So far, I’ve considered the following ideas:
Consciousness is a symptom/effusion of the information exchanged between the brain’s hemispheres, the peripheral nervous system, and their interchange with all things other.
Terms like consciousness and subconsciousness were useful concepts to establish models of understanding of the mind. However, they are simply no longer tenable for our successful evolution as the model ultimately fails to represent experience as described.
Consciousness operates primarily via metaphorical spaces and analogies (language-driven symbolism).
Much of that was Jaynes’ influence on my early development. It’s human-centric.
Now, I’ll turn to more abstract concepts—time, space, and entanglement.
It’s a funny thing, the term “center of the universe”. In my case, I’ve heard it more than I wish to recall as it’s a term that’s usually used to degrade someone (e.g. You think you’re the center of the universe?). But I have to say, my response to the question is often, a resounding “YES”. Because, where IS the center of the universe if not in the very perception of the individual?
I experience the universe as a process of complexification and motion. The universe presents itself to me as an engine of complexity; and the rate of this complexification seems to be increasing.
The astronomers of the world will tell you (thanks to the work of Edwin Hubble) that we have observed distant galaxies as they move away from our own and having recorded that motion for many years. We have conclusive evidence that the rate of galaxies moving away from us… is accelerating. This, in turn, presents the notion that our OWN galaxy, the Milky Way, is not only in motion, but that it’s ALSO moving toward something at an ever-increasing rate.
These optic observations mean that there is a high likelihood that some expansion is taking place in the immediate environments of those accelerating galaxies because we aren’t able to observe any DIRECT force that may be effecting them. I think of it like those moving walkways in some airports. You’re walking along at a normal pace. Then, you take one step onto the walkway and, even though you’re moving at your normal pace, suddenly, you are moving along faster in relation to things behind you and near you…
But, where are we headed toward? Or what?
What I was taught at university was that after the inception of the universe, a.k.a. Big Bang, plasma was produced. I heard that word for so long but never understood what it was. I could even “picture it” in my mind but could not explain much. It’s not just gas because you can manipulate it with magnets. It’s not just energy. It’s like a free-floating soup of atomic particles that have yet to be formed into atomic structures. And it’s 99% of all existence.
Plasma gives off it’s own magnetic field. It’s not something that is very stable, either. But as the plasma reacts after inception, it cools down and the soup of particles start to fall into rings of orbit around other types of atomic particles and we start to get hydrogen. That, leads to stars, then, galaxies, then quasars, to planets, to water, to single-celled organisms, viruses, multicellular life, then sponges, to cephalopods, to vertebrates, fungi, plants, and finally to mammals (that’s us)!
If you look at those developmental periods, you’ll note that each stage takes less time to evolve. The initial plasma state lasted about just under a billion Earth years. But the ensuing cooling stage that allowed for things like water to form took about 14 million Earth years.
Another instance may be the rate of human innovation. Take, for example, European Renaissance: in the western world, it’s considered our rebirth from the dark ages; the very basis of our civilization. It’s generally considered to have lasted a 400-year period. But there were other renaissances before and after it.
Golden Age of Greece & Rome ( 6th century BCE to 1st century CE = 800 years)
Islamic/Medieval Golden Age (8th century CE to 14th century CE = 600 years)
European Renaissance (14th century CE to 17th century CE = 400 years)
Industrial Age (1760 CE to 1950 = 190 years)
American Hippie movement (1960 - 1970 = 20 years)
800 to 600 to 400 to 190 to 20…
I know I’m being selective here. It’s not a steady acceleration. There was the Black Plague and the decline of Byzantium; there was the burning of the Library of Alexandria by Julius Caesar and World War II. There are regressions. But all in all, the evidence we have, coupled by personal observations justifies the claim that we are complexifying; moving faster or being shuffled into some pathway.
Spurts in human innovation and reformation are taking less time to evolve, mature, and devolve. The position is held by many scholars, much better known than yours truly. Buckminister Fuller discussed ephemeralization—more and more with less and less until eventually, you can do everything with nothing. Ray Kurzweil wrote about the law of accelerating returns in the late 90s. We all heard of Moore’s Law—the number of transistors on a microchip double every two years or so and cost 50% less.
Here’s a MUCH more precise example (and one closer to my heart as I worked in technology for a few years). Supercomputing power is measured in flops (floating point operations). Just think of them as the smallest action a digital/electronic processor takes. Humans operate at about a quintillion flops (1,000,000,000,000,000,000 flops). In the early 90s, the CM-5 Supercomputer already popped off at more than a billion flops. In the late 90s, the ASCI Red Supercomputer worked at a trillion flops. At that rate, supercomputers will reach quintillion flops in about ten years.
Things are getting faster.
We are moving at unimaginable speeds toward something…or are we being pulled? Like a metal ball rolling along the rim of a funnel in a tightening gyre.
The distinction is important, in my eye. Pulled implies a destination. After all, whatever is pulling us must be anchored in something/somewhere (or must it?). For example, if you were tied to a rope and I was pulling you by the rope from about 10 miles away, you wouldn’t know that you are moving toward me. You’d simply observe that you are moving. But if I was just pushing you from behind, you could be headed ANYWHERE. Sure, I may have a destination in mind. But you wouldn’t have any way to deduce that because the only piece of information you’d have is that there is a force immediately behind you pushing you, that your motion is accelerating, but there is not a path ahead. The path is selected by the force behind you.
But if the force was PULLING you, then a definite future path is predictable.
In the 1970s, after the initial mapping of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), astrophysicist calculated that galaxies are being pulled toward something. They called it the Great Attractor. It was considered to be a gigantic gravitational anomaly because it is pulling galaxies toward it at about 600 miles per hour (still, by the way). In the early aughts, we were finally able to view the Great Attractor area, only to discover that there was an even larger attractor behind it—the Shapley Attractor.
Just another example of cosmic motion.
All time is happening all the time
Backward causation, or retrocausality as it’s referred to in quantum mechanics, has been theorized since the 1960s (search: Feinberg tachyon). Going back to 1949m Professor Richard Feynman of MIT theorized the positron—an electron moving backward in time. David Hume warned us in his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding that we are only assuming the relationship between cause and effect based on probabilities alone (i.e. we shouldn’t justify what we believe about the future solely on our past experience).
Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance” quote is precisely about this idea. He didn’t like the findings from the quantum mechanics world that proved objects separated by space (and thereby, time) were somehow mysteriously connected (thus, the pejorative use of “spooky”). But that’s what the work of Erwin Schrödinger and Nathan Rosen and Boris Podolsky was pointing to.
Their proofs demonstrate that particles were magically able to communicate with each other—INSTANTLY. It was being referred to as entanglement and this, friends, became (and still is) the prime differentiator of classical physics and quantum physics. As simple as possible, entanglement is a property of the quantum world (the world of the very small). Imagine a particle—like a molecule or atom. We’ll call this particle a parent particle. Over time, the energy that holds the parent particle together diminishes. This is referred to as the decay of the particle. As the particle decays, it breaks into smaller particles. Let’s call those its daughters.
So the daddy particle gets weaker and weaker and decays into two weaker daughter particles. Now daughter one, let’s name her Bessy, moves to Hawaii to ride motorcycles along the beach all day and all night. The other daughter, Mavis, moves to Miami to the same thing. They LOVE their motorcycles.
Now, one day, Mavis is riding her Suzuki motorcycle down the highway and at the same time, Bessy is riding her Suzuki motorcycle in Hawaii. Mavis’ bike suddenly breaks down so Mavis has to switch to a Honda motorcycle.
But then somehow, out of the blue, when Bessy looks down, she sees that HER bike has been turned into a Honda too!! That’s entanglement. It’s as if no matter what comes between Bessy and Mavis, they will ALWAYS be riding the same bike.
Yeah. That’s modern physics. That’s science. Like real, university research type science. Not fringy, New Age-y science. The cutting friggin’ edge. And it’s basically, weirder than Tolkein’s world of magic.
So what are we saying?
Tempus fugit. Time flies. I’d just add “ad finem” (to an end).
The generally reliable ideas of cause and effect, past and future, big and small, etc…they’re starting to break down…
Lastly, I recommend a fascinating text entitled Faster by one of my favored authors, James Gleick. He does a witty and disturbingly well-researched job at shining the light on our epoch of the nanosecond…