Acausality is an interesting concept. An acausal
structure doesn't exist in time and has no past or future in the sense of
cause and effect which implies a passage of time. It has no continuity in and of itself. How then does the
static structure of superpositioned Platonia give rise to the dynamism and apparent continuity of our conscious experience of space-time
reality?
To reiterate, it helps to imagine reality built upon a
primal asymmetrical entity. As an analogy, imagine his asymmetrical
feature to be the equivalent of a '1' and a '0', or 'something' and
'something else', and give it the ability to interact with itself. It
instantly becomes infinitely superpositioned, Platonia, still an acausal
structure, a singularity within which all of its '1's and '0's cancel out
to nothing, if this singularity could be observed by an outside agency,
add up to zero nothing.
Only in a conscious mind can we imagine such a
structure. We cannot imagine something that is not being 'observed'
because, from our conscious point of view, it wouldn't be there. 'What'
would something be that has never been imagined? 'Where' would it be? The
exercise is pointless and futile. From our point of view, consciousness
and reality are synonymous terms. Any counterargument will invariably take
place in a conscious imagination. The effort of consciousness' attempt to
argue itself out of existence is the equivalent of an animated hand
holding an eraser attempting to erase itself.
But the notion of two realities, something and
something-conscious-of-it smacks of the same futility. If the two
realities interface, they are one, are they not? And it's bad enough to
have to endow primal reality with two things. It's hard to imagine
why anything must exist? Why does anything exist? If
consciousness exists, and our experience is dynamic, we know we can build
a universe with a '1' and a '0', which works just fine for our electronics
and technology in general. Adding something else, especially something
objective is blatantly unnecessary.
Imagine that the '0' and the '1' don't interact.
Imagine them being properties of another kind of primal entity altogether.
Or, imagine that their interaction generates conscious awareness.
The potential interaction of 1 and 0 is infinite, like imagining 1 and 0
reflected in an infinite mirror. We don't have to use moving photons to
imagine the sight of them generating all of infinite reality if this
entire scenario is conscious. It remains acausal, but infinite conscious
perspectives interact and 'objective physical reality' is the resulting
epiphenomena. Each of infinite primal conscious perspectives would
generate an overall static 'awareness' at the level of Platonia, but every
possible random structure within would be unique and interacting as
well with both 'ends', alpha and omega, aspects of a reality as close to
nonexistence as mind can imagine. And it gives birth to galaxies and
toaster ovens from a subjective point of view.
The key to structure is pattern recognition,
self-generating, self-sustaining, and self-replicating conscious
structures inherent within the whole. We experience time and space, so we
can safely say that interaction paces conscious awareness, although
the speed of this pacing is arbitrary, infinite, far all we know. Still,
pattern recognition and interaction gives birth to quantum information
processing in this realm, and gestalts and hierarchies of conscious
structure within the whole give rise to the measured conscious exploration
of the infinite potential of the system. Alpha and omega and everything
intermediate state between the two coexist.
Time is sequential in nature, information processing
proceeding in single file. Space is associative in nature, information
processing occurring simultaneously in parallel. Time and space are
space-time, a unity, because they are aspects of one another. We may
process information in time, but that doing the processing is spacial in
nature. Likewise, that doing the information we have defined as
necessarily spacial in nature depends upon time for its flow of
information to process. When we project this relationship onto the arena
of 'objective physical reality', we obtain Einstein's mathematical
relationship. Nothing science does is in error. We simply do our thing
within our selves by functionally breaking that conscious field of reality
into bite-sized morsels, the biggest dissociation being between 'self' and
'other'.
Consider how we use 'space', or association, in our
lives. Take Paul Revere's ‘one light if by land; two
if by sea’ as an example. This represents an previously accepted agreement that
‘land’ will associate with 'one light' and ‘sea’ with two. The lights, one
or two, do not contain or transmit information. A puff of smoke can
represent the Declaration of Independence, although the Declaration of
Independence will never be contained in a puff of smoke.
We can't 'see' numbers. They are invisible, only
visible when we represent them as something that we can see. We see
them as correspondences with things. We can't 'see' the number 'three',
but we clearly understand the relationship between three, trees, three
frogs, three honks of a horn, and three raps of a knuckle on our forehead.
We smile. We can't define 'three' except in terms of something else.
In our space-time worlds, human or otherwise,
association is a means of structuring our sensorium by noticing how things
are the same, similar, or how they differ, and then how they interact or
relate to one
another. Association is the foundation of communication with others, a
sharing of information orchestrated by a long and imperfect process of
connecting a symbol with a thing or event so that symbols can represent
reality itself. A bird, for example,
might learn to associate two approaching pinched fingers as an offering of
food. A dog scratches at its water bowl knowing the bowl to be associated
with water and a scratch with catching the attention of water-givers. The entire process of our human education from birth
has been one of association in this manner. As children, our nurturers
taught us words by using otherwise meaningless sounds such as ‘blue’ and
pointing at, or indicating in some manner, a blue bird in a tree, or in a
book.
As our multitudinous languages testify, any sound will
do for a word. There is no intelligence inherent in a word or a sound. The
sound is 'nonsense', but comes to represent something sensible. Maybe we
thought ‘blue’ meant the name of the animal when our mentors pointed to
the bird and said the word. When the sky was also pointed out as ‘blue’,
we sorted out the confusion for ourselves. If we cannot sort out semantic
confusion on our own, if we lack the personal resources to do so, it
cannot be done for us and we will have no capacity, or diminished
capacity, to learn.
Language is not the forte of humanity alone. Ask a duly
trained gray parrot to select three green boxes, or to remove four yellow
circles from a selection of different shapes of different colors and the
results are what we would expect of an intelligent child. Does that mean
parrots can ‘talk’, count, and reason? Yes, if we equate speech and the
mental process that gives rise to speech with the ability to associate.
However, definitions of words are based upon personal experience. 'Snow ' means
one thing to an Eskimo and something else to a Swahili. If a young woman walks into a circle of chimps and faints
dead away screaming, “The monkey’s are talking to me!”, we would assume
her to be having personal difficulties should we be unaware that the
monkeys have been taught sign language, and that the woman was deaf.
Qualia are like species of consciousness, the 'color
red' quite distinct from 'Middle C'. Education organizes and structures
qualia/consciousness to form an internal model of the world we share with
others. Education puts nothing new into our mind aside
from an awareness of associations that may not have previously
occurred to us. Words may describe experience we ourselves have not experienced, as with a boat trip across an
ocean. The emotions others experience in association with people, places
and things may be different than our own, but the cause of those emotions
will be understandable. We don't all feel the same way about snakes
and spiders, but we can empathize regardless with a person with a terrible
fear of spiders as well as a scientist who spells out in detail why he or
she loves spiders with a passion. We share much associated
experience in common.
And if we have a handicap involving a lack of a
particular qualia in our conscious experience, if we are color blind, as
an example, we have no way to process references to color. We can only
memorize how the words and sentences are constructed when colors are
involved and do our best to bypass our confusion. We know something is amiss, but we cannot imagine what.
Others can point out to us many sensory associations
when we don’t see them for ourselves, although the potential must exist
within us to make the connections. How old were we before we first
recognized the association between arrogance and possible low self-esteem? Emotional evaluations of conscious
experience are entirely private affairs, although if we have no personal
foundation for an emotional evaluation, taking our snakes as an example,
we do tend to 'go with the flow', culturally speaking. We may decide
snakes are to be feared, as most of us have, simply because others seem to
fear them so intensely. We harbor a phobia another may cure by introducing
us to a friendly, harmless, colorful pet snake, at which time we learn to
discriminate. It's not snakes we fear, but the effects of the
toxins some snake bites will have on us.
Existential dissociation, the difference between 'me’
and ‘other’ is also learned in this manner. 'Me' is the core conscious
presence of each of us. It has in itself no objective identity aside from
its current biological coordinates in a shared space-time arena. 'Me' becomes the
ego when it selects from and adopts a broad array of behavioral and
emotional traits with which to master the challenges of life.
The ego is meant to be our self, but it is actually the
creation of the self. It tries to be an unchanging anchor by which we
maintain consistency and continuity of experience. We can see the extent
of the ego's arbitrariness when we take notice how we role-play as we
interact with others. We do not present the same face to everybody, but
rather pose ourselves in specific ways to gain favor, hide our true
feelings and intentions from different people, hold them at bay, or drive
them away. We coo at our children, caress our spouses, and shoot at
burglars breaking into our house at night.
In our lives, information means something, has
significance, and associates with other structures of information because
of that meaning. The significance of meaning has deep roots. Our worlds and
associations differ because we do not share the same
personal experience. We are all unique perspectives of reality because of
our varied background of experience. We have no means of establishing
precise frameworks of common understanding when this is the case, and it
is always the case to some degree.
Association is spacial in nature and can be
overwhelmingly expansive and overpowering as with a static view of the
Grand Canyon, but what about time and its inexorable ticking away of
seeming eons? Our smooth flow through the dimension of time seems to be a
continuity, but quantum theory is telling us it is 'digital' in nature,
broken into fundamental units at the Planck level. It is at this level
that Platonia exists as the resource for conscious space-time experience,
but how do we get from here to there in terms of past and present?
Consider the image of a locomotive moving across our
television screen. Wheels turn, smoke billows, trees fly by. And yet
illuminated phosphor dots on the screen don’t actually move. They just
vary in intensity in quantum leaps of electrons orbiting atoms. Like
lights seemingly to flash around and around a billboard, movement within
the screen is a complete illusion. We say that photons are moving from the
screen to our eyes, but it's curious to remember that time does not pass
for photons moving at the speed of light. From the standpoint of a photon,
the journey from a distant galaxy to our retina takes place
instantaneously. As well, space is described as a quantum foam exchanging
quantum packets of energy. Again, neither time nor space as we know it is
involved. From our perspective, it varies according to relative speed and
mass.
How about sound? Sound must move. How would it
otherwise get from the speakers to our ears? Actually, sounds are
concussion waves. Atoms bounce off each other and transmit energy in the
process. Atoms of air do not move the entire distance between the source
of a sound and our ear, only far enough to impact another atom and
transfer its kinetic energy. Atoms or molecules can be ‘touching’ and
conduct concussion waves as through glass or steel.
We can gain an intuitive inkling of the nature of time
when we look more closely at the analogy of the billboard. To make the
lights of a billboard seem to move, a certain sequence of illumination is
required. Lights one and two are lit, and then lights two and three, and
then three and four. When lights are on or off at the same time, we have a
blinking effect, but when one is always lit to maintain that handshake
with the next light, we have our illusion of movement. Because
consciousness is aware of this change, we can say that consciousness spans change, and it is that constant,
interconnected change that generates the experience of time.
We can close our eyes and imagine pulling ourselves
through the dark along a length of rope, hand over hand. Briefly, two
hands are on the rope, and then one, and then two, forming a continuity of
motion. One hand is on the rope at all times, helping to establish a
connection of experience from moment to moment. Drop the rope even
briefly, and the continuity is lost.
We use our understanding of quantum mechanics to give birth to unimaginable
technologies. It reveals to us the structure of reality extending beyond
our immediate senses, but we inhabit the same reality as our technology.
That insight overrides all of the misunderstandings, fallacies,
misperceptions and fantasies about the nature of reality we have applied
exclusively to ourselves. There are only one set of rules for the reality we know, not one for
'mind' and another for 'body'.
Some do not want any part of it. Our senses tell us we
die. Some prefer it this way. There is comfort in thoughts of simple
oblivion. Oblivion is the final defense of existential dread, fear of life
itself.
It is not actually death we fear, nor life. We fear the
unknown. Infinity harbors paradise, but it harbors monsters and living
hells as well, and eternity provides the opportunity to experience them
all. Maybe the gods of our imagination can handle it, but what makes
anyone think we can, or would want to?
Who wants to be this kind of god? Who wants to be told
that we have no choice in the matter?
For those whose interest has been piqued, key evidence
to the nature of consciousness currently lies outside the general
interests of the physical sciences and falls within the realm of personal
experience. It is unfortunate in that we can be dismissed as unscientific
by embracing personal experience, but it is fortunate that so many have
shared in this personal experience that supports the implications of quantum
theory for human existence. We are not scientists, but anyone who has
experienced a detailed precognitive dream that unfolds in waking reality
does not need to understand the nature of time and space to know that
common-sense and social consensus are in profound error. Something is seriously
wrong with the way we’ve been told the world works.
Isaac Newton missed a few things and quantum mechanics
opened a veritable Pandora’s box to compensate. We cannot possibly
reconcile Newton and the box, but trying to stuff the contents back inside
by denying personal experience that complements new visions of reality
isn’t likely to work any better. We've spent centuries denying the
equivalent of rocks falling from the sky. We should know better than to
dismiss any lone voice that warns of experience in defiance of the norm.
They may be mad, or confabulating, or defective, but then again, we may be
missing something vital to our own view of reality, and we should pay
close attention to avoid missing a critical clue to the mystery of life.
It’s as if we’ve always had an extra pair of arms
attached to our bodies, arms that dangle uselessly and go unnoticed in
ourselves and others, and even denied when they get in our way, because
they conflict with what we have been told by ancient story-tellers about
how we are built. We know far more about reality these days, but we still
abide by old stories and cripple ourselves by virtue of the blind momentum
of habit that has built up in our lives.
But we take notice, bit by slow bit, that things are
amiss. We pay closer to those annoying ‘bumps in the night’ that are our
own unrecognized potential swinging uncontrollably about. And once we have the ball
of new understanding rolling, we have not only a new world to explore, but
new tools with which to do so as well.
