Theory of Everything

http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13226725

Sounds like reality isn’t just a figure of our imaginations.  Which, I suppose, it a good thing.  But quantum mechanics is buckwild.  I mean, really buckwild.  Smashes all preconceived notions…alters our sense of reality.

And, for all intents and purposes, seems like the most viable model of reality.

Craziness.

Inside the Savant Mind: Tips for Thinking from an Extraordinary Thinker: Scientific American.

I find this article wildly interesting.  It’s an interview with an autistic savant who described how he ’sees’ numbers and letters in his mind.  It’s almost synesthetic.

It makes me wonder even more deeply about the nature of reality.  For instance, is it that these people with “mental illnesses” aren’t really ill at all?  Could they are simply “tuned to” or able to perceive different aspects of the complete reality in which we live?

What’s even more interesting to me are the patterns which seem to emerge in cognition of this “other slice of reality” when you dig a little.  For instance, people on DMT have reported vivid “hallucinations” similar to synethestics and schizophrenics and near-death experiencers.

There are those who may say its a matter of brain chemistry…which I, frankly, agree with.  However, due to the similarities of experience, one can only wonder if this change in brain chemistry allows these people to view different slices of the complete reality.

Intriguing stuff.

Here is the link to the blog posting at Discovery Magazine.

Strange things are afoot at the Tevatron particle collider at Fermilab, and the aging U.S. particle smasher is getting an unexpected moment in the spotlight while physicists wait for the repairs of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Researchers say experiments at the Tevatron have produced particles that they are unable to explain using the standard model of physics, and say it’s possible that they’ve detected a previously unknown particle. If the result does turn out to be due to some unexpected new process, it would be the most significant discovery in particle physics for decades [Physics World].

Cool.  That would definitely be interesting.  Something tells me that we’re on the cusp of a breakthrough.  Just “feels” like it.  Something that will radically change how we think about reality.  Well, at least the way that people who think will think about reality.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/30/dole.ad/index.html

CNN reports on a really shitty ad put out by Elizabeth Dole, whose North Carolina Senate seat is being threatened by Kay Hagan, in which she calls Hagan “godless”.  Kinda reminds me of McCarthy’s witch hunt in the 50s.  We were afraid of the communists so everyone he didn’t like was a communist.  Now we’re afraid of Muslims (and the end of days), so everyone we don’t like is now godless or (perhaps worse) Muslim.

In the 30-second ad, a narrator says that a leader of the Godless Americans Political Action Committee recently held a “secret fundraiser” for Hagan.

The ad then shows members of the group, which promotes rights for atheists and the separation of church and state, declaring that neither God nor Jesus exists.

“Godless Americans and Kay Hagan,” the ad continues. “She hid from cameras. Took ‘Godless’ money. What did Kay Hagan promise in return?”

The ad ends with a picture of Hagan and a voice that sounds like hers declaring, “There is no God.”

Kinda reminds me of the time when I was told by a bunch of blue haired old ladies that I was unfit to be my nephew’s Godfather because I currently didn’t attend church.  Although they were fine with the drug addicts and welfare recipients who were around the table with me…because they lied and said that they went to church every week.

So it’s ok to fuck up your life and the lives of others every day, but as long as you go to church on Sunday (or at least pretend like you do), then you are a better person than someone who leads a good life but wants to explore the meaning of life and a relationship with God on their own.

It’s funny.  It feels as if, somehow, we’re slipping into the dark ages.

The problem, to me, isn’t that people are religious.  God bless em.  Seriously.  But its so arbitrary.  I mean, Christian God is different that Allah which is different (maybe) from YHWY.  I mean, why can’t we all be right?  Why can’t we all be expressing the same longing for order and meaning?  Aren’t we all looking for the ultimate truth.

If people disagree, then how in the hell can it be “ultimate”?  Truth is truth.

I really, really hope that we move away from this era of me against you into an era of us.

I just read an interesting but, to me, profoundly flawed article in Scientific American (wow, did I actually say that). The article Never Say Die: Why We Can’t Imagine Death, by Jesse Bering talks about how it is impossible to rationalize inexistance because we can never actually experience inexistance while existant. In other words, when we die, there is nothing. And since we can never experience nothing while we are conscious then we’ve evolved these myths of an afterlife of some sort.

The problems, however, start in the first paragraph where Bering assumes

After all, the brain is like any other organ: a part of our physical body. And the mind is what the brain does—it’s more a verb than it is a noun. Why do we wonder where our mind goes when the body is dead? Shouldn’t it be obvious that the mind is dead, too?

The assertion that the mind is what the brain does is wildly assumptive. I’m not trying to break all flaky, but isn’t it possible that the brain is how the mind does rather that what the mind does? Rick Strassman’s work on DMT, Ervin Laszlo (and others) thinking around the Akashic Field, and others put forth interesting thinking around this.

The bottom line though is that it is borderline irresponsible, in my view, to put forth such an overarching assumption - and that is what it is - in a supposed scientific forum.

Realistically, there is not data to support this…so on either side of the coin, we’re taking about faith.

One might think that based on my blog, that I’m a Godless Secular Humanist. I’m actually not. I just have a broader vision of what God is and my relationship to it. I tend to believe in, based on a hell of alot of observable patterns in nature, that cycles and patterns are one of the most, if not the most, fundamental aspect of the universe. Also, I tend to believe that universe is a closed system…in that ultimately we’re talking about infinity…and doesn’t infinity include everything. Everything to me is a closed system. How can you be outside of infinity? (If someone can educate me, I seriously would like to know. Frreal.)

Thus, if we live in a closed system and the first law of thermodynamics (the law of conservation of energy) is valid…

the law of conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another or transferred from one body to another, but the total amount of energy remains constant (the same)

…then one must conclude that death is not an end per se…but a transition. Where this transition leads is clearly a matter of faith. Hopefully, one day science will allow us to understand this.

The bottom line though is that I have a problem with basic idea of an “end”. By the way, new thinking in quantum gravity asserts that the unierse did not come from stasis (i.e. the big bang)…that it seems more like an oscillation (i.e. the big bounce). That sounds like the cycling of a closed system to me.

There aren’t many things that I am sure of in life…I just don’t think that any person of reasonable intellect can be…but I feel pretty good about this idea of transition and connection in an afterlife. How?

It all goes back to the absolutely most profound experience of my life. It wasn’t at church. It wasn’t on top of a mountain. It wasn’t in a sweat lodge. It was in my bed about 5 years ago.

I was sleeping peacefully when I started dreaming. This dream was unlike anything that I’ve ever experienced. It’s funny, because I don’t remember the details…but I do remember the jist of it…and I do remember my deeply and profoundly visceral reaction to it.

Somehow, I was looking into this house where a woman seemed to be abducted and abused. She looked pretty bleak. It was her birthday. Not sure how, but I saw a cake on the table near her that had “Happy Birthday — Pet Name”. I don’t remember the pet name. And I don’t know how a captive could get a cake. But I do remember that it was what I had called this woman either before my death or in another life. I saw her look at the cake and begin to smile and cry at the same time. Somehow, at the very moment, I KNEW deeply and thoroughly that I was connected to this person. Uh, what?

Again, this isn’t logical…but I’ll be damned if it didn’t feel real.  As real as anything that I’ve ever experienced.  I’m serious.

Anyway, the point is that in that moment, for the first time ever, I felt that I had been “told something”. I had been given some sort of insight that truly leads me to believe that consciousness or life or whatever goes on. That we can be outside of or transcend time.

During this, I think that I was in sleep paralysis yet I was crazy lucid. As lucid as I had ever been. And when I was finally able to open my eyes, I was crying. Not sad crying. But crying. Frickin’ wierd. And all that I could do was reach over, kiss my wife, and hold her hand as she slept. Somehow, I knew that we were connected. More than now. That we’re all connected.

This experience is what drives my leaps of faith.

And its why I became open to ideas of consciousness and spirituality that are outside of the mainstream.

That shit was real son.

It’s funny.  I was reading an article about a really elegant model of spacetime in Scientific American on the crapper last night…I tend to do all of my reading in there…sort of my version of “a study”.  Anyway, the geometry described in the piece reminded me of “the reality” that users of DMT often see.

I find this very interesting because, as you probably know, I am very interested in the unexplored space between science and spirituality.  I believe that there is a set of fundamental ideas that unify these ways of exploring reality.  And to that end, I believe, as do many others, that altering your state of consciousness whether through meditation, entheogens, or otherwise can provide powerful insight into the true nature of reality.  It’s a simple matter of changing your perspective.  Is THAT perspective any more or less real than the basal state?

Maybe Joe Rogan isn’t as crazy as everyone makes him out to be.

I was lying in bed last night when a thought popped into my head. It wasn’t as if the whole model was thought through…but I found it interesting enough that I jumped out of bed, opened a text editor, and wrote this.

A New Model of God
God is the super-symmetrical partner to the universe. Although we can never merge (annihilation), we move asymptotically toward God through the process of enlightenment and the understanding of the ultimate truths. We, in essence, would resonating on same frequency as God. We would be, quite literally, complete. True Harmony. Bliss. Nirvana. Heaven.

The reason why this strikes me as the making of something profound is that it brings together some ideas that have been rattling around in my head for years now — string theory, the Higgs Boson, Kant-Hegel asymptotes, Akasha, reincarnation, etc.

I’ve had a problem with God as a human construction for years now. Although the Bible says that God made us in his image…I kinda think that its the other way around. What is it about us that is so special? I think that this line of thinking is extremely short-sighted and frankly, a bit vain.

I’ll be writing more on this subject as I begin to explore it a bit more.

I often become frustrated with radicals…not the kind that produce molecular damage…the kind that push their ideas on you.

Essentially, I’m frustrated with anyone who is arrogant enough to think that they are capable of truly “knowing” anything. Religious zealots, community college english professors, bad bosses, guys on infomericals…you name it. Let me tell you why I feel this way.

I believe that everything that we, as individuals, process is an approximation of what it really is. The Heisenberg Uncertainly Principle is a well-known articulation of this thought. Since different people have different frames of reference, no two perceptions can be identical.

It’s as if each of us looks through a pinhole to understand reality. None of us are right. But if we took those pinholes and combined them over the range of all consciousness, then we’d actually have a tapestry of experience that would, in essence, be that reality.

As such, someone else’s perception of the world is no more or less valid than mine. The abstraction may be universal. But the context cannot be. It’s simply impossible…at least at my level of thinking.

Ergo, how can anyone be “sure” of anything?

From my experience, the zealot is one who is so incredible ignorant to the world around them that they not only fail to understand the nature of the context in which they live…but they actual believe that somehow they are operating at some absolute level.

Reality check.

There are viruses, which by some definitions aren’t even living things, that are capable of selectively changing the behavior of higher order species as to create a more suitable environment for reproduction. Essentially, these viruses specifically change brain chemistry as to illict a response in the host…a “desired response” (not to personify the concept too much).

Maybe I’m not making the connection here as effectively as I could be.

My point is simply that in a world where viruses can “brainwash” us (a little dramatic but not untrue), how can we really think that we know much of anything. How can we be so sure that our view of the world is the only view? That our God is the only God? That my red is your red?

We can’t. And we shouldn’t. We’re all wrong and all right at the same time. It’s the abstraction that is real. The idea. Not the manifestation of it. Kinda like Plato’s forms, except without the pretense.

We should simply try to find what connects us. Not what separates us. We’re not that cool. We don’t know it all. We don’t know anything. We simply uncover what has always been there. Everyone knows the same things. We simply express them in different ways. Only the zealot truly believes that his vocabulary is the only vocabulary.

That’s why relationships and connections are so important. It allows us to understand and incorporate different vocabularies into our imperfect pursuit of understanding (in the bigger sense). This is why ideas such as chaos, network effects, and the like are so refreshing to me. They require us to zoom out of our localized existances. They allow us to everything as unimportant and essential at the same time.

Anyway…I’m starting to ramble…stream of consciousness soapboxing is starting to take over this post…so I’ll sign off.

But one last thought…if only educators could use this concept when teaching our children. If teachers could find ways to truly resonate with our children so that they could speak in the vocabulary (bigger sense) of each child, then the child would be able to begin to understand and untap the potential that he/she has. No one is stupid. They simple haven’t found the way to translate their own personal vocabulary with one that is more “mainstream”.

I’m probably making no sense now.

Oh, well…maybe I need to readjust my vocabulary.

Originally published August 18, 2003

Trust me. I don’t completely understand theoretical physics. In fact, I barely understand theoretical physics. But then again, I barely understand all of the stuff that the nuns and priests fed me for the first 18 years of my life too.

That being said…I am completely intrigued by theoretical physics. It pushes toward the metaphysical in ways that other scientific disciplines simply cannot or at least will not. Theoretical physics allows us me (the ex-scientist) to understand the universe…or at least to give me a vocabulary of the universe that I can sort of understand. Take the article that I reference above for instance.

Again, I don’t completely understand every word of it…but then again, I didn’t understand every single concept in biological chemisty but I was a year from a Ph.D. in it at one time in my life. I digress.

What strikes me as fascinating about this holographic concept isn’t the 3D to 2D paradigm shift. It’s the idea of infinite parallel universes. Infinite parallel universes says to me that there is such a thing as immortality. Not in the “if you give your $20.00 to the church every week, you’ll go to heaven” kind of immortality. I’m talking about the kind of immortality that is possible when you abandon the fact that what we are experiencing right now is the only reality…or reality at all.

If you can do that, then you can imagine that “death” is simply a shift in perspective. A new reality of sorts…which, according to theoretical physicists (or at least my read of them), are happening infinitely.

My brain is starting to hurt…and I’ve probably confused anyone and everyone who may read this. But it brings me to a fantastic quote that I read today.

“Religion and science are opposed, but only in the same sense as that in which my thumb and forefinger are opposed - and between the two, one can grasp everything” - Sir William Bragg.