Once
upon a time, humanity lived as the animals do. We went many tens of
thousands of years assuming that reality is a what-we-see-is-what-we-get
affair. Because brain-size is the primary survival feature of Homo
sapiens, it got smarter as those millennia passed, at which point humanity
spent another several thousand years looking at the spilled brains of
fallen comrades and wondering how that could be all that we are.
The unlikely notion of a dynamic conscious entity
lurking within a piece of 'meat' contains the first glimmer of realization
that reality must be more than what it seems to be. Appearances are not
only deceiving, they may be confusing, and herein lies a danger. Taking
the world at face value forces us to accommodate misunderstanding and
confusion instead of resolving them.
Who and what are we? Most of us would respond to the
question in sensory and social terms, but this just takes us back to
square one. How many of us think deeply enough, or are introspective
enough, to take notice of the little Jedi mind tricks we play on ourselves
in regard to this issue? We know we are more than just the sound we have
assigned to represent us, our name. We are more than where we live. If we
could replace our bodies one cell at a time, which we do regardless
throughout our lives, we remain ourselves.
Consciousness is an experience. We can play with
internal representations, but we can never escape 'ourselves'. We can never
say what consciousness it beyond our experience of it.
Consciousness is not identity. Identity is based upon
continuity of experience. Consciousness does not share in that continuity.
We are only conscious now, in this immediate moment. We may be
conscious of memory, but any given memory is a feature of the now.
We can imagine the future, but consciousness of possibility is a feature
of the now. We see the world around, what we deem to be 'objective
physical reality', but we see only as much as can be contained with the
now.
The conscious moment is the gateway standing between
the full potential of the now and the result of our conscious fulfillment
of that seemingly fleeting instant of time. It seldom occurs to us that
consciousness is structured by personal values and meaning and thereby
validates or aligns as best it can in any given moment the structure of
our lives. Choices, or focus, 'fixes', or establishes, our personal
history contained with our 'objective physical environment', which is
always a conscious structure from our subjective point of view. It seldom
occurs to us that consciousness is a filter, converting
multidimensionality into space-time, that nothing really moves in
time, and that our perspective of the world we share with others is always
and forever a personal experience that could never be shared with
another.
To establish a division between self and other so that
we can consider 'other' to be objective to ourselves, we divide the human mind into two distinct arenas,
thinker and thoughts, perceiver and perceptions. We identify ourselves as
the thinker and the perceiver and the world around us as the perceived and
thoughts about the perceived.
The division is invariably internal. Information
enters the brain imprinted upon a common form of bioelectrical impulse transmitted by
the nervous system and translated as a qualia, a conscious component of
our conscious structure of reality, a color, a sound, a taste, a smell, a
sensation. Consciousness is a mystery. Scientists dissect human brains,
observe dynamic MRI images in an attempt to study consciousness, oblivious
to the fact that they are doing so from the standpoint of conscious
qualia. Our conviction that what-we-see-is-what-we-get and lies outside of
ourselves is so overpoweringly convincing that only in our most powerfully
thoughtful moments can we rise above the conviction and recognize the
frightening subjectivity of our individual realities.
Anything we experience of the world is a conscious
model, and we have never had way to determine whether our conscious models
interact directly in unseen fashion as with quantum entanglement, or if
our subjective realities are mediated by an 'objective physical reality'.
Reality does not operate the same way in these two options, and
living in the 'wrong' universe has repercussions, which we can see if we
pay close attention to the illusions and delusions our sensorium instills
within us. They do so for good reason when the consciousness of the
animals is being structured by the blind forces of evolution. When we see
the nature of those forces at work, we can intervene. If that intervention
is not in our best interest, it will result in the destruction of what we
are becoming. If it is beneficial, we will evolve more rapidly into richer
arenas of experience. Either way, we only amplify the process rather than
transcend it.
We experience our selves, but we take the independent
existence of objective reality for granted. It's not obvious to us that the division between self
and 'other' is
deeply mysterious. As we go about our daily affairs, we assume we interact
with an outside physical reality that possesses an independent existence.
We've had no awareness of the connections between aspects of reality that
are not visible to our 'physical' senses. We currently insist that these
quantum entanglements are features of that 'objective physical reality'
and play no role in our thought processes,
overlooking the observation that our only experience of this 'objective
physical reality' lies in qualia, subjective conscious experience which provides
structure, but only to our conscious selves. We have no way to transcend,
or reach beyond, 'red', Middle C,
pain, the aroma of flowers, and the taste of sugar to validate a parallel,
separate, objective reality. We reason that reality must be
objective to self based upon our ignorance of those invisible connections
or entanglements that are said to structure that outside reality, but we
have no direct access to it.
Quantum
mechanics provides, if we wish to address it, a version of reality free of the need to sustain an
assumption of a parallel reality identical to the conscious one. We shy
from it because we think subjectivity isolated us from the world when in
fact this form of 'quantum' subjectivity includes the entirety of reality.
Our apparent subjectivity becomes the equivalent of a subroutine
within the ongoing quantum information processing of reality.
Our conviction that we have access to 'out there' in
all its bright, noisy glory is absolute regardless of the fact that what
we see, feel, hear and touch is the equivalent of an immaterial lucid dream. Only the source of the
information that structures our qualia remains in question, but where do we draw the line between 'in here' and 'out
there'? Does such a demarcation exist, and how does it go about
defining our individuality? Keep in mind that if time is dismissed as an
unnecessary facet of reality as some theoretical physicists are wont to
do, space goes with it.
Without time, the sequential acquisition of information, there is no
space, which is parallel or associative information processing. Space and
time become part of our conscious information processing structure, but we must dismiss their
redundant objectivity. In doing
so, we change nothing of our conscious experience, although our new
understanding implies interesting possibilities we will address in a
future chapter, possibilities we currently dismiss as impossible and
thereby 'warp' our overall experience of life in doing so.
For most of us, these points are moot. It seems to us
that reality absolutely must be objective to our personal existence
because others dwell in the world we see, and we see that they are mortal.
They die and we see that the world goes on without them, so we assume that
we will cease to exist as well. The world will go on without us as
effortlessly as it went on without them. Therefore, it seems apparent that
the world preceded all of us and has no requirement within its vast
reaches for conscious beings to exist at all. How can we doubt the
obvious?
Taken a step further, consciousness becomes curiously
irrelevant. Because there is no way for an immaterial force to move
matter, consciousness is deemed an epiphenomenon of our physical
neurology. It is pointed out that we physically react a fraction of a
second before we are even aware of having made a decision to do so.
Therefore, if consciousness is a mere tag-along, we are not who or what we
seem to be at all. We are an epiphenomena deluded into believing we are
more than an ephemeral and impotent ghost in the machine.
We don't buy that, of course. We think we are at the
helm of our soul, so to speak, because it seems obvious that we are.
Bumblebees can't fly either, right? And yet they do, because we didn't
have the grasp of aerodynamics that we thought we did. We don't know how
to reconcile the contradiction of a consciousness that can't move matter
and the fact that it does, but we know reality is objective to
consciousness because a car was build in a factory by people who have died, driven by people who
live, and recycled by people still to be born. Obviously, the car is
objective to those who have had contact with it. Our experience of reality
is dominated by time and space, and our part within it seems to be
profoundly insignificant.
The human mind really does seem to be divided between
thinker and thoughts, perceiver and perceptions, and objectivity is an
explanation for the appearance reality takes for us. A woman gives birth to an infant daughter in New
York. Thirty years later, the infant is an adult residing in Sydney, Australia
and has children of her own. A
world of that size and complexity cannot be contained within any one human mind.
Objective physical reality is the arena within which multiple selfhoods
reside and is larger than any one of us.
But we also have a problem with the nature of that
hard-core physical reality. We say that we ‘see’ light and color, although our
optic nerve does not transmit light or color into the dark reaches of the
brain. Our ears do not transmit sound. Our nervous system transmits
information, and that information in generic form can be interpreted in different ways, as
an image, a sound, a taste, an aroma, or a touch.
Our neurology structures that information in time and space to give birth to our sensory
view of the world, our sensorium.
Our senses are said to transmit bioelectrical impulses
into the depths of our brain, but how this information becomes conscious
qualia of light and color, aroma and taste and tactile sensation of
different kinds is not known. Even our perception of bodies and brains
enter the brain as 'bioelectrical' impulses. What is this 'brain' of which
we speak in terms other than a structure of conscious qualia? How
can we possibly know? How do we step outside of consciousness for an
objective point of view?
If this is the first time we have encountered the
notion that brains and bodies are only conscious models of reality, this
will be our first realization of the trap of the self-referential. If we
have no direct access to 'objective physical reality', what could it be
aside from our conscious model of it? It's clearly an accurate
correspondence as far as it goes in the same way the bubbles on the
surface of a CD is a correspondence to the music that can be derived from
it, although bubbles are
not music and our neurology is not conscious thoughts. Brains
are a model of such, and if we think they still exist in the shape and
form we see outside of our consciousness, how do we reconcile the horrors Einstein and relativity inflict upon those sacred aspects of reality? Space
is curved and time is frozen in the core of a black hole. What about
quantum physics claim that reality is superpositioned beyond our conscious
wave function collapse of our space-time perspective? Our preferred notion
that reality is exactly as we experience it is under constant assault by
modern science.
Again, we do not perceive qualia. Even from the
viewpoint of a neurologist, qualia is consciousness in and of
itself. We do not perceive a world 'out there'. We are that world,
both the thinker and the thinker's thought, both the perceiver and the
perceiver's perceptions, including information we deem to be ‘other’.
Remember that we are not currently debating the origin of that
information, only that the information that is part of our world, is
our world. We are not saying that any particular consciousness is
the entire world unless we manage to tear down the apparent boundaries
that separate consciousness into biological 'things' strewn across the
universe.
The means by which we structure our conscious world of
‘matter’ and ‘energy’ by what we term ‘time’ and ‘space’ are equally first
and foremost part of our conscious structure and not necessarily an
objective part of 'out there'. Our logical need for an objective reality
does not hold in light of quantum theory. We have no real
understanding of the nature of time and space, matter and energy aside from the droll observation that time
keeps all events from occupying the same moment and space keeps all
matter from occupying the same point. We say all too easily that 'red' is a certain frequency
of electromagnetic radiation, but energy is defined even by the most
sophisticated dictionary as merely 'the ability to do work', so what is
this 'energy' of which we speak? What
photons are involved in a full-color lucid dream
of a red apple?
The key to the problem of the vastness of reality
confronting selfhood is where we traditionally draw the boundaries to our
selves. Most of us draw functional boundaries at our skin layer. The
individual is defined as a human body, but can that body survive an
instant in a vacuum? In a forge furnace?
The conscious model we call the human body is part and
parcel of its environment and cannot exist independent from it. The same
applies to any aspect of reality, the relationship between the Earth and
the Sun, the Sun and the surrounding galaxies. The brain specializes in
reducing reality to bite-sized morsels suitable for information
processing, but if we reverse the process, we find ourselves overpowered
by the complex and extensive unity of reality.
Space divides nothing if paired electrons a billion eons and
miles apart can react simultaneously to the disturbance of one. Time is
defined as a separation of events, but an 'event' is a happening in time.
So, what is time? We can't be as specific as we'd like because we
generally don't give conscious experience the thought it deserves. We have
functional definitions of the core mysteries of life associated
with consciousness. We make unwarranted assumptions about the mysteries
themselves, which is why we tend to walk into panes
of clear glass now and then.
Definitions of human experience preach to the choir.
Imagine the task of describing or defining consciousness to an artificial intelligence.
That AI would never broach the subject of consciousness in the same way
and for the same reason a gay man does not wax poetic about romantic or sexual encounters with women, or the same way the blind do not initiate a
discourse on the intricacy of the color in a fireworks display, or the
deaf passionately discuss the audio qualities of various musical
instruments.
'Energy' is defined as 'the ability to do work'.
Definitions run us
in circles within our dictionaries, one term attempting to define another.
We're missing something, a common source for our definitions, but we're blind to that 'something'. What we are
missing is our inability to step outside of conscious experience to define an
experience in terms of something objective to that experience. This
is why we can't say what 'red' is aside from an association with a rose
and a 'frequency of electromagnetic radiation', which still doesn't
guarantee that I am seeing what you would define as 'blue'. Even
if we could step outside of ourselves and have a new, larger reality with
which to define consciousness in terms of something else, how would be
define our new reality without again needing to step outside of it for an
even greater objective view?
It's important to concede that we experience
psychological time and space. We are not contesting what seems to see
aside from overconfidence placed in defining it in terms of something
beyond conscious experience. We are only saying that we do not have
absolute objectivity with which to work. There is, and has always been, something
very strange afoot in our insistence that we stand apart from reality,
that consciousness is one thing and reality something objective to it.
This is the thinker/thought and perceiver/perception phenomena at work
when we know our neurological processes do not differentiate between the
two. There are no neurons that are 'self' and other neurons that are
'other'.
Psychological space-time gives birth to relative psychological objectivity, as with a dreamer and his or her dream.
Some qualia are
intimate, as with emotion. We have an admittedly subjective self made up of conscious feelings
and thought and then the
ever-changing flow of qualia that comes from beyond the recognized self. We become
very much like a puppy chasing its tail, confused
and angered when it notices that 'alien' thing constantly sneaking up behind
it. Even in ordinary psychology it's recognized that very much of what we
consider 'objective' is very much a part of our individual selves. The
question we will raise here focus upon the assumed boundaries and
definition of 'individual'.
Like animals who will attack or turn away in
disinterest from their own
reflection in a mirror, convinced of the objectivity of the reflection, issues
regarding our relationship to the universe aren't recognized as important
to a definition of who and what we are. We are born and we die and build our lives in
reality-as-it-seems-to-be just like mice. In terms of time, our neurology
is the product of billions of years of evolution and serves us well,
unless we are in a process of transition, a dinosaur with wings leaping
from tree to tree, or a lungfish lumbering in some discomfort across the
landscape. Regardless, what’s the point in questioning
any of it? If the subject is of any interest to us at all, we shake our
heads in exasperation at the confusion we can bring to light, and we have
done so for millennia. We confess that we have a problem looking too far
beyond the workaday world within which we are equipped to function and
survive. It doesn't seem to be a practical problem, so we let it ride.
This is the nature of the mind-body problem. We are in
a process of transition when we notice its existence. Are we an epiphenomena of a
fundamental material world, or is reality contained within a sphere of
conscious existence within which our individuality is ensconced? We can’t
have it both ways. The notion of two separate, alien, but nevertheless
perfectly compatible realities is profoundly unlikely, even if the idea of
an immortal existence in a common waking 'dream-world' strikes us as a tad unsettling. We
prefer hard demarcations between 'self' and 'other'. 'Other' is the greatest
psychological defense we have against things and happenings that can do us
harm.
We've left the issue to the philosophers to bicker over
in past eras. Today, most of us settle for two separate realities, the
material world and the ‘spiritual’ world based on the primitive Greek
notion that we ‘breathe in’ invisible forces of inspiration and emotion
into our lives, as with the word 'respiration'. We see ourselves as 'souls' contained in our bodies and
brains.
We accept that within the countless light-years of
emptiness littered with exploding suns and massive black holes sucking in
the detritus, we have little to no impact. Aside from countless religious
fantasies vying for our uncritical belief, our lives appear to be
ultimately meaningless and futile to boot. Meaning, like
everything else, is a relative term, and we would continue chasing our
tails contemplating our existential confusion, if it served a purpose. There seems to be no point in doing so.
Death is an undeniable sensory observation. We see our
loved ones cease to function and decompose. The earth at our feet is the
product of biological death, although we could say that biology recycles
and only the conscious individual truly dies. Therefore, life on earth
is part of an unbroken chain of reproduction going back four billion years
or so, a process that will not end until the Earth itself vaporizes in the
superheated atmosphere of an expanding Sun. We could also say
that the Sun and the Earth and all that lived upon it was born of the
death of stars and the death of our own star will add a bit of material to
the intergalactic clouds from which new stars, worlds, and the life upon
them, will continue to emerge.
Notice that within the hard logic of this de facto
capitulation to the 'body' side of the mind-body problem there's no room for the
individual, specifically, the conscious individual. If
consciousness serves no real purpose in reality, why are we insulted and
tormented by our impotence? We're an entirely irrelevant and disposable aspect of reality,
or so it seems.
Reality needs everything but us to function. Still, it's
only a problem if we could do something about it. It is, otherwise, a
simple fact of existence, an observation of what seems to be.
Our capitulation to that world-view, however, comes at a cost. During the
course of our lives, we face that critical decision as to how much effort we invest
in the world beyond our self. The pleasure/pain principle goads most of us
to derive as much satisfaction as can be attained from the ‘here and now’
and make do with that. We stay busy and rent video disks in the evening,
fantasize adventures we seldom have, and settle for the adrenalin they
produce. Except for occasional and tragic deaths among loved ones, we
seldom acknowledge the utter vulnerability of our selves. We tell
ourselves that death lies decades away, not worth bothering ourselves over
now, although one breath of air and one beat of our heart stands between
us and utter and complete oblivion.
This serves as ‘meaning’ for most of us. Others
fantasize further existence in afterlives of various sorts to the corpses
we bury at our feet. We have a total of twenty-six hundred gods to attend
to the dead. If the gods challenge our credibility, some of us succumb to drugs, alcohol, mental-illness, or suicide as
the answer to the lack of purpose to our lives. We all suffer a degree
of existential anxiety that reflects our recognition of the mystery of our
existence. If death is forever, how did we come to be to begin with? If
our conscious existence happened once, why can't it happen again?
Let's take a simplified look at the nature of this
insidious mind-body problem at a more personal level. On one hand, there's
no way for consciousness to tweak the slightest atom, molecule, or cell in
our brain to initiate a series of events should we decide to get up out of
a chair and walk across a room. Modern science has never seen such a
process at work, and it has most certainly looked with every tool at its
disposal. Every injury to the brain is reflected by an accompanying
dysfunction of mind and personality. Consciousness must, therefore, be an
epiphenomena of neural processes of the brain. Our brains do all the work.
We're just along for the ride, an emergent illusion of the process.
On the other hand, there's absolutely no direct
evidence whatsoever that anything physical exists. After all, we
are only conscious of the world. We can scream, yell, bang our
drums, kill, detonate thermonuclear warheads, launch spaceships to the
moon, be invaded by aliens from outer space, or pull out all of our
fingernails with needle-nose pliers, and through it all, there is no way
to step outside of our conscious minds and the qualia of our experience to
see the objective world we imagine to exist. Reality is conscious
experience. Nothing more can be said of it.
When we talk about a perception of a physical
item, however, we have made an assumption that we are dealing with two
separate realities, one a mirror image of the other, one conscious and immaterial, the
other 'physical' and real. The physical, real and objective is starkly
convincing if, as an example, we are involved in a fourteen car pile up on
an interstate and have both of our legs broken. The fact that we are still
experiencing qualia within the confines of immaterial conscious experience
will have no emotional impact upon us whatsoever.
Actually, what we are
doing when we differentiate between 'I' and 'other' within the confines of
the mind is to dissociate some conscious parts of ourselves from
others and interpret a conscious qualia as 'an objective material thing'. It is in this manner that we give rise to two separate realities,
a thinker and his or her thoughts, or a perceiver and his or her
perceptions. The separation is functional. It does not otherwise exist.
To a large degree, the separation between 'I' and
'other' is a personal defense mechanism and part of our cultural
conditioning. We are told in indirect ways as we mature by self-styled
cultural authorities exactly where society
expects that boundary between ‘self’ and ‘other’ to be placed within our
psyche, and what the relationship between the two should be.
In the minds of lesser animals that have but a
rudimentary sense of selfhood, the self-referential dilemma of the
mind-body problem does not exist. It is never contemplated. Once the
division is born and clearly perceived in the reflective depths of more
developed minds, and until it is resolved and understood for what it is, a
war of survival between self and a cold and heartless 'objective physical
reality' is waged. Even chimps have been observed grieving the death of a
mother so intensely that they, too, have died. Until this war is seen as a
lack of understanding of the nature of reality, it is a war that
invariably threatens personal destruction and oblivion and is all too
often preemptively self-destructive. We kill ourselves rather than wait to
die in subtle and not so subtle ways. It is a war currently engaging the
whole of humanity. It engages each of us daily on an intensely personal
basis.
It doesn’t have to. In the future, it won’t. It will
take time for new paradigms to filter through the human species, but the
resolution to the mind-body problem has been at hand for the past century. An understanding of some of the confusion was readily
at hand even before the eve of quantum theory. Some of the paradoxes that
arise from a strictly sensory interpretation of reality were apparent
thousands of years ago by astute thinkers such as the Greek philosopher
Zeno. Zeno reasoned that an arrow takes time to reach half the distance to
its target. He reasoned that any remaining distance can be subdivided,
endlessly, each taking the arrow a smaller, but discrete moment of time to
transverse. Therefore, given that our reality is a continuum, the arrow
would take an infinite number of moments to reach its target which is, in
essence, an infinite distance away, because space can be endlessly
subdivided in the same way.
Today, we understand that our reality is not a
continuum. It is 'digital' in nature. Time and space cannot be endlessly
subdivided, but end at the Planck constant. There are only so many
temporal subdivisions between an arrow and its target. The bow and the
target are only so many spatial 'quantum' apart from one another, not an
infinitely dividable continuity.
Notice that this insight affects 'objective physical
reality'. What about conscious experience? Is consciousness 'digital' in
nature or a unified continuum? A unified continuum links quantum
processes. A digital reality bears a stronger resemblance to a projected
film upon a movie screen, a sequence of stills that provides the
illusion of movement. In a superpositioned reality, what factor gives
continuity to a space-time structure that otherwise possesses no
continuity at all? Sure, space-time structure is inherent within
Platonia in the same way a sculpture is inherent within a block of
granite, but we experience space-time history in a manner that is
not possible to an infinite potential with no means of manifesting
space-time except as infinite potential. Consciousness and
space-time history are synonymous terms.
We are like lungfish standing upon the shores of a new
reality, perfectly fit for neither the sea behind us nor the unknown land
lying in wait before us. Ours is a challenge faced by any organism living
anywhere in any universe that evolves to our level of complexity, a state
of mind straddling realities alien to one another. What happens beyond
this point in our development we cannot even begin to imagine, because we
ourselves stand on the precipice and have not yet progressed beyond it.
Lesser animals are goaded toward survival-oriented
behavior by virtue of the ancient pain/pleasure principle. The ante has
been raised for Homo sapiens. We see through it and have mastered it and
have been left floundering in its wake. We take drugs or create
psychological ploys to alleviate our pain and suffering, but have we cured
our problems having simply numbed our symptoms? What incentives do we have
to live once all the pain has gone and readily available pleasure becomes
blasé? What incentives do we have to work to improve ourselves in the face
of our conviction of our own inevitable extinction? What new values exist
when the old ones evolved to accomplish little more than to move cattle
from one green patch of grass to another?
Modern answers to these age-old questions lie in the
understanding of that new reality implied by quantum theory and those
isolated photons that manifest themselves as an interference pattern in
the infamous double-slit experiment. In that new reality, the world is not
at all what it seems to be. It does not work the way we think it works. We
are not who we thought we were.
So, what is the nature of that new ante that has been
raised for Homo sapiens? What will be the consequences of our failures in
life, or the rewards of our successes, in light of these new realities?
The pleasure/pain principle is still in effect after
all, because our misinterpretation of its purpose is our disease even when
nothing ails us. It was never meant to prevent or postpone death, only to
fulfill to the greatest extent possible the potential of our lives. Our
reward for seeing the world as it is beyond the view afforded by the part
of our brain inherited from lions and tigers, mice and cows, when we
achieve it, will be the panoramic view of more distant horizons and
broader vistas of our personal existence. Even if these are not sensory
visions of our new reality, but rather abstract structures of thought born
in the neocortex, they still allow us to face the apparent darkness of
physical death and the chasm that exists between our lives and the lives
of 'others', knowing as an irrefutable fact that not all of reality and
its unifying connections are visible to the senses.
Recognition of this greater reality involves more than
just an understanding of its nature. It involves knowing how it undermines
old and fallacious ideas of selfhood and space-time reality seen through
ancient lenses of cultural beliefs and tradition. Just as knowledge of
germs alleviated our fear of demons even before modern medicine alleviated
our suffering, quantum theory alleviates the existential terrors our old
Newtonian reality has instilled within us by insisting that consciousness
is an ephemeral epiphenomenon in a what-we-see-is-what-we-get reality. It
is far more than that.
Platonia, brain-child of Julian Barbour, author of
The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics, is that new reality. Its strange
inhabitants in this acausal realm are quite alien to those who consider Isaac Newton part of
their heritage. Newton's inhabitants saw and acted upon an immediate
reality that had horizons beyond which the self did not exist. From the
standpoint of these creatures, the inhabitants of Platonia appear as
veritable gods, just as feeble and mortal from one perspective as insects,
birds, and mammals, Homo sapiens included, but ultimately infinite and
eternal in ways that can be, and have been, demonstrated within our modern
quantum-based technology.
None of the cultural and traditional fallacies based
upon ancient, common-sense observations of our sensory reality are
original to this century. The vast majority of humanity then and now cannot see
beyond superficial appearance, just as we had little choice but to assume
at one time that the sun, moon, and stars moved across the sky and the
earth stood obviously still. It took clearly great, exceptional minds to clearly see the
Earth and the planets revolving around the sun by virtue of the complex
dance of lights in the night sky, and we're all a lot smarter these days. We
increasingly recognize the psychological nature and social purpose of the
fallacies of culture and tradition. The paradoxes that lie at the root of
commonly understood reality have begun to unsettle all of us to some
degree. Few of us are ignorant of the fate of the ‘rock-solid’ universe in
the minds of the Albert Einsteins and David Deutsches of our day and age.
Welcome to the greatest challenge of the twenty-first
century, a challenge that ensconces the crises of weapons of mass
destruction, destruction of the environment and the approach of the
mythical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. How can we hope to manage a
world that reflects the beings we are when we have entirely misunderstood
ourselves?
Are we interested in the manner of being we are beyond
the superficially apparent? Our lives are not at risk, although we
perceive that they are, that death and destruction await but a few short
years down the road. We may even find death comforting in light of the
greatest implication of an acausal interpretation of quantum theory, that
we are immortal, that we will always inhabit this acausal, but ever-changing
moment of time, although it will never be the same from change to change. Time and space are epiphenomena, or so implies quantum
theory, not our conscious existence. In terms of time and space, we have
always been here, although 'here' is currently unique. Because existence is a quantum, acausal phenomenon and
not a place in time and space, there is no other where to go, and
no when.
Ours is not a simple existence despite its simple
premise, that of a primal ‘polarized’ entity interacting with itself
binary-style, generating infinity and eternity in its conscious
wake. Reality expands by virtue of
the dynamics of trial-and-error evolution. We are explorers of unmanifested
possibility. We bring our dreams into the light of day.
Evolution is trial and error by nature, because there's too
much information ‘out there’, infinite information, for us to process as finite, space-time beings. We
can only be infinitesimal fractions of the overall equation. But
we can be, at least, aware of the process. A great deal of unnecessary
suffering can be avoided once we recognize the fundamental fact that
consciousness manifests its choices by virtue of focus, not as the reality
it perceives, but as the reality it is.
Have we noticed as yet that there is no reference in
this book to 'you'? This book is about ‘we’, you and me, all of us,
relative individuality manifested in a continuum in which unity reigns
like the spectrum of a rainbow. We are the indivisible Gods of Platonia.
At our core lurks an ‘I’ that is a primal perspective of the infinite, a
multi-dimensional ‘I’ that sees in infinite directions in the immanent
Now. Each of us is one of these perspectives of the whole. Between these
poles of reality, the unified consciousness of the immanent Now and its
infinite space-time perspectives, lie the seemingly isolated, endless
lives we each lead in our infinite multitude.
Gods of Platonia is a primer on the simplest of
levels, not of how it all works, because we have only a glimmer of
understanding with which to work, but how the world as we have viewed it
cannot work, how our sensory perspective of reality, which serves the
animals well, fails humanity and threatens it very existence.
