THE TOPOLOGY OF TRUTH  

Topology: The mathematical study of the properties that are preserved through deformations, twistings, and stretchings of objects.   

The Sacrosanct Little is known about how and when our species developed from primitive animal into spiritual being, although we can hazard some quite remarkable guesses. Over several eons, in conjunction with a changing ecology and an ever-burgeoning need to adapt, our brains gradually made a quantum leap into the realms of formal language constructs, imagination and visionary thinking. Mystical modes of consciousness were therefore a natural progression from a purely survival-based dimension of existence, incorporating dream-like states and numinous experience into heightened perceptions of reality. But what triggered this new direction in our evolution? Some contemporary luminaries have put forward a highly plausible mechanism. Proposed by Terence McKenna, the ‘Stoned Ape’ theory categorically links our first real intimations of a higher intelligence to the early hominid consumption of naturally occurring psychoactive plants. These realizations of a ‘greater spirit’ can be construed to have served as the platform for the creation of religion – the worship of deities, the anthropomorphism of the environment and the juxtaposition of meaning onto inanimate objects. 

The architecture of religious traditions, prior to mass organization, had much to do with mystical/occult symbolism, transmitted through individuals who seemingly possessed a connection with spirit worlds. Over millennia, these symbolisms began to share common threads across all continents and peoples. Thus, it became evident that the aspects of life that deal with the instructions for a functional and ethical society imbibe their ideals from ancient shamanistic wisdom. 

So how has our modern society diverged from these ways of living, having been transmuted along the way into isolationism, the absence of life meaning, the dismemberment of sacred tradition and the sterilization of mysticism into a setup that deifies only commodity, ownership and celebrity? The scientific revolution of materialism, a culmination of centuries of religious oppression, bore all the hallmarks of a true revelation, heralding the biggest spurt in technological aspiration since the ascent of man. Science supposedly had all the answers, laying claim to the truths explaining the origin of life, the creation of our universe and everything in between. And yet, the very notion of scientific progress is now synonymous with the disconsolate view of being separate, segregated from the world at large, of each individual dwelling within a lonely shell for the entire duration of one’s life. As we grow more technologically advanced, we appear to be screaming ever louder for the need to be heard amongst all the noise – for the need to truly connect. 

Is it therefore very surprising that we are now approaching an epoch defined by humans coming full circle, as the western fortifications of rationalism, empiricism and materialistic inquiry begin to validate our most fundamentally human beliefs?   

Reality is Perception As quantum physics and studies of sub-atomic realms began to eviscerate our most cherished scientific dogmas right through the 20th century, a number of weird and baffling phenomena arose from our quest for absolute truth. It appears that the universe, being fundamentally quantum in nature, employs the sharing of information and energy in ways that we haven't even begun to fathom. In fact, the universe is a countless multitude of information pathways and systems, all of which give rise to this wondrous fabric of experience. Fritjof Capra, a pre-eminent spokesperson for the merger of science and mysticism, writes in the Tao of Physics: “The quantum field is seen as the fundamental physical entity; a continuous medium which is present everywhere in space. Particles are merely local condensations of the field; concentrations of energy which come and go; thereby losing their individual character and dissolving into the underlying field.” By extension, every object, every system within our universe, is a manifestation of an ultimate reality that underpins the Whole. Capra then likens “the conception of physical things and phenomena as transient manifestations of an underlying fundamental entity” to the non-dualistic worldview of the mystic, and the notion of all things being one. Ultimately, it would seem, separation is only a construct, a vestige of the human mind, programmed to compartmentalise and label. There is no real distinction between objects or systems within our reality. 

What incomprehensible machinery lies beneath our worldly co-habitation? Nested between the layers of our fractured and fragmented worldview is an energetic and unified reality, a sheet of wholeness stretching out indefinitely. The minutiae of detail embroidered within this fabric is astounding; and yet we are part of the same continuum, an ocean within which we ripple. Quantum field theory demonstrates that we aren't really separate at all, but merely differentiated, much like the fingers on one’s hand. 

Tripping the Light Fantastic In order to flesh this idea out further, an experiment performed in May ‘97 by a University of Geneva group showed that a measurement carried out on one photon particle had an instantaneous and identical effect on another photon, seven miles away. This particular phenomenon arises when two or more particles are ‘entangled’, having properties that are dependent on one another. Pertinently, this measurement effect has been proved to be independent of the distance between the two particles; theoretically, it would work even if the particles were to be held at opposite ends of the universe. Physicist Nicolas Gisin was quoted as saying it was the equivalent of having two persons flipping coins; every time one person would grab their coin out of the air, his colleague's coin would simultaneously stop spinning and land identically. Gisin surmises that some "influence" may be affecting both measurements from "outside space and time." 

Any connecting force or information transfer linking these particles would need to travel faster than light, which would break one of the most immutable laws of our times (Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity). At a fundamental level, this result indicates an inter-connectedness or "whole" aspect inherent within matter itself. Einstein himself valiantly fought against this very idea of ‘spooky action at a distance’ ("spukhafte Fernwirkung”), countering that faster-than-light speeds would invalidate everything we know about our world. Nevertheless, quantum entanglement describes a state of instantaneous transmission of 'information' across the Universe, independent of space-time. 

This particular type of instantaneous transmission has been shown to define a new class of events, the presence of ‘non-local’ systems, not subject to the constraints of classical physics (John Bell’s investigation on EPR paradox). The most significant extension to non-locality is the knowledge that all particles were once entangled at the genesis of the cosmos, and must therefore still in some sense be unified across space-time. These transmissions don’t follow causal principles, travel superluminally and are perfectly compatible with the mystical concepts of Unity and non-dualism. It’s a match made in heaven: the Brahman of the Hindus, the Dharmakaya of the Buddhists and Tao of the Taoists is the ultimate unified field that seeds our phenomenological existence. 

The Implicate Order In the New Causality, cause and effect are seen as two sides of the same coin. Alan Watts makes a quaint analogy to clarify the position: a strolling cat seen across a narrow fence by an observer would immediately raise the issue of the head seeming to ‘cause’ the tail, in the absence of the knowledge that they are parts of the same entity. It is an inviting conjecture, and even more exquisitely reinforced by scientific tests. Particle investigations show that effect can precede cause, demonstrated by virtual particles that pop into existence like flitting butterflies, before vanishing altogether into the ether. In the Standard Model of particles, these are equivalent to real particles travelling backwards in time. Quantum mechanics furthermore drives the notion of us having retroactively created the Big Bang, merely by looking deeper into space. Wheeler’s ‘Delayed Choice’ experiment, a clever modification on the infamous double-slit result, wonderfully demonstrated that knowledge of a particle state in the present affects its state in the past, so that any observation at a given moment can literally conjure up a history that has never happened until that point. 

David Bohm, a renegade theoretician of the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s, produced an entirely self-consistent formulation in which everything affects everything else, every way in time. There appears no distinction between apparently separate events & identities, owing to the fact that the Whole is ‘enfolded’ within each constituent part. Bohm extended his idea of this ‘Implicate’ order to suggest our universe as being a multidimensional holographic projection, with each region containing a total structure within it. So far-reaching was the theory, it resonated with evidence in the field of neurology (by Karl Pribram), that memories may be enfolded within every region of the brain, rather than being localized in cells or atoms. 

Almost simultaneously, UC Berkeley physicist Geoff Chew pioneered the bootstrap approach, countering that there are no fundamental particles or forces; and that one can achieve a complete description of reality by seeing it as a web of interrelated connections. As a natural consequence of this work, consciousness is seen as forming an essential ingredient in the soup, so that matter and consciousness form parts of an undivided whole. This is the final frontier for intellectual conquest, the holy grail, the realm where mysticism, materialism and magic collide. 

Mind At Large In light of the brain-boggling results in quantum mechanics, consciousness is seen to be central to any worthwhile understanding of our reality. In subtle terms, consciousness ‘creates’ all the phenomena we know; for if we were to do away with the act of observation altogether, reality would be in an indeterminate state of flux, like unmaterialised waves of potential existence in an intangible state. It is no fluke then that consciousness is often called “the ground of being”, a fundamental ‘field’ that is the source of all meaning. At the absolute core of existence are life, awareness, and conscious pattern. 

Jung realised and recorded meaningful connections between psychic and physical events, which seemed to exist outside of time, space, and causality. In his diaries, Jung wrote about this synchronicity as "acts of creation in time", and pondered on the idea that the subconscious was somehow producing physical manifestation in our shared external reality. Not surprisingly, this psychology-based gestalt ties in neatly with the Holographic Universe theory, with the brain playing the dual roles of the projectionist and the screen. In fact, much as a hologram materialises from the interference pattern of two coherent light rays, all of our physical reality can be thought to be a ‘simulacrum’, materialising as an interference pattern between a field of consciousness and a field of unmanifest potential. 

Of course, alternate descriptions of reality flourish and stake equal claims to validity. There are some esteemed figures in academia who have interpreted the weirdness of quantum mechanics to justify what is now called ‘Many Worlds’. Simply put, this theory suggests that since the indeterminate probabilities mentioned above exist as a superposition of all possible states, these states indubitably exist in an infinite set of parallel realities (multiverses). David Deutsch, an eccentric theoretical physicist at Oxford, has argued that one can speak of multiple universes being an interpretation of quantum mechanics only as much as one can speak of dinosaurs being an interpretation of the fossil record. This framework for explaining how a wavefunction ‘collapses’, and what happens to the other wavefunctions not being observed to collapse, is a testament to the broad-minded nature of scientific query in the 21st century. What was formerly a concept rooted exclusively in science fiction, has now become a popular and consolidated position in academic exchange. 

 Nirvana and Nothingness Within the myriad traditions of mysticism, the primacy of non-intentional consciousness is an unquestionable fact. Dating back to the early Hindu and Buddhist treatises, the human mind is regarded as the ultimate trans-dimensional conduit; a self-sustaining wormhole looping in on itself recursively, strangely, looking at itself look at itself till infinity. This is essentially what we would nowadays call a system or cybernetic model of consciousness: the universe being infinitely systematised in all directions, we are entirely contained within all the systems there are. Paradoxically, the conscious Whole flows through our very essence. It is a beautiful concept: the convergence of Eastern mysticism, Western philosophy and scientific rationalism.

In the meantime, however, science by itself will continue to provide an incomplete description of reality unless it accounts for and explains consciousness. Although we can now empirically describe the universe in terms of self-organisation and order (in what are essentially non-conscious processes), we can hardly even begin to quantify the idea that self-awareness is really just the same as the Whole being aware of itself. If we can accept the notion of life manifesting as ‘intelligent’ and ‘sentient’ ripples in an oceanic unified field, then surely it is a logical progression that the oceanic field itself is ‘intelligent’, ‘sentient’ and ‘alive’. These terms, in a sense, are merely arbitrary qualifiers that we use within our language constructs to distinguish states of being – one cannot presume to explicate on the difference between ‘dead’ and ‘alive’ without resorting to the aid of thought constructs (which may or may not be an accurate representation of reality). 

In light of this ambiguity, it is imperative that we adopt a framework that encompasses the overlap between the apparently divergent worlds of spiritual tradition and hard empiricism. In many ways, Buddha enlightenment has been scientifically validated: namely that in our elemental state, we are everywhere and nowhere at once (quantum superposition); we are the universe and the universe is completely contained within us (enfoldment and the Holographic Universe); that there is a realm beyond our physical world that echoes a cosmic-level consciousness (how the intelligent and sentient mind-within experiences itself subjectively). Strictly speaking, we are defining the pure meditative state; a reflection of the Omega point source, that immense, impossible nothingness from which the material universe sprang forth. All matter was once connected, and still is. That awakening is an intimation of the wonder of universal oneness, of bypassing our dualistic definitions to achieve a state of unity. 

The Conquest of Space, Time & Mind It may seem short sighted to assign legitimacy to transcendental states of consciousness, and to wholly relocate these experiences from the realm of hallucination to a place altogether more familiar. However, fMRI brain scans now indicate that the states accessed by psychoactive drug users (including feelings of timelessness, contact with beings & intelligences beyond our own, spirits and visions, feelings of oneness and ecstatic bliss, and seeing reality from the perspective of the 'Whole') are now wholly objective experiences. The same brain areas are awakened as those when we see what we would classify as 'real' objects. Scientists have even set about demonstrating that brain patterns can now be used to switch on and off hierarchical states of consciousness, some of which involve a very real world 'objective' experience of mystical and spiritual realities. For the first time in our history, we can actually peer into the brain as it shifts and morphs, as it weaves an immense tapestry that one can never quite fully behold. Additionally, it gives us an indication that perhaps we don't need to employ physical phenomena like teleportation, tunnelling wormholes or matter/anti-matter collisions to access other dimensions: we have all the tools within us, prepared by nature herself. Just as psychedelic transformation gives us a glimpse into these alternate realms of experience, ancient techniques like yoga, tai chi, tantra and pranayamic breathwork have been tapped into the source for countless centuries. These diverse mechanisms have served as pathways to explore higher dimensional realities, for anyone with enough inclination to persist in their quest for truth. 

To fortify the notion that everything we can imagine is possible, there is now strong statistical evidence suggesting a strong positive bias towards the existence of some ESP and ‘paranormal’ phenomena; a thorough meta-analysis of studies conducted since World War II by Dean Radin points to a better-than-odds chance of occurrences of telekinesis and remote viewing within the populace. If true, this wouldn’t be the only instance wherein the individual of a species can communicate with the collective almost instantaneously. Bees have been shown to use waggle-dancing techniques in 6-dimensional quantum manifolds to describe the location of food sources to the hive. Photosynthesising plants maximise their energy efficiency by using quantum coherence to calculate the fastest and most efficient paths for solar energy transfer. The collective behaviour of birds, called ‘murmuration’ in starlings, can only be explained through instantaneous communication, as though each bird is ‘entangled’ with the flock. Even Carl Gustav Jung used analysis from dog behaviour to describe what he called the 'collective human unconscious'. It suggests that many organisms employ modes of non-local communication (akin to quantum entanglement, or information sent in superpositioned states which can then collapse) to form coherent and synchronous behaviour. 

Thus, the architectural and organizing patterns within nature – most pertinently the brain, perhaps the most complex hologram that we know of – are recursively present at all levels of perception. This is what we know as objective truth. And even though particles come into being and vanish in an endless dance of energetic motion, Truth possesses a universal quality, one of omnipresence in an inherently transient world. As best encapsulated by Capra, “Like the subatomic world of the physicist, the phenomenal world of the Eastern mystic is a world of samsara – of continuous birth and death.” Truth, Love and Beauty, however, are eternal and beyond the grasp of change. 

Doowop

As a follow up to the article on http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 ... tml?page=1

"Gravity and mathematics alone, Palmer suggests, imply that the invariant set of the universe should have a similarly intricate structure, and that the universe is trapped forever in this subset of all possible states."

"Many details still need to be fleshed out, says Coecke. "Palmer manages to explain some quantum phenomena," he says, "but he hasn't yet derived the whole rigid structure of the theory. This is really necessary.""

"Because black holes destroy information, Palmer suggests that the universe has an invariant set too, though it is far more complicated than the pendulum."

"Ever since Einstein, many physicists have hoped that a new approach might go beyond quantum theory and find a way to restore belief in objective and independent properties."


My repudiations:
1. Firstly, the universe cannot destroy information, but that information only changes forms.
2. A rough sketchy idea doesn't constitute a breakthrough in the field, particularly judging by mainstream physics' anal-retentive fabrications. The deceptively pleasing outcome that the universe ought to have a single invariant set represented by some weird, unimaginable fractal is ludicrous. The universe IS every fractal, every vibration and everything ever conceived by us (or any races of greater intelligence).
3. The trouble with science is that it is riddled with the same extremist dogmas as religion, only on the opposite side of the spectrum. Why this dogged belief in the objective? Our culture, social idiosyncrasies and humanity are worth nothing, all owing to our unwavering quest to agree on a shared reality with maximum objectivity. Does that make the acid raver's hallucinations or the psychotics delusions any less real, when viewed from within their frame of reference?

I'd welcome a debate about this!
skand1nsky
hunter

Posts: 26
Joined: Mon Apr 06, 2009 8:34 am
Location: London

Beebop

Hiya Rob,
Thanks indeed for the response --- yes I did stumble on Tim Palmer's description in New Scientist, and it kind of struck me as absurd that one would want to use an invariant state to describe the underlying fabric of the universe. While the invariant set of a chaotic system is definitely a fractal, it flies in the face of the holistic approach, especially the one pioneered by David Bohm.

I don't think one ought ever to treat a system as reducible and in isolation, and especially NOT the universe, since it is a conglomeration and superposition of every possible state. On the other hand, as this forum is testament to, we are now looking for academic boundaries to be broken, and to unify spiritualism, science, metaphysics, philosophy, the arts and consciousness in a broad framework. We're talking about a web of interconnectedness, without sectioning findings into pigeonholed boxes. I reckon there's a few cosmologists who had better embark on some genre-hopping before getting too bogged down by the process of due diligence.

In the same way that Bohm illustrated a technique in which there are no such things as fundamental constants or irreducible quantities, it makes sense to talk about a homogeneous approach to fractal behaviour which is unifying and not standing alone.

Chatter box

The last post set my mind racing, so let me unleash my barrage now, quick, before the thought escapes:

As anyone who has sampled entheogens, hallucinogens or even transcendental meditation would testify, all the characteristics of a point of singularity (including its paradoxes) manifest themselves in states of higher consciousness. How can something infinitely small be infinitely dense and hot? How can something spring from nothingness? In the same manner of speaking, transcendental bliss is a solipsism so deep that it's actually unsolipsistic, is a mind so great that it is sheer mindlessness, is a moment so eternal that it is timeless.

The human brain is the ultimate transdimensional conduit, and the self-sustaining wormhole that is your mind is looping in onto itself recursively, strangely, looking at itself look at itself till infinity. We don't need to employ 'physical' phenomena like teleportation or matter / anti-matter collisions to access other dimensions: we have all the tools within us, prepared for us by Nature herself (and the occasional psychoactive substance wouldn't go amiss either).

There was a time when I would never profess the use of certain drugs, owing to the misfortune of a few horrendous acid freakouts over the years. However, follow-up experiences on mushrooms, 2C-I and derivatives of mescaline have reinformed my own internal debate. Entheogenic awareness is by far the most powerful capacity of itself that the mind can comprehend, and the knowledge that you are your own God is as humbling as it is enriching.

There's one way I usually like to picture reality as we know it: the universe is infinitely systematised in all directions, and we are entirely contained within all the systems there are. Paradoxically, the Whole flows through our very essence. It is a beautiful concept: the convergence of Eastern mysticism, Western philosophy, holistic arts and sciences and the spiritual awakening of mankind.

If only it were that simple...

Chatter

As a newbie to this forum, I'm still in the process of taking in the immensity of the set of views and counterpoints demonstrated by this community -- you guys have completely convinced me that there are still people out there asking all the right questions. There really is hope for the spiritual absolution of our species.

As a former physicist driven to disillusionment by the narrow-minded fornications of old school academia, it has come as an awakening for me that I can now venture my cogitations for consideration, without feeling as though the guillotine of scientific reprobation is about to seamlessly slice through my neck.

I'm personally quite enchanted by the 10-dimension theory, particularly it sounds so elegant, but also because addresses timelessness, mindlessness and higher consciousness so effortlessly. Of course, it should all be crystal clear and make perfect sense -- and yet, the fog of uncertainty ceases to relent.

We have thus far established the holographic nature of the universe, but there has been no mention of its fractal behaviour. As far as we know, the universe is both a fractal and a hologram, differentiated by either self-similarity or self-identity respectively. But this distinction leads to an interesting quandary: if geometrical objects like the Koch snowflake, coastlines or fractal broccoli are real and have fractional dimensions, then couldn't we conceive of beings existing in d=0.618? Of course, their paths would be folded through d=1.618 (Phi), and they will destined to be forever wandering aimlessly along the Golden Spiral.

The trouble with Rob's 10-dimensional exposition is largely in that considering that all possibilities are contained within the 'Infinity' as pertaining to your seventh dimension, there are possibilities of worlds contained within any dimension, be it integer, fractional, negative or imaginary. Which brings me to my basic premise:

REALITY IS PERCEPTION, BUT IMAGINATION IS OUR REALITY

If we can mathematically, visually, even abstractly visualise or conceive of alternative realities (be it in different planes, futures or manifolds), then they EXIST. Even if that commonplace chemically jumbled up construction that exists in 4-D (the brain) is consciously or otherwise generating a possibility, then that eventuality has occurred. The concept of 'thoughtspace' isn't new -- it is as real as 'probability space' and is clearly the medium through which memes propagate through mutation and self-replication. In that case, it doesn't matter in what dimension you exist; what is really relevant here is that you, like that fractal and hologram, are a part of that unified wholeness of being, a cosmic consciousness, and that the whole universe (or multiple universes) is embedded and enfolded within you. It is an awe-inspiring and terrifying thought.

An aside on post-mortality and the eternal nature of the soul -- death states have often been likened to dreamlike existence. People calling themselves 'Oneironauts', who practice the art of lucid dreaming, echo shamans when they say that the soul continues to exist in a timeless state. If timelessness is the cloth that embroiders our veil of past, present & future, then please wrap me up in it.


Hope to contribute more soon!

Sk.
skand1nsky
hunter

Posts: 26
Joined: Mon Apr 06, 2009 8:34 am
Location: London

1:32 PM
me: a little something for your neurons to chew on

http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2007/01/19/joe-quirk-author-singularity-sociobiology-sex/
1:33 PM
remember that discourse in waking life with the guy talking about the realisation of human and neohuman potential? the crazy scientist guy?
might be a futurist or transhumanist like this dude
10 minutes
1:43 PM
Kapil: it looks like fun. i think i'll put a feed to 10zen monkeys.

the earlier article you linked me too was pretty fascinating.
11 minutes
1:55 PM
me: about the talkin parrot?

cleverer than some people i know

Kapil: i'm not through it yet - was interrupted by an email.
1:59 PM
me: so zen vot else

Kapil: working in the field, i'd like to address some of the stuff that they're talking about
2:00 PM
like machines appreciating james brown, for instance.
2:01 PM
there's a dichotomy in the definition of AI between creatingn programs that act/think like humans and programs that act/think rationally

me: mm. doubt it, though... ask any schizophrenic -- there's too many intangibles, things without nomenclature, that exist to be described as language
2:02 PM
Kapil: yes, exactly. my field is inherently human-centered (though the techniques used often aren't) and we often evaluate against human performance on the same tasks

me: i see wat ur saying... most of our behaviour is coloured by experience and perception, and rationalism itself is only relative
2:03 PM
okay, help me thru something...

Kapil: well, i'm saying that the human condition is one speck (or a smattering of specks) in a vast space of possible consciousnesses
2:04 PM
me: despite what physicists proved, that there is no absolute frame of reference for motion
2:05 PM
... is it that inconceiveable that there is an absolute frame of reference for reality
2:06 PM
Kapil: and if if we are to create/evolve an artificial consciousness, either singular or networked, it will be a vastly different type of sentience, unable to share a lot of things with individual humans, but a sentience all the same.
(right i'm done here)

to answer your question, it is to me.

it is for humans, rather.
2:07 PM
me: but if you try to step outside your human-ness, what if you were observing 'reality' from outside of itself

or yet, what if the observer and the observed were one and the same

okay im blabbing

utter bilge

Kapil: do you talk just about physical reality?
2:08 PM
me: physical and metaphysical
2:09 PM
Kapil: i consider it impossible because i think you need an infinite number of perspectives.

but maybe i'm missing your point.
2:10 PM
me: wat im trying to say can perhaps me better explained by the following: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicate_and_Explicate_Order_according_to_David_Bohm

or maybe not, its a horribly written edit
2:11 PM
Kapil: i can't understand it.

me: bad stub bad stub
2:12 PM
hold on, lemme find summat a leetle more crisp

Kapil: still reading it.
2:13 PM
but, yeah, his points still aren't clear

me: okay, might as well...

what bohm calls 'enfoldment'
2:14 PM
Kapil: he seems to be saying that all the order we've theorized about is wrong. and that's all i can glean from this.
2:15 PM
me: in a hologram, each part of the photographic plate through which it is observable contains the whole 3D image

only at a lower resolution

so even if you illuminate only a part of the plate, you still see the whole image

Kapil: and at some level, he seema to talk about the same notion of the unifying theory of physics.

really? i know nothing about holograms.
2:16 PM
me: the point is, the whole of the hologram is 'enfolded' within each little part

Kapil: okay

me: the whole exists within each infinitesimal constituent
2:17 PM
so what if all reality were like a hologram, and we inhabit only a miniscule speckle within it

but each speckle contains the whole structure enfolded within it
2:18 PM
so essentially, in my typically long-winded way, it sorta leads to this...

Kapil: i see what you're saying in an abtract sennse

me: if we're a speckle within the whole, there's got to be a frame of reference which lies outside the whole, just like someone looking at a fully illuminated hologram
2:19 PM
and that frame would be absolute

Kapil: that's your conclusion, not his, is it?
2:20 PM
me: well, its hardly a conclusion, just collided two ideas

but bohm goes on to say that both matter and consciousness are enfolded
2:21 PM
if u can decipher this, you win a trillion bucks

For example, in the case of matter, entities such as atoms may represent continuous enfoldment and unfoldment which manifests as a relatively stable and autonomous entity that can be observed to follow a relatively well-defined path in space-time. In the case of consciousness, Bohm pointed toward evidence presented by Karl Pribram that memories may be enfolded within every region of the brain rather than being localized (for example in particular regions of the brain, cells, or atoms).
2:22 PM
so somehow (unbelievably!) this comes back to your neural networks

Kapil: oh wow. i really can't see the relation he's making.
2:23 PM
me: only in an organized and complex piece of matter such as the brain can stuff like 'memory' and 'thought' be enfolded

there's no way any artificial sentience could have the same kind of consciousness
2:24 PM
Kapil: don't think i've gotten this enfoldment idea down exactly. all i see is that he claims that there is an underlying order, a pattern, an organization, seen at every level of abstraction from basic matter to life to the universe. is that close?

me: okay he breaks it up into an implicate order and an explicate order
2:25 PM
the latter represents the obvious, space, time, particles occupying discrete points in space, so on...

Kapil: yeah. didn't quite understand that. is the implicate one the one i'm describing?

me: yerp.
2:26 PM
Kapil: interesting.

me: implicate im guessing means that the whole universe exists within each individual constituent of it
2:27 PM
Kapil: but what part of the whole universe?

me: ALL of it
2:28 PM
but im guessing, the smaller the part one observes, the fuzzier the whole becomes

Kapil: in a hologram, each piece contains the image, but not the thing itself. i see his definition as something like that.

me: the hologram is the thing!
2:29 PM
Kapil: hmm... okay. i think i see. slightly.

fractals?

me: yesssssss!!!!
2:30 PM
gawrsh, u gotta read summat first before we continue this

in brief

Kapil: send away. i'm ust finishing the 10ZM article
2:32 PM
me: Colossal void may spell trouble for cosmology
Cosmologists are shocked by the recent discovery of a monstrous void of empty space spanning nearly a billion light years in diameter. The void – the biggest ever observed – challenges the standard picture of how structure has formed throughout the universe's history. No one's sure how big of a problem the void is for standard cosmology, but it certainly flies in the face of generic predictions.


There is, however, a group of rebel physicists who did predict the existence of such a mind-bogglingly enormous structure. Back in March, I wrote an article entitled, Is the Universe a Fractal?, detailing the ongoing debate between mainstream cosmologists, who assume that the large-scale universe is homogeneous, and a band of physicists led by Luciano Pietronero, who claim that the structure of the universe is fractal.

The standard model of cosmology – that is, the big bang, cold dark matter universe – is founded on the assumption that the distribution of matter (both normal and dark) becomes evenly spread at sufficiently large scales. Look in one spot in the sky and then another and they should appear nearly the same, they say. There shouldn't be a big hole in one spot and a giant cluster of matter in another.

The fractal guys argue that, on the contrary, matter continues to clump into ever-bigger structures even at the largest scales. It's like this: imagine you could have a bird's eye view of the universe (obviously impossible, but play along) and you zoom in to look at a single star. Then you begin to zoom out and you discover that the star is part of a galaxy. Keep zooming out and you see that the galaxy is part of a cluster of galaxies and the cluster of galaxies is part of a supercluster of galaxies and and the supercluster of galaxies is … This is where the debate begins.
According to the standard model, there's nothing bigger than a supercluster. When I interviewed mainstream physicists David Hogg and Daniel Eisenstein for my article, they were claiming that the pattern should start to smooth out at about 200 million light years. According to the fractal guys, it just keeps getting bigger.

As is, mainstream cosmologists have a hard time explaining the existence of structures as big as superclusters, but they make it work by invoking something called a bias parameter. The bias parameter is there to make up for the difference between the distribution of normal luminous matter and the distribution of mysterious dark matter. The bias is declared to be 2 – which means they are assuming that the dark matter distribution is twice as smooth as what we see with our eyes (and telescopes).

A deciding factor between the two models, then, is the distribution of dark matter; in particular, whether or not there is dark matter lurking in the voids. If the mainstream guys are right, the voids should be full of evenly spread dark matter. If the fractal guys are right, the voids should be truly empty … and huge. "If the cold dark matter model is correct, then there should be dark matter in the voids," Hogg told me.

So here we are, with a void nearly a billion light-years across that is truly empty – no stars, no dark matter. Does that mean that the universe is fractal? One observation isn't enough to support a definitive conclusion – but it seems the fractal guys, who have long been shunned by the mainstream, deserve to be heard.
The reason their ideas have been considered dangerous is that if the universe is fractal, it's back to the drawing board for all of cosmology. But as I wrote back in March, "If the voids are full of dark matter, then the apparent fractal distribution of luminous matter becomes rather insignificant. But if the voids are truly empty, the fractal claim requires a closer look."

except from the newscientist spaceblog
2:35 PM
the mind boggles, the brain toggles, the eye goggles
2:36 PM
Kapil: fantastic

the brain "toggles"?

me: between states

Kapil: ooh. nice
2:37 PM
me: like a switch

so i figure that it isnt just the universe, but all of reality is a fractal
2:38 PM
and all constituents or 'objects' within this reality are in a state of constant replication

and transmutation

subject to laws such as natural selection
2:40 PM
it couldnt be a fractal if the individual parts didn't copy themselves at smaller and smaller magnification
2:41 PM
and only in a fractal could the whole be evident within each fragmentary constituent
2:43 PM
Kapil: fair enough. i remember touching upon this thought once when i was stoned in oxford.
2:44 PM
me: it's the perfect framework within which the whole 'system within system within system' infinite regress could work

nested to infinity both ways

Kapil: i think the exact thought was something along the lines if "what would the view from a tiny subatomic particle be like?"
2:45 PM
would it be really different from the view from this little dustball surrounded by all these other similar looking things?

me: depends on who's looking
2:46 PM
because the vastness of the space around you would totally dwarf actual extra-terrestrial space

Kapil: the thing is - your theory is that life is part of the fractal pattern too?

me: yup, 'life' as such is a system within reality

and within life, different categories, sub-categories

...
2:47 PM
Kapil: fair enough. i mean consciousness then. it arises from reality, no doubt.

me: is life the only conscious and sentient system? i would probably wager not
2:48 PM
or maybe 'life' is everything. even non-animate simple molecules are laced with 'life'
2:51 PM
http://www.tribunes.com/tribune/art97/crom.htm
2:52 PM
scroll down, there's a rocking explanation of enfoldment or 'undivided wholeness'

and read about geoffrey chew and his bootstrap approach. fascinating stuff

Kapil: fair enough. but the sort of singular self-awareness that we have (naturally a product of the agglomeration of life rather than a single human) seems interesting. it's like we're on one level of the fractal, studying the levels above and below, gradually expanding our view.
2:54 PM
me: i think it's more like we're at the intersection of many convergent levels, almost as though we were stationed in multi-multi-dimensional space

gradually expanding our view exactly!

In the 1970s and 1980s, Chew, together with several collaborators, developed a 'bootstrap' approach to subatomic particles in which no particle is to be considered as more fundamental than any other. In fact, in this approach, there are no fundamental objects of any kind, whether they be particles, laws or equations. Instead, the universe is represented as a self-consistent web of interrelations. Chew regards consciousness as forming a part of this web, so that matter and consciousness are part of an undivided whole.
2:55 PM
so essentially beginning from a point and working outwards, deciphering and decoding the web of interrelations
2:56 PM
Kapil: _Instead, the universe is represented as a self-consistent web of interrelations_
you've just described the brain
2:57 PM
me: totally. but the brain enfolds all reality

so the same must apply at both smaller and larger scales

Kapil: i don't mean just physically. that's my abstract view of knowledge within the brain
2:58 PM
but we can't recognize this level of organization when we look above or below (at the meta-organization at the galactic scale and the micro-organization at the level of bacteria and atoms)
2:59 PM
me: i see what ur saying... but u cant really 'see' it in the brain either
3:00 PM
consciousness is only an emergent property of the brain, it isnt a byproduct of it

and it's all likely to be warped because only one brain can really look at another brain
3:01 PM
Kapil: but the self-reflective capabilities of consciousness don't seem... hang on, what you're saying actually makes sense to me

me: at least that makes one of us

Kapil: oh, wow. now that's something to think about
3:02 PM
well, combine what you said with something i said when we started this conversation

me: and you explain god?
3:03 PM
Kapil: about how human consciousness occupies one small speck (or distribution of specks) in the possible space of sentiences

you remember that, right?

me: yerps

Kapil: now. we're looking at the entire universe as a fractal. layers of organization of self-repeating patterns
3:04 PM
me: stop teasing me...
3:05 PM
Kapil: i asked why we don't see the same sort of sentience, the introspective capabilities of human sentience, in other levels of organization from molecular physics to cosmology.
3:06 PM
me: because it's the culmination of that system called 'life'
3:07 PM
Kapil: but, we wouldn't see it all. if you go back to the cartesian view and human sentience is just a speck in this vast plain, we'd only recognize sentiences that most resemble our own.

me: you wouldn't see it, but you'd be able to conceive it

Kapil: so we'd expect to see this sort of intelligent organization only in levels of abstraction immediately surrounding our own.
3:08 PM
me: gimme an example

say if you consider the sentience of a protozoa. couldnt be farther from resembling our own

Kapil: one example is this concept of networked sentience. humanity as an organism
3:09 PM
it's a level of abstraction higher ("higher" in the traditional sense of hierarchies)

but we're seeing fairly fascinating patterns in behaviour at that level.

me: agreed. but sadly, the only thing that can look at humanity is humanity
3:10 PM
Kapil: right. exactly. if sentieance exists all along the fractal, we wouldn't be able to recognize it at all

me: and that viewpoint is liable to be coloured by the idiosyncracies of individual perspectives

Kapil: because it's too far removed from our own.

me: aaaha...
3:11 PM
so in effect, reality could be teeming with 'life'

just not life as we know it

Kapil: we can make sense of humans, humanity as a whole, nature (a level of abstraction "below"). but after that it's fuzzy, and we come up with physical laws to explain what we think we understand

exactly
3:12 PM
it's... just something to think about

me: heh. had this argument with shem the other day... at what point does 'information' become 'knowledge'
3:13 PM
and, more specifically, if there were no such thing as human sentience to perceive what information and knowledge are, then would information still exist
3:14 PM
and dude btw, that universal sentience that would be unrecognizable to us peabrains is probably what they refer to as 'the cosmic spirit'

Kapil: all of existence is teeming with what-begs-to-be-classified-by-humans-as-information

me: maybe there

maybe there

Kapil: we aren't talking about a single universal sentience
3:15 PM
me: why not? maybe there's a common undercurrent of a sentience running through everything, a universal consciousness

Kapil: the existence of sentience at every level.
3:16 PM
that's a tempting thought, yeah.
3:18 PM
me: maybe those are the kind of epiphanies humans have, either on drugs or in deep meditative trances

a oneness with the cosmos

ya heard of fritjof capra? the guy who wrote 'tao of physics'
3:19 PM
Kapil: yeah. although a friend of mine says the tao of physics is rubbish

i have another book by him

me: he said that one day in meditation, he began to see everything (including himself) as vibration

energy, pulsing, dancing

which one?

Kapil: ironically called "the hidden connections"

really?

me: yeah... he worked with david bohm and geoff chew
3:20 PM
Kapil: i wonder how different deep meditation is from altered states of consciousness

me: and his whole viewpoint on science is built up from his experience with psychedelics :P

Kapil: are you serious? i want to read him then

me: he was the quintessential 60's flowerchild

Kapil: if nothing else, i'm sure it'll be fascinating to try and comprehend how he sees the unverse

me: with a bent towards theoretical physics
3:21 PM
Kapil: heh. yes, those hippie theoretical physicists.
3:22 PM
me: back to altered states. meditation's a path to access them

scheisse. how opportune. call of nature brb
3:23 PM
Kapil: have you seriously tried it?
3:24 PM
blast, i think i have to get on with the insignificant activities of everyday life.
3:25 PM
i'm going to save the tribune article for later.
3:26 PM
this has been a wonderfully mind-expanding morning. later, then.
3:30 PM
me: once you're done with this annoying little thing they call a thesis, we should write a book
3:31 PM
even if its pop-sci

elucidating our ideas

Kapil: heh, we should

me: in all seriousness

Kapil: i ws about to turn away to the day and read the first few lines of the tribunes artice.

now, i have to finish it

me: yay
3:32 PM
Kapil: i=our theories don't differ much from bohm's, do they?

me: or chew's
3:33 PM
because they're exquisite ideas. just beautiful in essence

stash this conversation in a safe. we might need to revisit this frequently
3:35 PM
a bit like darwinism. so elegant, but never verifiable

or non-verifiable, for that matter

forever doomed to be locked in some theoretical purgatory of sorts
3:36 PM
hehe... excerpt from the tribune article: 'These concepts are reminiscent of Bohm's work. Indeed, in Fritjof Capra's excellent book, 'Uncommon Wisdom', Chew acknowledges that the 'two approaches have so much in common that they might well merge in the future.' '
3:37 PM
Kapil: interesting. yeah, i haven't gotten that far yet
3:39 PM
me: incidentally, chew also espoused the view that time is not continuous, but is actually seen as discrete chunks at the sub-quantum level
3:40 PM
and its continuity emerges purely as an averaging out of all the individual packets
3:41 PM
Kapil: oh.

that's bizarrely hard to think about
3:42 PM
He [Bohm] developed a direction for quantum physics in which both relativity and quantum theory were themselves abstractions (i.e. approximations or limiting cases) of the underlying implicate order. He also formulated a consistent mathematical description of this implicate order.

a consistent mathematical description?

me: yeah even capra mentions it in 'uncommon wisdom'

i'll believe it when i see it

Kapil: i need to read that book then
3:44 PM
has chew written anything that can be understood by the mind untrained in physics?
3:45 PM
me: erk. dunno. these guys were geniuses, so probably way beyond our earthly realms

i'm also trying to fit in pauli's theory of synchronicity
3:46 PM
somehow... into the discretization of time thing

Kapil: i don't know what that is

me: that events such as coincidences, for example, are those which happen outside of time

ie, they don't follow linear causality
3:47 PM
Kapil: oh.

yeah, i don't understand it.

the wikipedia article on chew is woeful
3:48 PM
me: hehe. indeed
3:49 PM
"Surprisingly, synchronicity has captured the attention of some well-respected scientists. As one might suspect, the scientists have experienced it themselves! Carl Jung said the synchronistic events he witnessed in his life might appear unbelievable, yet he couldn't deny their reality!

Jung once counseled a woman he described as having a disposition of total rationality. She couldn't free herself from this attitude to explore things from a different perspective. One day, she was in his office describing a dream about an Egyptian scarab beetle. To the Egyptians, the scarab was a symbol of rebirth or new awakening. Jung heard a tapping on the window behind him and turned around to see that just such a beetle was bumping against his window! Catching the beetle, he presented it to his patient. The occurrence of such an irrational event so stunned her way of thinking that it provided the breakthrough for his treatment of her problems!
"
3:50 PM
maybe PKD is right after all.

hoooolllly shit
3:51 PM
Another synchronistic experience described by Jung, involved his analysis of the fish symbol. He believed symbols in legend and literature were universal indicators of an underlying psychic structure common to all. He'd been studying the significance of the fish for some time, when the following chain of events occurred on April 1, 1949.

Finishing an inscription containing a figure that was half-man, half-fish, Jung went out to lunch, and was served fish. Someone at the meal, with a slip of the tongue, mentioned the custom of making an "April fish" of someone. Later that afternoon, a former patient he hadn't seen in months showed him some pictures of fish. That evening, someone showed him a piece of embroidery filled with fish. The next morning, a patient he hadn't seen in ten years, described a dream she had the night before about a large fish. A few months later, after writing about this series of events to use in another paper, he walked to the bank of a lake. He'd been to the same spot several times already that morning, and no one else was present. Now, however, there was a sizable fish laying on the sea wall with no explanation for how it got there.
3:53 PM
Kapil: wow. not to be dismissive, but we've had similar experiences, haven't we? everybody has, i imagine.

me: full article at http://www.hsuyun.org/Dharma/zbohy/Literature/Special/themindofgod.html

Kapil: where do you find these links?

please don't lose them

me: they're safely stored in my gmail chat history now
3:54 PM
dude, that schizoid episode i had in goa - i was outside linear causality

Kapil: oh, here's another possibly related anecdote. i saw it on QI last night
3:55 PM
me: it's very different from a coincidence, cuz you're physically excluded from the real world

at least, in your head

QI?
3:56 PM
also indubitably mind-numbing: "Pauli saw parallels between modern physics and Jung's theories of consciousness. He even postulated a revision in the theory of evolution.

It was assumed in the past that mutations within species occurred at random, and natural selection, then, favored the more desirable traits. More recently, however, scientists have pointed out that the selection of mutations by chance alone would have taken much longer than the age of the earth would allow for. Pauli suggested Jung's concept of synchronicity might account for how stressed organisms could produce changes in physical reality more quickly than by chance. "
3:59 PM
Kapil: sorry. call of nature. QI is a brilliant hilarious quiz/discussion show hosted by steven fry. there's a headquarters at oxford on turl street, which is a bookshop and cafe. i bought shemin a book from there.

me: yeah of coursa! didnt know there was a connection
4:00 PM
Kapil: back to the anecdote, it involves a particular species of bird. apparently, this bord had never been seen to do anything particularly intelligent, was observed learning how to open a milk bottle (or something else) in a rather clever way.
4:02 PM
this isn't the point though. this was seen in in england, and at almost the same time, at another place in scotland, i think.. miles apart, no way of communicating, same species of bird, but they had never beenobserved doing that before

me: yup. like in waking life, ethan hawke talks about everything being telepathically connected
4:03 PM
same revolutions, technological advances cropping up independently in diff places

Kapil: apparently this sort of stuff has been observed frequently in nature, like there's a species-level awareness

right. exactly. which reminds me that i need to watch waking life again.

the darwin anecdote is a good example

(in the article you linked to)
4:04 PM
me: the fish thing is even more bizarre

because i saw it right after i made the comment 'maybe PKD was right after all'

and PKD saw the symbolism of the fish on the woman

around her neck
4:05 PM
and his realizations of it being 50AD followed consequently

Kapil: yeah, i remember that bit in the essay. memorable.
4:06 PM
coming across the fish paragraph at the same instant is pretty coincidental.
4:07 PM
me: okay... bear with me on this, suspend your belief or watever...

if time is indeed discrete at sub-quantum levels

and if we accept synchronicity as a real phenomenon
4:09 PM
then could synchronicity arise because the same individual discrete 'packet' of time has appeared at more than one location?
4:10 PM
Kapil: i don't know whether i accept the link between synchronicity and discontinuous time.
4:11 PM
me: from the same article: Jung recognized meaningful connections between psychic and physical events, but the events appeared to exist outside of time, space, and causality. The existence of synchronicity has been recognized by other scientists as well, but it has eluded a clear explanation. Postulated theories include Kammerer's theory of "seriality," and Bohm's theory of an "implicate order." Jung described synchronicity as: "acts of creation in time." He believed the subconscious was somehow producing a physical manifestation in external reality.

acts of creation in time
4:12 PM
also, An experiment performed in May 1997 by a team from the University of Geneva showed that a measurement carried out on one photon particle had an instantaneous and identical effect on another photon, although separated by nearly seven miles! Physicist Nicolas Gisin, the team leader, said it was the equivalent of having two persons seven miles apart flipping coins. Each time one person would grab the coin out of the air his colleague's coin would simultaneously stop spinning and always land identically! This was repeated thousands of times in a row! Any connecting force would need to travel faster than light, something thought to be an impossibility. It implies an inter-connectedness or "whole" aspect inherent within matter itself.
4:13 PM
Kapil: wait a second. are you serious? where can we read about this photon experiment?
4:14 PM
me: not entirely sure. try googling
4:15 PM
Kapil: http://www.cebaf.gov/news/internet/1997/spooky.html

me: but to rephrase: if events can occur acausally, would that only have to do with the inherent aspects of matter (ie, the objects that are involved with the event) or with some as-yet-unknown property of time as well?
4:16 PM
ive heard of this before, except only with electron spins
4:17 PM
Kapil: i feel that it's time. not sure why.

me: if you flip the spin of an isolated electron, the pair-twin would automatically flip its own spin to keep the overall state constant
4:18 PM
even if held at opposite ends of the universe

Kapil: how was this tested?
4:19 PM
me: not sure. heard about it at some physicists' drinks evening in oxford

anyhoo, its almost 9 o clock and i shouldve been home hours ago
4:20 PM
and desperately need a faggot

all this constructive thinking cant be good for my nicotine receptors

Kapil: oi. you stopped.
4:21 PM
stay stopped.

me: no no, back with a passion

have been since i got an all-clear from the do

doc
4:22 PM
Kapil: no odc is going to tell you to start smoking again

me: he didnt have to

Kapil: just stop.

me: soon as he figured my chest pains were due to acidity and amoebiosis and nothing else, i reverted to familiar territory
4:23 PM
Kapil: oh. what about the morning with the blash phlegm?

black, i mean.

or ash.

but not blash
4:24 PM
me: disappeared. its all psychosomatic, i tell u

placebos work for a reason

anyhoo, im off. it's been most pleasurable
4:25 PM
got an hour

'hour's drive home

Kapil: ouch. okay then. it's been eye-opening.
4:26 PM
me: likewise. to be continued...

Kapil: indeed.

me: meow.

"In the future an emergency medical technician might give hydrogen sulfide to someone suffering serious injuries and they might become a little more immortal giving them time to get the care they need."

A little more immortal??? What kind of maniacal screwball scientist could come up with that gem of wisdom? Immortality is, without question, already within our own individual psyches -- it has always been! death is merely a renewal and a change of form -- no one can escape immortality.

This work is not only awesomely inspired and pioneering, it validates the most commonly held Eastern spiritual belief & awareness; namely that at the quantum level, reality plays myriad wondrous games with us (we are everywhere at once); we are the universe and the universe is enfolded within us (see Fractal Universe), there is a realm beyond our physical world that echoes ripples of a higher cosmic / universal consciousness. We are defining the pure meditative state, an alertness to how our intelligent and sentient God within experiences itself subjectively. Buddha enlightenment has now been scientifically validated.

The one fallacy that Western cultural & scientific dogma betrays of itself is its dogged assumption that all the constituent parts that comprise our reality are absolute: God either is or isn't, true or false, can or can't. However, it seems inevitable now that we cannot escape the undeniable fact: all states are possible simultaneously, & consciousness is the sheeit.

No baiting, fuzzli, I'm merely bringing 'coherence' to the science-spirituality relationship. Let me ask you something: if you acknowledge that science is an empirical movement, reliant only on observations and sensory measurement (usually sight), then how do you know you have feelings and thoughts? Have you ever seen them? Have you ever heard them ringing inside your bones or throbbing in your cranium? No, they are experiential, much like the divine. A taste of the Universal Truth is absolute -- there's no going back from there. Try a psychedelic like DMT or mescaline some time, or perhaps sample a wee bit of meditation. The point is, man has always had the capacity to transcend the narrow confines of our physical reality, within which science revels. However, cast aside our restricted worldview, and we're suddenly thrust into the world of the intangible, the formless, the ground of being. Quantum mechanical superposition is merely our way of saying 'higher dimensions of existence'.

I must admit, I find it appalling that a lot of hardcore scientific pushers fail to acknowledge that it's time to break boundaries. Separation is illusion, my friends, you have all been submerged in dualities for far too long.

We all come from the same Omega point source, that immense, impossible nothingness from which the material universe sprang forth. All matter was once connected. That awakening is an intimation of the wonder of universal oneness, of transcending our dualistic definitions to achieve a state of unity. Separation is your ego's way of keeping it's identity, and it will cling desperately to all notions of being 'apart'. This isn't religiobabble either, it's what saints and mystics have been postulating ever since the earliest tribes sampled natural hallucinogens, to have their first realisations of a higher intelligence and expanded consciousness. This isn't a high horse upon which I place myself, I'm only trying to unseat your fervent science-based zealotry.

kasen, it comes as some consolation to my existential angst (or lack thereof) that there are others who have pondered the subject, and tried to find connective pathways between such differentiated fields.

However, I firmly believe that science, if it looks inwardly as well as at the whole holistic picture of reality, can validate the deepest, most profound mystical / metaphysical / philosophical / spiritual truths. Ultimately, differentiation is only a construct, a vestige of the human mind, programmed to compartmentalise and pigeonhole. Really, there is no distinction between these apparently distinctive explanations for our reality. Science and religion (as you describe) aren't mutually exclusive. Bill Hicks, the famous stand up comic, said it best: "Matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, & we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There's no such thing as death, life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves."

fuzz, i would like to thank you for your info -- i've been chasing the dream for a while now. i've seen some fantastical and magical real life events that have left me stumped for rational scientific explanations, including UFOs, heavy rock levitations, 'miracle' healings and manifestations of group consciousness. if i could only make a million off it, my life might just be radically changed.

but then again, it's never about the money. when one immerses oneself into the spiritual realm, you realise the fallacy of the reality around us -- war, politics, financial institutions, power, greed and fake life incentives. money happens to be the foremost example of the latter, the archetypal anomaly that creates only the most abhorrent feelings within a human. i could never strive for the prize, for the simple reason that it betrays my sense of doing what's right.

so, the other alternative would be to change people's lives in a more subtle way, by firstly introducing them to themselves.

This is the probably THE biggest discovery to come out of quantum weirdness. I've been espousing the idea for ages that the whole universe is one colossal fractal (including us humans), and this encoding of spins at the quantum level shows that this underlying Phi symmetry is scale invariant. That is, the golden ratio is universal and can be observed at all levels of reality. Intelligent design, anybody?

Wow, practical applications as well as theophilosophical implications. Firstly, if our computer systems can be made to function non-locally, as in employing entanglement to communicate signals, then we've basically got no upper limit on speed. The evolution of the AI doesn't appear to be far away.
On a more optimistic note, if non-locality is validated, it shows us there are most aspects to our physical reality than our 'human' mind can grasp. In such a situation, it only makes sense that we now, more than ever, need to be evolving and expanding our collective consciousness. Nirvana, or the state of the attainment of the true self, is not only a necessity, it's a must.

Professor Chang, a reputed genetic researcher at the Human Genome Project, has this to say about our origins:
http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/home/Frontpage/2007/01/08/01288.html

Perhaps if this really is the case, then all this 'contamination' is utterly irrelevant, as life has been cultivated in accordance with biological necessity. It doesn't therefore matter where life is 'found', but rather that it happens to exist at all.

This postulate reverberates with truth. This reminds me of Tim Leary's claim of a communique sent by an alien intelligence, using meditation and astral projection techniques. A snippet as below:

"It is time for life on Earth to leave the planetary womb and learn to walk through the stars.
Life was seeded on your planet billions of years ago by nucleotide templates which contained the blueprint for gradual evolution through a sequence of biomechanical stages.
The goal of evolution is to produce nervous systems capable of communicating with and returning to the Galactic Network where we, your interstellar parents, await you.
At this time the voyage home is possible. Mutate! Come home in glory!"

Is the universe a breeding ground for similar life, seeded by higher powers?
Amazing to think of comets as far-flung cosmic nurseries of life.

The plausibility of 'Earth as a womb' is undeniable, in that it has facilitated and harboured life for millions of years, as evidenced by our fossil record. More pertinent, however, is the question of whether Life can be perceived as an interstellar communication network, disseminated through the galaxies in the form of nucleotide templates. These "seeds" could potentially land on planets, become activated through high temperature and pressure bond formation, and evolve nervous systems over the course of time.

I think the truth might be right under our very noses, in the form of chemical imprints in our structural DNA. We just don't know how to identify them as yet.

This isn't the only instance wherein a species can seemingly communicate with the collective almost instantaneously. Bees have been known to use techniques in 6-dimensional quantum manifolds to describe the location of food sources to the hive. Photosynthesising plants use quantum superposition to calculate the fastest / most efficient paths for solar energy transfer. Even Carl Gustav Jung used analysis from dog behaviour to describe what he called the 'collective human unconscious'. My guess is that flocks use some mode of non-local communication, akin to quantum entanglement, or information sent in superpositioned states which can then collapse to form coherent and synchronous flock behaviour.

Wow, scientific condescension at its finest! Sometimes I think PhysOrg is like some sort of elite clique, an anonymous herd of nay-saying pedantics who will snarl at the slightest mention of anything outside the realms of the empirical.

I'm continually astounded at how you pledge allegiance to scientific endeavour, and yet forget that the very underpinning of it is that we know *absolutely nothing* as yet.

You might want to revisit the idea that the universe, being fundamentally quantum in nature, employs the sharing of information and energy in ways that we haven't even begun to fathom.

I am certainly not bandying words around. Aside from having a Masters in Particle Physics, I've been a scientific warrior for more years than I care to remember.

It's doubters and radical sceptics like yourselves that give the quest for knowledge a bad name.


This post is probably going to remain unscrutinised, but I pose this question to you all; what if we already know that light speed ISN'T the ultimate speed limit. Quantum entanglement describes a state of instantaneous transmission of 'information' across the Universe independent of space-time. We even have higher-dimensional theories explaining how folds in our fabric of reality can lead to the access of more complex phase spaces, 'phase' in the sense of frequency bits emerging from neuronal structure. So why the reluctance to accept fundamental Truth. The universe, an intelligent and sentient entity, would never set unsurpassable limits on itself.


Antialias, I think we come from two non-overlapping viewpoints on the same topic: entanglement has been shown to indicate the presence of non-local systems, following no causal principles and usually involving some sort of self-organisation that we can only hope to understand. There is much, even in mainstream literature, of theoretical wormholes and higher dimensional branes, cosmic holography and unified fields in the form of vacuum energy. Even statistically, there is now strong evidence suggesting a positive bias toward the existence of some ESP / paranormal phenomena (see Dean Radin's books); we've even set about demonstrating that brain patterns can now be used to switch on and off hierarchical states of consciousness, some of which involve a very real world 'objective' experience of mystical and spiritual realities. Of non-dualities and ecstatic states of Oneness, and even (believe it or not) encounters with otherworldly beings (DMT: The Spirit Molecule is one helluva eyeopener)

Antialias, it's as much speculation as the proposition that you're sat at your computer typing your flimsy ripostes. Until you've experienced expanded consciousness, your brain will continue to be tied up in the knots of its own denial. I'm afraid, antialias, that your closed mindset is symptomatic of the very funk our species has landed itself in, stubbornly refusing to evolve to a deeper understanding of the universe, and you as an expression of its dynamism. Just drop the facade of stoic empiricism (which is tantamount to nihilism), and embrace the reality of seeing the inherent connectedness of EVERYTHING. You and I are part of the same continuum, that ocean within which we're all ripples. In fact, we aren't really separate at all -- merely differentiated. The universe is a countless multitude of information pathways and systems, all of which give rise to this wondrous fabric of experience. Cast your doubts aside, and take heed: Nature is you.

Callippo, from your article: While I am convinced of the critical importance of historiography in the study of esotericism (and for this reason all of my academic books are firmly grounded in historical method) I do not believe that historiography is adequate in itself to convey the complex, multivalent nature of esoteric thought, traditions, or most of all, experience. "

Well, nothing is adequate to convey experience. Not even language. We might as well have a caveman code of expressing our base instincts through grunts and groans. Esotericism is just the intellectual toff's way of (again) describing and classifying memes as the opposite of mainstream. That's what we do, as a general rule -- compartmentalise, pigeonhole, put into boxes. But the ideas expressed through language and through esoteric thought are far greater than the ability of human contact to convey -- they simply have to be experienced.

All you consciousness-deniers, here's something for your inadequate neurons to chew on:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20978-drug-hallucinations-look-real-in-the-brain.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

Nerdyguy, the point I try to raise is that the mind is already capable of accessing superluminal states. Try yoga, meditation, psychedelic exploration, tantra, tai chi, of even prolonged breathwork -- all these mechanisms are merely conduits to exploring higher dimensional realities which are ALREADY PRESENT within our universe. The skeptics on this site will try to apply their reductionist perspectives to dismiss this sort of claim as 'piffle' or 'codswallop', terms which are by the way wholly unscientific. This cynicism is part of that global media propaganda machine which will have us all remain passive, disempowered and wholly unaware of these truths. Science has barely begun to scratch the surface of what reality truly is, and sages, mystics and spiritual seekers over millenia have propagated the very same ideals that I now try to bring to this forum. The world we inhabit is so extravagantly implausible, and yet we fail to see our universe as the ultimate mythological construct.

This ties in to the article I mentioned on drug use: scientific tests now indicate that the states accessed by psychoactive drug users (including feelings of timelessness, contact with beings & intelligences beyond our own, spirits and visions, feelings of oneness and ecstatic bliss, and seeing reality from the perspective of the 'Whole') are now wholly OBJECTIVE experiences. The same brain areas are awakened as those when we see what we would classify as 'real' objects. We cannot cast aspersions on this any longer -- as a species, we have now come full circle, and the very tools of understanding we use nowadays like Quantum Mechanics completely validate the oldest religious and spiritual traditions. Try and read stuff by Schrodinger, Bohm and Capra -- they all speak of Truth as looking through the eyes of the Cosmos. In such a perspective, there is no such thing as 'separate' objects, or even time. Boundaries between inner and outer worlds dissolve, and the veil is finally lifted.

Which is, and will forever be, a wholly subjective opinion. Castenada tried this already.

Youre just another superstitionist looking for ways to escape his inescapable corporeality. Try jesus - at least they have refreshments.


Castenada was many generations ago my friend -- do you for a moment believe that humanity's understanding of itself is limited to efforts made during earlier epochs? You must be blind to not see that the line between objective and subjective is continuously and increasingly beginning to blur, and that hope, belief, fear and doubt will always play a part in the creation of our lives. Remember, each of us comes from a unique reality tunnel that will never be wholly understood by anyone else.

Castenada was many generations ago my friend -- do you for a moment believe that humanity's understanding of itself is limited to efforts made during earlier epochs? You must be blind to not see that the line between objective and subjective is continuously and increasingly beginning to blur, and that hope, belief, fear and doubt will always play a part in the creation of our lives. Remember, each of us comes from a unique reality tunnel that will never be wholly understood by anyone else.
Do you feel hard done by and resentful that there are people out there who are living on completely different planes of existence than yourself, people at the forefront of the human consciousness project? It isn't escapism as you say, simply because when you see as the Whole, there is NOWHERE to escape to. Have you ever experienced ecstatic bliss? Or is your life a never ending series of mundane occurences and trite rituals, in the hope that they will eventually amount to something? If you haven't tasted the nectar, you have no legitimate basis to knock it, whatever your biases and preprogamming. It's great that you're on your path, whatever that might be, but if you had ever in your life witnessed events that have flown in the face of all that is rational, you might be feeling rather different.

It's a shame that we aren't all on the same plateau, simply because I wouldn't have to had to spend the last few minutes of my life typing this; this knowledge would simply be implicitly understood by everyone. You are everything, and everything is you. There's no measurement problem here -- it is pure experience from the viewpoint of an observer who is fundamentally intertwined with the observable. You ought to know enough about science to understand that concept. And with the passing eons, hopefully enough skeptics like you would see the light of dawn, and the birth of a new phase in our quest for self-acceptance.