The premise of Gods of Platonia is
self-evident, although infuriatingly elusive to grasp. We see the world in
a certain way. We make assumptions based upon our sensory observations.
When we don't understand what we see, we explain it as best we can, but we
tend to do so by assuming reality to be objective, thereby giving birth to
two separate realities, one 'dead' and 'mindless', but 'real' as opposed
to our immaterial and ephemeral conscious awareness of it.
This assumption causes a problem upon closer
examination, a problem known as the mind-body problem. Because
consciousness has no way to move electrons about like beads in an abacus,
consciousness can only be an epiphenomenon of neurological processes. We
may be aware of what's going on, but we are deluded into thinking that
'we' are at the helm and responsible.
On the other hand, because we tend to
confuse qualia, 'red', 'Middle C', etc., for 'objective physical reality'
itself, we often fail to realize that we have no direct access to an
objective reality beyond our conscious model to begin with. Qualia are
consciousness in and of themselves. Consciousness is, therefore, 'trapped'
within the confines of consciousness. Despite our conviction that qualia
are something else, we have no way of knowing what may lie beyond.
'Objective physical reality' has always
seemed to be an eminently reasonable assumption for the source of
our conscious experience. The world is a big place, sprawled across eons
of time and light years of space, far too complex and vast to fit into a
human brain. Time and space as features objective to our conscious
awareness explain how a car built before we were born can be stolen while
we sleep, driven long after we're dead, and perhaps decompose for
centuries after the human race itself has been rendered extinct by war or
accident. Our conscious existence does not seem to be a necessity in a
universe encompassing billions of light years and eons of time. We could
not have lived during the violent early eons of the Big Bang, nor can we
hope to survive the accelerating expansion of the universe during the long
era of dying stars.
Ages ago when we knew next to nothing of the
nature of reality, we made up stories about things we didn't understand,
and we understood very little of the natural world. We thought that maybe
chariots pulled stars across the sky above a flat Earth. When we developed
the ability to better confirm or reject our assumptions and guesses, we
discovered that the reality standing behind our perceptions has a far
greater breadth and depth than we could have imagined.
Once men like Isaac Newton showed us how
mathematics reflect the forces that structure our world, we could then
calculate what it might take in physical resources to pull a star across
the sky, even at distances close enough for heavenly staircases to reach.
A proper perspective of the sheer scale of our universe gave rise to an
awareness of the Sun as just another star within entire galaxies of stars,
and a dwarf one at that.
Even so, the mathematics that helped us to
escape our fantasies and to see the world in a more reasonable light was
found to have 'fuzzy edges' at very small scales. Quantum mechanics was
born of the need to account for these inconsistencies, and it did so with
a precision that allowed the anticipation and development of an entirely
new kind of technology, one that dominates today's world.
That understanding, however, did nothing to
shrink the disparity between reality as it appears to our senses and
reality as we continually rediscover it to be. That disparity has more
fundamental and extensive than most care to address because it
necessitates rethinking the very nature of our entire view of the world,
the nature of human experience, and the relationship between the two.
This necessity is not always apparent
because of our tendency to tweak the implications of quantum mechanics to
fit the ancient world-view we have always known. The nature of an
'observer' plays a major role in quantum mechanics, because of the implied
multiplicity of space-time realities, but in applying Newtonian 'common
sense' to quantum mechanics, we reduce that multiplicity to our ancient
sensory world view. In doing so, we unwittingly relegate conscious
experience to the realm of irrelevancy. Newton's universe can do quite
well without us.
Caught between difficult science and a
crippled world view, we do little to nothing to seriously address the
nature and role of consciousness in our 'objective physical reality'. We
summarily reject certain 'paranormal' experiences as fantasy, aberration,
and misinterpretation of ordinary occurrences that would otherwise support
reality's acausal nature implied by quantum mechanics. It's not possible
to have a precognitive dream, nor be aware of what others are thinking, or
experience so-called synchronous events in Newton's universe.
If this quandary is indeed the case, the
betrayal of true scientific 'objectivity' is responsible for the delay of
a world view that would accommodate the counter-intuitive nature of
quantum mechanics, specifically the redefinition of 'physical' reality as
an informational realm of infinite possibility from which our conscious
space-time experience is derived. After all, quantum computers work quite
well on this premise and human brains appear to work in much the same way.
The impact of this shift in our cultural paradigm would be profound, but
aligning ourselves with reality would open to us an entire new reality to
explore.
Gods of Platonia addresses this
issue, although most of us would consider ourselves far removed from the
need to rethink the nature of reality. This, unfortunately, has been one
of our persistently dangerous assumptions for over a century. We are in
dire need of a rethinking of the nature of human experience for reasons we
commonly overlook.
Our current perception of reality has been
'engineered' over centuries of cultural tradition to accommodate religion
that science holds in such low esteem. Remove those beliefs from the
equation and what remains is not a scientific view of reality, but simply
a crippled, cold, heartless skeletal remnant of those old
fantasies. Ancient gods promised a warm and fuzzy world for believers, but
modern cosmology investigating dark energy, dark matter and the fate of
the inflating universe render it an increasingly alien and hostile
environment. We have our anthropic principle to fall back upon to explain
the wanton improbability of our presence, the observation that we can only
exist in conditions suitable for life, but the unlikelihood of those
conditions in the vastness of the universe dwindles the importance of
beings like ourselves to abject insignificance.
Is this the way things really are?
Either way, why is it important?
We see only as much as we need to survive as
animals in a natural environment, which poses a problem for our species.
What we need to see to survive in the world we have created for ourselves
vastly exceeds any animal's perceptual or cognitive capacity. Because our
physical senses are not as acute as those of most animals, the question
arises as to whether we are missing something in the demonstrable field of
modern science that warps and distorts our perception.
We are confident that we do have a clear
view of reality because we see beyond the world of an animal with our
intellect. We create our technology by virtue of our thought processes,
and then we explore the universe with senses augmented by microscopes and
telescopes.
Even so, the world as-it-seems-to-be is a
function of our biology. We call in our sensorium. Much science-fiction is
filled with spaceships with wings that bank as if in an atmosphere and
astronauts walking about their decks as if within a Earth-intensity
gravitational field. The more we know about environments alien to our
biology, the less apt we are to anthropomorphize, but the tendency
invariably kicks in at the limits of our understanding. Reality, including
the nature of our conscious experience, has a scope, depth, and complexity
exceeding the capacity of any individual animal to perceive, process, and
comprehend in its entirety, or even an entire species of intelligence such
as ourselves. We seek clarity in our scientific investigations. We have
never ceased reaping even greater depths of astonishment, confusion, and
even deeper mysteries to resolve.
Aside from all of this, we assume we can
still conduct our day-to-day existence on the basis of a
what-you-see-is-what-you-get reality as we have done for ages. We take
what we perceive and the way we interpret it for granted and seldom have
cause to doubt our senses and our interpretation of our perceptions. We
know that science has uncovered more mystery than any lifetime of study
and investigation can ever hope to resolve, but we seldom believe any of
that seriously impacts day to day existence.
But it does. Quantum theory has proven an
unexpected plummet through Alice's rabbit hole into a realm that has
little in common with the sensorium of our conscious experience. This is
not an observation we can disregard considering that quantum theory is the
veritable foundation to our technology and responsible for much of our
economy. Because our bodies, including our brains, operate in the same
manner as our technology on the atomic and subatomic level, we are obliged
to reconcile the impact of quantum effects upon our own biochemistry and
what they imply about the nature of conscious experience.
But what are these 'quantum effects' of
which we speak? We'll need a primer on quantum mechanics before we can
address the issue because the very nature of reality as we have known it
alters drastically.
Quantum theory has four components that
rework the common-sense, sensory nature of reality. The first is the
nature of the 'quantum'. Physical reality is not a smooth, unbroken
continuum. That assumption led to runaway infinities in the mathematics of
the early physical sciences and led to the discovery of quantum mechanics.
Max Planck, in a nutshell, showed that the 'size' of time, space, matter
and energy cannot be reduced beneath a certain point called the Planck
constant.
The second component is the concept of
'superposition'. The heart of reality can be described as an infinite sea
of undifferentiated energy, the 'wave function' that stands behind all
matter and energy. Like waves of water or sound, the 'waves' of
superpositioned matter and energy 'interfere', which is the third
component of quantum theory. The waves amplify one another, or they cancel
one another from existence, or they form standing patterns that seem to be
stationary. Shining light through two slits in a mask placed before a
screen will form alternating bands of light and dark to demonstrate these
wave interactions of light. Noise-canceling headphones operate by sampling
noise in the environment and then reproducing it within the headphones,
but one-hundred and eighty degrees out of phase. In effect, the background
noise is canceled, and the listener hears only his or her music.
The fourth component has no counterpart at
our level of reality. Two particles born of a subnuclear interaction speed
way from one another at the speed of light. Ten billion years later, one
particle interacts with another and is altered. Its original partner
alters along with it simultaneously. Despite the time and space separating
the two particles, their mutual identity survives intact.
In essence, a subnuclear particle, lets say
an electron, is everywhere in space and time and exists as a 'wave
function' until it is 'measured', by a space-time 'observer', at which
time it 'collapses' to manifest its particle nature in the space-time of
its 'observer'.
In the infamous double-slit experiment, the
light that is fed through the two slits is coherent light, a laser beam,
and there is a mystery to resolve if we feed one photon at a time through
the double slits. We get a spot of light on the back screen, right?
No, our interference pattern
counter-intuitively insists on taking form photon by photon. With what, we
wonder in amazement, is our photons interfering to form these bands of
light and dark?
This demonstrates that our space-time world
does not stand alone. Our collapsing wave functions do not all collapse
into a single space-time reality. After waves of water or sound or quantum
wave functions interfere with one another, the original waves involved
continue on their way in original form as if the interaction never
occurred.
The wave function collapses that generate
our space-time reality generate infinite other space-time realities as
well. These other space-times coexist with ours. They simply do not
interact with one another. They do not 'see' one another.
The closest of these, however, do interfere
with our reality to give birth to the mystery of the interference pattern
generated by single photons and quantum computers who use superpositioned
attributes of atoms or fields of energy as numerical registers with which
to perform calculations. Quantum computers can process information in a
reasonable amount of time, information that conventional computers would
take billions of years to process.
Particles that we 'see' belonging to our
space-time are said to be quantum entangled. They follow the established
equations of quantum information processing, rendering our 'multiverse' of
space-time realities a quantum information process. It is said that
information is physical in nature, but if we confuse qualia for
'physical', both qualia and 'information' become mysteries we cannot hope
to further define. We are forced to use language implying the reality of
space and time to describe acausality.
The question of whether time and space has
an objective reality or are aspects of our subjective conscious reality
has been raised. It is generally then dismissed, although doubts are
taking form as the mind-body problem continues to stand like an
impenetrable barrier in the midst of the 'physical' sciences. Modern
science, after all, inhabits the realm of human consciousness.
Ignoring it is the equivalent of pretending the irrelevance of a very
large and inconvenient elephant in the room.
The view of the universe as ultimately
timeless in nature is called Platonia by Julian Barbour in his book The
End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics, arguing that time does
not exist as an objective feature of reality. The 'gods of Platonia' to
which this book refers are, therefore, conscious perspectives within an
acausal realm in which quantum interactions produce change, but not
space-time objective to our conscious experience.
To avoid the paradox-ridden quandary of the
mind-body problem, information in itself is best viewed as conscious. We
have no opportunity to step outside of our conscious selves for a truly
objective view of reality. Conscious information, qualia, is the only
reality to which we have access by virtue of direct experience. We can
smash our fingers with hammers, blow our cities into vapor with nuclear
warheads, dissect brains and analyze their structure until we have every
synapse memorized, but we never step outside of our conscious selves to do
so.
Regardless, quantum physicists tend to
address 'objective physical reality' taking no interest in the data
processing structure of their own minds and assuming 'observers' to be
space-time prisoners of living meat that are still somehow capable of
seeing and understanding 'objective physical reality'. We have dared not
allow the nature and functioning of the human mind to fall into that
difficult rabbit hole of quantum theory, and yet we must. What is being
blocked from view is the possibility that space-time is entirely a
matter of conscious perspective, that quantum mechanics applies first to
the functioning of the human mind, that we each center our own
perspective, our own universe, although that perspective is
'entangled' with those with whom we interact and minds we would deem to
inhabit the distant past and future in terms of time.
This being the case, consciousness cannot be
the product of space-time physical processes, but dwells at the very heart
of the exponential bifurcation of space-time realities generated by
quantum interaction and, by a process of focus, selects the information
with which to further structure its space-time. 'Laws of nature'
are part of the fine tuning of conscious experience and not random or
arbitrary variations within which we exist by virtue of the strong
anthropic principle. It's far easier to create order from chaos as a
resource than to create order through the product of those proverbial
monkeys endlessly pounding at their typewriters and creating rare
universes entirely by accident.
And if our seemingly isolated selves are
born within an unbroken continuum, all life can be likened to a branching
tree with a common root system. By virtue of that common root,
consciousness is a feature of Platonia and space-time is its structure,
but there is ultimately only one universal consciousness. Look at another
human being, a cow, a preying mantis, an alien from another world, and we
are looking at ourselves from another conscious perspective of ourselves.
Minds expressing themselves as biology in
our shared world are the only minds of which we are aware, but being
native to an acausal reality, we coexist with our primitive past and all
possible distant futures within the immanent Now. Our universe is our
perspective, but also the co-creation of minds within which we are
ensconced as bacteria are ensconced within our biology. When we look into
the night sky at the stars and other galaxies and imagine all contained
therein, we are looking into the the depths of our common heritage.
If we cannot see an organizing principle for
reality within the nature of the self, we still cannot be the product of
monkeys kicking through clouds of quarks and giving birth to the
equivalent of locomotives and rabbits seen in the clouds. Even the notion
of a god fails in that capacity. By virtue of the need to be infinite and
eternal and omniscient, 'god' fulfills the definition of Platonia, but at
that scale, Platonia is static. There is no motion because all places are
congruent. There is no thinking because all thoughts are thought. All
possibilities and happenings coexist. Only within the structure can
one become aware of change and experience 'time'. Only here can parallel
information processing can give birth to associative space. These 'gods of
Platonia' may be eternal, but they function without omnipotence or
omniscience, and their god is but a resource.
Conscious quantum information processing is
eternal, ever-evolving, and self-sustaining. The only alternative is a
'dead' reality generating the hapless, futile and ephemeral epiphenomena
of consciousness as the byproduct of neurological processes. We've never
needed quantum mechanics to know that we have a serious problem explaining
the nature of human consciousness in conventional terms. We seem to have a
decent grasp of the content of human consciousness, but we blindly
confuse it for direct and unfettered access to still another kind of
reality. We confuse the territory as a map and then look beyond for
the territory.
We don't do well wrestling with
self-referential confusion. The questions we ask about ourselves promise
mind-bending answers we may not want to integrate with our world-view, not
if it needs reorganizing as extensively as we suspect it must. We insist
that our ancient assumptions about the nature of reality continue to hold
fast even when Greek philosophers two millennia ago were pointing out the
paradoxes of our confused paradigm.
Isaac Newton had no answers to the nature of
consciousness, but quantum theory applied to conscious information
processing harbors bombshells that threaten the very foundations of our
social, political and religious institutions across the face of the
planet. Within quantum theory, consciousness clearly stands at the
threshold between a superpositioned reality and our three-dimensional
universe. What this implies will never be easily, quickly, or willingly
accepted by the general population, that we stand at the helm to our own
personal realities. We have sufficient intelligence to apply quantum
theory to our technology, but few have the patience, motivation or
emotional resources to ponder what it all means. Ignorance is bliss, it
would seem, considering the confusion and inevitable misunderstandings
that lie in our path. Or, so it would be aside from one critical factor.
If you look carefully, the status quo we
fight to defend is killing us. We have outgrown the sensory realm of the
animals. More and more often, we must engage the intellect to function in
human society. The intellect thrives in human society, but it languishes
when confined for too long to the natural world of the animals. We bask
there at twilight for its beauty and peacefulness, take our vacations in
paradise and walk our national parks, but our eyes are on the stars, both
figuratively and literally, and worlds that pose intellectual challenges
we would absolutely die to engage long-term, if only we could. The problem
is, if space and time are objective features of reality, we will die
before we see our full potential come to pass, even on our own world. It's
not an factor the animals ever had to consider.
We aren't animals anymore. We think deeper
and far broader in scope, and we are, in the twenty-first century, at war
with ourselves on a very personal level because of that awareness,
literally at war with our own human nature, the sensory reality of death
and the resulting impotence of what is termed the human spirit. Animals
quickly turn away from their dead, briefly tormented by a loss, but not
understanding the nature of that loss. We take pride in helping to build
our modern civilization, but we partake of very little of it before our
days end. We will not survive as individuals to reap its greatest rewards.
As a consequence, we limit our investment in the world around us. We only
owe the world and the future of the world so much of our time, effort, and
enthusiasm. The rest belongs to our creature comforts in the here-and-now
while we age, decline, and wait to die.
If death did not await us at the end of our
lives, we'd conduct those lives with far more care, but our lives are
finite. This is not the way things seem to be. This is accepted beyond
doubt. Within the context of the space-time world in which we live, it is
provable beyond a shadow of a doubt. Any attempt beyond religious fantasy
to deny the mortality of men appears to be utterly futile, and yet the
implication that we are immortal and our human worlds infinite lurks
within quantum theory.
In the oddest fashion, we have always sensed
something amiss in ancient understandings of time and space. Mathematics
are acausal structures. Introduce time into an equation and you must do a
new computation for each change that we call a moment of time. Far more
fundamentally puzzling is the simple fact noticed by the most primitive of
minds that enemies may fight to the death in the heat of blinding rage and
hatred, but when the victor shatters the skull of the defeated, where in
the blood and gore is the enemy, his rage and his hatred? Meat is
angry? Meat harbors hurt feelings, and under other circumstances, love,
and a sense of humor?
Even today, science sees nothing in a human
body, dead or alive, that we can pinpoint as our conscious self. We speak
of consciousness as the driving force of human existence, but do we see
consciousness flitting about in a human brain, switching neurons on and
off like an abacus with nine billion beads? If not, how then does it steer
the course of neurological events?
We have never moved beyond seriously flawed
speculation and conjecture in our study of consciousness, because we
literally have nothing 'solid' with which to work, and science requires
samples and specimens to examine in its laboratories. It must 'objectify'
that which it studies, separate it from the subjectivity of the minds of
the scientists who will analyze the specimen.
In a nutshell, a thing cannot examine
itself. It needs an objective perspective to do so, but how does one stand
outside of one's own awareness? We can imagine floating around bodiless as
in out-of-body projections and near death experiences, but we are still
seeing a view of the space-time sensorium as always. We have escaped
nothing.
There is a solution to the mystery, of
course. We live a kind of conscious dream and everything deemed 'physical'
is 'just' information. The dream is information processing. Reality is
structured information. The content of the dream has nothing at all to do
with the dreamer. To confuse the two would be foolish, to fall prey to the
illusion that the dream is objective.
The dream and the dreamer are one
process.
You clearly cannot separate dreamers from
dreams. How can you divide information and say that this information is
the dreamer, and that information is another person, and this other
information is the table at which they sit? Oddly enough, this is the
perspective of quantum theory applied to conscious experience. We are
aware information without beginnings, endings, divisions, or boundaries.
It only makes sense if the dreamer is an illusion and simply conscious
information processing in and of itself.
Few like that solution to the infamous
mind-body problem. Most of us subscribe to the 'body' alternative to the
mind-body problem, the idea that 'objective physical reality' stands
before us, separate from our conscious selves. At this point, we cheat.
Even knowing consciousness has no way to move atoms, we assume they
somehow do anyhow, that consciousness steers and controls the brain. After
all, there's not a neurologist or physicist on the face of the Earth who
goes home to spouses and children and accepts them as biological
automatons inhabited by delusional ghosts.
Another point. How do brains know
they are inhabited by consciousness if they themselves are unconscious?
Brains and bodies write and speak about consciousness all the time. How
would a mere epiphenomena with no ability to influence neurological
processes call attention to itself?
On the other hand, if we accept the 'mind'
alternative to the mind-body problem and see reality in its entirety as an
conscious information processing structure, there is no problem at all
aside from the need to accept the implications of quantum theory without
trying to reconcile them with familiar and comfortable Newtonian ideas,
which is exactly the challenge faced by this book.
The central concept of critical importance
to Gods of Platonia is that fact that quantum theory requires a
observer to determine which of an infinite number of superpositioned
possibilities becomes part of its space-time world. Consciousness falls
into place as the nature of that observer simply because the alternative
is our plight as those epiphenomenal ghosts suffering their delusions of
grandeur being jerked around by neurological zombies that have no
functional reason whatsoever for having this discussion.
Any one given conscious perspective does not
go it alone, however, because conscious perspectives, as quantum entities,
entangle and give birth to relatively stable communal realities. We are
familiar with human consciousness and attribute some level of
self-awareness to animals, but we must now imagine the biosphere of planet
Earth a conscious identity, and any given species of life within it
forming a conscious gestalt. Reality is not limited to our role within it,
although it does not follow that the limits of our awareness are the
limits of our identity or being. We are all lesser perspectives of greater
perspectives and vice versa. Like cells of our body functioning in
concert, we belong to one another and we need one another to do our thing.
We center our own unique universe, entangled
with others, but we are never totally congruent with any of them, and we
are able to shift at will to other entanglements by focusing upon new
possibilities that are at least linked by quantum interference. We are
immortal and ever-changing because quantum interaction stands at the
threshold between space-time and Platonia, or superpositioned reality.
Change generates space-time. 'Change' in itself can belong to more than
one space-time structure. 'Acausality' is not the same as 'eternity', but
'change' is something else entirely, both neverending and generating
space-time in its wake. If our conscious experience can never end because
it is not taking place in time, neither can our 'self' be anything other
than inviolate.
Our acausal worlds are fields of
information. We can see and understand them only to the extent we can
process the information inherent in them and make it part of our
recognized self. From the space-time of our conscious being, we
continuously grow and evolve at a pace fixed by the interaction of quantum
entities at the Planck constant.
Given a choice between the peaceful death of
Newtonian oblivion and a potentially dangerous immortality we can never
escape, we generally choose what seems to be, by far, the lesser of two
evils. Because we are intuitively attuned to the 'body' alternative to the
mind-body problem by virtue of our animal sensorium, we give consciousness
incomplete control over its experience. Outside forces can and do
intervene.
Information that runs counter to accepted
common sense seems destined to fail the test of logic in a heartbeat.
Isaac Newton still reigns supreme as the foundation for most of the
beliefs about the nature of 'objective' and conscious reality. It will
take time to explain how the new information ties together so that
inevitable counter-arguments resolve themselves before they rise to mind.
Until this point is reached, for those who do abide by Isaac Newton's
common-sense, ball-bearing universe, where might these two worlds,
Newtonian and quantum mechanical, meet? After all, the brain operates at
the level of calcium ions, well within the quantum mechanical threshold.
We're increasingly aware that quantum mechanical effects are the veritable
heart of understanding biology.
Dwell too long on the controversy and it
becomes apparent that we currently harbor a Frankenstein view of reality
born of the purely emotional need to stuff the genie, a veritable invasion
of alien ideas, the stunning and extensive implications of quantum theory
that we are only beginning to recognize, acknowledge, organize, and
address, back into the bottle. Our hearts refuse to follow our minds. We
don't quite have the courage to openly tackle the issue. In time and
space, only one possibility of any given set is manifest and forms a
'history' of events. We don't see these other worlds in action aside from
photon interference patterns on a screen behind a double slit. They,
therefore, seem irrelevant.
They are very relevant. We are, at some
level, acutely aware of where our deepest held beliefs take us, and the
reality of death lurking at the heard of the 'body' side of the mind-body
problem eats away at our souls from deep within. The inevitability of
death and the denigration of all human value lies with the heat death of
the universe, because we don't always dwell within the comfort zones of
time and space. Time and space have beginnings and endings, and if they
rule our lives, then we have beginnings and endings as well.
A few of us manage contraphobia as an
escape, the literal embracing of fear as a means of disarming it. We can
become enormously courageous accepting death, seldom questioning its cost
in terms of our commitment to life. Either way, awareness of the ultimate
futility of conscious existence is the source of the pandemic tension,
unrest, and dissatisfaction with the status quo of our lives. Not only do
we fear death, we come to fear life itself as the harbinger of death, a
thing called existential dread. Paradoxically, death becomes our ultimate
escape from our fear of both life and death.
It will take a bit of explaining to show in
more detail how quantum theory applied to our conscious existence works.
The question we must ask ourselves at this point is whether our
dog-eat-dog world is a dog-eat-dog world even for the dogs? What if more
is happening in our reality than we have imagined, more than we have been
capable of imagining? If the nature of time and space as we have
understood such concepts becomes unglued, how does life change to exchange
death for immortality?
In light of quantum theory, the world we
share with others is shared by virtue of our informational quantum
entanglement. In such a world, our dead bodies become the space-time
property of others. Our entanglement has been broken, but we can only
change, not die. We have at death as we had at birth, infinite potential.
We accumulate errors along the way, but they cancel just as wrong answers
cancel out in the cash register feeding us the total of our purchases. One
and one never equal three.
Biological errors, the aging process, seem
to be an exception, but we accommodate biological errors and resulting
death as a necessary means for our biology to adapt to a changing
environment. Our conscious selves become like a stream of water and death
can be likened to a pebble in our path. We slip on by without ever
noticing the world that has just ended. The stream we shared with others
is broken, but there are other tributaries in which to continue the
space-time course of our personal history. Consciousness cannot end at the
pebble because time and space as objective realities do not exist. Change
provides the illusion of time. The stream of our lives has no beginning
and it has no end. Or, to reverse the analogy, there is no motion to the
stream aside from the illusion imparted by our interaction with it. We do
the swimming and the water is still.
Follow this argument through another chapter
or two and it's easier to see and understand that refusing to look closer
at the mind-body in favor of 'mind' may undermine what we think to be our
future and the future of humanity. Once the implications of quantum theory
are applied to the nature of our conscious reality, it's can see both the
extent of the danger as well as the untapped potential of human experience
available to us. We need only make a few critical adjustments to the way
we think about ourselves and our world to set things right and put
ourselves on a more constructive path. We've already made those
adjustments to our technology. We need only apply them to our selves.
To date, little to nothing of the impact of
quantum theory on the nature of human existence has been offered by the
experts in the field. They already know how horrendously contentious those
implications will be regardless of whether they are loyal to 'mind' or
'body'. Still, it is an issue we need to explore and sort out sooner or
later. If we are trying to force-fit ourselves in the 'wrong' world, and
if the consequences of doing so undermines our well-being and, the sooner
we begin sloughing through the quagmire the better.
William G. Tedford
Davenport, Iowa
November, 2008
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