considered archetypal -- floods, hurricanes, volcanoes, tornadoes, earthquakes, fire, ocean, river, mountain, cave, stars, lightning, voidspace -- the abyss of the transcendent imagination. Nietzsche famously claimed, "And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
The Unconscious Mind is not unconscious at all. Only the conscious mind is unconscious of the consciousness of the Unconscious Mind. There are archetypes emerging in science that have an ancient history in symbolism with meaningful messages that resound through the ages: "Turning and turning within the widening gyre..." They have been resurrected in scientific forms to explain even the mathematical mysteries of the microcosm and the macrocosm: vortex, gyre, spiral, solitons, toroids, entanglement, spin, singularity, black holes, flower of life, fractal iteration, interference patterns, and more. http://www.tetras-consult.gr/resources/Resources/Archetypes%20%20Mythology/The%20Emergence%20of%20Archetypes%20in%20Present.pdf
Interference Patterns
Is reality an enormous interference pattern? It has become increasingly plausible that the energy that powers the universe, which some call the unified or zero point field and others call God, is consciousness. It is this consciousness projected through the interference pattern of energy waves that gives rise to us, all that we perceive and that which we do not. Even what we perceive as solid objects are all manifestations of wave energy forms.
Scientific notions can be viewed metaphorically, noting particularly their similarities and differences. Is an attractor basin and a gravity well essentially the same metaphor? Space is never empty, since it is full of virtual pairs. Black holes draw everything into their sphere. Near a black hole the negative virtual particle is drawn into the black hole, while the positive radiates away (Hawking radiation). A binary black hole merger replicates the form of the inspiraling double helix, seen in DNA, at the macrocosmic level, creating enormous singularities at the event horizon. Fiat Lux. Such massive jets create shockwaves - gravity waves. http://www.tpi.uni-jena.de/gravity/Showcase/EH.shtml
http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1crNZF/www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/02/strange-microscopic-carbon-spheres-found-orbiting-xx-ophiuchi-a-pair-of-stars-6500-light-years-from-.html
Is there a hierarchy of singularities in light fields? If we live in a holographic universe, and the principle of "As Above, So Below" prevails, then the nature and intensities of interference patterns is crucial. Interference is another name for wave propagation. It is this interference pattern that is imprinted on the recording medium in a hologram. According to diffraction theory, each point in the object acts as a point source of light. Is interference itself, cycling between interference, entanglement and interference, more than a metaphor? There is primordial darkness in the light as well as radiant effulgence.
Photon interference among distant quantum emitters is a promising method to generate large scale quantum networks. Interference is best achieved when photons show long coherence times. For the nitrogen-vacancy defect center in diamond we measure the coherence times of photons via optically induced Rabi oscillations. Experiments reveal a close to Fourier-transform (i.e., lifetime) limited width of photons emitted even when averaged over minutes. The projected contrast of two-photon interference (0.8) is high enough to envisage applications in quantum information processing. http://www.iqis.org/~amacrae/Papers/Nov26/PhysRevLett.100.077401.pdf
Perhaps even sterile theories can be mined for metaphorical gold, prospecting for data. We can make a psychological axiom, that when the parallels in physics are strong, the results are useful. One of the classic metaphors is that "light" can also mean perception or consciousness. It brings to mind the the significance of signal-to-noise ratios and a variety of other possible transformations that can be applied to the human scale. Is it more than compensatory to think that perhaps the symbolic nature of the unconscious is the natural and fuller state of things -- a reflection of fuller consciousness?
During this writing, a synchronistic communication occurred mirroring such ideas, unearthing the mythic life: "the symbolic nature of the unconscious is the natural state of things". precisely. C. G. Carus and Schelling affirmed that in 1940- the symbolic language of the unconscious (Traumbildsprache) is the language of Nature. The unconscious is Nature in us. Hence, from the point of view of the human psyche, everything is symbolic. (the Centaur in Pasolini's Medea says so in a beautiful way). Yet questions remain. If projection is attributing unconscious contents to the object of observation, now when we try to observe our unconscious terrains... we can detect some projections in our feedback, but what is the reason that although this projection tells us about unconscious materials, it is not equal to the observed ones?
The universe is the sum of the interaction of all waves that are correlated. Interference usually refers to the interaction of waves that are correlated or are in phase, and destructive interference when they are half a cycle out of phase. The use of two-photon interference allows entanglement. Cabrillo et al suggest creation of entangled states of different atoms by interference.
Does the fine structure of light have something to do with focusing? Diffraction patterns are wave dislocations or line singularities. A polarized wavefield is an even finer structure of singularities. The singularities of geometrical optics are systematized by catastrophe theory. Partial decoherence comes from rays with widely differing paths of differences. (John Nye, Natural Focusing and Fine Structure of Light: Caustics and Wave Dislocations)
Caustics dissolve into intricate interference patterns which catastrophe theory describes as emergent semiclassical phenomena called diffraction catastrophes. In spectral universality, if we consider quantum systems whose classical mechanical treatment is chaotic, we find that the statistics of the spectra of all such systems is the same. Spectral universality is nonclassical, because it is a property of discrete energy levels, and it is semiclassically emergent because the number of levels increases in the classical limit.. As we generalize to a deeper theory, the singularities of the old theory are dissolved and replaced by new ones. http://www.counterbalance.org/ctns-vo/berry-body.html
When is a rainbow a catastrophe? In optics."Catastrophes" are at the heart of many fascinating optical phenomena.
The bright side of the rainbow (below the primary bow) shows a delicate interference pattern. Catastrophe optics describes the wave properties of ray singularities. In the hierarchy of physical concepts, wave optics refines and embraces ray optics, and quantum optics rules above wave optics. So, what would be the quantum effects of wave catastrophes [6]? First, what are quantum catastrophes? It might be a good idea to begin with an example, the black hole [7]. When a star collapses to a black hole an event horizon is formed, cutting space into two disconnected regions. Seen from an outside observer, time stands still at the horizon, freezing all motion. A light wave would freeze as well, propagating with ever-shrinking wavelength. Potential quantum effects of such a wave singularity are effects of the quantum vacuum. The gravitational collapse [7] of the star into the black hole has swept along the vacuum. The vacuum thus shares the fate of an inward-falling observer. Yet such an observer would not notice anything unusual at the event horizon. http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~ulf/catastrophe.html
Singularities, chaos and order depend on our perspective or level of observation: there is a problematic relation between the presence of chaos in classical mechanics and its absence in quantum mechanics. If classical mechanics is the limit of quantum mechanics when Planck’s constant h can be ignored, why does a system appear nonchaotic according to quantum mechanics and yet chaotic when we set h = 0? Moreover, if all systems obey quantum mechanics, including macroscopic ones like the moon, why do they evolve chaotically? This problem is located within a larger one: namely the mathematical reduction of one theory to another. His claim is that many of the problems associated with reduction arise because of singular limits, which both obstruct the smooth reduction of theories and point to rich “borderland physics” between theories. The limit h _ 0 is one such singular limit, and this fact sheds light on the problem of reduction in several ways. First of all, nonclassical phenomena will emerge as h _ 0. Secondly, the limit of long times (t _ ñ), which are required for chaos to emerge in classical mechanics, and the limit h _ 0, do not commute, creating further difficulties. To illustrate the role of singularities in the semiclassical limit, first consider a simple example: two incident beams of coherent light. Quantum mechanics predicts interference fringes, and these fringes persist as h _ 0 due to the singularity in the quantum treatment. But in the geometrical-optics form of classical physics (where the wave-like nature of light is ignored) there are no fringes, only the simple addition of two light sources. To regain the correspondence principle between classical and quantum mechanics we must first average over phase-scrambling effects due to the influence of the physical environment in a process called “decoherence.” (Michael Berry)
In optics, a caustic or caustic network is the envelope of light rays reflected or refracted by a curved surface or object, or the projection of that envelope of rays on another surface. There is a parallel between the physics of optical caustics and protein-folding. How does energy from diverse small sources drive a complex molecule to a unique state? Perhaps that the missing factor is in the geometry.
A putative underlying physical link between caustics and folding is a torsion wave of non-constant wave speed, propagating on the dihedral angles and found in an analytical model of the molecule.The translation of genetic information, which is encoded in the DNA, into uniquely folded proteins defines a central mechanism in all living cells. The first stages of the process, entailing the translation of the information into an amino acid sequence in the protein, have been understood for a long time. The final step, the folding of the protein into a unique native state, remains an intensely active research field.
The optical field, including the caustic, is an interference pattern which requires no additional energy to form. There are only a finite number of caustics that can be uniquely characterized geometrically. Also, the formation of caustics is strikingly insensitive to perturbations. The theory of caustics entails the application of mathematics to the propagation of electromagnetic waves subject to various boundary conditions. One of researchers' motivations for comparing caustics and folding is the appearance of waves and solitons in an analytic molecular model. One issue is that caustics are a wave phenomenon (although geometric optics also gives a complete picture of caustics). Do torsion waves on the molecule backbone, disrupted by heterogeneities in the arrangement of amino acids, form singular points which direct the folding into elementary geometric catastrophes in short segments? Does bond formation subsequently alter the shape? (Simmons & Weiner). http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1108/1108.2740.pdf
In a new discovery, scientists using the Spitzer Infrared Space Telescope detected tiny specks of matter, or particles,consisting of stacked buckyballs. They found the particles around a pair of stars called "XXOphiuchi," 6,500 light-years from Earth, and detected enough to fill the equivalent in volume to 10,000 Mount Everests. These exotic particles (image below) were detected definitively in space for the first time by Spitzer in 2010. Spitzer later identified the molecules in a host of different cosmic environments. It even found them in staggering quantities, the equivalent in mass to 15 Earth moons, in a nearby galaxy called the Small Magellanic Cloud.
"This exciting result suggests that buckyballs are even more widespread in space than the earlier Spitzer results showed," said Mike Werner, project scientist for Spitzer at NASA's Jet PropulsionLaboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "They may be an important form of carbon, an essential buildingblock for life, throughout the cosmos." http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1crNZF/www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/02/strange-microscopic-carbon-spheres-found-orbiting-xx-ophiuchi-a-pair-of-stars-6500-light-years-from-.html
The archetypal nature of such translatable models is highlighted by a recent paper ("Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life", Andrulis, 2012), first released as "scientific" then retracted from peer-review because no one can understand it. It is based entirely on a non-mathematical model of the gyre to explain all domains of existence and information morphology. It claims to unite atomic and cosmic realms.This paper highlights the apparent stranglehold archetypes have on the nature of our thinking and conceptualization. That is, if the notion of archetypes themselves holds up. Right or wrong, it shows the power of primordial symbols to attract and fascinate us.
A quantum approach may be clearer: We are pieced together out of atoms. Atoms are made from protons, neutrons, and electrons. Protons and neutrons are made of quarks. Quarks and electrons, as far as we know, are elementary particles, with nothing smaller inside. The gyre is the caged electron. Science thinks of the electron as something that circles so fast around a center proton so as to have the properties of a cloud around the proton with varying strengths here and there. But in the microtubule there is no proton to cloud around. It is not the case where the cloud behavior of the electron is sometimes associated with the beta molecule and then it jumps over to the other molecule as most seem to imagine.
The caged electron has no proton to center around and forms a gyre or tornado or vortice or cyclotron orbit instead.
The gyre or electron cloud is forced to form by the van der wall forces between the opposing repelling molecules.
Sometimes the flow of vibrations from one molecule excites the gyre and sometimes the flow from both molecules excite the electron gyre. The gyre can be squeezed or expanded. The gyre has a singularity which is made of photons emitted during the excitation of the gyre or electron cloud in cyclotron orbit. The brain recreates the behavior of the gyre. Life is delayed entropy and what delays the entropy is the incomplete dissipation of information in the singularity held by the gyre.
Vortex-motion has been suggested from pre-history to account for creation, and is with us today in other modern theories of black hole singularities at the core of all matter. Heterodox theories often show more archetypal influence than conventional theories, as they tend to be idiosyncratic. This one is based on the premis that any cycle that exists in nature—in physical, chemical, or biological systems—may be viewed as a gyre. The ground state is the base of the gyre. Gyre collapse occurs by two extreme means: overcontraction or overexpansion.
Because it is so unabashedly archetypal in nature, it illustrates the point that conventional and heterodox theories, in general, are archetypally molded. The gyre is suggested as a basic and concrete model of broad applicability, a profound heuristic, and an unchanging form that changes. Further, nested gyres evidently fulfill many of the modeling requirements of complexity, emergence, chaos, systems, information, and evolutionary theory.
Andrulis claims his theory organizes scales across all domains by feedforward and feedback between, among, and within nested gyrosystems, and that all physical systems, particles, and phenomena in the microcosmic and macrocosmic realms obey a vortical trajectory. He claims to demonstrate that, "that each gyrosystem singularity represents the origin of that gyrosystem. In other words, the singularity is the beginning and the end, the thermodynamic source and the sink of each cycle."
His metaphysics reflects a conceptual surety of an "elegant solution to the origin, evolution, and nature of life in the cosmos.": "The gyre models the living universe perfectly. I have been unable to find one system, particle, event, or process—at any point or stage leading up to or during the origin of life—that does not consent to modeling onto the gyre form. In other words, there is no “before” or “after” the gyre in a spacetime sense; the gyre is evolutionarily and existentially omnipresent. This theory proves that the gyre is the long-sought invisible and inevitable metaphysical element of the universe, fulfilling a philosophical goal that dates to ancient Greece..."
The central idea of this theory is that all physical reality, stretching from the so-called inanimate into the animate realm and from micro- to meso- to macrocosmic scales, can be interpreted and modeled as manifestations of a single geometric entity, the gyre. This entity is attractive because it has life-like characteristics, undergoes morphogenesis, and is
responsive to environmental conditions. The gyromodel depicts the spatiotemporal behavior and properties of elementary particles, celestial bodies, atoms, chemicals, molecules, and systems as quantized packets of information, energy, and/or matter that oscillate between excited and ground states around a singularity. The singularity, in turn, modulates these states by alternating attractive and repulsive forces. The singularity itself is modeled as a gyre, thus evincing a thermodynamic, fractal, and nested organization of the gyromodel. In fitting the scientific evidence from quantum gravity to cell division, this theory arrives at an understanding of life that questions traditional beliefs
and definitions.
The gyromodel depicts the spatiotemporal behavior and properties of elementary particles, celestial bodies, atoms, chemicals, molecules, and systems as quantized packets of information, energy, and/or matter that oscillate between excited and ground states around a singularity. The singularity, in turn, modulates these states by alternating attractive and repulsive forces. The singularity itself is modeled as a gyre, thus evincing a thermodynamic, fractal, and nested organization of the gyromodel. In fitting the scientific evidence from quantum gravity to cell division, this theory arrives at an understanding of life that questions traditional beliefs and definitions (Andrulis). http://io9.com/5880786/biochemist-publishes-a-unified-theory-of-life-but-no-one-understands-it
Natural Laws & Ordering Principles
These primordial forms, geometries, and pre-geometrical dynamics are the archetypes of nature, at levels more fundamental than those of personification. As our penetration of our own depths and those of nature deepens, we become cognizant of the primordial nature of such symbols in our personal and collective life.
Personified archetypes were well-covered in the 20th century, but in the 21st we need to revision our view of archetypes and what is archetypal to include the raw nature of archetypes, not just the archetypes of nature. Energy has shape…and that shape emerges from the vacuum potential.
As the Heart Sutra implies, form is not other than void and void is not other than form. In this sense, all of manifestation is archetypal. Smethan (2012) claims, "the reason that the apparent solidity of the apparently material universe comes into being is because the universe is nothing more than an enormous and multitudinous ultimately immaterial epiontic information exchange which takes place within the quantum ‘dream stuff is made of.’"
The "pregnant void" evokes the sense of its infinite energy density, pregnant with boundless possibility. The void is not devoid but naturally manifest paradoxical luminous emptiness. The universe is bootstrapped from Nothing, from cosmic chaos. Engineer Tom Bearden describes the vacuum as a virtual plenum, elsewhere called a "pregnant zero" by mathematician Chris King (2012).
"The vacuum is an observable emptiness that is a virtual plenum. It is spacetime, massless charge, electrostatic scalar potential, broken bits (subquantal) of energy, pure virtual particle flux, zero-vector wave flux, multilevel, structured, patterned. It is all things and contains all things in potential state. It is not, in that it is not observable. But from it comes all observables. It is both ordered and disordered, simultaneously. The vacuum is the absence of charged spinning particles of observable mass.
In the presence of a spinning charged particle, in a del-phi which contains electron-vortex-holes to mesh with, the charged particle attaches itself to the moving del-phi flux gradient, moving itself with the river. This produces an Ë field. The Ë-field CONSISTS OF the smeared electron, it does not CAUSE THE MOVEMENT of the electron. It is an effect, not a cause. The conventional equation for del-phi equals E is correct for matter waves in electron gases; it is not correct in vacuum itself. A spinning charged particle, when it hooks to a spin-hole in a del-phi river, MOVES ITSELF.
Electromagnetic waves in vacuum are scalar longitudinal waves of alternate compression and rarefaction of the vacuum virtual particle flux. That is, they are waves of electrostatic potential. They are zero-vector waves. They are internally structured and patterned. They usually contain electron "spin holes" unless made in a fashion so as to make opposing spin holes that cancel each other. Since they are pure phi-waves, they need not be limited in velocity to the speed of light. They are hyperspatial waves. They are waves in the virtual state itself.
Both poles in the virtual substructure remain as a translated scalar magnetic field. There's a virtual flux to and from each observable particle of charged mass in the observable state. Accelerated portions -- atoms with electrons in whirling orbit, spinning electrons, protons, etc. -- possess nonzero ordinary vector magnetic fields by translation. There are successive interlocking levels of reality, all the way from deep in the virtual state into interlocking levels in the observable state." (Bearden)
Matter conceptually arises from our perception of the universe. In the computational analogy the universe is a virtual reality - it is 'made' of computation and information. Only through virtual senses does it seem to be 'solid'. Existence is a field of consciousness, our personal consciousness is an aspect of the cosmic consciousness and with a focused awareness we participate in that field. By interacting with the underlying energy and information we may influence it, then when our senses perceive the situation it seems that 'matter' has been influenced - but that matter is just the underlying energy and information as it appears to our senses.
Rumi, the 13th-century Sufi mystic poet said, “The nature of reality is this: It is hidden, and it is hidden, and it is hidden."
Physical reality is not absolute. Science has tried to find the fundamental building blocks of matter, but has been stymied. It simply depends on the assumptions and theory you use with the level of observation: cosmological, molecular, atomic or subatomic. Now the quark (theoretically point-sized), long thought the smallest unit discernable, is giving way to finer distinctions -- a whole new level of the makeup of matter.
In The Quantum Brain, Jeffrey Satinover describes, “a world in which one can comfortably argue the dynamics of interference among multiple universes both forward and backward in time; can ask seriously, as did Feynman and Wheeler, whether every electron in the universe is the same one, just reappearing through multiple loops in time.”
Lee Smolin is not a fan of Many Worlds Interpretation, (MWI), but he describes its anomaly: “only an observer who lived outside the universe who had somehow the same relation to the whole universe that we may have towards some atoms of gas in a container, could observe this quantum state of the universe. . .it is only such an observer who could know all of reality.”
Creation may come from nothingness (ex nihilo), but it doesn’t travel very far from it when closely examined. It only and ever manifests as quantum potentiality, though it appears particle-like. This includes both the so-called organic and inorganic matter. The universe is more like a dream than concrete.
In fact, there is no such thing as solid matter at all, no hordes of tiny particles. All manifestations are reduced to probability waves in quantum mechanics. We have suggested elsewhere (see “Helix to Hologram”, Nexus) that the so-called material world is a projection of a frequency domain, fields within fields, tuned with resonance, light and sound. This holographic concept of reality requires the unperceived information background as its basis. Both particle and field exist only in the implicate order.
Light is even more ephemeral. As Wolf (2000) describes, “When we see light, we really don’t see light at all; we see an effect appearing as a result of light pushing and pulling on the matter making up our sensory bodies. We see matter moving. Light itself is really out of this world and, as far as I can tell, out of any parallel world we wish to think about.”
The most theories provide is the best explanation. Explanation not prediction is the point of science. We explain the world in terms of embedded hierarchies of substructures and superstructures. Each appears as a thing in itself with specialized functions and dynamics. Physics determines what can be computed, including the information capabilities of matter and energy underlying physical dynamics and deeper sub-quantal levels.
Reality consists of continually diverging and converging waves unfolding from the information level, but that is another story, as is the physics of consciousness. The mind arises from the laws of matter. While some scientists are trying to describe matter as consciousness others are trying to reduce consciousness to matter.
A thought of a thing is not that thing, but it is not nothing either. Our thoughts about the ultimate nature of reality affect that reality at the metaphysical level. As intuitive Jorge Luis Borges said, “Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.” All that can happen, must happen. The outdated notion of our universe is an idea, not a reality. As an idea it has been proven obsolete.
Re-creating the Wheel
Do we have to imagine our end to find a new beginning, to reinvent civilization? Change starts with the questions we ask because they have the potential to shift our awareness. What is inconceivable one day may not be the next. The tipping point could come at any juncture. Reality is neither structure nor chaos, but a process in which structure and chaos dance between form and formlessness. This is the eternal cycle of death and renewal.
Just what is the universe at the tiniest scales -- dots, strings, consciousness -- nothing at all? Abrams and Primack write: "if we were to possess a transnationally shared, believable picture of the cosmos, including a mythic-quality story of its origins and our origins -- a picture recognized as equally true for everyone on this planet -- we humans would see our problems in an entirely new light, and we would almost certainly solve them." Is this the meaning of today's crises rooted in the changing Age? Do we need to recreate the cosmic Wheel? Or is their premise just wrong - utopian?
Our ancestors may have had as much native intelligence as we do, but being dead doesn't make you smarter, so in retrieving their "wisdom" we may bog ourselves down in the undertow of outmoded thinking, swayed by emotional draw to archetypal fascinations, stereotypical superstitions, and magnetic symbolism. Something was missing from ancient science that does not lead to universal harmony through its practice. Yet, each person cleaves to their limited interpretations, conceptions, and overdrawn conclusions like a jealous lover. Our theories of self, others and world are constrained by the limitations of our individual minds.
Consciousness doesn't mistake itself for a god; people do. Some cultures are still locked in worshiping their version of God, while others have reduced god to the personalistic level, wishing to be that through such memes as co-creation, LOA, and "intentionality". The later is thinly disguised ego-aggrandizement. Whether that is possible in any sense or not, it is hubris, or spiritual pride, an addictive state of the ego that opens the door to self-deception, even in science. Does spiritual innovation and natural discovery trump religious belief? Despite our efforts, existence remains an enigma.
Consensual reality is not a single objective reality, but many entangled worlds that share information with each other, each defined on its own viewing screen, and each observed from its own point of view. The self-concept is understood in terms of the encoding of information on the viewing screen, and the expression of personal will and universal will is understood in the sense of the flow of energy. The nature of the Self is understood as a presence of consciousness that arises at a focal point of perception, while the perceivable world arises on a viewing screen. In a nondual sense, the Source of any such world, and the Source of any individual consciousness, is understood as a void of undifferentiated consciousness. (James Kowall) http://scigod.com/index.php/sgj/article/view/155/186
Cognitive science indicates that much of our mental lives is not available to introspection (e.g. Nisbett and Wilson, 1977; Gopnik, 1993; Wegner, 2002). People presume introspective access to their mental events. There are two dimensions of introspective access: (i) the power of access, i.e. whether people believe they can unfailingly or only typically introspect mental events; and (ii) the domain of access, i.e. what types of mental events people believe they are able to introspect. Beliefs about introspection fall on these dimensions. IWhile people do not presume universal introspective access, they overestimate the amount of access they actually have, particularly in the case of decisions. http://ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jcs/2011/00000018/F0020011/art00006 Awareness of Unawareness Folk Psychology and Introspective Transparency Authors: Kozuch, Benjamin; Nichols, S., JCS
Big Questions will always remain as our understanding is necessarily limited. We are receivers of revelatory downloads in symbolic and cognitive form that can change the paradigm. But we lack the capacity to "know" it all, which is reserved to the archetypal domain. Thus, the unified theory, which would be more than theory because it actually describes reality, remains elusive.
Leon Maurer suggested this new paradigm would start with the reasonable fundamental propositions (some already presumed as aspects of advanced physics) that: (1) Unconditioned pre-cosmic space is the ground of all reality; (2) Such absolute (0°K) space is inherently potentially conscious as well as potentially infinitely energetic -- in the form of abstract cyclic motion or zero-point angular spin momentum; (3) Such zero-points of both consciousness and infinite potential mass-energy, located everywhere in total cosmic space-time, necessarily contains the infinite structural information of the entire cosmos -- which could, logically, only be the conserved memory of all previous cyclic manifestations and evolutions of the cosmos.
If such a worldview can only appear as a consequence of far-reaching changes to the conceptual foundations of science, changes which science proper cannot initiate for itself. A legitimate contemporary philosophy of nature complements the methods and aims of science. It remains for the archetype concept in psychology, and its extension to other areas of science to be established. Criticisms and misperceptions about the nature of archetypes remain to be addressed and corrected, changing the present meaning of the concept of archetype. If successful, such a transformation at a very deep level of our understanding of nature will change our place in it.
"Through haste and increased willing and action we want to escape from emptiness and also from evil. But the right way is that we accept emptiness, destroy the image of the form within us, negate the God, and descend into the abyss and awfulness of matter. The God as our work stands outside us and no longer needs our help. He is created and remains left to his own devices." ~Carl Jung, Red Book, Page 288
"Thus your soul is your own self in the spiritual world. As the abode of the spirits, however, the spiritual world is also an outer world. Just as you are also not alone in the visible world, but are surrounded by objects that belong to you and obey only you, you also have thoughts that belong to you and obey only you. But just as you are surrounded in the visible world by things and beings that neither belong to you nor obey you, you are also surrounded in the spiritual world by thoughts and beings of thought that neither obey you nor belong to you. Just as you engender or bear your physical children, and just as they grow up and separate themselves from you to live their own fate, you also produce or give birth to beings of thought which separate themselves from you and live their own lives. Just as we leave our children when we grow old and give our body back to the earth, I separate myself from my God, the sun, and sink into the emptiness of matter and obliterate the image of my child in me. This happens in that I accept the nature of matter and allow the force of my form to flow into emptiness. Just as I gave birth anew to the sick God through my engendering force, I henceforth animate the emptiness of matter from which the formation of evil grows."~Carl Jung, Red Book, Page 288
Though theories abound, many phenomenological questions remain unanswered:
1) anomalous cognition and phenomena (ESP, NDE, ghosts, ufos, channelling).
2) Personal identity, the soul, the self, mind-matter, the psyche, reincarnation
3) Physical and mental health/illness, why are genetic factors triggered.
4) Time, space, origin of the universe,
5) Perception
Professor Russell Stannard offers unanswerable questions that include:
“The brain is a physical object and many people liken it to an elaborate computer. But unlike a computer the brain is conscious.” What is consciousness?
Free will versus determinism: “Will a scientist be able to to predict what anyone does in the future? That doesn’t match with our decision to make a choice – it is the free will versus determinism question”.
“Why is there a world in the first place? Why is there something rather than nothing?”
“If the world was chaotic, there’s nothing to explain. Certain things happen and other things cannot happen because of the Laws of Nature. But why are there any laws at all?”
Is mathematics something human beings invented or something we discovered?
For all of us to be here, many many conditions had to be satisfied. The chance of life happening on earth, and satisfying those conditions were “practically zero”. We find ourselves in one of these freak universes.
How do you prove that there are universes other than our own?
Cosmologists are able to describe the tiniest fraction of a second after the Big Bang. There was neither space nor time before the Big Bang. Some theories do not require nor include a Big Bang at all, making it's "cause" meaningless.
Does the universe go on forever? Where is its border and where does it stop?
No one knows what the smallest unit of distance or time is, or the length of a "string".
http://news.techeye.net/science/science-is-grinding-to-a-halt#ixzz1fb1MqE7U
Doom or Bloom?
"You can't predict what a myth is going to be any more than you can predict what you're going to dream tonight. Myths and dream come from the same place. They come from realizations of some kind that have then to find expression in symbolic form. And the only myth that's going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future is one that is talking about the planet, not the city, not these people, but the planet and everybody on it. That's my main thought for what the future of myth is going to be." --Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers
"The fantasy we call 'current events,' that which is taking place outside the historical field, is a reflection of an eternal mythological experience... .Nothing can be revealed by a newspaper, by the world's chronique scandaleuse, unless the essence is described from within through an archetypal pattern. The archetype provides the basis for uniting those incommensurables, fact and meaning." --James HIllman, "An Aspect of the Psychological & Historical Present"
Doom or Bloom
We are appropriating for our own consumption a large and increasing fraction of the biological productivity of the entire earth. This is why we need to figure out quickly how to transition out of the current period of worldwide human inflationary growth as gently and justly as possible. Psychic repression depends on social oppression. All context is important, including popular culture. Not all archetypal significance is evolutionary, therefore archetypal psychology, for example, honors the pathological, as well.
Campbell claimed, “Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.” What we seek is within us. Can we use the principles of character transformation to change the character of our society? Surely it raises more questions than answers, as the later are necessarily as-yet-unknown. What are the new Rites of Passage for our civilization? What do we need to collectively manifest Aristotle's definition of happiness? "The exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a life affording them scope." Is it not the [molecular] archetypes [neurotransmitters] that in some way color, limit and potentiate the spectrum of our emotions and their complex interactions?
Can any image be universal? Can they be passed on genetically, emerge instinctually, or transform over time with language, culture and history? Do we unconsciously rework the archetypes of previous ages and discover archetypes that can only emerge in our own? Maybe not entirely, but certainly metaphorically, and often it is more than a metphor, leading to tangible effects in the real world, where the mindbody lives in its material context.
In the parietal lobe, the angular gyrus is partly responsible for the human ability to understand metaphor. For those with damage to the angular gyrus region of their brains, metaphors are confusing. The angular gyrus is strategically located at the crossroads of areas specialized for processing touch, hearing and vision. The left angular gyrus deals with cross-modal metaphors (“loud shirt”), while the right angular gyrus deals with spatial metaphors.
Metaphor feeds the imagination. Metaphor unites the dual themes of creativity - coarse semantic coding and hyperconnective sensory, emotional and conceptual areas of the brain. Metaphor helps us project structure across categories to establish new connections and organization of meaning. Metaphor springs from and interprets the core of our corporeal experience. Metaphors expand meaning by transcending the literal and structural interpretation.
Tibertan masters claim, the root of our material-mental universe is this self-existent pristine cognitiveness, a point instant virtual singularity. Its facticity is open-dimensioned and not discernable as any concrete thing. The meaning-saturated field of pristine cognitivenessis am intrinsically radiant field of this open dimension -- the sheer lucency of quantum potentiality.
With meaning awareness, insight can be extended to the cosmos as a whole. Universe itself emerges from a quantum ground of pure undiluted meaningfulness which explodes into the infinite play of the meanings of the experiential world. Bohm concludes that meaning‘ can be considered to be the ultimate constituent of the process of the universe because it enfolds‘ the other primary aspects of matter‘ and energy‘. The universe can be considered to be a self-referential, self-creating process within which infinite meaningful acts of internal cognition create a multitudinous field of dualistic experience within an overall field of pure undifferentiated meaning, which we may identify with the quantum ground.
In The Power of Myth, Campbell states, “People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances without own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
He points out that, “Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.” (Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor).
Archetypes are more than just socially constructed symbols. Jung did not subscribe to genetically-driven behavior, per se, and today's Jungians certainly do not. Archetypes arise from emotionally-charged aspects of our being. An archetypal understanding of events immediately changes our perception of them and ourselves. History repeats because it is an expression of human nature, which includes the mythic dimension.
As mediators archetypes help us deal with our enormous individual and global problems, the irrational and unconscious. We are given the age-old task of gaining wisdom without losing our potential. We have to remain open to chance and change, and the dance of opposites. It helps us deal with individual, social and cultural trauma, inflicted by events and media. Can they help us move through our protracted adolescence?
When "inner" and "outer" distinctions dissolve, the world become transparent. Is our universe is populated by simple, recursive, self-similar structures of consciousness at arbitrarily small scales? Fractals may be a much larger part of our subconscious than we realize; somehow they provide a link, or a bridge, to a larger universe; a Greater Reality. We know the Universe itself has a fractal nature, that can be measured and observed. Does consciousness itself adhere to the same fractal relationship? Does consciousness also split into parts and observe itself in each state of self-similarity? This is the flow which appears to move through the infinity of potential universes or connections.
The notion of ontological "emptiness," or more meaningfully, "nonbeing-ness" of physical things follows from the "Axiom of Transcendence." "Being" (in the metaphysical ontological sense of the word) may be taken as absolute at hypothetical point of zero- singularity convergence of manifold. Given, however, the fact of the "no-zero-point axiom," the realm of what we call "physical" becomes the realm of virtual phenomena. In the interplay of form and motion, all matter takes form based upon an infinite fractal scale.
Correlation of an inner observer to parts of a fractal structure inevitably entails a correlation to the whole, thereby preserving the undividedness of the self. Researchers suggest molecular mechanisms for the generation of a fractal structure in a neural network. This self-similarity is suggestive of human consciousness. Level is just a matter of resolution of boundaries between self and universe.
“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.” -Ervin Laszlo
Can cosmology help – by providing a model for this seemingly insurmountable task? The ossified old age (senex) is dying and the next one (puer) is only beginning to emerge. Can archetypes encode and offer a model of a cyclic cosmos that might help motivate people to change enough, fast enough? Can such an approach help us hold the tension of the opposites, and restore meaning to the post-postmodern world?
Despite the acceleration of vast areas of knowledge, grey areas of understanding and the unknown outweigh our self-knowledge. We have only begun to explore the ramifications of the electromagnetic field, much less the groundstate from which it and ourselves arise. Quantum Chaos, dynamic systems, and holographic studies have opened new dimensions to our comprehension of nature's way and our perception of the universal framework. Multidisciplinary explorations seek coordinated explanations that span all branches of science.
Metatheory
Abrams and Primack argue that for the human race to take responsible and meaningful action, we must first agree on a common creation story. http://bigthink.com/ideas/41338
The problem, however, is compounded by lack of consensus in physics about the true nature of the "Reality" we experience. Theoretical physicists and mathematicians are loath to accept that their physicalist constructs are in themselves “beliefs” not radically different from classical-symbolic or sentential-logic representations, leading to belief-type theological “propositions, but the philosophy of science suggests it.
We have models that "work", but the Unified Theory that is consistent with our actual universe, rather than merely mathematical, remains elusive. Ultimately, beliefs are the result of unconscious genetic and subconscious memetic processing of bottom-up inputs (from internal and external objects or events) into neuronal network representations.
The superposition of all possible states can be applied equally to notions of the cosmos, and Jung's concepts of "archetypes" and the Self, as the totality of archetypes in potential. Such an exploration works toward Jung's expressed desire for a language that unites psyche and physics -- our inner subjective and outer "objective" experiences.
We don't have to take such analogies literally to creatively explore juxtapositions from different disciplines. Open-ended conclusions may not be "right", yet may be fruitful in moving our intuitions forward. It might help us realize our as-yet-unknown potential. The Absolute or Unborn exists eternally and is always and already the case whether there is manifestation or not. Only our conceptions of such an unborn potential change.
Absolute space is forever outside the cycle of birth and death or the play of matter and energy. Accordingly, Space is synonymous with the sense (or awareness) of hearing or rather listening -- the voice of the silence is the basis of all sounds, forms etc. Drums beat, trumpets blast, bells ring, thunder rolls, and the Word continuously becomes light and flesh.
Mystics pursue direct experience of the primordial field and what it feels like to realize ourselves as the Unborn. It may be as close as we can ever get, conceptually and experientially, to Reality. Each of us in our way, through natural discovery rather than only religious belief, continues to reach toward the absolute. Our exploration will have more questions than answers. The complexity of the brain itself (and chaos) does not allow us to foresee all the consequences and implications.
Points of View
Dr. Angell de la Sierra suggests the search for meaning is to be found with the aid of language and sentential or symbolic logic representations, making possible the cogeneration of self-consciousness and the associated emotional mental state, corresponding to the particular judgment/event. The interactivity relation between the sense-phenomenal (internal/external) input, genetic/memetic memory input, and their associated emotional mental state is critical.
This strongly echoes Jung's notion of archetypes, irreducible quanta of our experience. There are three dominant ''levels'' – virtual, intensive, and actual. In practice, holes and possibilities of breakthrough emerge through which new pathways and territories can be generated -- even if only temporarily.
Sociologically, when socio-political reality becomes more and more difficult to inhabit, many are driven into mythic, magical and superstitious thinking as an escape into a mirage of control. Perhaps the real hope there is a personal or collective miracle, so the disenchanted world is reconceived in terms of such unlikely possibilities, which comes off more like an onslaught of alien selves, compulsive weirdness and reliance on the supernatural or wishful thinking. Madness, passion and hubris fuse in the redirection of drives and violence, without any critical self-awareness or self-critique. Idiosyncratic "content" triumphs over meta-views. Delirious discourse, a dialogue of unreason and "certitude", is mistaken for true or balanced discourse.
Interiority is reduced to a defense against inferiority, and an age of "normaliens". Denial of psychopathology makes it difficult to discuss one's own psychological difficulties. Empty places become haunted. Transgression becomes regression. Is it an attempt to return to a "zero point", prior to the establishment of science, where madness and reason become indistinguishable? Utopianism becomes the omnipotent denial of finitude. Eschatology re-emerges as the desire to reach the Absolute all at once at the limits of being.
The measurement problem shows us each atom is spread out in a smear until observed and measured. Scientists associated the tenth of a second with the "perceptual moment", the speed of thought. It is also close to the limit of perception for smooth animation. Moment to moment perception facilitates the integration of sensory experience into perceptual ‘time-slots’. In other words, perception is a kind of ‘windowing’ operation, which presents and updates our representation of the external environment. The updating occurs by virtue of timing mechanisms: perceptual moments, which hold at all levels of neurological processing, and which range from thousandths of a second in duration to an outer limit of around three seconds.
It is these timing mechanisms which form the basis of our experience of time. In the visual cortex, the dominant rhythm, the alpha rhythm, has a frequency of around 10 pulses per second. It is neurological activity in the brain, innate ‘timing mechanisms’, which give rise to perceptual moments, and thus are in large part responsible for what we perceive. This rhythm is linked to the Earth frequency of Schumann Resonance to which our organism is tied.
The basis of temporal experience is ‘between the ears’ rather than ‘between the stars’. Time is internal rather than external. While time is not a physical thing, something that is objectively ‘out there’ which can be perceived in the same way that objects in space can be, it is nevertheless a real experience. Our awareness of time emerges from the process of perceiving, and from the properties of our perceptual apparatus.
Time is a duration of consciousness and an infolded form of energy. We now have the "measurement" that we are one tenth of a second from whatever we think we're experiencing ... and it took the universe a good deal less time to expand. The world we live in lives within us, a universe removed from reality by enough time for another universe to appear. There is no time, locality, or solidity, just the reality our brain manufactures. There is no separation of electrons or people; individuality is an illusion. Yet, we cannot perceive at the ultimately level of reality, which appears to be empty.
So, in the past we hallucinated the Big Bang theory to give substance to our being. According to scenarios imagined by modern theorists, "the universe originated in a cosmic fluctuation, in which pure energy condensed into matter. Sometime around 10-14_ second after time zero, a soup of elementary particles and antiparticles condensed out of this energized void, like water droplets condensing out of humid air as the temperature falls. These particles and antiparticles then began annihilating, so the theory goes, until only one in a billion was left, and that happened to be matter rather than antimatter. Perhaps the universe began with this one-part-in-a-billion excess of matter over antimatter, and what's left over from the furious annihilation is our universe..."
Divine Explosion
Both the perceptual, bottom-up and the conceptual, top-down processes are severely limited in their capacity of resolution in our human species. Thus, when making judgment about optimal adaptive spatiotemporal responses to important contingencies, we can no longer have certainty about the truth-value of our input or output content or meaning, respectively; we only have probabilities. We have no choice but to satisfy that human innate curiosity about origins and destiny, and make mental representations of that micro sub-Planckian and macro cosmological invisibilities with the aid of metaphysical epistemological logic tools and cross our fingers, according to Dr. de la Sierra.
Understanding and sensibility are both subserved by the faculty of modeling with a hybrid epistemic-ontological approach, which I had promised myself to develop. Thus, incomplete in the absolute sense, the practical reason that Kant defended must be now reinterpreted to include evolving explanations on the structure/function of the invisible, non-existential reality that includes theological and physicalist faiths. The cognitive processing undertaken by the rational faculty depends on the quality of the bottom-up information to produce the logical inferences underlying our top-down modal judgments, hopefully consistent and coherent, within the context of our biopsychosocial existential reality.
It is clear that the self-conscious affirmation of one’s existence, the “I” as actor and observer, is situated at the executive vortex where all relevant perceptual/conceptual representations converge as the synthesis of the several semantic constituents of that cognition into the high-order cognitive singularity of a cortical premotor attractor space ready to be consciously chosen to activate the corresponding muscles or glands into action. How these primitive neural representations become further represented in the form of a priori logical constructs, assembled within the existential circumstance and ongoing mental state of the subject, and made available for free will access and choice may be outside the reach of rational tools.
Many of us out there whose hobby is to model reality have to always keep in focus that our most serious brainstorm pronouncements are necessarily inferences on representations and never descriptions of observable reality. In the bottom-up phase, our brains represent inner and outer objects and events as inputs for linguistic processing into other types of metaphysical logic representations; the top-down outputs are only inferences representing a mediate cognition of that original object/event.
Our particular judgment on a given situation, i.e., our opinion, is thereby the resultant of representations of previous representations until one final concept binds many representations, and worse, many concepts may comprise a single representation. Our judgments, far from being objective, are inferential and utterly subjective. This is the best our species can offer in matters of cognitive certainty.
Sensibility to the body-proper internal and the environmental external, as a bottom-up process, would now include not only sense-phenomenal interoceptors, exteroceptors, and proprioceptors but also quantum electromagnetic energy absorbers and emission (biophotons). The top-down process of understanding meaning entails the possible emergence of self-consciousness with the help of an inner proto-language, generated as a symbolic, imaginal forerunner of language processing. Again, Jung's concepts resonate.
Solutions to age-old questions need to embrace the physical ontological and metaphysical epistemological, and fuse them together with the quasi-deterministic glue of quantum theory, maybe leaving room for free will and a credible explanation for self-consciousness. Such contemporary solutions to eternal questions of finite existence share a metaphorical resonance with the alchemical notion of the Universal Solvent -- the Philosopher's Stone.
Entanglement
"The entanglement is your madness...the sword is the overcoming of madness." --C.G. Jung, Red Book
“It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed” ―Thomas Moore
Every particle in the universe is connected to every other particle, so that nanosecond to nanosecond they interact and are coupled across the vast distances of space. This leads to the central idea that we are living in a "synchronized universe," one layer of which we see and interact with and are synchronized with. This means every particle, every atom that we see as "real" is synchronized with the other atoms and particles in what we call the "real" universe. Other universes, with a different synchronization, can coexist with our own and yet they can pass right through each other. --Claude Swanson, Lifeforce
Entangled Consciousness
The fundamentally interconnected medium of reality is revealed by modern physics. It suggests some remarkable human potentials. Separated particles or people (bioentanglement) remain instantaneously connected regardless of distance. Entanglement has been suggested as an explanation of anomalous cognition and psi. Quantum mechanics shows entanglement between particles exists everywhere, all the time, and affects our macrocosmic world. Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance."
In a nutshell, quantum theory tells us that two entangled particles behave as a single physical object, no matter how far apart they are. If a measurement is performed on one of these particles, the state of its distant twin is instantaneously modified. Cabrillo, et al suggest driving two (or more) atoms with a weak laser pulse, so that the probability that two atoms are excited is negligible. If the subsequent spontaneous emission is detected, the entangled state is created. http://pra.aps.org/abstract/PRA/v59/i2/p1025_1
This effect leads to quantum nonlocality, the fact that the correlation between results of local measurements performed on these particles are so strong, that they could not have been obtained from any pair of classical systems, such as two computers. To cut a long story short, it is as if quantum particles live outside space-time – and experiments confirm this. The key commonality in entangled particles is that they share a single quantum state.
Understanding this phenomenon of quantum inseparability, arguably the most counter-intuitive feature of the theory, represents a major challenge of modern physics. A key point is that inseparability appears under various forms in quantum mechanics. Understanding precisely the relation between these various forms is a long-sought-after goal.
Cosmologists speculate the quantum vacuum is filled with entangled particles. Entanglement is the basis of quantum cosmology. At the micro- level, the nature of the wave particle duality points to a different reality of the cosmos than is currently described by either the particle or the wave schools of thinking.In standing wave patterns, destructive interference can be made to "stand still." The standing wave interference can be seen in two synchronous sources of vibration.
We know that mass has a vector quantity from other observations and experiments and that mass is entangled with quantum gravity and virtual to real to virtual manifestations. The fact of "self-interference" from these experiments suggests that at any moment, defined by Planck time as 10-43 sec. half of the cosmos for all intents and purpose is canceled out and invisible to the senses, no matter how measured. The missing part not described here must then be partly made up of virtual particles and photons. The part that we see and inhabit is only a small percent of the cosmos and this part can behave weirdly.
Quantum Entanglement (QE) is thought to be the working mechanism of the Higgs boson or the God particle, because it’s so fundamental. Quantum Entanglement is at the heart of understanding how significant events across the universe operate at the macro- and micro- level in split-second synchronicity despite considerable distance between them. Quantum Entanglement suggests that information is exchanged faster between Quantum Entangled particles than the speed of light, which was deemed impossible per Einstein's special theory of relativity proposed in 1905.
The cosmos behaves in an entangled and in a quantized individualistic state. The well known double slit experiment and single photon interference is something that most practicing and aspiring physicists are aware of. It presents one of the most puzzling aspects of the particle wave duality of the cosmos. Recent experiments have shown that electrons, neutrons, whole atoms and more can behave in the same manner as photons of light when passed through double slits one at a time. In all cases, there is every indication of "self interference" that is characteristic of what we perceive as wave interference patterns.
This "self-interference" is an important consideration in the idea of entanglement, otherwise known as the non-local reality. "Self-interference" can help to explain why some mass is missing in the cosmos, but it is not the whole answer. Yet, a curious co-existence between entangled states and non-entangled state appears to be the reality in the cosmos, when we look at the foundation of it in the quantum level. Whereas entangled states represent the unity in the cosmos, non-entanglement allows for individuality and apparent separateness and duality.
Entanglement is the apparent means by which Extra Sensory Perception (ESP) like information is instantaneously channeled and non-entangled states gives each one of us the sense of separate identity and the idea that intuition is nothing more than a flight of fancy. The non-entangled state is the realm of chance and uncertainty and on the human personal level, the sense of ego identity. This combination places us in a position where the cosmos can look strange indeed, from time to time. One can suggest that one state represents objective reality and the other subjective reality.
The cosmos was born out of an initial fireball that set the initial differentials so necessary for the evolution of all following complex processes. In addition, the ongoing feedback between the virtual and manifest conditions of the cosmos keeps the whole process in a constant flux of change. This change incorporates ever increasing orders of complexity until we arrive at you and me, who are intimately connected in the entangled sense, but have a strong sense of individuality and separateness in our day to day lives. Where astrology enters the picture is insofar as the entanglement of states of all physical and energetic entities in the cosmos upon all others. In other words, there is a distinct connection between all the planets, their energies and positions upon each and every one of us in a unique way. Each unique combination also contributes to each of our unique characteristics. When the planetary relationships change, so do individuals born in that cosmic environment, differ from others who were born in a different cosmic environment. Hence individuality arises through the change in planetary relationships. Stated in more traditional terms, timing is important in the analysis of an individual from the planetary perspective. It is this in the local sense that gives us the feeling and appearance of separateness, so necessary in the complex evolution of states. The arguments and tenets of astrology have a basis in fact in the entangled and non-entangled states of the quantum.
The mystery of individualization in the cosmos that is also entangled at the fundamental level, does not however, address the question of individual consciousness. From the point of quantum individualization in the non-entangled state, we must then take another step to describe how individual consciousness arises out of the primordial complex quantum matrix. What can be said at this point is that consciousness, like anything else in the cosmos, arises from the quantum. This must by implication, suggest that the fundamental units that build and change the cosmos on a continual basis, are conscious. That consciousness can only exist where observation can occur with something else. Here we have a type of quantum relativity insofar as that one thing can only be described in terms of something else. To have consciousness, a sense of separateness in the non-entangled state must exist as a precondition. Therefore, in the entangled state, there also exists a kind of collective conscious (some would say collective unconscious), which acts as a kind of reference for the rest. This then describes why things can get downright weird. This is especially true under extreme conditions.
http://syzygyastro.hubpages.com/hub/Entanglement-Missing-Mass-Interference-and-Individuality
Fractal Consciousness
Is there a fractal edge to undifferentiated consciousness? If so, is this how human awareness merges with universal consciousness? When trying to measure fluctuations in gravitational waves sensitive laser equipment was always picking up a “fuzzy” noise from the universe. In the 1990's, University of Florida physicist Charles Thorn theorized that our Universe is a hologram that gets it's information from an encoded area (event horizon) from where the universe was created. The information is this fuzzy noise that permeates everything that exists in the Universe. It is a sort of vibrational wave form information that we as conscious humans interpret into a three dimensional world. The fundamentals of both Fractal Geometry and a hologram show us that we are all smaller representations of the whole picture.
In "IMAGE PROCESSING:THE FRACTAL NATURE OF EMERGENT CONSCIOUSNESS (1993), Iona Miller suggested that the essence of this transformative process is revealed in the fractal nature of imagery and symbols--i.e. their ability to encode, enfold, or compress the informational content of the whole. Strange attractors condition and govern the transformative process through the complexity of information in dynamic flow. Emergent consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of the brain. Rather it is the transformational process of non-manifest, undifferentiated consciousness emerging into manifestation. http://www.asklepia.org/chaosophy/chaosophy23.html
In "Fractal Neurodyamics and Quantum Chaos: Resolving the Mind-Brain Paradox Through Novel Biophysics", mathematician Chris King suggests a fractal link between neurodynamical chaos and quantum uncertainty, revealed by transactional wave collapse. Despite these conceptual advances, the principles by which the brain generates mind remain mysterious. http://www.dhushara.com/book/paps/consc/brcons1.htm
The intractability of this central unresolved problem in science suggests its principles run deeper than the conventional biochemical description, requiring novel biophysical principles. His paper develops such a model based on linkage between the fractal aspect of chaotic neurodynamics and quantum non-locality, giving brain science a cosmological status at the foundations of physical description. The term quantum chaos has been used to describe a variety of quantum systems which have analogous dynamics to classically chaotic systems.
Stuart Hammeroff also suggests a fractal nature for human consciousness. The brain constitutes not only networks of neurons, but also hierarchical layers, with self-similar information patterns represented at various different scales, i.e. fractal-like organization.
The brain has fractal-like structure, known as small-world networks, with a very few large, and very many small, hubs (like airports, and the internet). Pribram, Bieberich and others have said for many years that memory and content of consciousness may be fractal, or holographic, and many have described altered states of consciousness as fractal, or scale-free.
Neuroscientists (e.g. He and Raichle, Bullmore, vandeVille) have found scale-free, or fractal dynamics in electrophysiological recordings, from slow, large scale default mode network switching (0.1 Hz), to 40 Hz gamma synchrony EEG (about 2.6 orders of magnitude).
In an abstract for the upcoming Tucson conference Toward a Science of Consciousness www.consciousness. arizona.edu, he suggesta that a fractal brain hierarchy extends downward in scale, from network and neuronal levels, to faster (and smaller in local scale) levels. Namely, the fractal brain hierarchy extends smaller and faster into microtubule dynamics, shown to involve a series of resonances from kilohertz to megahertz (Sahu et al, Nature Materials, in press).
Applying Penrose-Hameroff Orch OR, consciousness occurs whenever E=h/t (see abstract), and that can happen at any of these various scales.
This suggests consciousness can move up and down the fractal hierarchy, like music changing octaves. Going deeper in scale (smaller, faster) into, say, microtubule- based megahertz consciousness would involve more intense experience, more overall brain involvement, and quantum coherence. As consciousness goes deeper (e.g. into quantum level stochastic resonance), membranes rest and energy requirements are minimized.
From the network standpoint, it is as if airline passengers shifted from nearly all passenger being on large, long distance flights between major hubs, to them all transferring to many, many small, short flights between local airports (all perfectly synchronized) . The large hubs would be quiet, like they are in the brain on psilocybin.
These deeper layers in the brain, according to Orch OR at least, would be connected by gap junctions and utilize quantum effects for non-local coherence and interactmore intense levels described in Eastern philosophical traditions. As the Beatles said, The deeper you go, the higher you fly. The higher you fly, the deeper you go.
Fractal, or scale-free structure and dynamics imply systems with self-similar information patterns occurring across many spatial and temporal scales. Such systems are found widely in nature, including the brain. 1) Structure: neuronal dendrites (and their internal cytoskeleton) have fractal geometry, neurons connect in nested hierarchies of small-world fractal networks [1], and grid cells in layers of entorhinal cortex represent spatial environment at different fractal scales. 2) Mental representation: memory is distributed "holographically" [2], and visual imagery in altered states is often
described as fractal. 3) Temporal dynamics: Electrophysiology by He and Raichle [3] and others has shown self-similar dynamic patterns repeating at spatiotemporal scales, e.g. default mode switching (0.1 Hz) and more rapid EEG (10 to 100 Hz), separated by 2 to 3 orders of magnitude. What about smaller, even faster scales? Underlying neuronal and synaptic
functions, cytoskeletal microtubules have a series of resonant frequencies, e.g. roughly 10 kilohertz and 10 megahertz [4], and gigahertz and terahertz resonances are proposed. Self-similar dynamics and information processing in these 6 discrete levels (EEG through microtubule resonances), each separated by 2 to 3 orders of magnitude, may comprise a fractal brain hierarchy in which a process supporting consciousness occurs and moves, akin to musical notes moving through different scales and octaves. What process? Penrose-Hameroff Orch OR [5] is the only theory proposing
a specific process resulting in consciousness: quantum computations in microtubules, each terminated by quantum state (objective) reduction by E=h/t. E is the degree of quantum superpositioned matter (microtubule tubulin subunits), h is Plancks constant/2 pi, and t the time at which reduction and moments of consciousness occur. Recent demonstration of quantum-like conductance, condensation and resonance in single microtubules at ambient temperature [4] strengthens the biological case for Orch OR immensely. E=h/t, and consciousness, can occur at any layer in a fractal brain hierarchy. At the layer of gamma synchrony EEG at 40 hertz, t equals 25 milliseconds, 40 conscious moments occur per second, and E involves superposition of a billion or so microtubule tubulin subunits (0.0000000001 of total brain tubulins). E=h/t can also occur at deeper levels, with higher frequency, greater experiential intensity, and more
microtubule/ brain involvement. At 10 kilohertz microtubule resonance, E would involve 0.0000001 of brain tubulins, and at 10 megahertz, E would involve 0.0001 of brain tubulins, nearing brain capacity. Meditation, peak experience and altered states may involve consciousness (by E=h/t) moving to deeper, faster, more intense levels in a fractal brain hierarchy. [1] Bieberich (2002) Biosystems 66(3):145-164; [2] Pribram (1971) Languages of the brain, Prentice-Hall; [3] He and Raichle (2009) TICS, [4] Sahu et al (2012) Nature Materials (in press), [5] Penrose and Hameroff (2011) J Cosmology 14 http://www.quantumc onsciousness. org/Cosmology160 .html
Instantaneous Communication
Everything we perceive of as our reality is a consciousness hologram, 'entangled' within the matrix of creation. The cosmos behaves in an entangled and in a quantized individualistic state. Some suggest a mini-black hole lies at the core of each nano particle of our being - our very own cosmic subspace, always there, always eternally the same, the very core of our being, and a direct link to subspace and therefore the Cosmos.
It did take a long time to prove that Quantum Entanglement truly existed. It wasn’t until the 1980s that it was clearly demonstrated. But it has been shown without doubt that this is the case. In 1982, at the university of Paris, a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. The problem with this discovery is that it violates Einstein’s long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light.
Quantum measurements do not fit with the idea of an objective reality. John Bell showed, in his profound and simple proof, that NO CONCEIVABLE LOCAL REALITY CAN UNDERLIE THE LOCAL QUANTUM FACTS. Bell proved, in short, that reality is non-local. In other words, even though all the quantum facts are local, these facts cannot be simulated by an underlying local reality. Any reality that fits the facts must be non-local and entangled. http://quantumtantra.com/bell2.html
CONSCIOUSNESS: is the Presence in all things-by which each thing is conscious in the degree in which it is conscious as what or of what it is or does. As a word it is the adjective "conscious" developed into a noun by the suffix "ness." It is a word unique in language; it has no synonyms, and its meaning extends beyond human comprehension. Consciousness is beginningless, and endless; it is indivisible, without parts, qualities, states, attributes or limitations. Yet, everything, from the least to the greatest, in and beyond time and space is dependent on it, to be and to do. Its presence in every unit of nature and beyond nature enables all things and beings to be conscious as what or of what they are, and are to do, to be aware and conscious of all other things and beings, and to progress in continuing higher degrees of being conscious towards the only one ultimate Reality-Consciousness. --
Harold W Percival, Thinking And Destiny, 1946
Consciousness is the greatest and most profound of all mysteries. The word Consciousness is a unique coined English word. Its equivalent does not appear in other languages. Consciousness is the ultimate, the final Reality, that by the presence of which all things are conscious. Mystery of all mysteries, it is beyond comprehension. Without it nothing can be conscious; no one could think; no being, no entity, no force, no unit, could perform any function. Yet Consciousness itself performs no function: it does not act in any way. Because of its presence all things are conscious in whatever degree they are conscious.
Consciousness is not a cause. It cannot be moved or used or in any way affected by anything. Consciousness is not the result of anything, nor does it depend on anything. It does not increase or diminish, expand, extend, contract, or change; or vary in any way. Although there are countless degrees in being conscious, there are no degrees of Consciousness: no planes, no states; no grades, divisions, or variations of any sort; it is the same everywhere, and in all things. Consciousness has no properties, no qualities, no attributes; it does not possess; it cannot be possessed. Consciousness never began; it cannot cease to be. Consciousness IS.
Quantum entanglement is the nature of coherent organization of information. Coherent organization arises as bits of information tend to align together. Spin networks explain how this is possible. Spin angular momentum tends to combine together due to entangled spin states. As spin combines together, the spin variables tend to align together like little magnets. Alignment of information allows information to become coherently organized on a viewing screen, and makes the viewing screen holographic in nature. Alignment of information also allows for correlation of information between different viewing screens -- a light-like boundary like a gravitational horizon, as explained below.
We now have to face the possibility that there is nothing inherently real about the properties of an object that we measure, which brings them into existence. Rather than passively observing it, we in fact create reality from a superposition of probabilities. Physics doesn't tell us how nature is, it only tells us what we can say about nature.
This raises deep concerns for theories attempting to unify the universe. General relativity, Einstein's theory of gravity, is fully realistic -- it relies on things existing independent of measurements. So the search for a theory of everything, which involves uniting quantum physics with general relativity, may be even more difficult than we thought. String theory is getting nowhere, so the answer lies elsewhere, perhaps within absolute space itself, which may be a dynamic rather than inert primordial background to the cosmic panoply. Einstein suggested decades ago, entanglement could be the key. We need to radically revision our basic physical concepts before we can make the next big breakthrough in physics.
Physicist David Deutsch at the University of Oxford warns that even re-examining entanglement might not help us find the path to a theory of everything. According to Deutsch, we are blocked by something even more fundamental than that. Entanglement is real, he says, but it tells us more about how information can be extracted from quantum systems than the nature of the physical universe. "All the philosophical hand-wringing over entanglement is based on the delusion that we have a basic grasp on quantum theory". All Deutsch says of a theory of everything is that it is likely to come from uniting quantum theory and relativity at a more fundamental level than current entanglement experiments allow.
The idea that we live in a hologram is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and has a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard ‘t Hooft suggested, after others since the 1970s <http://www.emergentmind.org/MillerWebbI3a.htm>, that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole.
Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface. Such a physical theory, the Holographic Principle has been modeled by Leonard Susskind. He essentially claims we are holograms projected from the edge of the universe. His theory is tied to string theory, so it may or may not eventually gain traction. Holographic universes can be modeled in other theories, as well. http://www.scribd.com/doc/15765052/Our-World-May-Be-a-Giant-Hologram
Holography demonstrates that consensual reality is composed of multiple entangled worlds, each defined on its own viewing screen, and each observed from its own point of view. Both a world defined on a viewing screen and an observer present at a point of view arise from, and within, empty space. The expenditure of energy that animates the images of that world, as displayed on the viewing screen, is inherent in the accelerating frame of reference of the observer.
My Own Private Neurophilosophy
We each experience our reality utterly subjectively. No two observers exist within the same world, but their information states are entangled. Each observer's world is defined on its own viewing screen. What appears to happen in either world is only correlated with what appears to happen in the other world due to quantum entanglement of bits of information on different viewing screens that define those different worlds, each of which is observed from a different point of view.
A viewing screen defines a state of information that is entangled with other states of information. Only those worlds that become entangled, and interfere with each other, can share information. Different worlds that do not become entangled, and do not interfere with each other, do not share information.
Emotional mental states play a role in self-consciousness -- our ability to dig deep into the abstract representational world in search of ideas to correlate with the situation being analyzed and identify the best alternatives to choose from. How can we integrate data from inherited genetic DNA memory, perceptual sensory input, acquired memetic memory, conceptual inferential input (based on language processing), and the associated emotional mind state, all into one comprehensive hybrid biopsychosocial physical/metaphysical package?
What about the nature of consciousness? Is the nature of consciousness a part of the same world we perceive with our observations of the world? If we assume that consciousness arises within the same world with the things perceived within that world, that assumption is a paradox of self-reference, and leads to logical inconsistency, since it implicitly identifies consciousness with something that consciousness perceives within that world.
How can the nature of consciousness be identical to something that consciousness perceives within the world? Science has no answer to this question, since the scientific method is based on observation, and assumes the existence of consciousness. But consciousness cannot be measured externally. It is impossible to discuss any physical theory of any physical world without mentioning the observer of that world. Simply stated, without the observer of that world, there is no physical world.
Both physics and metaphysics place the observer at the center of this discussion. Quantum physics cannot give us metaphysical information; metaphysical claims supported by quantum physics are at best an irrelevant distraction. 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. Our physical theories of the observable world only describe some physical thing observed by an observer. The observer is inherent in our most basic scientific principles. Furthermore, those observations are conditioned by filters -- by archetypes which condition or pre-dispose our observations.
At the exclusively human level, where psychosocial considerations become part of the human species survival equation, we have to resort to brain representations of the chaos of sensations, and access an innate language faculty to classify, sort, combine, permute, and parse to extract the meaning of an otherwise atemporal, acausal, and asymmetric reality in se. Genetic and memetic memories of past and present provide the bottom-up input of coded representations.
Holographic Mind Body
Does a mind arise from a body, or is a body somehow dependent on a mind? Neuroscience implicitly assumes that a mind arises from a body, but that assumption has never been verified. The problem with this assumption is that it assumes matter and energy exist within some pre-existing space and time. The body is assumed to be composed of matter and energy that exist within space and time, and somehow the mind is assumed to arise from the body. We know from the holographic principle that this assumption is incorrect. The other problem with this assumption is that it is too limited to explain the mind.
It is impossible to explain the nature of the mind with this assumption of a a mental model of the world, or a mental concept that arises in a mind. The content of the mind is information content. Behavior and emotional expression arises with the flow of energy through the world. This mental concept of the world can never explain the nature of consciousness that perceives information and energy in that world.
All concepts can be reduced to the way information is encoded in the world, and the way that information becomes coherently organized into form, as energy flows through the world. The consciousness that perceives and recognizes those coherently organized forms of information can never be reduced to a form of information it perceives. A presence of consciousness is always outside that world of form, as it perceives and recognizes those forms of information.
The mind displays an entire world that includes the body. How can the mind arise within that world? How can consciousness arise in the same world the body arises within, since consciousness perceives the entire world that the mind displays? That world includes the body. A mind displays an entire world that includes the central form of a body. The brain is part of that body. The entire world the mind displays is perceived by a presence of consciousness.
As the event horizon arises in empty space, the observer arises at a point of view. All the information in the brain of a person is defined on the viewing screen. Consciousness cannot arise inside a brain. The brain is defined on the viewing screen, like everything else in that world. Consciousness is outside, present at a point of view in empty space. The undifferentiated consciousness that is the source of all actions in the world, and the source of any individual presence of consciousness, exists as empty space.
In the holographic principle, all the fundamental bits of information for the world are defined on the surface of an event horizon, which defines a state of information for an entire world that includes the body. The mind displays an entire world that includes the body.
The form of a body is an image on a viewing screen. The form of the body is the central image, and all external sensory perceptions of the world are relayed through that central image, in the same way that all internal emotional perceptions of the body, or body feelings, are relayed through the central image. Consciousness perceives the entire world that the mind displays. Consciousness recognizes itself in all of its actions, since all of its actions arise from its true nature.
The void is the source of all information and energy. The void is the source of the universe, and everything in the world. The void is a state of zero energy and no information, which physicists call the vacuum state. In this sense, the void is the 'stateless state', since all states of information and energy, and all states of the world, are defined on surfaces of quantized space-time. The stateless state is the most stable state, since it is the unchanging ground state. That empty background space is the 'ground of being', in the sense that it is the source of all things that appear to exist in the world. It is the primordial nature of existence. Everything in the world arises from that 'ground'.
This way of understanding the nature of the void, as the empty background space, vacuum state, or ground state from which all excited states of information and energy arise, is not controversial within mainstream theoretical physics. All unified theories, like string theory, and all theories of the creation of the universe, like inflationary cosmology, assume the existence of the void, and understand the nature of the void in this way.
The void is the source of consciousness that perceives the form of everything in that holographic world. The principle of equivalence tells us that in a state of free fall through empty space the effects of all forces disappear, the event horizon disappears, all forms disappear, and that world disappears. Ultimately, nothing exists, there is no separation, no self, and no other. The void is 'all-one' and alone. There is no intentionality in the void, only potentiality. Intentionality is only about actuality. Intentionality only arises with the flow of energy through the world, the organization of information into the form of a body, and the emotional actions of a body.
Cognitive/Affective Balance
A key aspect of the development of coherent organization and memory in a mind is the development of a self-concept. In some sense, the self-concept is mentally constructed as a meta-stable state of high potential energy, which is characterized by a potential barrier. In some sense, that potential barrier is the expression of self-defensiveness. These emotional expressions inherently defend body survival, and allow for development of a body-based self-image that is emotionally held in mental imagination.
Simply stated, it is not possible to have a self-concept without the self-replication of such a body-based self-image. A self-concept only arises as that body-based self-image is emotionally related to the images of other things held in memory (Damasio 1999, 169). The nature of those emotional relationships are body feelings, which represent the flow of emotional energy through the body. This process occurs on a moment-by-moment basis, and only depends on short-term memory of events (Damasio 1999, 112). Damasio calls this process core self-consciousness. If there are also long-term, or autobiographical memories, then there is also a sense of an autobiographical self (Damasio 1999, 174).
The mental construction of a self-concept only arises as an emotional projection to past or future events, as a body-based self-image is emotionally held in mental imagination, and is related to the images of other things held in mental imagination (Damasio 1999, 133). Holding of images in mental imagination is the nature of what we call memory and anticipation of events, and is inherently emotional in nature. The holding of a body-based self-image in mental imagination is inherently self-defensive in nature. The construction of any mental concept is emotional in nature, as an image is emotionally held in mental imagination and related to other images.
There are two kinds of emotional expressions that are inherently related. The first kind of expression is an emotional attachment, and the second kind is a self-defensive expression. They are related since self-defensive expressions only arise with emotional attachments. It only makes sense to defend attachments. Without an attachment to something, there is nothing to defend. Attachments come first, followed by self-defensive expressions.
The participation of the amygdala, hippocampus, thalamus, and limbic system in the formulation and synthesis of the representations (in harmony with natural law) into cortical phase spaces has to be detailed and remains a great challenge to cage into a credible formulation. The materialist/physicalist need not be challenged by a hybrid epistemic-ontological model of reality. Kant admonished, conceptual thoughts without perceptual meaningful content (“intensions”) are empty, just as pure physical ontology without metaphysical epistemology is blind.
The indelible complementary/supplementary and semantic interactivity of the perceptual and conceptual (ontological and epistemological) is essential for an existential cognitive act to take place, because neither senses can conceptualize, nor rationality can sense. Yet, there may be conceptual meanings without rational underpinnings (intuitions) or perceptual experiences that resist expression as logical constructs (revelations). We unavoidably come to the conclusion that, beyond sensory phenomena, a complex structured reality “exists” that resists being reduced to logical representations.
Archetypes appear as images. The images of a physical world appear within space, encoded in terms of bits on information on the boundary surface of that space. In this sense, that bounding surface acts just like a holographic viewing screen that projects perceivable images to a focal point of perception (Bousso 2002, 28). If that bounding surface is a sphere, then that focal point of perception is at the central point of view of that sphere.
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. Things can always be deconstructed into the nature of information and energy, reducing all information and energy down to its fundamental holographic nature. The holographic nature of the world describes at the most fundamental level possible how all information and energy is encoded in the world. All unified theories are inherently holographic in nature.
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? What is the screen? The nature of the 'observable world' as observed from the central point of view of that accelerating frame of reference. The holographic principle implies both system and environment are defined on the "screen".
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. The event horizon is a two dimensional surface that is as far as the observer present at that central point of view can see things in space due to the constancy of the speed of light. Both observer and event horizon arise in empty space. In this sense, the propagation of a light wave is like the projection of an image from the viewing screen to the central point of view. The nature of time arises as images are animated over a sequence of events, like the frames of a movie.
What or Who is Conscious?
If our experience consists solely of images, does that mean it consists solely of archetypes? In the sense that archetypes appear solely as images, a viable argument can be made for that notion. At least we can explore it in a variety of ways, based on both physics and psychology.
The source of intelligence is more complicated than brute computational power, David Deutsch conjectures. What matters for knowledge creation, Deutsch says, is creativity. New ideas that provide good explanations for phenomena require out side the box thinking as the unknown is not easily predicted from past experience.
Deutsch sees quantum superpositions as evidence for his many worlds quantum multiverse, where everything physically possible occurs in an infinite branching of alternate histories. Deutsch argues that a great deal of fiction is close to a fact somewhere in the multiverse. Deutsch extols the usefulness of the concept of fungibilty in quantum transactions, his universes and the particles they contain are fungible in their interactions across the multiverse structure. Deutsch explains that interference offers evidence for this multiverse phenomenom where alternate histories affect one another without allowing the passage of information, as they fungibly intertwine again shortly after experiencing alternate events. According to Deutsch, our perspective on any object we detect with our senses is just a single universe slice of a much larger quantum multiverse object. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beginning_of_Infinity
Quantum theory does not express the fundamental nature of consciousness. The fundamental nature of quantum theory is the uncertainty principle, which describes how something is created from nothing, as virtual particle-antiparticle pairs spontaneously arise from the vacuum state. Virtual pairs appear to separate at an event horizon, as observed by the observer present at the central point of view. That separation of matter from antimatter, called Hawking radiation, is the essence of the holographic principle (Penrose 2005, 30.7). http://scigod.com/index.php/sgj/article/view/155/186
Inflationary cosmology tells us the total energy of the universe is zero, since the universe arises from the vacuum state as a spontaneous eruption of energy, due to the virtual creation of particle-antiparticle pairs. Those virtual pairs are created out of nothing and normally annihilate back into nothing, with a total energy that adds up to zero. Virtual pairs appear to separate at the cosmic event horizon, as the antiparticle appears to cross the horizon. That separation is how a universe of matter is created.
How can the total energy of a universe of matter add up to zero? The answer is gravitational attraction. The negative potential energy of gravitational attraction cancels out all forms of positive energy, like mass energy and kinetic energy. Even the dark energy that is responsible for the exponential expansion of the universe is canceled out by gravity. Everything ultimately adds up to zero.
The holographic principle explains how all the information for the universe is encoded on the surface of the event horizon. That encoding of information is inherently related to the separation of matter from antimatter at the horizon. The holographic principle is the only known way to unify relativity theory with quantum theory, and unify the equivalence principle with the uncertainty principle. The probability factors embody the uncertainty principle.The principle of equivalence tells us there is no way to distinguish the effects of a gravitational field from an accelerating frame of reference.
Quantum field amplitudes are calculated with a sum over all possible particle paths. The path of least action is the most likely path in the sense of quantum probability. We measure a particle-like behavior of the point particle when we measure its position at some moment of time (Susskind 2008, 80). Quantum field amplitudes also exhibit wave-like behaviors due to the sum over all possible paths. Those wave-like behaviors include phenomena like interference patterns. We measure a wave-like behavior when we measure the interference pattern (Susskind 2008, 78).
All the debate about the correct interpretation of quantum theory is about the nature of observation. The only way to take the meta out of physics is to take the observer out of physics, which is impossible. The only other option is to explain the nature of the observer with a physical theory, but that is equally impossible. Such a physical theory of the observer would give a physical explanation of the nature of consciousness, but no such physical explanation is possible. That is what the incompleteness theorems prove.
The many world interpretation is seen as the natural interpretation by those that accept it. Those that hold onto the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics see the flaws of that interpretation, and don't like it, but consider the many world interpretation as too far-fetched and too radical an idea. But there is no natural way to understand the holographic principle without it. The holographic principle explains the subjective nature of reality. There is no such thing as objective reality.
If reality was objective in nature, information in 3+1 dimensional space-time could be encoded on a three dimensional lattice of quantized space, referred to as voxels (Susskind 2008, 295). But information is not encoded in three dimensional space. Information is pixilated, and is encoded on the two dimensional surface of an event horizon, as observed by the observer present at the central point of view of that surface.
The encoding of information arises purely from the principle of equivalence, which expresses the equivalence of all points of view in empty space, and the uncertainty principle, which explains how something is created from nothing as virtual particle-antiparticle pairs appear to separate at a horizon. Simply stated, without the observer of that world, there would be no observable world. The key idea is that an event is a decision point where the path branches. The quantum state of potentiality includes all possible paths.
Besides physics, there are many mutidisciplinary approaches to the self-assembly an self-organization of nature, each of which contributes a partial view of different domains and complex systems of organization. Transpersonal psychology refers to disciplined inquiry into human experiences in which an individual’s sense of identity extends beyond its ordinary limits to encompass wider, broader, or deeper aspects of life (Krippner, 1998, p. ix).
Simply put, one’s sense of identity is extended beyond its ordinary limits, giving him or her the impression that "reality" has been encountered more completely. Ultimately, both mathematically-induced propositions and transpersonally-induced beliefs are ultimately inferences about an invisible world. Enter a conceptual ‘time,’ this time as an ‘emergent’ phenomenon. We do this by manipulating tensor space mathematics to cancel the effects of the temporal asymmetry nature tries to impose on us.
Truth is a goal to be achieved as we travel the sinuous path along an evanescent asymptotic line. Consequently, we can only have opinions on the probable value of our representations of an invisible reality, and this is as close as we can go about knowing the truth of our reality.
Quantum Foam
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Liquid Crystal