m2theory

There is a force connecting us all.  Rather, we are bathed in an unconscious connectivity described in physics as a forcefield.  It appears to us in many different ways and has a certain magical nature.  Experimental evidence inclines me to believe that if we think metaphorically we are also able to think mathematically about the connective tissue of humanity, of life, and of even death.  There is meagre scientific evidence of this force and philosophically we are met with sporadic attempts to bring psychological events into a more scientific schematic which leave me cold.  Logic may bring us to an illogical place but irrational behavior may illustrate lines of force.

Lately my fascination with physics has been leading me to conceptualize psychological forces according to relativistic schema, quantum schema, and string theory schema.  My aesthetic sense leads me to believe I am on the right track, that there is a deep structure to the psyche if only I could use my scientific training to fully sense how we think and feel.  In that intuitive manner creative people lead the way to meaning.  How can physics and creativity lead the way to a deep structure theory of psychology?

More than that, how can I leave metaphor and objectify subjectivity?  What kind of perspective is there gained by observing local and non-local phenomena from the platform of different theoretical points of view derived from physics?  As I lay in bed each night my mind composes ideas that make so much sense but can I translate these 3AM fantasies into a hard science?  Will data match my sense of how things work psychologically?  Perhaps there are some things we just cannot understand.  Yet I keep coming  up with them, these overarching ideas.  This is the path Einstein took.  Gedankenexperimenten or thought experiments such as what would it be like to travel alongside a photon at the speed of light were among his earliest probes into the nature of nature itself.  Thereafter Einstein insisted that perception is the product of theory and that perception reifies theory.  Theory precedes what we can experience.  But theory must be experimentally driven and if experiments do not support the theory, out it goes.  My theories need to make predictions, and experiments must support the theory.

Tonight the concept has been how we live in a field.  The subatomic particles composing all fields have been defined as bosons, fermions, and anyons.  Bosons are force connectors, fermions are particles, and anyons can transmute one into the other.  This makes sense to me in that my brain utilizes chemical reactions, electrical patterns emerge from these and are passed from one part of my body to another by nerves, and all my cells, organs, and behavior collaborate to keep me alive.  I am not alone.  I speak to my wife and she understands me or not.  We are driven to understand each other and become unhappy if communication breaks down.  We live in a field of attraction and repulsion, where our fermionic particle nature interacts through bosonic forces.  It is emotional, spiritual, and physical.  It is intellectual, artistic, and irrational.  We are crazy or sane, sexual or celibate, but we know each other by now and can return to a base line of common understanding built up over the years.

Why not extend this conceptualization to include others?  Communication is a natural thing but needs to become developed or we live in a black hole of isolation.  No light escapes from a black hole and yet black holes manifest the heaviest forces of which I am aware.  Black holes affect the forces around them; they tear apart particles and reproduce conditions extant at the beginning of spacetime—the Big Bang.  We just cannot observe these conditions directly.  This is similar to being alive because though they are not alive black holes emulate life through their effect on other physical forces.  From this perspective a black hole is the psychological equivalent of the ultimate narcissist who cannot see another person from any other point of view other than from his or her own one-pointed nature.  A black hole is closed.  It is attractive.  But it is not alive.  Why not make black holes a metaphor for a state of being?

I have noticed that working as a psychologist in a setting such as a nursing home, or in my office with one person, if I open myself up to the forces around me I can tune those forces.  My artistic nature entails the need to shape an aesthetic whole with the shaping of the beingness of other people in psychological settings.  I am familiar with the similarity between performance with others and the necessary communication that playing music with others and artistic collaboration entails.  It has been helpful to conceptualize my work with others this way because I can draw upon years of practice, an aesthetic, and a drive to take others—including myself—somewhere more positive.  What I am doing comes from that need on my part to make people think for themselves but within a group so that there is efficiency and focus.  By going at it like that I don’t have to predict outcomes because the individuals make them emerge if they work together.  In this way a black hole becomes an organizing principle.  Black holes are people who cannot relate to other people and are negative.  Negative means destructive of a group process that relies on openness and cooperation.  The energy of a narcissistic person organizes the energy of people around them in a negative way.  How can I get to a place where healing can occur?  My solution has always been to be open to the forces in the situation.  Now I am thinking of them from the perspective of the interactivity of particles scaled up to include the biological forces and by extension the psychological forces that connect the particles.  This is how physics works—it scales up from the fundamental, from the basis, from the smallest, most energetic level.  Mathematical formulae schematize these fermions, bosons, and anyons.  If I were a better mathematician, that is what I would be doing with psychological forces connecting us all—building up from the smallest, most energetic levels to the macro levels of behavior.

On this note, quantum mechanics becomes relevant.  Quantum forces exist by definition at the smallest, most energetic scale.  If quantum mechanics were to be understood as an operative on the psychological scale, the most seductive nature would have to be that of entanglement.  Particles, and here we are on the subatomic level, interact, become entangled, and operations on one particle affect the entangled particle.  Instantly.  Or at least, as instantly as can be measured by our instruments.  For our purposes, there is an identity between the entangled particles so doing something to one is the same thing as doing something to the other.  Experimentally, particles such as these have no time-like difference.  There is no speed limit imposed by the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum.  For this reason entanglement stands for a FTL—faster than light—interaction.  Entanglement is superluminal, FTL.  For this reason I like to think of it as beyond space-time.

The quantum nature of entanglement allows many things to occur.  This leads to speculative physics.  Rather than launch into a treatise on the  multiverse or upon alternative universes, and what this implies, I want to make psychological sense of quantum physics.  Yet, if we each occupy a black hole of narcissism, we can also communicate.  Quantum physics might be the way one black hole communicates to another.  We are surrounded by beauty and the internal beauty in our black holes finds a connection to the beauty external to our black holes.  For this reason my own logical process drives me to feel a we, rather than a singularity.  A singularity may be the rock-bottom point of the black hole in which space-time physics no longer exist.  Quantum forces exist in the singularity so there is a communication from out of the black hole.  My sense is that we are narcissists but that we can communicate—communication logically proceeds on the quantum level and follows mathematical formulae pertinent to superimposition, Schrödinger wave function, quantum chromodynamics, all the way down to the Planck level.

When we reach the Planck level, and the Planck energy of the quanta, a different mathematical schema becomes necessary.  Here we look for string theory to bring it all together.  At least quantum theory can be tested.  String theory operates at energies so high and dimensions so small that the ways science so far measures and observes no longer work.  Yet the elegance of string theory, and its later version, M Theory, short for membrane theory, alerts me to the potential for further speculation about physics and psyche.  Let me point out that we live in a membrane, or what string theorists refer to as a brane.  Branes are not just one-dimensional like pond scum.  Branes have up to 10 dimensions, plus another dimension for time, making 11 dimensions.  Within branes are other branes, and external to branes are other branes, and they don’t necessarily communicate with one another.  Branes accommodate something that quantum mechanics so far has been unable to do—gravity.  I am reaching the limit of my understanding of  branes and string theory because it is of all the scientific principles the most dependent upon mathematics.  It is expressed almost exclusively in this mathematical language.  I am convinced there must be physical principles beyond Einsteinian space-time and quantum mechanics.  Whether it is string theory or not lies beyond my present understanding.

If we are all connected on the most fundamental level of the Planck energy we must all be resonating like strings.  When I speak to you the music of my ideas and feelings and emotions help you to vibrate sympathetically with what I am expressing.  Less than perfect understanding is naturally discordant—out of harmony.  Since we are all entangled, what one says affects another.  We are all strings vibrating sympathetically with one another.  My words and actions are magnified by the natural amplifier of the life force—energy emanating from the source of our very being.  Otherwise it would all be gibberish.  Psychology starts here.