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Jean Sweep for Quanta Magazine
#NEW PHILOSOPHY
GRAVITY SUCKS
by Kenneth Harper Finton ©2017
Some years back, I believed that people grew old and died because they became ill and their bodies deteriorated. As I age myself, I wonder if that is so. Could it be that people pass on because the world about them changes so much that they no longer feel attached to it? Can a person evolve to the point where withdrawing from the world seems the best logical choice? Does this changing of the world about us affect our consciousness and then our health? Does life culminate in the desire to no longer desire? Is death the natural end because we lose the desire and will to persist? Or is the will to persist yanked from us despite our rage against the darkness of the unknown night?
What is true for one might not be true for another. The sheer variety of humanity and the vast complexity of nature creates a different world for each entity that lives within it.
Inequality is everywhere because inequality is essential for movement. Inequality is gravity. It is that weak force that binds things together, feet to the earth and planets to the stars, friends to friends.
Each individual life is a cosmos unto itself.
As a young man, I easily saw the truth in the unity of all being but saw also that the world is a game of one-upsmanship. People compete to produce winners and losers. The world around us is stratified, socially and economically.
Social inequality is a constant, but nature demands a balance for stability. The highs must not be too high and the lows must not be too low. When things are too far out of balance, they explode and gravity is overcome.
Gravity is the result of inequality. When things are equal, there is no push nor pull.
Each side of the equation is different, but the equality creates the balance.
For most of us living on Earth, there is nothing as fine as the era in time in which we now live. How could this not be so, when this time is all we have? Are we not practical? We cannot live in another era.
Yet, eras change, and change brings new actors to the stage, new athletes to the field. Soon enough, we barely know the rules of the game because it has changed so much.
We spend our lives speaking our lines and doing our work. We seek what makes us feel good—through pleasures, work, pastimes, and relationships. It becomes the driving factor that motivates and moves us.
It is movement that produces the gravity that keeps us centered enough to survive. We—like our Earth, our Sun, and our Galaxy—must evolve and revolve as we orbit around something much bigger than us. Heinlein wrote: “Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.” Love is one of the gravitational anchors that hold us in place.
Health does get worse with time and wear. Physical strength does deteriorate. Passion itself takes a tumble with age. We know this is so. Yet, our fast-changing world can become so unfamiliar that we can easily become those Strangers in a Strange Land that we heard or read about years ago.
Heinlein’s character said: “Thinking doesn’t pay. It just makes you discontented with what you see around you.” Time passes and consciousness is overloaded with evaluations and judgments made by past choices. It becomes harder to distinguish the winner from the loser when you know each all too well. We can become confused or dismayed about the directions our society and nations are going.
“Thou art god, I am god. All that groks is god,” Heinlein wrote.
Grok may be the only English word that is derived from a fictional Martian language. “Grok” was introduced in Robert A. Heinlein’s 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. It means to understand fully and intuitively with empathy or intuition. It is hard to grow old and not see the reality of these observations. “Random chance is not a sufficient explanation of the Universe—in fact, random chance is not sufficient to explain random chance; the pot cannot hold itself.”
Everything living has a blind instinct to survive built into its system.
“The only religious opinion I feel sure of is this: self-awareness is not just a bunch of amino acids bumping together.” ― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
FATHER TIME AND ME
©2017 Kenneth Harper Finton
Born squawking with a curious furrow in my brow, I had no choice in the matter of my birth. Later, I was to learn I had been born into a large country and into an even larger universe that I am still learning to comprehend.
When I was eight I had an abdominal operation and was placed under either. I still remember the vision I had under the influence of the drug. I was running from Father Time who chased me with thunderbolts shooting from his fingertips as he yelled, “Stop, stop! You are ahead of time. Stop!”
It was a powerful vision that is vivid to this day.
How strange this world is to the young: I was born to be myself and not someone else. This is odd enough but it was even odder to come to conception here in this time instead of somewhere else in another time. Everything was such a mystery. I truly wanted to solve the mystery. I felt this could well be my calling.
It did not take long to discover this fact: everyone is stuck in themselves, the same as I am. Everyone has their own little universe where they are the king or the queen.
Sometimes while I was in a playful mood, I asked myself, “If you could be somebody else, who would that be?”
When I ran through the history of people I have met or known, I could not choose to be any of them. There was no one I might want to be more than myself, male or female. It’s inconceivable I could be someone other than myself unless I was play-acting the part. Since I have to be me, I might as well make the most of the situation, I decided.
I took a while to understand why I arrived to be a player in this era. I surmised that it had to do with time and consciousness, something science cannot yet explain. It is so easy to miss this vital connection: the now is ever present, just as awareness is always present.
Is this a mere coincidence? Is the now not a measure of time?
The now is not measurable at all, but a micro fraction of an instant where the past changes into the future. The only thing solely contained in the now is our awareness. Consciousness remembers the past and imagines the future, but always does so in the now.
I came to this realization at a young age and caused myself great confusion. Did this mean the world is a mental construction?
For a while, I considered the possibility that the universe is actually a vision which comes alive in the intellect. This was a problematic idea. The mind itself is a mystery. How could the mind be only a product of flesh and blood, neural connections, when nature obviously had a mind which did not need a nervous system?
We are the centers of our worlds, yet nature has carried out its miracles for billions of years without the help of human consciousness through an unconscious process of evolutionary experiments. This has likely been the case since time began.
The colors we see are wavelengths of light. The mind learns to recognize these as different colors. About me, the people I knew had their own personal mindsets. They were different and separate from my own thoughts, though they used much of the same information I used to make their own world view. The primary difference between us is the type and quantity of the information we process both in the mind and the body.
Throughout our lives, the now remains stationary. It is not time that moves, but consciousness. Awareness is always being transformed through experiences, interactions, and observations. If time were to move, what would be the speed of time? If time flowed, what would be the volume of the flow?
No fixed universal clock can measure the flow or speed of time. Time is relative to dimensions, not to a fixed standard. With no way to measure the speed of time, no method can be devised to measure the speed of the now. The now has no speed at all, nor can it move. The rational thing to conclude is that time does not flow and the now does not move. Instead, consciousness changes.
This was a huge revelation.
-Kenneth Harper Finton
June 8, 2017
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE UNIVERSE
The hosting of awareness is something inherent in all things existent. This awareness of which I speak is the same awareness that you are using at this very moment. All awareness comes from and shares the same origin in the zero dimension. Awareness is the source of things, but awareness is not a thing. Neither is it nothing. It is what we might term the soul of the universe, not a material substance.
I am aware of the existence of a universe around me. Other things that are not my being validly exist but I can never prove it unless the world outside me and my own conscious awareness are one and the same. If the universe outside me and my being are ultimately connected and the fundamental awareness that is present in both is one and the same, then both are logically substantiated. The perceptions I use to perceive my being are the same as those used to perceive the universe.
What we call the Now, this fleeting moment that seems to move through time and space, is the very embodiment of our human personal awareness. It is always present—a universal phenomenon that can be viewed from many points of reference.
Awareness is non-material. It is not a product of a nervous system any more than it is the product of the evolution of elemental interactions. That thing which makes you aware of yourself and the world around you is not unique to you personally, but the basic property that creates the geometry and form of all things existent. Awareness has evolved an unconscious network of differentiated components that build and project an actualized world into our locally personalized world and the universe about us. The business of physical sciences is showing how this happens in a physical manner.
When we examine the material world for evidence of its history, we discover things that are both previously unknown and surprising. These things exist independently of our perception, just as the world exists independently of our perception. Why is this so if we are all of the same elemental awareness?
Each of us has our own constantly changing version of that which we are aware. It is composed of what we have been taught and what we have learned both consciously and unconsciously.
Primal awareness, the precursor of consciousness, creates the world through observation, materializing matter from a field of virtual energy, forcing time and space into existence by observing movement and slowing the speed of that movement by adding physical dimensions. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_state /react-text )
In quantum physics, a virtual state is a very short-lived, unobservable quantum state. In many quantum processes a virtual state is an intermediate state, sometimes described as “imaginary” in a multi-step process that mediates otherwise forbidden transitions. Such is the state of the universe before the actualization of dimensional realities.
The first step in actualizing an outside world is the creation of dimensional awareness. The first dimension has no time and space. It is simply a point that exists everywhere and nowhere simultaneously, as there is no time nor space nor observer with which to measure and define it.
The second dimension records the point in motion. That movement creates space, which until that movement took place, never existed. A line is composed of many clones of that individual point. All are all the same point. The prototype line also exists everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. Space is defined, but not the duration, as time does not yet exist. The positions and entanglements of electrons are possible because they exist in the second dimension, everywhere at once but not in time.
It is through the ‘observation’ of itself, perhaps by touch, that a point becomes a line. This second dimension is the birth of the finite. It creates a process of a beginning and an ending. It creates an observed, closed system.
The only way a point can be influenced by itself is to clone itself into many points, all of which are the same point, and then move in a curved line that comes back to its beginning location. This creates a closed, circular system or orbit. Only at this moment is there is an inside and an outside. What is inside is virtual energy and empty, unused fields of possibility. What is outside is the undifferentiated awareness of the zero dimension.
With the third dimension, we have the birth of the unconscious mind from the formless, undifferentiated primal awareness. This awareness unconsciously observes the two-dimensional closed circle from above and adds the dimension of height to the width and length of the two-dimensional circle, creating what appears to be a sphere by the act of awareness observing a circle from above in three dimensions.
Light itself, the photon, is one dimensional and has no experience of time and duration. Light gets to its destination as soon as it leaves. We are in the 4th dimension. This dimension gives duration and time to light and perceive is as traveling many light years to reach us, but the photon does not experience time and duration. This is relativity. By the same process, electrons, being in the primary dimensions, can be many places at once and are not fixed until they interact and are observed. This is quantum mechanics.
The fourth dimension emerges as the duration of time is observed and merges with space as duration—and spacetime is added to the primordial soup. As we live in the 3rd and 4th dimensions, our awareness seems to be locked into these dimension, though more elementary existences—such as waves and particles— exist in the many dimensions.
In 1993, the physicist Gerard ‘t Hooft put forward the holographic principle, which explains that the information about an extra dimension is visible as a curvature in a spacetime with one fewer dimension. For example, holograms are three-dimensional pictures placed on a two-dimensional surface, which gives the image a curvature when the observer moves. Similarly, in general relativity, the fourth dimension is manifested in observable three dimensions as the curvature path of a moving infinitesimal (test) particle. Hooft has speculated that the fifth dimension is really the spacetime fabric.
If this is so, then we may live in the 5th dimension as well, but we cannot perceive it with our senses, as we cannot perceive any of the larger dimensions by virtue of our physical senses.
- A perspective projection of a five-dimensional penteract
What Is Entanglement Anyway? Chris Fields
Entanglement or non-separability is the core idea of quantum theory. It is a simple idea: the universe is not a bunch of independent parts, but is rather one entity that evolves through time as one entity. That’s it. The problem is that this means there’s no such thing as causation. This is very hard to wrap your head around. Quantum theory is extraordinarily accurate, and our knowing quantum theory is why we have things like cell phones and computers. But what is quantum theory, really? Why is entanglement its primary prediction? This talk will explain what quantum theory is. It will show that quantum theory has nothing to do with tiny particles, wave-function collapse, or Schroedinger’s cat. Quantum theory is about how observers obtain information about the world. It is, in particular, about how observers who have memories and use language obtain information about the world. It is, in other words, about how you and I interact with perfectly ordinary things like tables and chairs and each other. You will leave this talk with a new understanding of quantum theory, and a new appreciation for entanglement. Chris Fields is an interdisciplinary information scientist interested in both the physics and the cognitive neuroscience underlying the human perception of objects as spatially and temporally bounded entities. His current research focuses on deriving quantum theory from classical information theory; he also works on cell-cell communication and cellular information processing, the role of the “unconscious mind” in creative problem solving, and early childhood development, particularly the etiology of autism-spectrum conditions. He and his wife, author and yoga teacher Alison Tinsley, recently published Meditation: If You’re Doing It, You’re Doing It Right, in which they explore the experience of meditation with meditators from many walks of life. Dr. Fields has also been a volunteer firefighter, a visual artist, and a travel writer. He currently divides his time between Sonoma, CA and Caunes Minervois, a village in southwestern France.
HELIOS 