I have a problem with Fenyman’s sum over histories and the buckyball twin slit experiment. Well, I have several problems, the worst of which is being far too stupid to understand what it’s all about, but that is not what I want to explore here. No, the topic for discussion today is observation.
As I understand it, a C-60 molecule buckyball is fired at a screen with two slits in it and hits a screen behind. Due to the whole sum-over-histories malarkey, the buckyball interferes with itself as it passes through the twin slits*: there is a possibility of it passing through both slits on the way to the screen, hence the interference. This works as long as the buckyball is not observed, at which time the path of the buckyball is fixed and the interference no longer happens.
Now, surely something as massive as a buckyball is being observed all the time. It is moving in the earth’s gravitational field, so surely must have some interaction with it. This is a form of observation, no? Even if conducted in a vacuum outside of any field, there is a chance that particles would spontaneously arise in the path of the buckyball and so observe it during the collision. In the weird world of quantum, isn’t it the chance of things happening that counts?
Surely it should not matter what is doing the observing, however small or unconscious it is, as long as something is there to observe. I see no reason that any interaction with the buckyball should be insufficient to count as an observation, just because it cannot allow a human researcher to find the location or path of the buckyball. Is it not true that anything that exists (or has probability of existing) can observe, whether quantum particle, energy, wave, planet or person?
The alternative is that the observation has to be orchestrated by something sentient, such as the person doing the experiment. This opens a whole new can of worms, such as any interference of solo buckyballs meaning that there cannot be a God, as otherwise His omnipresent omniscience would be an observation and so stop interference from happening. Or, perhaps, that He does exist but has a wicked sense of humour, putting this little conundrum into the universe on purpose.
I realise the whole sentient observer thing is complete nonsense, so where am I going wrong in my reasoning? What makes an observation an observation?
Thanks for your help!
(*ooh-errr misses!)
What the experiment suggests to me and apparently many other people including scientists is that at the level of quantum physics nothing exists if not observed, or at least it doesn’t exist the same way it does at our level, it exists only potentially. The buckyball does exist but above the quantum level. It is the interaction with “itself” that is at quantum level and thus happens only if not observed. Because to observe is to make a choice. Not observed, the buckyball interacts because it can be “everywhere”, and then many potential versions of the buckyball interact with one another. If you observe it, ie if you “choose” one version of the buckyball, it becomes only one, the “real” one, the one observed. I personally am willing to accept that idea although I don’t understand it! Now you’re saying that any interaction should count as observation, but I don’t see how. Observation implies consciousness being informed of something happening. What quantum physics implies for some people is that consciousness is part of the universe, not just an observer from outside. That is to me the most fantastic recent discovery, if indeed it is proven to be true.
I don’t know if that answers your question.
Thanks Theo, very interesting. I have heard that the observation has to be in a form capable of a resolution smaller than the quantum of the phenomenom being observed. So, in the case of buckeyballs, the wavelength of the interference is massively smaller than many sub-atomic particles, so their interaction with the buckeyballs could not possibly count as observation: they are simply too big.
However, interesting this implies that gravity MUST be a quantum effect, with quite large quanta too, as it does not count as observing the buckyballs whilst they move through a gravitational field. OR as you say, the observation has to be done by something conscious.
If the consciousness thing is right, it is very troublesome. It rather implies that, in the experiments done, the scientist was the first conscience to have observed the buckeyballs, as without her observation they happily acted in a quantum, unobseved way. This in turn rather suggests there is no universal consciousness; no omniscient God.
The way I understand it is this: The universe is one big probability wave, a (normally) undisturbed calm surface of watery soup. It always acts like this, always. There *never* is a particle. A “particle” is the result of “observing” with our common sense, that being “forward-in-time”.
The trick, or misconception of “particles” only occurs because we are and we use certain and very particular “observers”, most of us just never realize it. I’ll explain:
The “observer” as we know it is always something that has a “forward-arrow” in time. This includes all life and all devices we’ve ever created including all methods of recording; “knowing” something happened.
If that sounds weird and beyond your mind, you only have to look at the process without considering time, and it becomes clear as to what is going on.
First, and this is what most people can’t get past, you have to understand that “going on” means no forward-arrow in time. It has always been going on and always will be, the forward-arrow is only our observation. We have a bias in the universe to only understand, or look at the universe from this forward arrow in time.
Take a photon; it’s moving at C (the speed of light). The photon therefore is “frozen” in time; time does not pass for the photon. We all understand this and accept it.
But the photon can move, it can leave your flash light and hit the wall, seemingly “going through” time to perform things. We can tract it, detect it, utilize it, we can use it “in-time”.
…and this thinking bias is exactly where we trip up. That is not actually happening. There is no photon. There is an energy wave, a probability wave, a possibility that it can happen, if you travel through time in one direction this way, in another direction this way, here, there, where-ever. It’s a probability in time. It’s an undisturbed watery surface.
By turning on the flashlight, which is a forward-arrow time device: the flashlight switch must be pressed, the electrons must flow to the light bulb, the light bulb must heat up and emit photons, the photons are directed in one space dimension. The process that is the flashlight only works when those events occur in that order, ever. The device is designed to function in one time-direction. When you look at things from one time dimension you get particles, or “photons”, but when you look at things without time, or at the particle level, you see probabilities and waves, as they actually are.
You already have a huge observance bias, or “constraint” on the photon to act as a particle, because you’re using a forward-arrow device, and you are a forward-arrow being; the light enters your eyeball, a signal goes from your eyes to your brain, your neurons fire, in specific order, and then you are “aware” it occurred. It happens in that order, if anything happens out of that sequence of events, you’re aware of nothing.
The universe doesn’t follow this arrow, so anything we observe from it is like trying to look at ocean from a moving train. It’s really difficult to tell what is actually there.
It’s easy to think of a photon as doing this, but when we consider mass, a buckyball, something we can see with a microscope, as being in this area of “probability wave”, we tend to go nuts.
The truth however is there are no particles at all. There is no “you”, there is no “spoon”, “apple” whatever. Everything is just a probability of waves.
The only reason you can observe particles is because you, your construct of a human body requires a forward-direction in time to be “conscious” or aware of anything, to “know” something happened.
This is because when you potentate time in one direction, or, “observe” it, you “create” the particle. Otherwise, it doesn’t even exist. It’s a probability wave. By you moving forward in time to be conscious, the objects literally “materialize” when you detect them, they “become apparent” because from this very narrow direction in time you are traveling, you only are aware of their tip, their point, their very narrow potential from your direction in time.
If this doesn’t make sense now, sleep on it and read it again.
It helps to think of things in the past-tense, and then go back and think about the events as they occurred, once you get comfortable with your mind being able to flow through time like that, you can take it a step further and think; “what if I didn’t need to move forward in time to understand” i.e. what if you could move backward, what if you could stand still, what would events and the universe look like?
Your life would be one big worm. Your born on the tail, you move, live, grow through the body, and you die at the head. Your life is a wave of events, even at that massive trillion-trillion particle size mass. In the past-tense, you can observe it however you like, but normally, you would consider you are born, you live, you die. In that order.
The universe doesn’t follow that order. Evolution evolved us into sentients based on the build-up through time of consciousness. We’re biased to never know it’s true nature.
So, when you, a forward-arrow time observer, look at a photon coming out of a flashlight, a forward-arrow time device, you assume everything inside is behaving like you want it to, but when the photon comes out, if you observe it right, through a slit experiment, or through a photoelectric experiment, it boggles the mind; when you don’t constrain it. It acts like a wave. When you allow the “observing” to be of the entire event, you see the event as a wave, and you see the interference patterns right on the wall. Proof it’s a wave. But when you detect individual particles, you see them too. You choose to record single points of the wave, a tip, a slice, and they are there, they are just not the whole picture, what you are doing is observing that forward-biased slice of time on the wave, and we call that a “particle”.
I would like to suggest/conclude to you and your awesome readers that in answer to the God question, and if something conscious needs to make the observation; I think these are on the right track but are looking at the issue wrong.
You have to consider that we’re conscious only when we travel on a forward-time arrow. If time stops moving “forward”, so does the process of consciousness. You’re not very conscious if you consider a nano-second of forward time movement, or no time movement. You’re not going to be “observing” anything on that time-scale. You can “record” or “check”, but if your checking is done in an instant, not over a time-scale, you’re only going to see a particle. Essentially, you’re not “checking” correctly, so you only see a particle.
The wave pattern or wave-like properties only occur to us, or are detectable when you “observe” without time-restriction, without trying to get a snapshot, because the universe doesn’t work like that, you only see a pin-prick, a dot, a particle.
So, from our perspective, we question if simply observing creates something, or makes a change, when in fact we are simply observing too narrowly. Nothing is changing or being created, the act of focusing our attention changes nothing, it only makes us aware of a little slice of the real material that has always been in front of us. These “materializations” or results change depending simply on how we look at them. i.e. the wave particle “duality” of matter is much like the picture/real person “duality”. If you take a snapshot of a person, you have a 2D version of them in time, but it’s not the whole picture, it doesn’t embody what it recorded, it’s just a limited recording of what is out there.
Also, you really have to throw out the idea that time “must” pass. It doesn’t. It only must pass for you to be aware of it. The universe itself does not need to be aware of anything, and there does not need to be a God, and this phenomenon doesn’t prove a God exists or does not, it only proves that time is like an ocean of space and moves back and forth and we’re only aware of the sum-total movement along one single axis because that is what is needed for our form of consciousness to function.
If there is a way to achieve consciousness without time; to record or observe without time moving only in 1 direction, we will be able to reach our hand out into this newly unconstrained dimension and experience the true nature of the universe.
Things only appear magical or mystical when you don’t understand what’s going on completely. The good news is, at least we know some thing is happening that shows us we’re not on the right track yet, and we have good people like you to question what it really means.
Quantum observations are the “real” way things are happening, everything is a wave. A particle, our notions of what exists, are just snapshots in time.
Maybe check out “Athene’s theory of everything”, especially part 2 on youtube for more light on the subject.
Wow Nick, thank you so much for taking the time and effort to explain all that – really appreciated. A great concept that I will think about slowly over the next while: too tricky to take in all at once. I think it is the same concept that Douglas Adams was illustrating in the fifth of the Hitchhike’s books, if I have got the gist right. Also it reminds me of Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception, which somehow has a ring of truth about it too.
One thing that I am immediately stuck about is this bit from your last post:
“So, from our perspective, we question if simply observing creates something, or makes a change, when in fact we are simply observing too narrowly. Nothing is changing or being created, the act of focusing our attention changes nothing, it only makes us aware of a little slice of the real material that has always been in front of us.”
If nothing is changed, why does the interference pattern happen when we don’t observe the ‘particles’, but does not happen when we do? Something is changing there, but surely it shouldn’t if our observations are not interfering with the underlying waveform (a small aspect of which we see as buckyballs)? Or am I missing the point entirely?
Thanks.
AHA! You aren’t missing anything, I think you’re about to get what I am saying…
You’re a forward-arrow time observer, right? If that makes no sense re-read what I wrote previously. It’s very important you understand that your consciousness depends on a forward arrow of time, but that time doesn’t have to always go in this direction and can (and does) go backward and forward. Time is not what we normally think it is. Just keep in mind Einstein proved that time and space are a single thing called “space-time” and effect each other.
OK, so what you see depends on how you look.
If you look at a sheet of paper from the top-down, you see a large surface, but if you look at it from it’s side, you’ll see a very thin line.
That is a big difference in what you see; a very large surface vs. almost no surface. Something changed. Was it the paper, or how you looked at the paper?
You can both confirm that what you see has changed, and that the paper itself has not changed. You are only in a new position.
To you, what changed is obvious; you changed your point of view in space; this is easy to notice because you change your point of view in space a million times a day.
But you never change your point of view in time; you always and only travel forward. Today is after yesterday, and so on and so on.
The universe doesn’t do this, we only assume it does because our consciousness depends on one direction, so we are only aware of one day after the next, we aren’t aware we can and do go back and forth.
How can we tell we go back and forth in time?
The same way we can tell we go back and forth in space!
In this sense, the “surface-line duality” of paper is exactly the same as the “wave-particle duality” of all matter: The “surface-line duality” of paper is an artifact of our ability to move in space, and the “wave-particle duality” is an artifact of our ability to move in time.
Sounds fringe and SciFi? Well wave-particle duality is about to make sense…
First, stop reading this and watch the double-slit experiment: youtube B9xM2_MrC2k (paste the string in the youtube search box)
In the video, the photons are ejected one by one, 1 single photon *at a time*, correct? So, (and not touched on in the video), where is the interference coming from?
That is the question that solves everything.
How can you fire a photon on Monday, and fire another photon on Tuesday, and you will still record an interference pattern between them? When exactly did they interact? You fired them at different times!
But, you fired them in the same space!
How can you fire a photon Monday, go poop, eat, sleep, watch a movie, come back the next day, fire another, and simply because you fired a photon in the same place, at an earlier time, you record the interference of the previous particle?
The answer is because you’re going back and forth all the time. As long as you keep either the same time OR the same position, matter can interact.
Now I don’t expect you to be saying AHA! to everything quite yet, but you are certainly almost there…
Next, stop reading this and watch this great explanation of the sum-total of current research on double-slits, with all the questions, including the one you have in your blog post: youtube UMqtiFX_IQQ.
The end of the video, describing the measuring device, that it interacts with the electrons and forces the electron to behave like a particle again. The heisenberg uncertainty principle, turns out to be on the right track, but none-the-less, false.
Are we cosmic far-out beings that can alter the fabric of space with our minds? No. So science came up with what we call quantum “superposition” states of mater. This is also on the right track, but also paints the wrong picture, but it’s the best we had until recently.
So my friend, what else can change the actions of photons, of electrons, of buckyballs? When we just decide to observe them?
Time.
In the last video you saw, the electrons fly through BOTH slits and you can prove this because you detect, over time, the recording of the position they landed in as a wave interference pattern.
This recording of the resulting positions of electrons is itself an observation, is it not? So, obviously, observing, or detecting the electrons themselves does not change their behavior.
So, why when we try to detect WHICH slit the electrons pass through, does it cause the electrons to only pass through that slit?
Because we go forward and backward in time, and we are trying to detect what happens at a *certain time*. This certain time detection collapses things back into particles for us, but only for us, the observer.
We collapse which “forward” direction we are aware of. That is it. That is the wave-particle duality. We didn’t change anything but which time direction we allowed ourselves to travel in, the object stayed the same.
Imagine the youtube video you just saw, and you can slide the movie forward and backward, to before the electron passed through the slits, and after.
If you don’t change anything about the slits, you simply make it *possible* to go through both slits, well if you fast forward to after the electron passes through, it doesn’t matter which slit it passed through, it made it through one of them, and you can check your results saying it went through both of them at the “same time”.
But it actually did made it through both of them; time went forward, and it made it through one, time went backward, then forward again, and it made it through the other.
The frame just after the electron hits the wall, you record the interference pattern of BOTH slits because the electron had the possibility of going through BOTH slits. It was possible, so BOTH actually happened. We were conscious in a time direction in which both did actually happen previously. Our reality is then a superposition of what was possible.
So if we go back and attempt to “check” which photon goes through which slit at a certain time, we become conscious of only the forward direction in time where the photon went through the slit we are checking.
The photon still went through the other slit, but we’re no longer conscious of it, so we observe it acting like a particle going only through one.
At some other time, in what other people might call “alternate realities”, the electron did in fact go through both slits, no slits, the experiment was never run, the machine blew up, dinosaurs are still alive, suns don’t exists, and on and on and on…
But, to check at a particular time, and be conscious only moving forward, you collapse what is possible.
I hope that makes sense and makes you “conscious” of what matter “waves” are. 🙂
I am also being a little misleading when I say the electrons went through both slits because it was possible and we “collapse” what is possible when we check. It’s just hard to explain because there is nothing else close enough to what it is like that I can say is “like” it.
It’s like trying to describe “red” without saying “red looks red”, or explain why like-charges repel without saying something like “they repel because they push each other apart” (which is just another way of wording the same thing). Once it clicks in your mind and you “experience” it, it becomes easy to understand, but it’s still hard to explain, because it’s so different from everything else, if that makes sense.
This collapse I am trying to explain is not quite a “collapse” in the normal sense, it is like saying a sheet of paper can look like any 4 point polygon and in 2D, to our eyes, can appear to have almost any amount of 2D surface area, but when you “look” at it, you collapse what is possible into one shape.
Well, that is what happens, but it’s also not what happens… you can still move your position and see another shape. Things were only collapsed for you, personally, from your position, at that time. What is actually happening is you “looked at a sheet of paper”. But explaining in detail why the paper looks different at different times is difficult.
This is what is happening with observing particles and matter waves, you can and do move “forward” and “backward” in time, but your movement is not like you are swaying uncontrollably in an ocean of time, and it’s also not like you have full control over it and can decide to travel like you can in a room either.
Worse, time is not a dimension; it’s also misleading to say you move “forward and backward” in it.
The only reason we think space has 3 dimensions is because we can describe a position with 3 points of data. In reality, space is “space” and hard to describe, and not very useful at all without a time, also, if someone tells you “meet me at X, Y, Z” they also have to tell you a time, so space and time are obviously connected.
But, if something happens between the time they tell you to meet them, and the time they meet, the X, Y, Z and T might not be valid, so there are also other factors in time. We live with this and get around it without quantifying it yet.
What is actually happening is your particles that make you “you” were only possible the day you were born, so, “you” can’t exist before then, but your possibility wave exists from the time it was possible onward. You can become good and travel “that” way, or become evil and travel “that” way. But you’re not going in a “direction” you’re going in a “possibility”, it doesn’t have a classical sense of dimension with relation to forward or backward or is comparable to space.
On top of this problem of describing things without anything to compare it to, it’s even much harder to see because we are biased single-direction time conscious beings. It’s now like trying to describe “red” to a blind man.
We will probably never know what it’s exactly like, but like the blind man trying to understand red, we can know that there is a property called color, that most things have the property (not glass, etc.), and the property doesn’t particularly matter to us eating, sleeping and going poop.
And, like the blind man that understands light makes color, and understands which wavelengths of light are particular colors, and what makes the wave bend through matter, can predict what will and wont be “red”, even though he can’t “see” it, we can do the same to understand time and what the “wave particle duality” actually mean.
Just don’t think you’re stupid because you don’t fully understand it. You never will because you can’t experience it. Like Einstein and Feynman and everyone else, neither do I, we can just help each other get closer and closer to imagining what’s actually going on. But since we can’t experience it with our current bodies, we’re all essentially screwed.
In the end, it’s going to be a formula, it’s going to make complete sense, and we’re going to harness and build stuff out of it, but we’re still not there, nobody is, so don’t expect that yet 🙂
Nick, sorry for the long delay in replying – been a hell of a year, one way and another. Still, enough of that: more important things to think about!
Thanks again for taking the time to try to explain all this to a simpleton, which cues me up well for another question. I thought I was getting somewhere until I read this:
“What is actually happening is your particles that make you “you” were only possible the day you were born, so, “you” can’t exist before then, but your possibility wave exists from the time it was possible onward. You can become good and travel “that” way, or become evil and travel “that” way. But you’re not going in a “direction” you’re going in a “possibility”, it doesn’t have a classical sense of dimension with relation to forward or backward or is comparable to space.”
I am having trouble reconciling reality being a big wibbly-wobbly vat of potentialities with things having a start. I have begun thinking of the universe as being golden syrup in the dark, with conscious thought (the forward time arrow) acting like a beam of light shining through it – making a very small amount visible to us, which we understand and think of as everything (the rest is still dark & unknown to us).
Only less sticky, of course.
So, surely for my particles to exist at all as particles rather than as waveforms of potential, they have to be within the light beam, so I exist as ‘me’ only within that one very small frame of reference. The potentialities inherent within ‘me’ have always existed and always will, in every possible combination or non-combination. But the ‘me’ that is thinking these thoughts to type to you now is only possible in a forward-arrow consciousness: within the beam of light in the syrup. Do ‘I’ have any other possibility paths than the one I am ‘travelling’? As all my particles are tied down to being within the beam of light – they cannot express their other potentials within their wider waveforms as otherwise I would cease to be me and return to the dark syrup outside the light – ‘I’ can only exist travelling along the beam of light. Perhaps there is some room for manouver within the light, enough to allow free will etc, but pretty constrained when considered in the wider context.
Hmm, see what you mean about how tricky is is to explaining things!
So, that brings me to the bit I cannot even try to come to some conclusion about: did the universe ever start, does it have boundaries of any sort and does it even exist? Trying to think these through in classical physics/philosophy references is a bit big for me, so trying to do so in ‘golden syrup’ is a trifle beyond me!
As ever, your thought and instruction on all this would be most welcome.
Many thanks,
Angus.
Actually, while I think about it (memory like a sieve), I can’t help getting a bit excited about how this and the concept of infinity will interact.
One for the late night ponderings, which hopefully I might be able to indulge in again from time to time. So to speak.
TTFN
A
Maybe think of Time as a collapsed dimension. All activity and events, all observations and experiences, all change and awareness occur only in the Now of time, and it is by these agencies that time appears to progress, ever forward (because all change is built upon the potentialities of the Now). All past is memory; all future is potentiality. These are embedded in the actuality of the Now, the eternal and ever-changing present.
Bran
Bran, do you mean that there is no meaningful past of future? That this just Now, with memories of past Nows & a potential for more Nows to come?
Is that almost the opposite to Nick’s comments, where time is everywhere & everywhen at once, almost? Sort of super-dimension?
Thanks,
Angus.
Angus, I think the past, present, and future are as we find them now. But how is that? I can look and move along all three dimensions of space, so I can understand why I would call them dimensions or extensions. But time is not extended in any such fashion except in our imagination and memory. There is only the moment of actualization in which all change and motion, all events and activities, all actions and process occur. This Now is constant flux. The future is like a river flowing to a precipice, and the past is like the water cascading down the waterfall. The Now is that one brief instant of transition between the two, but in that instant the universe lives. In that one instant, all the potentialities and expectations of the future and all the lingering memories and effects of the past exist embedded in the fabric of actualized physical (and mental?) reality. The universe is like a page whose existence is spread across the two dimensions of the page (except our page is three dimensional) and the thickness or depth of the page is the Now of time.
In essence, I’m only recognizing the true nature of time as we experience it. It’s not time that we experience but change, a conflagration of change too immense to comprehend. Change is the reality that our device of time measures and orders. But we have begun to believe in time as a reality unto itself in which changes occur in their measured points along some continuum. We conceive that a time machine might transport us back and forth along the continuum of time.
But when I say only Now exists, I mean that time travel is impossible. We have only memories of previous states of the Now and the ongoing effects of those previous states as evidence of the past. We imagine future states of the Now based upon calculations of possibilities and probabilities. But only the memories and probabilities are real. There is no continuum.
What do you think of this concept? I’ve put some thought into it and found good explanations for processes that occur over time and for the effects of relativity and light speed.
Samm / Bran
Wow… time is only change? Such a simple idea but it seems to me to have a ring of truth somehow… It sounds like it’s one of those cosmic philosophic ideas but at the same time sounds like a perfect fit and I want it to be true. Why do we feel we have to be able to go backward abyway? And the “forward” we all experience is only the cumulative effect of change? Essentially you can “only” perform actions?
If this is your original idea and it turns out to be true you’d surely win a noble prize and everyone would smack their forehead and at the same time be in awe about how simple it is.
What are your thoughts about the artifacts of quantum mechanics? Have you ever thought about it? As in, why do particles appear to travel in every direction they can when you fire multiples, as a probability, but when we fire single particles, we measure a single, seeming “choice” they made? Like which slit to pass through?
Also, can you explain your ideas on why are there are seeming “limits” to how fast change can occur? Or, what and why are there “measurements” of time? For example, why does gravity take a certain amount of “time” to
“work” or act on mater? Why does light travel at 1 light year per year? Or, elaborate on what you feel a “second” is, or any measurement of time?
Why is it easy to build a 60fps camera, but really complicated to build a nanosecond camera? Why do we only think at 24fps? Why is there a limit to velocity? i.e. “light speed”? Why are there limits to how fast change can occur? For example why do newly formed proteins out of RNA take 5ns or 15ns to respond to the electromagnetic pull they produce and “fold”? i.e. why is this not instant, or conversely why does it not take longer? Why does it take a “certain” amount of time to do anything?
Essentially, and I know these are much more broad questions, but, your explanation of time is so simple and yet totally covers it, I am hoping you can shed more light on the “what” of time, and all that seems to be left in your idea of “what” time is, are the questions of quantum choice and measures of lengths of time, or, the “time” it takes to perform the actions that make up time.
Very eagerly awaiting your ideas! 🙂
Hi Nick and Angus. I hope I have time to write a clarification and extension of my views. I’m afraid they are quite extensive and comprehensive. Please forgive me that. Nick, you say that consciousness is a negligible process in the universe. Here’s a passage from your remarks.
Nick says: “I think you may be tripping up on thinking about consciousness too much and how it plays into this idea. I did that too, and everyone tends to. You kind of have to leave consciousness out of it. Consciousness is only how we end up looking at it; it is *our* reconciliation of the universe, but not what it actually is, so trying to include consciousness, which is what we as a process do, with how the universe works is like trying to think of the driver of a car while also trying to understand how a car engine works; the driver matters, but not to the idea of the engine, or how the engine works, in itself.
The Driver can use the engine to do stuff, but there’s not much room for talk about the driver and how he thinks when you’re trying to learn about how an engine works, if that makes sense?
Much less, about the driver’s consciousness of the issue of driving…
Consciousness is only a process, it’s reproducible, can be created and destroyed, there is nothing mystic about it and can be created out of dust, even a teenager can create consciousness by making a baby using vegetation as fuel.” End of quote from Nick’s remarks about consciousness.
Consciousness is supremely important in my view of the universe, but my definition of consciousness is often criticized for being non-standard, so Nick and I may be talking about two diverse processes. Let me explain my take on consciousness as briefly as I dare–and perhaps more briefly than I should.
The empiricist philosophers, including John Locke, Bishop George Berkeley, and David Hume, postulate that all our knowledge about who we are and about the world we live in, in fact all knowledge in the absolute, is acquired by us through our experiences, including the five sensory perceptions. I think they are essentially accurate in this conclusion, although they may not be inclusive enough in their assessment of what processes belong to the general phenomena of experience.
Vision and hearing, taste, touch, and smell are quite diverse, and a definition broad enough to cover all five of them must be very general. Here is my definition of EXPERIENCE:
***Experience is any interactive process in which “that-which-experiences” responds to the stimulus of “that-which-is-experienced”.***
The eye responds to images conveyed by light by generating electrical signals to specific areas of the brain. The brain responds to the electrical signals by firing synapses and registering the signals as immediate visual input and as short term memory data. The visual images merge with the short term memory of previous visual images to create the perception we call vision, which is conveyed in some manner to our consciousness. Consciousness, in its turn, then experiences the visual image and responds to it, not as a solitary function but in coordination with the many other experiences of human consciousness that impinge jointly and synchronously upon our consciousness.
Human consciousness is extremely complex, a summary process inclusive of the five sense perceptions, our emotions and desires, the influences of hormones and other chemicals that affect what and how we experience, the images residing in our imagination, our thoughts and memories, expectations, dreams, sense of self, etc. All of these experiences merge together like rivers merging into a single great confluence flowing down the courseway of consciousness to the ocean of memory.
We are conscious of many things at once and have the ability to focus our attention to varying degrees on the cacophony of experiences in our consciousness. A single experience may receive extreme focus and many experiences, to the contrary, receive little if any attention. These include subliminal and peripheral experiences. In fact, the eye may experience some things which never even reach our consciousness. Our body is generally “aware” or conscious of many things that never enter into our sentient (human) consciousness. The beating of our hearts and the pulsing of blood through our veins go unnoticed by us, but not by our body as an organism. Our human consciousness never has to remind our body to drop under the tug of gravity.
Even rocks drop in response to the tug of gravity. We do not say the rock is conscious. Consciousness is a human trait and we will not share it readily. But the Feynman diagram shows how even particles can exchange forces such as charge and gravity, and these processes are precisely the stimulus/response interactions that define experience. And consciousness is at its core simply “that-which-experiences”. Rocks have neither sentience nor memory, yet they have a primitive consciousness by which they are able to experience and interact with other objects in their immediate environment. Different kinds of consciousness experience differing kinds of stimuli, and all the diverse kinds of consciousness are elements of a continuum from the most fundamental consciousness of quantum particles to levels of consciousness exceeding the complexity of our human level.
My conclusion is that consciousness is simply the ability to experience; that consciousness is “that-which-experiences”. I argue that everything that is real in the universe is a conscious being, and that it is consciousness that enables real objects to interact with one another in accordance with the physical laws of nature. Consciousness is a characteristic of the universe itself from the moment of the Big Bang. The first indivisible particles to “condense” from the pure energy of creation inherit the property of consciousness from the one consciousness of the newborn universe. When the fundamental particles bond and combine into more complex atoms and molecules, those complex forms also inherit consciousness. Fundamental particles have a kind of consciousness unique to them. Atoms have a consciousness unique to them. Molecules have their own kind of consciousness. Single-celled life has its own unique kind of consciousness. Complex living organisms have a kind of consciousness unique to themselves. Sentient beings have their own kind of consciousness.
Experience and consciousness is only part of the cosmic cycle. The response of conscious beings to their experiences results in actions that manifest the potentials intrinsic to the Now of things as actions and events that bring about change and give birth to the future.
Bran
There is no reply button to your last comment so I’m putting it here. Your definition of consciousness, that it’s anything that can experience anything, and that your definition of experience is anything that can interact with something, is as broad as it can get since that covers the entire known universe with varying degrees, since it all can interact with it all.
I think of consciousness in the more standard sense, that it is only a fuzzy line of the ability to process things in a way that will benefit itself, with varying degrees of complexity.
i.e. even a really stupid human doesn’t know right from wrong or ponder their existence, or someone going through the day while really tired, and some would question weather they are conscious, or how conscious they are, but I think the line is fuzzy and at some point, once the ability to process gets to a certain state, say a fish, a tree, an animal, a human, different people will say “it’s conscious”. This is the consciousness I’m talking about, and it requires the ability to process stuff on a very large scale with it’s own interests in mind, and also of course, have some interests too.
So our definitions of consciousness are different in that yours covers things that have no interests or ability to process things.
Taking your ideas though, did you ever thing about why time moves at a certain rate depending on your speed and mass or why quantum selection happens, i.e. that a single photon will take the possible path you test for, every time.
Hi I didn’t notice you replied to my post till your last comment today, here is the answer:
I think you may be tripping up on thinking about consciousness too much and how it plays into this idea. I did that too, and everyone tends to. You kind of have to leave consciousness out of it. Consciousness is only how we end up looking at it; it is *our* reconciliation of the universe, but not what it actually is, so trying to include consciousness, which is what we as a process do, with how the universe works is like trying to think of the driver of a car while also trying to understand how a car engine works; the driver matters, but not to the idea of the engine, or how the engine works, in itself.
The Driver can use the engine to do stuff, but there’s not much room for talk about the driver and how he thinks when you’re trying to learn about how an engine works, if that makes sense?
Much less, about the driver’s consciousness of the issue of driving…
Consciousness is only a process, it’s reproducible, can be created and destroyed, there is nothing mystic about it and can be created out of dust, even a teenager can create consciousness by making a baby using vegetation as fuel.
So, consciousness can be made from organized hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and a few other elements, this we know for sure, but it can also be made from anything theoretically, as it’s simply a process, it is not dependent on particles. Religious connotations, in this realm of thought, will only slow you down and hook you on insignificant issues; you’ll think one idea is significant or meaningful simply because it involves us, our souls, consciousness or the like, when in fact it’s something banal; consciousness is meaningless to the universe in the same way a driver is meaningless to an engine. The engine can and does exist in a car without a driver in the driver seat.
Just keep in mind consciousness is insignificant, it’s not magical, and it has no bearing on matter waves, or the universe, which consists of matter waves; which is matter, or particles over time. And I say “over time” because I have no idea what else to call it, but that’s not quite what I mean either.
…
To answer your question about possibilities; And this is probably what you want answered most, you only need to consider processes, not particles. Particles are meaningless to “you” and what “you” care about…
To illustrate:
First, “your” particles are not yours, you’re just using them right now, or, your process is currently using them, they all very likely at one point or another belonged to perhaps a tiger, a tree, a plant, a bug, the air, water, birds, viruses, bacteria, rocks, you name it, your particles went through many trillions of cycles over billions of years on Earth. “Your” particles were split up between many different processes; perhaps before you were born, “your” particles belonged to a cow in Montana that your mom was about to eat, also, to spinach in Illinois, also to tomatoes in Vermont, to a fly in Africa, which was eaten by a frog, which was eaten by a crocodile, which died and decomposed into the earth and grew into a plant which spit the oxygen into the air and it was reabsorbed by your father breathing on the other side of the planet which his body used in the creation of the sperm cell that ended up forming the zygote in your mom which created you.
This is perhaps the chain of events that took place on “your” particles that made you, but if this chain was broken in any way, would “your” possibility of existing be in danger? Not at all.
Keep in mind these particles, these elements, could have come from anywhere. If that fly wasn’t eaten by the frog described above for example, would that stop you from being born? From your possibility of existing? What are the chances it would have an affect on your existence?
Absolutely zero, without any chance of me being wrong.
You only need, roughly, a certain amount of particles, in a certain ratio, to exist as “you”, and who cares where they came from. You could be very fat, skinny, dehydrated, missing a limb, whatever, “you” would still exist, and you may desire, for example, to eat a cheese sandwich 1/1/2021 at midnight. Who cares if you get shot, get beaten, go through raising 9 kids, whatever in the mean-time; If you are conscious and so desire, you’ll eat it if it’s “possible”. If you as a process desire for something to happen, very little will get in your way, on the fellow-process level, much less particle-level. Your dependence on particles is there, but in a very vague and limited sense.
The sperm that created you could have been formed by other elements from other sources. Particles are insignificant to processes.
What matters is the processes that were in place at that time. Your dad existed, your mom existed, they, as processes, as an *organization* of particles, but not necessarily those particular particles, for whatever reason, decided to perform the process that would lead to your creation. Very little in the way of particles could have influenced that, it would take many orders of magnitudes of particles to change your possibility of existing. The processes are what matters, not the particles.
Processes perform actions. Processes need particles, but are not dependent on particular particles to exist. For example if you didn’t eat breakfast would you still be reading this? Lets say you have 5,000,000,000 fewer carbon atoms in you now then you could have, possibly, would that change something significant? Perhaps the process of you putting on pants? Getting a shower? Etc. No. Because you are in the process of doing something, only if enough particles exist or don’t exist in a particular place at a particular time that will change your *process* will a possibility of something for *you* change, or the “possibility” change.
So to *you*, who cares about particles? For *your* possibilities, we’re only talking about *processes*.
So, in this big wibbly-wobbly vat of potentialities with particles, the outcome for us, on a macro scale, are totally insignificant. We operate in a wibbly-wobbly vat of potentialities with *processes*. The particles themselves, they operate independently of us.
So, thinking in this way, looking for “significant” or process-based potentials, it certainly narrows down what can and cannot exist; for example why don’t purple WWF wrestlers exist? Is there an alternate reality where dinosaurs still exist? Why don’t giraffes talk? The answer is always “the precursor processes that would have made that ‘possible’, never existed”.
Which *processes* did you depend on to exist? Your mom and dad, that’s about it except for processes that almost never change, like the sun and the Earth. So, you could not and did not exist until after your mom and dad existed, why don’t you have 3 eyes? Because your parents don’t and the way the process of DNA works, that’s not possible, so it couldn’t happen.
But, at the particle level, they are switching themselves in and out of you all the time, through time, going back and forth. When you look at them using quantum physics, or think at the particle level, when you do tests for individual particles, you see that if they can do something, they do, and already did. But, this does not mean there are alternate realities where everything is the same except everyone has green skin and so on. Their potential as particles does not correlate to our potential as processes on a 1:1 scale.
Since we are process based, and the process of our bodies have evolved through process-interaction over billions of years, the ability to work-around incredibly significant particle changes, the actuality of which particular particle is doing what has a sum effect on us of around 0.0000000000000000001% or less.
Now, if someone invents a time machine, or, in itself, a process called a time machine, and you, as another process, go inside that time machine, and use it to “go back in time”. Sure, that can happen, and then you can exist before the process of your parents existed, and then, you would, as a process, alter events based on other processes, for example, you can shoot your grandfather and negate the possibility of yourself existing later, from that point, but, because of your “time machine” you have broken the dependency and “already” exist, so killing your grandfather does nothing as far as making you instantly disappear and therefore never inventing the time machine, or breaking the space-time continuum, or whatever. Your process has nothing to do with particles except the fact that you need some number of them, but who cares which ones or where they came from. Space-time survives the time travel, there are no paradoxes, and from the universes perspective, very little has changed. You simply killed someone. The particles you affected don’t care, the process you affected is what matters.
Your time machine, that process, broke you out of your forward-arrow dependent state and put you somewhere else, and let you go from there, you are in a sense, broken off of our “time” and reinserted somewhere else. The “old” chain of processes have no affect on you now after your break and subsequent reinsertion. Only “new” process events can affect you.
Also realize that the only thing the “time machine” did is carry your “process” of being human through the time-forward-arrow, and reinsert you, intact as your original process, somewhere else in the chain.
But that machine doesn’t exist yet. 🙂 But there is nothing to say it can’t or is special or different on some mystical level than say, a microwave. Someone just needs to come up with it and it will be like a toaster to the next generation.
The particles you use today will switch out by you going poop, your cells dying, you breathing, you just “existing” as the process you are. But your state of consciousness remains unaffected, because your consciousness, as a process itself, is uninterrupted and unaffected by this switch-out of particles.
Particles are simply the ocean we ride on in which our boats, or processes travel with.
Without a time machine, you cannot exist before your process starts, or, before you were born, not because your particles don’t go back in forth in time, but because your process, “you”, as you exist, being conscious, is dependent on moving “forward” in time; one process affects another, one after the previous. You were dependent on other processes to first exist, in that order. You are like a flashlight; you are a forward-arrow process.
So, particles are very dynamic over time, but they can’t spontaneously do something on a process-level any more than an engine can spontaneously exist from nothing, because an engine is a process, not a particle.
A bucky-ball is not a process however. It performs no actions, it’s just particles sitting there organized doing nothing.
But before the bucky-ball was organized from carbon atoms into the shape of a bucky-ball; which *was* a process, the potential for that bucky-ball to do anything, or to “exist” was zero, so, if you zoom out from the bucky-ball first being organized from carbon, it’s potential scatters across the cosmos, forward in time, as doing everything it could have done, or everything possible. But *not* backward from that organizing process as a “bucky-ball”, but as carbon atoms which they were before that organizing process of it first existing/being “born”. It doesn’t need consciousness to have potential, but it needs to exist for it to have potential.
After it exists, if you perform the process of “observing it”, which is itself a process, you perform a process, and that bucky-ball, that organization of particles, now only has potential to do something from that point. Who knows WHICH carbon atoms in that bucky-ball did something, we’re looking at the process of a bucky-ball itself, and it’s potential from that point on, what it can do, and what it will do, and so what it does do, is everything possible.
The only reason you are wondering about time and consciousness and the universe is because someone somewhere took a look at a particle and saw it didn’t “do” what we “do”.
Unfortunately the result of all this thinking turns out to be like every other discovery; both drab and revolutionary, but the reality is only we’re “living” or conscious, on a substrate operating on a process-level, and that “substrate”, which is the particle-universe, or “known universe” (funny because it’s the most unknown part of it to us), is made up of stuff that doesn’t go forward in time like we do.
I also think Samm’s comment is perhaps exactly the same as mine but looking at it from a good and less-complicated, and less mega-book-like-comment 🙂 perspective;
Take out the whole idea of time. Particles aren’t processes, they perform no actions, and therefore don’t need a “now” like we do. Nothing changes for them, there is no “now” for them, only for us; “now” is meaningless if you can exist without change.
Because the time I’m saying is everywhere is not everywhere like you may think it is; we can’t access it the way it operates, so it’s inaccessible not because of a barrier or smallness or incomprehensibility, but because we as conscious beings depend on actions (actions being something that changes something) to be performed in the “now” in order to exist as we do; you cant “think” of anything unless physical,/chemical,/electrical changes go on in your brain.
Nick, I agree with very much of what you are saying, but I’m coming from a different approach, which leads to a difference of concepts or at least a difference in the names of concepts. In fact, I believe that consciousness is a process as you do. Any action, activity, change, motion, transition, event, or process can only occur over time, and consciousness, as the ability to experience, is certainly an activity or process. But I do believe that consciousness is important,in fact quintessential as the process through which all physical realities in the universe interact, how they experience and how they respond to what they experience.
I must make a trip to the store, and will write more when I return. I want to include some of the remarkable paragraphs you wrote in your post.
Samm / Bran
I like the way the posts here are mirroring the arguments themselves: not one following the other, but some comments arriving before the posts about which they comment. Very appropriate.
It sounds like there is something Platonic about the concept of processes: they are almost separate from the physical universe of particles & act fairly independently. Can some single particles change processes, such as radiation sickness: a single alpha particle harming a skin cell, so changing that process-within-a-process (cell within person)? Also, when do particles become processes? Could an atom be a process as it has properties that interact and do things to other atoms, whilst being made of quarks that could come from anywhere and function as particles?
Bran, could your concept of consciousness being interaction suggest that dark matter may actually be unconscious matter? Could it wake and become conscious? Does that fit with dark energy or would that be something altogether different?
I will have to read this all again to get to grips with it, so apologies if my questions are silly.
Angus.
Yes I think processes are completely separate from the physical universe; you can emulate processes in virtual reality, and also perform processes in virtual reality and real processes can interact with the virtual ones; we do this more and more every day with home automation and smart cars and the like; they are interchangeable, this “real” and “non-real” process interaction knows no limits. You can predict protein folding for example on the individual atom scale, all done with force calculations over time, or as Bran pointed out, one calculation or interaction after the previous, and the result is exactly the same as the universe would have done it; you compare notes and the results are identical.
I think processes are simply rules or actions, and matter is a substrate for them, just one way of letting them function, but not the only, matter is meaningless to us and we are meaningless to it, so when we as processes see how matter acts we don’t understand how it can be so different from us; it’s different because the how of it doesn’t even matter to the how of us.
I think this is why complexity, or consciousness can emerge in the first place; why groups of interacting atoms can make molecules, why groups of interacting molecules can make proteins, why groups of interacting proteins can make cells, and why groups of interacting cells can make people, and why groups of interacting people can make the global “consciousness” that is emerging the more and more we interact with each other on faster and faster scales, perhaps there are groups of interacting planets somewhere in federations and such and beyond that in our universe as well.
Complexity, yielding consciousness or any other “strange” or unexpected phenomenon, only needs a substrate and a set of rules that can yield change over time, or over interactions like Bran pointed out, like Conway’s game of life with it’s 3 rules and 2 dimensional empty substrate can theoretically create an emulation of the known universe, or how an incredibly simple touring machine with a few rules and only 1 dimensional substrate can do every single thing the most modern processor can, including play the Sims 3 or emulate the known universe, and a touring machine is just a tin can and tape!
But when you step back and look at a piece of tape and simple machine running back and forth on it, you don’t think that there may be billions of life forms being emulated across multi-trillion particles, and this emulation is occurring in 3 times as many dimensions as the machine is using itself.
It boggles the mind, but, if you realize that processes and matter are independent, and what we’re used to just happens to be, and it could be anything and we could still exist, it seems kind of plain as our noses, but obvious or not, it’s still happening; in our world, we use these games and devices that can show us it’s not only possible, but exists inside our own set of rules and dimensions. It’s nothing “special” in the sense that someone can make their own, totally new “universe” like Conway’s game in one afternoon, and it could yield an entire new universe in itself, using it’s rules, it’s substrates, and emerging complexities including consciousness and more.
These ideas are not mine but I learned them from a course in a new field in science called simply “complexity science” from the teaching company called “Understanding complexity” available here http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=5181
Angus, it seems to me that we have only two categories of experience. All our experiences, I believe, may be assigned to one or the other of these two categories of experience.
Some of our experiences reveal a SHARED realm of experience in which the things of our experiences appear to be shared by me and you and all manner of other conscious beings. My body and your body and indeed the bodies of all conscious beings have their home in this realm of shared experience. Not only do our bodies share this realm, but they also exclusively comprise this shared realm of our experience. I call this shared realm of experience in which our bodies co-exist and wherein our inter-relationships with one another are enabled “the WORLD” (or “the UNIVERSE”).
All other of our experiences consist of the PRIVATE and solitary activities of our internal, mental states. The processes and activities of this realm are hidden and private, and we know that very well. In this realm, we are alone and unapproachable. The imagined objects of this realm have no size nor any real shape because they exist outside of space. There are no real objects here, only imagined ones. Objects exist only in space. Here there is only time and the realities of time; there is only events and activities, only process and change. Here is the theater of consciousness; here is sentience and reflection; here is imagination and the imitations of the perceptions of the senses. Here is emotion and desire, memory and dream. I call this most intimate and private realm in which we are truly and completely alone “the MIND” (or “the SELF”).
All our experiences belong to one or the other of these two categories, one of the two realms of experience.
If I may pick up from my last post, there are two categories of experiences and all of our experiences belong to one or the other of these. Delusions are experiences we place in the world but they actually belong to the mind…things like unicorns and fairies and sales that save the purchaser money. 🙂
The thing that distinguishes the real unicorn from the delusional unicorn is that the real unicorn is a conscious being in and of itself while the delusional unicorn is an imaginary creature whose behaviors are contingent on the will of the person in whose imagination it originates. All entities whose bodies constitute legitimate elements of the universe are conscious beings.
Quarks and leptons are conscious beings. Atoms are conscious beings. Molecules are conscious beings. Cells are conscious beings. Organisms (plants and animals, etc.) are conscious beings. Stars and planets are conscious beings. Galaxies are galactic clusters are conscious beings. The universe is a conscious being. And of course, you and I are conscious beings.
But our consciousness is nothing like the consciousness of a quark or a galaxy. Galaxies have no eyes (of which I am aware) and no noses. And we do not have hundreds of thousands of stars swirling around in a cosmic soup with a bouillon of gravity waves and oceans of light. How can we comprehend such a consciousness as a galaxy might possess? Yet, we ourselves are a massive soup of cells bonded together by electro-chemical systems far beyond the comprehension of any molecule within any one of those cells. Molecules, after all, need only be conscious of such things as the valence of atomic structures that bind them together.
There are two things that consciousness has in common throughout all its many levels of manifestation. It is the consciousness that receives all the experiences of the being, no matter their kind or number.. And it is consciousness that initiates all the actions of the being, in response to those experiences that it receives. Consciousness experiences and consciousness initiates action. An electron experiences a change in the electrical force and initiates a change in its motion in response to that experience. It’s not a sentient act. The electron doesn’t even possess memory of its experience or action. A woman experiences the sound of a voice asking her to look at an object shown to her. Her response reflects a number of options available to her sentient will. Her choice among these options will reflect her values and preferences which define her character. Her character is the portion of the hidden potentialities of existence which are expressed by her being. Her action reflects her choice and her character and contributes to the evolution of the universe along its temporal course. Her action also determines what subsequent experiences she will know.
All the conscious beings in the universe, from the tiny quarks and most fundamental particles to the universe itself as a conscious being, interact with one another within the ranges of their specific senses. We are conscious beings comprised of smaller conscious beings, cells, molecules, atoms, quarks. All these conscious beings are active within us and contribute to our aggregate consciousness. We are legion. 🙂
Well, this is most of my view of things. If you put all my posts together. It’s not detailed, but some detail is available if you want more specificity. I can see some commonality with Nick’s thoughts, and I hope he can see them as well.
Samm / Bran
I saw a good video on biocentrism. Does it not seem that its vision is similar to that of Bishop Berkeley’s “To be is to be perceived (esse est percipi)!”? The argument seems to be that there is no external world but only a world that our mind perceives internally. Can either of you give me any more info about biocentrism? I understand it to be a theist (or deistic) view similar to the intelligent design argument. Is that right?
Yours in (typical) befuddlement,
Samm/Bran
Samm, I know little about biocentrism, but as far as I can tell it mixes the strong antropic principle with a dash of New Age mysticism, a dribble of Platonic ideals and a sprinkle of Descartes. Or more accurately for the latter, ‘I think therefore the universe is’. Not sure about the religion angle, but I do not know of any guiding god being involved. I would be glad to know more too – over to you, Nick?
Interestingly, what little I know about it sounds exactly like a blend of what you and Nick have been saying – that processes are independant of the physical universe and that consciousness is all important. However, I prefer your concept that consciousness is not just the inherent property of sentient beings but of everything, because where is the boundary between sentient and non-sentient?
[as an aside – I must be tired – I just wondered if a scentient being is one that thinks they smell nice]
I still have some questions though for both of you:
Nick says that time means nothing to particles as they don’t change, but if they do not change how can they form the substrate of processes? It is their very change that makes it possible for me to think, for instance (via brain activity).
Samm, if there is only the present, how long does it last for? For anything to happen, for it to change into the next Now, there must be some time for it to change in, mustn’t there?
Also, from both your points of view, did the universe start? If so, how does that fit with there only being a Now (also interesting concerning what came before the universe and how it started). How does it fit with particles never changing, time being wibbly-wobbly and the process/substrate concept?
So, in my usual perplexed ignorance, I’ll wish you a merry
toodle-pip.
Angus.
Thanks for the laugh, Angus.
I’ll let Nick handle the question about particles not changing, since I tend to agree with you about it.
I guess the present lasts for all time, from the beginning to the end of it. Another answer is that any single present lasts for maybe 10^-32 seconds, or however long it is that a collapsed dimension is. In string and membrane theory, most of the eleven (?) dimensions are collapsed dimensions having a size of something like 10^-32 cm–I’m going by memory and you’ll want to look it up. What I’m saying is that time may be a collapsed dimension, but I have no idea how big that would make the present. Tiny, but measurable I suppose.
The final answer for how long does the present lasts is however small the smallest possible instant may be, which I do not know. But be aware that we do not experience change directly. Our immediate experience can only provide “snapshots of reality”. we connect these snapshots in our mind or brain by the action of short-term memory. It is in our mind that we experience motion and change, by way of memory. Memory is vital not only for the experience of change and motion, without it we could not retain the information of our immediate experience, we could not know. Each instant of experience would be a reality complete in itself with no attachment to what came before or after. Intelligence would be an impossibility. A rock can enjoy experience without memory, perhaps. But human consciousness requires both that we experience and that we remember our experiences, vividly for a brief time and vaguely at length. Memory provides us the sensation and effects of the passage of time.
But experience of the moment, in answer to your question about how long the Now lasts, is miniscule; I imagine it the size of a singularity. Perhaps I’m wrong, but if it lasts long, then the next moment, the next Now, must wait in line, and moments can be so impatient! I wonder how long it takes a signal to travel from the eye to the visual areas of the brain, and how long they register there before being overwritten by more recent input. The scientists who study such stuff might be our best source of answers for your question.
Yes, the universe started, probably from a singularity, in a Big Bang. There was no space or time before the Big Bang–more or less. But there was an “initial condition” from which our universe and all other universes that ever may be have their origin. It is an initial condition of existence independent of space-time. This existence embodies the potentiality from which all universes arise. Have I not spoken on this point before? Anyway, it is about 2 a.m., and I must speak at length with the sandman. Good night to you both, my good friends.
Samm
Thanks Samm – hope you slept well! I love the idea surrounding your thoughts on the Now and conscious thought. Not consciousness of all things, but consciousness as we understand it as humans. In a way it is very biocentric: re really do create the universe, as otherwise it would only be segmented and, in some ways, independent snap-shots or reality, not the cohesive and cogent universe that we understand, the one that flows smoothly from day to day. I guess we create the analogue universe from the digital universe of the seperate Nows.
Possibly.
Angus.
How do we r”eally create the universe” if it existed before us? That sounds more egocentric than biocentric.
Angus, I think the Now of time is like the picture of Dorian Grey. It’s only a single picture, not an array of pictures, not a strand of film frames, not digital you see? But this one picture, this one single frame, is not acting right; it’s changing, aging. The present changes, but its always the present, always a single painting of Dorian Grey, but the image on the painting is always changing, changing, changing. We don’t have to create an analogue universe from a digital universe. The universe is very analogue. The changes are always happening, but we only perceive what is, not what was or what will be. We do not exist in the future or the past. We only exist in the here and now. We know this now is changing because we remember how it was; we remember the past now. But all we ever can see is the present now that we exist in. God, it would be so confusing if we existed in and observed more than one now at a time, more than one picture at a time. This one picture is ever-changing like Dorian Grey’s portrait.
Nick, it’s like I create Samm, you create Nick, and everything creates themselves, not only at our level of being but at every level of being from the tiniest fundamental and indivisible quantum particles to the vastest of galactic superclusters. What is hidden–existing in time but not in space–is first born, comes into being first. It then manifests itself in space by creating its physical body. If reincarnation is valid–I don’t proclaim it to be so–then the hidden being may outlast its manifest form and create another manifestation after the first body discorporates (this is pure conjecture). But this is going pretty far beyond science at this point. I don’t think we need to walk far down this path in our discussion here.
We talk about we can only know what we experience and we can only experience what exists. But can something exists that does not experience and is not experienced? I dare to say no, not things as we know them, not the things that comprise the universe. But the universe had a beginning. Who experienced this beginning? What was experienced by it? I’m suggesting that consciousness is universal and that the universe itself is a conscious being. If it were true of the universe when there was only cosmic mind and the pure energy of creation, then it remains true today.
I believe that the ground-state of being, of existence, is indeed beyond (independent of) space-time. In this state of existence, there can only be potential being, not actual being. The ground-state of being is boundless potentiality, all hidden and changeless (because there is no space-time structure). When a universe is formed, a space-time continuum is formed with it and the potentiality of that universe is scattered across the space-time superstructure. The character of that universe (its physical laws and intrinsic values–constants, etc.) is held by the cosmic mind of that universe, which will determine the path along which the universe will evolve.
Samm
Hi Samm,
My idea of the ‘digital’ aspect of the Now comes from the fact the present takes some time to occur – perhaps as long as a collapsed dimension is wide – which I have taken to mean that during that miniscule time nothing happens. It is a snapshot of reality, which is slightly different to the Nows before and after it.
I think I must have that wrong, as otherwise the progression of Nows would be just like a strand of film frames. So, how does it work? Does change occur during each Now? WHat am I missing?
Thanks,
Angus.
I think particles do not change because they don’t need to, and we have proven they can’t sometimes, yet they interact with us the same, it’s not my idea or a theory, it’s fact; light travels at the speed of light, Relativity which has been proven many times over explains that when you travel at the speed of light “time” stops from the perspective of the external, and so nothing happens internally from our place in time.
But, we still “experience” light, even though the particle itself does not change as we experience it; it’s absolutely frozen, only it’s _position_ changes. The light doesn’t change in itself and it can’t. But also, It doesn’t have to; We still see something happen, we can “use” light, even though it’s completely timeless and the particles themselves are unchanging, even though we know that nothing is happening to the light itself.
Electricity, or, electrons often travel at or so near the speed of light that their time as in a second would take 2,000 years to pass for us, yet, no matter how fast or slow an electron travels, we still observe the same effect on us.
We’re “dumb” to the universe and ever biased against it because we are stuck perceiving it inside our minds, and keep getting hung up on the idea that our perception somehow “means” something, or, worse yet, that our mere perception actually means everything! What a closed-minded view! That our minds “are” the universe!
The truth is the universe got along just fine without us and if we all blew up it would keep on keeping on. Thought is meaningless from the perspective of the universe, we are biased, and until we can see past that we remain closed minded and thinking ignorant thoughts about it.
Nick, I’m sure you’re familiar with “frames of reference” in regards to relativity. Within each frame of reference, time precedes at a constant rate. For example, the passengers of a starship traveling at 98% of light speed, notice no change in the motion of their clock hands, nor in their physical activities.
I don’t know how someone from a stationary frame of reference, relative to the starship could really observe anything aboard the ship, but if we may imagine it possible… A stationary observer would observe that time aboard the ship has slowed to nearly to a stop. And as you say, a photon traveling at light speed appears to experience no time from the moment of emission to the moment of absorption, even if it has traveled millions or billions of light years in the interim. The photon is expected to experience time normally within its frame of reference of course, but is the photon a particle or a wave as it travels at light speed, unobserved (having no interaction with other matter or energy?)?
I know that relativity theory states that space is compressed in the direction of travel as an object (frame of reference) accelerates toward the speed of light. At light speed, this compression is adequate enough to compress the photon’s point of origin/emission and point of destination/absorption together (from the viewpoint of a stationary observer), yes?
Speaking of time freeze…I’m outta time for now. More later.
Samm
I understand that to the photons frame of reference, no sort of freezing occurs, but also, because the photon is actually traveling at light speed, it will never experience anything, as it’s speed is always light speed.
Even for all eternity to pass for the universe, no time will _ever_ pass for the photon because it only has one speed; light speed (I know light travels slower in other mediums but this has proven to be bounce, not a change in actual particle speed). So from our perspective, if we observed the photon’s clock when it left the big bang, and checked again today, not a single period of time would have passed for it, although billions of years have passed for the universe, and trillions of interactions have happened with that photon so far.
So, in our frame, it’s frozen and cannot change; no moving parts, it’s makeup is exactly the same as when it was emitted; as you say the photon appears to experience no time. So we can affect it; absorb it, deflect it, direct it, detect it, shrink or stretch it, gravity can pull it, etc., but the photon does not experience this; it is a one-sided interaction as far as the possibility of experience is concerned, is it not?
Have you ever thought about these situations in your universal consciousness theory? i.e. the photon cannot experience these interactions and appears and for all purposes is actually frozen, yet that does not apparently stop it from being able to interact with the universe. I know the jury is out on what exactly the photon is (particle or wave) and I believe everything is a wave and that is certainly what the scientific community is moving toward, but, whatever it is, it still exists; do you believe it has consciousness or needs it or possesses it in order to interact, and if so, how does it do this when it is frozen in time from the reference of the interacting entities?
Also, the photon’s length itself collapses in the direction of travel, down to infinitely thin at light speed (a 3D object becomes 2D) but the distance traveled, in any frame; the observer or the photon, remains the same, only in the photon’s frame will the “experience” of travel seem instantaneous; because no time passes for it while it travels. I don’t know if that helps you formulate ideas; it’s making me go cross-eyed 😀 but also eager to hear what you think!
Samm you are ignoring emergence: Complexity theory proves that a mind, or, consciousness, is an emergent behavior; therefore it is silly to think an atom possesses consciousness because the whole of a human, comprised of atoms, possesses consciousness.
A human hair is not comprised of “lesser” human hairs. It is comprised of something completely different and alien to the hair. The hair is an emergent structure.
A computer which lets you type on a keyboard and play games is emergent; it’s made up of molecules of glass, oxygen, carbon and metals… these things themselves cannot use the Internet, yet the computer that is made up of them can.
The same with an apple, a building, a TV, a saxophone, or anything. They emerge out of lesser constructs, these lesser constructs have absolutely no properties that the greater structures possess.
You would think it to be very silly if I told you a lesser apple or a lesser baby rattle is inside every carbon atom, so why do you think along the lines of a lesser consciousness is inside every carbon atom simply because you possess this property and you are built from them?
Things can be built that possess “new” properties that the building materials themselves did not possess. This is emergence.
Ignoring this can be very limiting to where your thinking can take you.
Hi, Nick. As regards your post of Mar-10, 7:17, I see one source of confusion. When you say a particle doesn’t change, I assume that you mean it really doesn’t change at all, not in itself or in any of its intrinsic properties, and this of course is preposterous. You yourself say above that its position may change but the particle does not. And you say that particles don’t change, but that “they interact with us the same”. Now interaction is change.
So you see, we’re just understanding change in two different ways. What do you mean when you say that a particle doesn’t change? What doesn’t change? How can a particle interact without changing? *I think this will help us understand how a particle can remain changeless while in fact changing.
Samm
Well I mean things don’t change, _relative_ to a slower observer, if something is moving at the speed of light or very near it. Internally it is frozen in time to the observers reference; no internal change; like a car moving at the speed of light with an internal combustion engine; the engine works, and the car is indeed interacting with the universe, as in it is moving through the universe and it can slam into things moving slower, and forces are working on it, like radio waves will bounce off it, gravity will pull it, EM waves will emit from it, but, you must accept that internally there is no change; not a single atom or particle moves anywhere internally, not a single part moves or interacts with each other, zero internal movement or change of any kind; there can’t be, if there were, all kinds of impossible stuff would happen.
Now a speed of light car may be hard to imagine because we never see them, but many objects in the universe interact with us every day that do travel this fast, like the light coming from your computer screen is hitting your eyes at the speed of light; those particles have zero internal movement. They are unchanging. They get created by a reaction in the screen, and they get absorbed by a reaction in your eye, but during their travel they were 100% unchanged in anyway, only their _position_ in the universe changed, yet, also, they “experienced” change, as in their trajectory moved them, gravity worked on them, electromagnetism worked on them, and the strong and weak forces worked on them during their flight, yet still, zero internal movement was experienced; the particle was completely frozen internally.
So, how were they conscious of anything while they existed if they themselves could not change? Does that make sense?
You can scale this up further to objects with multiple particles themselves like an alpha particle being accelerated at CERN, and you can go even further with galaxies traveling near light speed (> 50%) that we have observed; their field forces are not at all latent as you might expect, if you would expect them to be conscious to be able to interact or “experience” the change.
So, how can this speed of light object be conscious of anything in the sense that change = consciousness, when there is no internal change from our point of view, yet all known field forces still interact with it as we would expect?
Could it be that consciousness is emergent? That it is not somehow special in the sense that everything must possess it?
Otherwise, when the object is completely frozen in time due to it’s velocity, how does it still interact with field forces, or experience change?
I will have to question the verity of Complexity Theory if it says that consciousness emerges in humans from lesser, smaller, or older levels of being that have no consciousness. Consciousness is our ability to experience. Without consciousness, we would be unable to experience our sensory perceptions, our thoughts, our feelings and desires, our memories, our imagination, anything at all. The absence of all experience equates to the absence of all existence as we know it in this universe. If I am not conscious, I cannot experience and I cannot have any knowledge that I exist. You might know that my body exists as a vegetable or a corpse, but you could not know that the I-inside exists.
My body in fact may continue to experience, to be conscious, although I am not. It can continue to exist and live even if I, the sentient consciousness who abides within it am not home. The body might even still respond to pin pricks. And I know it will continue its heartbeat, continue falling against gravity, continue responding to light by presenting a visible image. So yes, my body is experiencing and responding to its experiences. My body is conscious. And the bed that supports my vegetative body experiences the weight of my body and falls against the pull of gravity and responds to light. It is therefore conscious as well.
Human consciousness is emergent only in that it is more complex than more primitive forms of consciousness, but it inherits many of its fundamental traits from these lower orders of consciousness and builds upon them, especially by the inclusion of sentience among the things it experiences and affect its responses. Human consciousness does not exist among other beings in the universe, but more primitive and fundamental forms of consciousness do.
Consciousness is as old as the universe itself, with a lot more variety than humans allow it. We seem intent that only human consciousness is valid.
Samm
So I think maybe we have 3 different arguments going here that maybe are getting caught up with each other(?):
I am just trying to understand you definition of consciousness.
1) You are arguing to encompass everything into the realm of what is considered conscious, because everything can experience, or, interact. This is a definition change, and you are certainly entitled to it without an argument as long as you explain it and you have. But keep in mind your definition is incredibly different from mine and the norm, so this can be confusing since we’re both talking about it, but what I mean when I say it and what you mean when you say it are different even though the word is identical. So I think some confusion is occurring here simply because we’re using 1 word and 2 meanings.
2) I am asking about your definition in that, if everything is actually conscious, or “aware” of it’s surroundings on some level, how can things that are frozen still interact in your definition, and therefore “be conscious”, and, don’t these frozen objects need to at least have their “awareness” suspended through the interaction if they do not change, or are frozen in time because of their velocity? Yet they still change the universe through force? I am not arguing against your redefinition of consciousness, only, I am asking you what your opinion is of what happens during these weird occurrences in your definition of consciousness.
3) We seem to be starting an arguing about emergence and complexity but they are very intuitive ideas. They simply point out that wild and brand new traits emerge from other things when put together, for example, oxygen and hydrogen can combine to form water, something completely and totally different, that has properties that simply do not exist in any way in it’s building blocks. Although a clear complexity theory is only decades old, the original ideas it’s built on are nearly timeless; everybody realizes they occur. They are taught in college as factual and have many, many proofs, and they can’t in themselves disprove your new definition, I am just using them to draw a parallel that brings some similar thoughts and pitfalls into question, but they are just honest questions so that you can point out something I didn’t think about, or I can point out something you didn’t think about, and we can both learn more about it.
Hi Nick,
Sorry, I am about to be really thick, so please bear with me. It’s about the particle going at the speed of light and not experiencing anything as it doesn’t change. But if it hits a solar panel, for instance, the photon wave is absorbed and ceases to exit, doesn’t it? Isn’t that quite a remarkably huge change that must be experienced internally & externally? After all, what can be more of a change than going rather rapidly from a light wave to a slightly faster jiggling antifreeze molecule?
Probably basic stuff, so thanks in advance for your patient instruction!
Angus.