Quantum physicists exploring implications of quantum
theory invented the transistor, the laser, the tunnel diode, and a host of
other technological applications. Quantum mechanics is the rock-solid
foundation to modern science and technology, has been for most of the last
century and will be for the foreseeable future. There may be more to
‘physical’ reality than we know. We are certain there will be more. But
there will never be less than our current understanding, certainly not the
understanding that has already been translated as nuts and bolts
technology.
We have struggled furiously to apply that new
understanding exclusively to ‘objective physical reality’, what lies 'out
there' beyond the enigma of the conscious sphere of our personal
existence. Within this view, consciousness must be reduced to an
epiphenomena of neurological processes and dismissed altogether as a major
player in any definition of, or idea about, the nature of ‘objective’
reality. We see the same curious behavior at work in legal and scientific documents
that are often carefully
written to weed out any allusion to subjectivity, as if the document wrote
itself, simply popped into being, or has always existed.
Science has never had the capacity to cope with 'mind'.
It can't be defined. It can't be objectified and studied in the same way
as a rock specimen. Regardless, any description of reality that leaves the mind-body
problem intact and unresolved ignores a serious warning
that something is critically and seriously amiss. We become like kittens pacing in front of a
mirror, accustomed to the odd behavior of one of our own kind pacing us
move for move without the ability to address the problem.
The apple-spoon mind
demonstration shows that we have no direct access to 'physical' reality. If a computer was
feeding our nervous system information that simulated a torture session in
a Medieval dungeon, the experience would be no less agonizing or horrific
than an actual event. We can attribute the pain to our physical nervous
system, but we still have access to nothing but a representation of
physical reality. If we assume an objective reality, we are confined to
our space-time representation and all it implies. As our understanding of
quantum theory intensifies, we begin to understand the nature of
information and how even the death of a brain and decomposition of a body,
which has every bearing on our space-time entanglements has no bearing at
all on the nature of conscious experience.
Our conscious model of reality, whatever it may be, is
harbored within us. We are it. We live a three-dimensional reality in which
people die and cannot return, in which things can be destroyed and are
gone forever, but we do not see the origins of that piecemeal world in
sensory terms. We have
not, in the past, understood how it could be any other way in intellectual
terms. It makes no sense to say that someone has died, and continues to
live on.
Still, the nature of personal reality as so-called
'quantum immortality' as implied by quantum
theory is not impossible to understand. The concept of the
quantum and the Planck constant implies that new and far more workable
model of reality. We can see it with our mind's eye, but not within our
sensorium. It works for science, for our technology, but even here we
cannot see in terms of our sensorium the workings of quantum information
processing. It works as
well for an entirely new and exciting paradigm for human existence, but we
can only understand it.
We do have a problem with our understanding, however. Despite our best efforts to explore the notion of a
subjective, highly self-referential reality, in every sentence we utter, we attempt to
objectify the content of our mind, to separate thinker from thought and
perceiver from perception. We utterly lack even the language to express a
reality embraced by quantum theory. The language we speak and within which
we think is founded upon assumptions of the nature of reality hundreds of
thousands of years old, notions of reality a chimpanzee, a gray parrot,
and our family dog intuitively understand. It is the very way we have been
taught by the evolutionary process to perceive reality. We needed to survive
as animals before consciousness was ready to take its place at the helm of
our lives, but then what? How does that change from life in one kind of
reality to another take place?
Science is unwilling to take giant steps forward in
applying quantum theory to the nature of human consciousness partially because too
much of old ways of thinking are at stake. Too much self-styled cultural
and social reality stand in the way, and far too much fear of the unknown
and change to dare inflict upon the public.
The anthropic principle says that we live in a
reality that supports our kind of life simply because we couldn’t live
elsewhere, but a clear view of an acausal foundation to reality implies
with equal force that the laws to which we adhere are internal rather
than external to the structure of our being. We create reality, not by manipulating matter and
making it move in terms of time and space, but by tuning
quantum structures of
qualia, conscious information, by virtue of our ability to focus on one
possibility and by doing so, allow another to pass from our experience. We
create space-time realities from the resource of our superpositioned 'sea
of energy'. We are aware of change. We confuse it for more than it is. We
think space is much as we 'see' it, but within what group of neurons would
we find the height of a telephone pole?
What manner of creatures might we be to reduce the
infinite to the finite? To achieve such a feat, we really do become the gods of Platonia, Julian
Barbour’s vision of acausal reality, but with a twist. The inhabitants of
Platonia are Platonia in and of itself. Platonia is a living entity. The
term 'god' comes easily to mind, but a self-aware universe is static, frozen by
infinities within which time and space are meaningless. Only within
the structure can this mysterious quality called consciousness operate,
and this is not a god except in the sense that it self-structures.
Change is self-aware, or generates
self-awareness. Absolutely nothing in our experience can define the source
and nature of consciousness aside from our internal observations,
and the
source of a thing cannot be defined by the thing in itself, nor its
content. We can
continue to talk beyond this point, string words together, but to no
avail. Except for what we can apply in the immediate moment, this
is as far as we can take our understanding.
To be what we perceive in the timeless realm of
Platonia implies that what we are now is the culmination of all that we
have ever been in terms of time. All
change occurs in the acausal span of the dimensionless immanent Now. Time is
an illusion born of ceaseless change. We cannot even speak of the pace of
change, which implies a time scale. The pace of time is determined by
conscious continuity and is something more than movement within a media. Consciousness
experiences continuity because it spans quantum states.
Our conscious perception of reality, reality as we know
it, is born of a fine focus at the cutting edge between quantum superposition and
space-time history. Its structure is an evolutionary survival factor, a
structure that successfully replicates. As animals, we are 'supposed' to
be convinced of a direct access to an objective reality filled with the
potential for pain and destruction as well as unbridled joy and ecstasy.
Animals exhaust themselves avoiding pain and seeking pleasure, absolutely
terrified of their fate in the jaws of a predator despite their lack of
ability to envision a moment beyond the agony and sheer helplessness of
defeat.
It's probably safe to say that not a single human being on the
face of the planet is entirely free of the evolutionary processes that
direct the consciousness of an animal to achieve its full biological
potential, although it's probably equally valid it say that very few human
beings fail to sense the futility of an animal's life. If the life of an
animal serves some larger purpose, it is not seen in the throes of death
or the passion of reproductive processes, because we see that cycle in its
entirety and aside from being a wheel that goes round and round, is it
going anywhere?
Life does evolve, however. We know how that works. The
complexity of conscious reality intensifies. As far as we can see,
we stand on the verge of replacing blind evolution with a far faster and
more highly focused conscious evolutionary process. We fear we
will take ourselves down a dead-end and self-destruct, but in the
multiverse, we move in all possible directions at once, and in many of
these, the seeds of our efforts will fall upon fertile ground and take
root. We cannot envision what will become of these unimaginable successors
to Homo sapiens.
All life evolves by stumbling upon promising
possibilities and
specializing in one over another. Some forms of life specialized in the
sea, some on the land, others in the air. Humanity, too, seeks avenues of
express within which to specialize, but conscious evolution implies an innate science
of mind that ranges far beyond the
'physical' sciences. We cannot as yet imagine such a science. It would exist
as part of our conscious nature, but not part of our current level of
self-awareness.
One question comes to mind at this point. Have we been
speaking of an objective humanity, or of our subjective self in these
grandiose visions of the future? We are biologically mortal. Our bodies represent our most intimate entanglement
with our environment. We and the animals bear our young, age, and die, but we've already
had our discussions on the nature of time. We still have our discussion of
the nature of death to address.
We've implied that the
reality we experience is a reality we create. Clearly, we have created as
a process of default as we had no understanding of the multiplicity of
possibilities to which we had access. Does this imply that we will someday have
the ability to consciously steer the course of our private lives given
sufficient understandings of the workings of conscious reality that brought us
to our current status in time and space?
For the moment, it's important to know that our psyche is always in a state of flux, and that flux
is reflected in the constantly changing world around us. It changes at a
pace we could never hope to follow. On a sensory level, there’s no way to
perceive the foundation to it. None of it is directly visible to the eye.
We all feel ourselves to be the center of the universe,
every version of every individual of every world in the multiverse, human
or something both more and less than human. In essence, we are exactly
that, the center of a space-time universe, although we can never hope to
know the full true extent of the potential that lies before each of us in
terms of space and time.
Knowing everything at once as quantum superpositioning
implies is only a resource. Birds
fly and fish swim because they slipped into a niche in the biosphere
available to them. If we could see everything possible arrangement of
words of every known or unknown language upon this page, we'd see nothing
at all. The select bits of black ink on white paper serve highly selective
purposes. Space-time is reducing infinite choices to
the minimal needed to sustain a world. Many conscious space-time worlds are
dead-ends. Individual lives end within them. Magnificent civilizations die in the heat
of supernovas, but these are all space-time realities, and like a stream
of water encountering an obstacle, consciousness evades these
seeming tragedies effortlessly, without breaking stride, and it continues
elsewhere at exactly the same state at which it was terminated from any
other potential point of view. Errors
cancel. Solutions accumulate. Animals never notice until they awaken, as
we are awakening, into a larger realm of being.
In any world, we give birth to our deepest beliefs and
most precious ideals, and as they grow and evolve, they generate unending
existence. We'll dwell on this issue and establish as firm an
understanding of the reality we address before we move into the promises
and hazards implied by unending change within which time and space weave
the events of our lives.
