• 11aug9 • emergent views of a perceptual node
Individuating perception is emergent within inflationary decoherence. Perception includes an infrastructure that may be viewed “after the fact.” This decohering infrastructure implicitly delineates its own laws as it proceeds through nucleation, aggregation, biogenesis and evolution of all-that-is, including human perceptual nodes. This is just a way of talking, of course, as perception is perpetually present. All this, with its intricate history, is emergent solely now.
From the ever-present perspective of a localizing perceptual node, extension and duration pose a puzzle; as individuating perception is synchronous with its ubiquitously propagating spacetime environment.
The fact is the entire ensemble of personal reality decoheres instantaneously now, and is seen from the local perspective to have all the properties established by careful observation. Such fractal telescoping within present moment awareness is unbounded; correlating with a locally dense and exponentially growing macrosphere.
This suggests that the large scale environment may appear essentially the same, regardless of locale. The same cannot be said for the immediate environment, of course, which may range from outside to inside, and from ocean to desert to jungle to megalopolis.
• 11aug9 • iterating singularity
The universe of present perception
is the emergent view
of an iterating perceptual singularity —
a multidimensional fractal
forever receding into nothingness.
• 11aug9 • causal valence
Probabilities discernable in nature are effective — i.e., they carry a positive causal sign. Their observed progression animates evolution.
Individuating perception — the agency of discernment — is receptive, and carries a negative causal sign. This means that it emerges within boundlessly inflating probabilities, as butterflies flutter in gardens, and hands may be fitted with gloves.
The reality of the individual perspective reflects decoherence engaged by interaction between probability and perception. Emergent perception is the refining agent of local decoherence.
• 13aug9 •
The evolution of individuating perceivers works hand in glove with the emergence of collective perception. They’re simply two perspectives on the same phenomenon. Emergent perception refers to instantaneous decoherence within boundlessly inflating probabilities. All the objects of perception, including itself and its evolution, are present moment discernments within ubiquitous decoherence. Thus perception may be regarded as recoherence of an intelligible universe.
• 13aug9 •
Decohering probabilities condense as a filigree of Planck scale loops evoking perception amidst extension and duration.
• 13aug9 •
High energy physics glimpses the processes underlying emergent decoherence. In characterizing them, it observes that decoherence is everywhere a condensation of indeterminate probabilities into specific form.
• 14aug9 •
Geckos deftly scurry across ceiling surfaces that are as smooth as a mirror. They do this by exploiting weak electrostatic attractions between adjacent atoms that arise from fluctuations in the positions of their electrons. When engaged over the relatively large area of a gecko’s toes, such forces are sufficient to support the animal’s weight.
Each of a gecko’s toes is covered with tiny micrometer “setae,” which branch off into even smaller “spatulae,” that are thinner than the wavelength of visible light. Geckos are able to turn these atomic level interactions on and off to cope with varying inclines. Consequently on a smooth surface geckos may slip and slide when right-side-up, yet have perfect traction when suspended upside down.
According to researchers Russell and Higham, “The loading of the setae under tension is accomplished by the muscular system, and that this, in turn, is activated by reflex pathways that depend upon feedback from environmental cues, such as body orientation.”
• 15aug9 •
Once the notion of spacetime has been contextualized within instantaneous coherence/decoherence/recoherence, many seemingly intractable problems related to sequentiality are naturally resolved. It’s not that there is no sequentiality. Rather perception interprets ubiquitous simultaneous decoherence as endless sequences of temporal events. Correlations observed among these events evoke impressions of causality, agency and free will.
The foundational organizing principles of universal remembrance and individuating recollection sustain the vision of a seamless continuum extending through space and enduring over time.
Some contemporary theorists propose that the universe of observation is mediated by a boundlessly expanding array of Planck scale loops. It seems fitting that continuity be mediated by irreducibly small local loops.
• 15aug9 •
Within boundlessly encoding decoherence,
fractally individuating decoding and interpretation
sustain perception of a seamless continuum
extending as space and
enduring as time.
Within this vision,
spacetime is seen to be populated
with countless self-propagating perceptual nodes.
As to which came first —
decoherence or perception,
they arise together within coherence.
• 16aug9 •
Let’s get right to the point…
The most basic issue is persistence. Without persistence there’s no recollection and nothing is remembered. There’s no learning. Absent recollection, there’s no possibility of meaning.
Persistence is localizing decipherment of inflationary decoherence. Thus does boundless individuation asymptotically approach identity with the coherence within which it emerges.
Let’s look at what happens in the absence of persistence. While one suffering final stage Alzheimer’s is obviously known to those surrounding, he or she fails to assemble similar meanings. If everyone were to instantaneously succumb to this syndrome, all notions of art, mathematics, science and history would be obliterated, and the universe of human understanding would cease to exist.
So while everything occurs only in the present moment, persistence is required for the derivation of meaning.
• 16aug9 •
Vivid recollection of a past moment may endow it with immediacy. Past events are often relived. In fact, it is this very capacity to recall that instantiates spacetime.
• 17aug9 •
Entanglement is a superposition among multiple objects, in which certain of their properties are linked until they’re localized through einselection. Entanglement represents potential decoherence. Most obvious to humans is the decoherence of entanglement effected by observation. In this case observation includes any environmental interaction that determines the state of these objects. In this way, a personal reality is sculpted.
• 17aug9 •
Experience flows. It is boundless individuation perpetually emerging within eternal decoherence. By its own definition, the present point of view — subsisting within a sea of kindred perspectives — specifies the nature of its existence.
This boundlessly complex specification autonomically manifests virtually everything about where we locals now see ourselves. Upon this innate coherence, human culture propagates a rich texture of physical, chemical, biological, psychological and metaphysical understandings. No elaboration is ever out of bounds, as fractal existence accommodates what-is. This, of course, admits of chaos. But even there we’re not lost, as patterns are reemergent within chaos.
What we’re about here is casting a plausible metaphysical perspective upon observed physical phenomena. Nothing known is out of bounds and all beliefs are subject to strip search. Intent at once respects all-that-is and single-point-of-origin. That’s who’s in this particular venue.
An experience of continual observation composes an enthralling fractal spacetime projection. Experience is emergent within inflationary decoherence as boundlessly distributing perceptual nodes. Collectively they construct a compound eye of perception projecting a universal environment.
• 18aug9 •
“Probably the most striking characteristic of biological systems is that they are error correcting systems — a dead animal starts decomposing in a matter of hours so it must be that while living there are continuous error correction processes going on which maintain the body. So once we realize that error correction takes place in any living organism, whether or not it is enough to stabilize entangled states becomes a matter of scale not one of principle.”
• 19aug9 •
PhysOrg article on Tim Palmer’s newly hypothesized physical law: “a successful quantum theory of gravity requires some geometric generalization of quantum theory…. [In his] quest for a realistic geometric quantum theory, Palmer has applied geometric thinking inspired by…dynamical systems theory to propose [a] new law, called the Invariant Set Postulate, described in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society A.”
“The Invariant Set Postulate is proposed as a new geometric framework for understanding the basic foundations of quantum physics. Crucially, the framework allows a differentiation between states of physical reality and physical ‘unreality.’”
“The theory suggests the existence of a state space (the set of all possible states of the universe), within which a smaller (fractal) subset of state space is embedded. This subset is dynamically invariant in the sense that states which belong on this subset will always belong to it, and have always belonged to it. States of physical reality are those, and only those, which belong to this invariant subset of state space; all other points in state space are considered ‘unreal.’ Such points of unreality might correspond to states of the universe in which counterfactual measurements are performed in order to answer questions such as “what would the spin of the electron have been, had my measuring apparatus been oriented this way, instead of that way?” Because of the Invariant Set Postulate, such questions have no definite answer, consistent with the earlier and rather mysterious notion of ‘complementarity’ introduced by Niels Bohr.”
“In quantum theory, states associated with these points of unreality can only be described by abstract mathematical expressions which have the algebraic form of probability but without any underlying sample space. It is this which gives quantum theory its rather abstract mathematical form.
“As well as being able to provide an understanding of the notion of complementarity, the two-fold ontological nature of state space can also be used to explain one of the long-standing mysteries of quantum theory: superpositions. According to the Invariant Set Postulate, the reason that Schrodinger’s cat seems to be both alive and dead simultaneously is not because it is, in reality, in two states at once, but rather because quantum mechanics is ignorant of the intricate structure of the invariant set which determines the notion of reality. Whichever point (alive or dead) lies on the invariant set, that one is real. The notion of quantum coherence, which is reflected in the concept of superposition, is, rather, carried by the self-similar geometry of the invariant set.
“With superposition seemingly resolved from the perspective of the Invariant Set Postulate, other aspects of quantum mechanics can also be explained. For instance, if states are not in superpositions, then making a measurement on the quantum system does not “collapse the state” of the system. By contrast, in Palmer’s framework, a measurement merely describes a specific quasi-stationary aspect of the geometry of the invariant set, which in turn also informs us humans about the invariant set.
“The Invariant Set Postulate appears to reconcile Einstein’s view that quantum mechanics is incomplete, with the Copenhagen interpretation that the observer plays a vital role in defining the very concept of reality. Hence, consistent with Einstein’s view, quantum theory is incomplete since it is blind to the intricate structure of the invariant set. Yet, consistent with the Copenhagen interpretation, the invariant set is in part characterized by the experiments that humans perform on it, which is to say that experimenters do indeed play a key role in defining states of physical reality.
“Yet another quantum mechanical concept that the Invariant Set Postulate may resolve is wave-particle duality. In the two-slit experiment, a world where particles travel to areas of destructive interference simply does not lie on the invariant set, and therefore does not correspond to a state of physical reality.
“Among the remaining mysteries of quantum mechanics that the Invariant Set Postulate might help explain is the role of gravity in quantum physics. As Palmer notes, gravity has sometimes been considered as an objective mechanism for the collapse of a superposed state. However, since the Invariant Set Postulate does not require superposed states, it does not require a collapse mechanism. Rather, Palmer suggests that gravity plays a key role in defining the state space geometry of the invariant set. This idea fits with Einstein’s view that gravity is a manifestation of geometry. As such, Palmer suggests, unifying the concepts of non-Euclidean causal space-time geometry and the fractal atemporal geometry of state space could lead to the long-sought theory of “quantum gravity.” Such a theory would be very different from previous approaches, which attempt to quantize gravity within the framework of standard quantum theory.”
• 19aug9-1dec10 •
Coherent potential boundlessly individuates. The totality of such localizations includes myriad intertwining, overlapping and enveloping state spaces. Potentiality inflates as individuating physical laws, baryogenesis, nucleation, aggregation, biogenesis, and self-perception. The most fundamental of these are common among all state spaces, while the more complex grow increasingly idiosyncratic. The entirety fractally resolves coherence at ever finer resolution.
Quantum coherence — the entangled superposition implied by decoherence — is propagated by the self-similar geometry of an endlessly unfolding invariant fractal set. Invariant means any expression ever included in the set, is always included. This affords continuity of observation by individuating perceptual nodes populating the ubiquitously proliferating locales of a boundlessly inflating spacetime vacuum.
• 21aug9-1dec10 •
Explanation emerges as elaborating integument for a robustly growing body of observation.
The history of the biosphere traces the emergence of ever more complex levels of organization, ranging from inflationary baryogenesis, aggregation, nucleosynthesis and biogenesis to limitless speciation and collaboration, all culminating in executive capacity a la you and me. This evolution is reflected in the scale of interactions and their effects.
Detectable influences of particles of every ilk are exquisitely local. Yet by minutely deforming spacetime they determine the large scale structure of the universe. Similarly, the enormity of emergent organic complexity invariably shrinks to infinitesimal in local expression.
• 23aug9 •
Perception propagates
within boundlessly inflating probabilities,
as a universe of individuating attention.
The discovery that observation consolidates reality
is most profound.
Observation in this case
engages every emergence
from specification of natural laws
through nucleation and aggregation,
biogenesis and evolution
to all-that-is,
including a human perceptual node
that is doing the observing.
• 23aug9 • successful propagation
Survival of the fittest
is a way of describing
successful propagation.
Successful propagation
incorporates sensing, feeling, intuiting,
reasoning, anticipating, intending and articulating.
Thus is the ovum of universal remembrance
fertilized by the seed of circumstantial recollection.
Circumstantial recollection
of all now remembered
is featured 24/7.
• 23aug9 •
Visions and vibrations
regarded as the world
are at once encoded as multi-dimensional experience
and decoded as recollecting, reasoning, expecting
intending and articulating.
• 24aug9 • evolution versus emergence
Evolution
articulates a progression
from coherence to perception.
Emergence
articulates an expression
by perception of coherence.
The complementary principles
of evolution and emergence
reflect polar perspectives
upon observed phenomena.
• 24aug9 • too big to fail
From a cultural perspective, the realization by humans that some structures cannot be allowed to fail is a significant evolutionary step that quickens emergence.
For example, humanity would not likely withstand an asteroid impact like the one that exterminated all dinosaurs (except birds). As another example, human culture could succumb to runaway global warming. Or, the world economy, and all the wellbeing that hinges upon it, would be devastated by the collapse of major currencies or the demise of powerful financial institutions.
The evolution of these realizations prompts an avalanche of emergent recollection. ‘Past’ events interpreted in the light of ‘current’ awareness occasion ‘consequent’ remembrances composing evolution. All this, of course, occurs only in the present. Thus it illustrates the iterative nature of evolving emergence.
Quantum experiments clearly demonstrate synchronous articulation of what are customarily regarded as sequences of events. Quantum theory itself may be adequately expressed without invoking time.
• 28aug9 • phenomenalism
Wikipedia on phenomenalism: “In epistemology and the philosophy of perception, phenomenalism is the view that physical objects do not exist as things in themselves but only as perceptual phenomena or sensory stimuli (e.g. redness, hardness, softness, sweetness, etc.) situated in time and in space. In particular, phenomenalism reduces talk about physical objects in the external world to talk about bundles of sense-data.
“Phenomenalism is a radical form of empiricism and, hence, its roots as an ontological view of the nature of existence can be traced back to George Berkeley and his subjective idealism, which David Hume further elaborated.
John Stuart Mill had a theory of perception which is commonly referred to as classical phenomenalism. This differs from Berkeley’s idealism in its account of how objects continue to exist when no one is perceiving them. Berkeley claimed that an omniscient God perceived all objects and this is what kept them in existence, whereas Mill claimed that permanent possibilities of experience were sufficient for an object’s existence.”
Bishop Berkeley’s idealism is amazingly realistic in light of contemporary scientific findings. His ‘omniscient God’ is neatly replaced with recohering universal perception. This raises a question as to whether any such recoherence is possible. Obviously, the entire notion of decoherence is based upon primal coherence.
• 28aug9 • big-bang!
Coherence occasions perception—
the universal experience of fractal awareness.
Boundlessly individuating perceptual nodes
propagate universal experience.
All of local ken
is now surveyed from its own familiar perspective.
The entire montage fits together seamlessly.
• 29aug9 •
All observations are experiences. This includes statements about observations that may culminate in beliefs, convictions, speculations, hypotheses, theories and theorems. Everyday conscious observations are derived via perceptual processes of sensing, feeling, recollecting, reasoning, anticipating and articulating.
• 29aug9 •
Many perceptual nodes are observed. To writers and readers, the most familiar are we humans, hosting myriad points of view upon what is collectively regarded as our universe. Each such node casts its own moorings in organically mediated functions of recollection, interpretation, articulation and remembrance.
Science explores both the process of perception and its objects. The process of perception retrieves and integrates data, and projects it as what is commonly regarded as the purview of the physical and biological sciences, articulated as mathematics.
• 30aug9 •
From NewScientist article: “Many cosmologists think our standard picture of how the universe came to be is woefully incomplete or even plain wrong, and they have been dreaming up a host of strange alternatives to explain how we got here. For the first time, they are trying to pin down the initial conditions of the big bang. In particular, they want to solve the long-standing mystery of how the universe could have begun in such a well-ordered state, as fundamental physics implies, when it seems utter chaos should have reigned….
“Not that modeling the origin of the universe is anything new. The conventional approach is to take the laws of physics and extrapolate backwards from the present. From observations dating back to the 1920s, we can see that galaxies are moving farther and farther apart: the universe is expanding. By reversing that expansion, researchers concluded that 13.7 billion years ago the universe was in a very small, dense and hot state. The big bang theory, first proposed in 1927 by Georges Lemaître, was bolstered in 1964 by the discovery of the cosmic microwave background – the radiation filling the universe that is thought to be a relic of the big bang – and has ruled ever since.
“In 1981, a major addition was made to the big bang picture. Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and others proposed that the expansion of the early universe happened much faster than originally thought. This theory, called cosmic inflation, explained the surprising uniformity of the visible universe by saying that it grew exponentially from a patch that was extremely tiny to start with (New Scientist, 3 March, p 33). Though highly successful in this regard, inflation still doesn’t explain the initial conditions of the universe.
“That’s because inflation would have taken place between 10-35 and 10-32 seconds after the big bang. Going back further in time, we hit a brick wall because the two pillars of modern physics – quantum field theory and general relativity – break down. Physicists don’t have a complete recipe with which to concoct the behaviour of matter, energy and space-time under such extreme conditions, and it’s hard to blame them.
“To get around this, some are basing their ideas around an age-old tenet. The second law of thermodynamics dictates that the entropy of the universe – a measure of its disorder – increases with time. So the universe began in its most orderly state and has been getting messier ever since. The problem is, it would have been more likely to be chaotic and disordered, so what was this initial state? ‘It’s tremendously important that any respectable model of the early universe explains why entropy is so low near the big bang,’ says Sean Carroll, a cosmologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
“Enter the first of the new models. The entropy question has led Thomas Banks of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Willy Fischler of the University of Texas at Austin to conclude that the universe in its earliest moments – when it was less than 10-35 seconds old – was a sea of black holes. They call this scenario “holographic cosmology“.
“The idea is based on the holographic principle, which was proposed in 1993 by Gerard’t Hooft of Utrecht University in the Netherlands and developed by Leonard Susskind of Stanford University in California. Although it is unproven, many physicists think the holographic principle is right: all the information in a given volume of space can be represented by physical laws that exist on its surface. Entropy can be thought of as a measure of information content – the more disordered a system, the more information it takes to describe it. Cast in these terms, the holographic principle says the entropy in a given volume is limited by its surface area, and maximised in the case of a black hole.
“Now imagine turning back the clock towards the big bang. Matter and energy get packed together more densely into each shrinking region of space until we reach the entropy density limit, which corresponds to filling up these regions with a sea of microscopic black holes.
“According to Banks and Fischler, the universe began as this black hole ‘fluid’. From any vantage point, black holes would fill the entire space around, but how densely they fill it would fluctuate according to the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics. A fluctuation towards lower density would mean that in that region the black hole event horizons would not fill every last bit of volume, but would have some ordinary space between them, free of black holes and filled with radiation.
“This creates the conditions for our observable universe to come into existence. If the black holes in the region where ordinary space opens up are densely packed and moving fast, their collisions and mergers make them grow until they fill the space, pulling it back into the black hole fluid. But if the black holes are far enough apart and moving slowly, mergers won’t happen fast enough. In such a region the ordinary space filled with hot radiation would quickly expand, pushing the black holes further apart.
“About 10-35 seconds after the beginning of time, this bubble of ordinary space joins up with the conventional picture, in which inflation expands our universe to more than 1 kilometre across in a tiny fraction of a millisecond. Eventually, particles condense out of the radiation to produce the building blocks of stars, galaxies, planets and life.
“So how do Banks and Fischler explain the low entropy of the early universe? Many bubbles of ordinary space could have emerged from the black hole fluid, but to avoid collapsing back into the fluid, they need to have low entropy (www.arxiv.org/hep-th/0701146). That’s because higher entropy corresponds to faster-moving black holes that are prone to colliding and merging. If our bubble of space had begun with higher entropy, it would not have survived. ‘There wouldn’t have been a universe to live in,’ Banks says.
“Other researchers are still debating the merits of holographic cosmology. ‘It’s a very interesting speculation that is neither obviously true nor obviously false. Time will tell,’ says Susskind. After all, he says, ‘there is an enormous gulf separating the earliest origin from observational cosmology.’”
The abyss between
undifferentiated non-dimensional coherence
and localizing multidimensional self-comprehension
reflects the profound automaticity
of boundlessly individuating organic perception.
All specific remembrance and recollection
derives from what may be regarded as the primal self
of pristine coherence.
In the domain of present reading and writing organisms,
this captivating chimera assumes a human form,
whose imminent perdition is even now seduced by die Lorelei —
seductive sirens masking shoals of desire and fear.
Any such biases
holographically sculpt fractal reality
within pure coherence.
“The model raises the controversial issue of whether time began at the big bang. “There’s no necessity in the rules of quantum mechanics for time to extend out to the infinite past, or for that matter, the infinite future,” Banks says. An origin of time has its own problems, though. “If there were no beginning, I would sleep better at night. I think it would be more elegant,” says Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at MIT. A beginning of time raises the question of “why certain things come into existence and others don’t”.”
There’s no beginning,
as time asymptotically recedes
into boundlessly propagating black holes of understanding.
Thus does organically evolving perception
forever host
emergent experience.
“As for the beginning of time, there is no way to tell whether the cycling has been going on forever. ‘We don’t know yet how to make that into a scientifically decidable question,’ Steinhardt says. The problem is that information about previous cycles tends to get scrambled. Even if the cycling had a beginning, there may be no way to detect it. Nevertheless Steinhardt remains optimistic. ‘We addressed a lot of the show-stopper problems that might have stopped people from thinking about cyclic models,’ he says. ‘That’s really opened the door for people to come up with other imaginative ideas that take us back to the big bang and beyond.’”
Ascent to source spirals endlessly inward.
• 31aug9 • argument for non-dimensional coherence
Universal expansion
implies singular source.
Ubiquitous decoherence
implies original coherence.
Any and all notions
evidence emergent perception.
So the infinite potential of singular coherence
inflates as limitless possibilities
in which boundlessly individuating perception emerges
• 31aug9 •
Timeless awareness is the prime requirement for comprehending the genesis of what-is. Even the notion of genesis tends to evoke temporality. But the genesis of the universe is here now complete from back to front; beginning to present.
Two views must be synchronously held to make sense of it. The first is awareness of the entirety as eternally now. The second is recollection indexed in spacetime — a point of view presently beholding emergent totality, including itself and its learning.
Decoherence induced by present perception is unavoidable.
• 1sep9 • steady-banging
Big-bang origin is presently perceived as ancient source. In fact, there’s no perceiving other than in the ubiquitous and eternal present, where myriad fractal perspectives spontaneously emerge within the boundless potential of coherent awareness.
Individual consciousness is a coherent ray of awareness casting about within an endless expanse of such rays. All possibilities exist as perspectives upon the multidimensional hologram conjured by their collective interference patterns. Boundlessly propagating organic points of view emerge within this potential.
• 1sep9 • entropy
From NewScientist article: “Our sense of time is captured by the second law of thermodynamics, which says that any closed system – from particles in an isolated box to the entire universe – can only become more disordered. The measure of this disorder, known as entropy, can only increase.
“In the world of large-scale objects, increasing entropy is associated with the flow of heat, which always goes from a hot object to a colder one. Change in entropy can also be described as a flow of information: the higher the entropy of a system, the less information is contained in it. This has consequences in the quantum world: the particles in a box with low entropy are not as entangled with one another as particles in a box with high entropy.”
Quantum processes exhibit backward causality, and time is an artifact in quantum theory. Emergent perception cogently indexes its local percepts with spacetime — extension and sequentiality.
• 2sep9 •
The observed entropy that renders macroscopic phenomena irreversible empowers common sense reasoning, thereby investing classical observations with meaning. In the world of common experience, broken eggs — like humpty dumpty — are never put back together again. This is understood as the unidirectionality of time. Yet nothing in quantum theory prevents such occurrences. In fact, time itself is a convenient artifact in quantum theory. Indeed, while quantum observations don’t reverse reality, they do instantiate entire histories. A presently remembered past is now recollected.
And this is the crux of the matter. Quantum observations reveal the flatness of phenomena by exposing their indeterminacy in the absence of observation. Flatness here refers to the fact that history is forever writ in the present.
Many people are sometimes aware of their dreaming, and can readily observe dreaming interactions with unfamiliar characters and places. Many of these appear with complex histories that are immediately known to the dreamer.
• 3sep9 •
Entropy is progressive decoherence cascading from coherence.
• 4sep9 •
Time is asynchronous in dreaming. While you can indeed dream that you’re late for something, time in the dream is decoupled from events in the waking world. You can move forward and backward within the sequence of dreaming events, even rewriting history. Dreaming is a far more potent state as it’s not physically constrained. It could be argued that organic consciousness evolves to maintain the dreamer, as virtually every organism, including Mother Earth, is periodically dormant.
It’s well established that dreaming on a daily basis is essential. Without dreaming, even many hours of sleep are unable to refresh and reinvigorate. After just one day of dreaming deprivation, performance of ordinary tasks is noticeably impaired. After four days, mentality becomes delusional — incapable of distinguishing between fading consensus reality and ever more insistent dreams.
While there are no experiments where subjects are deprived of waking, there are plenty of short and long term absences of consciousness, usually associated with brain trauma. Interestingly, people have fully regained consciousness and physical functioning after a decade in a coma. So there appears not to be a similar penalty for deprivation of waking consciousness.
Still there’s an absence of recollection owing to a failure to participate in collective consciousness throughout the affliction. Autonomic remembrance has been suspended. Yet caregivers in the environment are able to recall their waking moments with the subject during this period.
So in the consensus world, a comatose organism doesn’t go out of existence any more than a sleeping person does. This suggests that environmental maintenance is independent of local consciousness. The world goes on, so to speak.
It’s not that I am because I think I am, but that I know I am whenever I happen to think about it. Or, more accurately, knowing, including an image of a knower, spontaneously emerges.
As crucial as conscious attention is to an operational self image, it’s a minuscule slice of the perception that spawns it. Virtually all the underlying perceptual processes are entirely autonomic, including sensing, feeling, recollecting, reasoning, anticipating, articulating and remembering. Collectively they manipulate the iris of attention that determines the present scope of consciousness.
Any local influence within this autonomic feedback loop is articulated as intent; sometimes referred to as an act of will. Like everything else, intent is remembered and recollected. That part of it, including the countless trillions of events that now instantiate the organism, is clearly autonomic. The only question is whether the formulation of intent itself is autonomous or autonomic.
Surely the instinct to evade an onrushing bus is autonomic, as is breathing, circulation, digestion and cell growth. Myriad conditioned responses are also autonomic. At the moment of execution, the most skillful athletes and artists perform without conscious interference. However, countless hours of highly focused attention are needed to prepare them for their spontaneous performance.
The notion of conditioning, based in ongoing processes of remembrance and recollection, suggests the operation of intent.
• 5sep9 • time is emergent
Time is emergent within present perception, which in turn is emergent within a biosphere, a baryonic universe and boundlessly inflating possibilities.
• 5sep9 •
We humans are articulations of trillions of organisms, among them the ubiquitous symbiotic mitochondria that power all cellular processes. Emergent consciousness is clearly an aggregate production of individuating organic evolution within primordial inflation.
Conditions favorable to emergent perception inevitably evolve within the boundlessly inflating potential of eternal coherence. Particle physicists — themselves perceptual nodes — examine the mechanics of this emergence. The quantum substrate is thought to be a net zero fractal foam with each infinitesimal Planck point capable of spontaneously erupting into an entire universe. These are observations of now emergent perceivers, each of whom is a singular facet in the compound eye of universal perception.
In an eternal explosion of awareness, coherence recognizes itself in boundlessly expanding possibilities. Within that limitless potential forever emerges a vast sea of participant perceivers.
All this takes place now, even as present moment perception fractally ruminates upon its own organic evolution.
• 6sep9 •
Lee Smolin: “The separation of scientific explanation into law and initial conditions leads to one of the most universal and powerful notions in physics — the notion of configuration space. This is the space of all possible configurations, or states, of the system. In classical and quantum physics we assume that this space exists a priori and outside of time, and that it can be studied independently of the laws of motion. These laws then specify the rules for how the point that describes the initial conditions in configuration space evolves in time. We call this the Newtonian schema for explanation.
“The Newtonian schema is the basis for the claim that time is not fundamental in cosmology. From this point of view, time is seen merely as a parameter on a trajectory in configuration space, and not as an intrinsic part of the physical law. The present moment, the time we experience, has no place in this description. The philosopher who does not believe in the flow of time points to the trajectory in the configuration space and says that the only thing that is real is that the whole history of the universe exists timelessly — what in general relativity is called the ‘block universe’ picture. Many physicists and philosophers have fallen for the temptation of believing in the ‘block universe’ picture. To them, our experience of the flow of time is just an illusion.”
It seems odd to interpret the Newtonian schema as suggesting that “the present moment…has no place in [configuration space],” as that’s the sole point under observation in deriving a description of initial conditions.
As for the ‘block universe,’ the notion that ‘the whole history of the universe exists timelessly’ is necessarily correct, as all observations occur only in present moment experience. The problem is that interpreting this as a physical block simply replaces the illusion of time with an equally illusory four-dimensional configuration space. Recollecting a history associated with an emergent universe of observations occurs in the present moment, as does sensing it, interpreting it, responding to it, and remembering the whole business. This entire perceptual process is immediate, spontaneous and ubiquitous. The content of consciousness features the present state of progressive decoherence. There’s no need to imagine a concrete history when the entirety manifests only now. What’s needed are the myriad points of view that represent every branching within decohering possibilities. All this timelessly emerges in present perception as the boundlessly faceted compound eye of coherent awareness.
Time is an interpretive overlay of localizing perception.
• 7sep9 •
Perception of a world
seen from myriad points of view
evokes a polar universe,
resonating with familiar melodies,
resounding with moving rhythms.
At one pole
is the boundless potential
of original coherence.
At the other pole
is an emergent reflection
mediated by a boundlessly expanding universe
of individuating perceptual nodes.
Between these two poles
quantum probabilities condense and aggregate
culminating in conscious organisms
sustaining ever more sophisticated views
of whatever they may descry.
The entire ensemble
instantaneously decoheres
in present perception.
• 6sep9 •
The question of time boils down to this: Does decoherence throb with periodicity? If it’s chaotically random, then time can be nothing but a meaningless overlay.
The infinity of possibilities imminent within coherence is chaotic in that it’s completely indeterminate and non-dimensional. Yet profound order is emergent within the universe of common perception.
In timeless experience, no process or product may be regarded as preceding or following another. Sequentiality is not applicable, as it’s flatly articulated in present moment decoherence.
Lacking nothing, the infinite potential imminent within coherence is flawlessly reflected in the universal consciousness of boundlessly individuating perception. Perception here refers to the compound perspective of every branching node of decoherence.
The inevitable question is: Can these nodes — collectively instantiating inflation, nucleation, aggregation, biogenesis and consciousness — influence the very forces that give rise to them?
As sequentiality is irrelevant, the entire affair is a magnificent symphony instantly composed, conducted, performed and witnessed by fractal perception. The substrate of ubiquitous quantum probabilities easily accommodates boundlessly individuating perception. To emergent subjects and objects of perception, time is an afterthought, albeit a most powerful and pervasive one.
The profound order manifest in the universe of common observation is a product of evolution. Indeed there are countless resonances among its members, all amenable to theoretical formulations.
So, in answer to the original question, periodicity is a manifest certainty perhaps best exemplified in planetary motion. Thus time is assured by the capacity to at once remember and recollect an excruciatingly detailed multi-dimensional history bearing all the familiar patterns now emergent within the totality of localizing perception.
• 7sep9 •
Localized knowledge cannot comprehend all lobes of existence. A lifetime of diligent study in any of thousands of scientific subspecialties cannot hope to overtake their ongoing branching growth. And that refers only to a minuscule cone of exponentially expanding information. Thus even deftest learning of great longevity leads only to a widening gap of ignorance.
• 7sep9 • A symphony of recognition
Recognition,
resonating among the countless perspectives
of decoherence,
extracts from boundless inflation
a resounding symphony of perception.