m2theory

Seldom has so little happened to so many.

MIND AND MATTER

I assert that the mind functions according to quantum states.  Mind collapses probability waves as described clearly by Feynman.  The brain is an organ specifically organized to collapse probability waves, inducing mind.  We are connected by entanglement, every one of us.  We apperceive non-local events across superluminous and extreme distances at FTL—faster than light—speeds as they occur.  We apperceive events before they occur.  Time does not strictly follow the arrow of time as suggested by dreams, visions, psychotic states, paranoid delusions, schizophrenic experience of the living dead, communication through teeth of messages from people on Mars, or seers and prophets as they peer into the future.

By this last statement, I do not support all psychotic visions and experiences as true, but I wish to examine them from a different standpoint than commonly accepted agreed upon reality.  Different cultures induce trance states.  Many drugs induce alternative reality states.  Why not look at what these states represent from the perspective of quantum mind before throwing out the baby with the bath water?

Synchronicity, a Jungian principle of acausal meaningful simultaneous events, might come under the quantum mind definition.  Geomantic procedures, including the Chinese Book of Changes—the I Ching—as described in The Secret of the Golden Flower, appear to be based upon the belief that the universe is one and all events in the universe are entangled in the moment.  The I Ching explicitly states it relies upon the constellation of universal forces when the Oracle answers questions put to it.  I think astrology and Tarot may also rely on quantum mind.

Please don’t think I am adhering to the belief that ufo sightings “prove” anything.  Jung makes the point that these sightings may be projections of the unconscious and until an alien steps out of the movie screen and says hello I will have to maintain an air of polite skepticism as a psychologist.  I just do not feel it is wise to rule out events and experiences until they are adequately described in a scientific manner.

Spacetime is the universe our body and our brain occupies.  Our individuality can be explained by the individual frame occupied by each brain.  Your spacetime and mine coexist  relative to one another.  We communicate through the mind.  The mind is a marvelous thing.  Let us wonder.

Classical physics posits two things cannot occupy the same space at the same time.  Ask any choreographer and you will obtain the same answer.  Through all the lifts, pas de deux, troupe choreography, you do not see dancers melt into one another (unless you are watching the Black Swan transform psychotically from a dancer into a swan).  But if you question a musician, you will hear something quite different.  Two musicians cannot, but two notes can occupy an identical spacetime continuum.  In this way music appears to be a form of quantum mechanics, specifically string theory postulates. Vibratory fields produce overtones of the dominant tone so all notes that interact have to occupy the same space at the same time.  When notes interact closely they produce beats, enrichen the timbre, producing physical results of their interaction.  Music defines a pointlike omicron of insertion that defies Newtonian physics, clarifies the classical mind, and invades string theory simultaneously.  Just ask any musician—they will say they have musically entered a private space when  they play with any other musician on the same piece.  In all written music, improvised music, folk music, spiritual, profane, rock, and all kinds of interactive music the notes/beats interact as they occupy the same space at the same time.  In turn, research suggests that in ritual, music synchronizes brains of participants too so that a group synergy emergent from the music and ceremony binds people together.

How can two massless objects, thin photons, occupy the same spacetime simultaneously?  If they have zero mass nothing keeps them apart or brings them together if they also have no charge.  But they have effects secondary to energy.  They take the form of a particular form of energy—frequency.  Photons, like other subatomic particles with mass, are emitted when electrons jump from an energized to a less energized quantum level of energy in quantum leaps.  As energy the photon has mass, but because it has no mass it has velocity equal to the speed of light, the speed of photons.  The question is, can two massless particles occupy the same spacetime simultaneously?

The classical Newtonian mind, the mind of Einstein, but not the mind of Bohr states e = mc².  Bohr and Feynman do not classically define spacetime and famously classical physicists cannot account for events at quantum energies.  Quantum time moves but not specifically in a direction.  Classical spacetime moves forward or backward.  How is it spacetime moves only forward to massive objects?  You and I do not follow the arrow of time backwards.  To move at the speed of light, as in the speed of a photon, is to effectively halt time itself and to relativize spacetime.  Any object with mass has a cone of possibility limited to the speed of light.  Mass moves slower than the speed of light through spacetime.  But entangled subatomic particles are not limited to and do not follow 4 dimensional rules.  There is room for speculation about whether, in a quantum world, two objects of a certain energy that have no mass can indeed occupy the same space at the same time.

Superposition posits potential.

Out of quantum superposition emerges entanglement of particles in a world beyond spacetime.  The word spacetime might also be relativized by reversing the usual order to create the word timespace, that area within which something happens in time.  Time being a dimension, timespace includes everything so entangled particles interact in timespace, even at FTL, faster than light superluminous speed.  Many entangled particles interacting outside of spacetime do not yet exist because of the superposition principle.  They have yet to collapse into spacetime.  Let us refer to entangled, superpositioned particles as occupying timespace.  They are superpositioned and therefore occupy the same space at the same time.  Dropping out of timespace, superpositioned quantum particles collapse into spacetime and cannot then act according to timespace.  So in timespace, superpositioned entangled particles are different from spacetime collapsed wave particles, or wavicles to be precise.  Wavicles are the spacetime rendition of superpositioned quantum particles.  How do they interact besides collapsing?

Vibrations may offer a clue.  Consider two musicians playing with one another.  They might be able to pass through one another—give them enough time.  But the odds are against it.  But the music they play fills timespace.  Playing together entangles vibratory schemae.  A tone is produced which has harmonics—same tone with multiple waves vibrating at various frequencies.  This effect can be heard as if they filled the air with virtual particles occupying timespace.  Good music comes from another place.  It takes us to another place.  That place is called different things so I cannot name it in a specific way.  There are mathematical formulae which describe imaginary numbers which describe superpositioned quantum particles that also could describe good music.

SCALAR THOUGHTS

Thoughts imply scales of thoughts.  Chord changes are mindful potential elaborations of thoughts.  In the central vortex emotional thoughts arrange, entangle, and manifest physically and spiritually.  In thinking a thought a thought emerges to which thought converges.

Thoughts, like stars, warp spacetime in Riemanic spacetime curvatures.  Heavy thoughts attract thoughts.  Black thoughts accumulate –white thoughts expand.  Black holes of black thoughts create vortices out of which white thoughts create possibilities—a metaphor of creativity via superposition of thoughts, notes and scales.

TRITONIC TRANSFORMATION

Play one note and different scales are implied.  Play a second, and multiple scales are eliminated, inferring different scales which are more likely to emerge.  A third note illuminates the sky of quantum potential.  Chords imply scalar possibilities.  Changes eliminate as well as illuminate as potential emergent interactions precipitate out of rhythm and time.  Forward and backward are relative frames meeting in the middle of the tritonic triangle—the Jewish Tritonic Star, the Star of David, the poet and musician.  In the center all potential particles interact and vortices often emerge:  Coltrane’s pulse-time; time and space implicate one another; notes entangle, vortices entangle, thought subsumes to quantum mind—Timespace.

Tritones in classical music theory are referred to as sus4 chords, where sus is short for suspended, and 4 is representative of the interval between notes, in this case a total of four notes—a 4^th.  A tritone consists of three notes, each a 4^th apart:  a sus4 chord.  Like any chord, tritones establish a field and this group forms a specific type of group that sounds in a particular way.  A set of tritonic or sus4 chord changes, which I will refer to as changes, formulate multiple triangles that form field interactions within the triangulation.  They are the most unstable chords and transform into more stable chords in a process I call tritonic transformation.  Think of tritonic transformation like you imagine reification, or the collapsing wave of superpositioned subatomic particles suddenly emerging into spacetime from timespace.  They become real, are reified.  Quantum mechanics following Schrödinger and Heisenberg refer to this collapsing wave as the result of observation.  Or, “when you hear music it’s gone in the air—you can never catch it again (Eric Dolphy, Hilversum, Holland, 2 June1964).”

VITAL AND CONSCIOUS

The Vital is the way of life

My speculative position that there is a beginning of  consciousness and that consciousness begins with the beginning of life might sound new, but it is not.  What is new is my desire to formulate a test of consciousness and to apply it on many different levels of what is alive.  The test has certain principles.  It is not a paper and pencil test.  Once the principles are established, and I have noted only a few, then they can be applied.  At that point I introduce hypotheses.  The hypotheses are stated in the hypothetical-deductive model which is statistical and therefore relies on the null hypothesis.  I hope to challenge those among us who are interested in the deep structure of consciousness.  With any luck, I can begin to move toward my other radical position, proving that there is a quantum mind.

I think there are some things I ought say again about consciousness.  Vital are the processes we think of as ourselves.  (If I could write in German I would call this The Vital.)  Everything alive is vital.  Everything that is dead is not Vital. Anything alive is conscious.  Vital has consciousness.  Consciousness is locked up in the body.  Every body, i.e., living thing is also conscious.  This means a virus has consciousness.  The bacterium found in interstellar space are aware.  Do I wonder if awareness might be eternal bliss?  That fits in with the universal appeal of an afterlife.  And do we give ourselves the wish made into reality of eternal bliss?  This projection of the wish falls upon everything and may be organized along archetypal lines of energy.  Psychic energy falls upon all life forms.  We investigate conscious behavior, unconscious behavior, and emotional behavior, calling it unconscious.  Consciousness is primordial and indestructible having accompanied life since the inception of life.  Infants are conscious from the moment of conception and yet this consciousness is not innate to the neonate but rather passed on from sperm and egg.  So there is no beginning of consciousness at conception.

Consciousness begins with the beginning of life. The end of consciousness may be an illusion.  Illusory projection upon matter forms culture.  Whatever the medium, a projection channels energy and consciousness.  Media include visual art, physical art, physics and science in general, literary arts, music of all genres, dance and Sufi spinning, folk dance, and the healing arts, and in some cases, religion.

We start off alive and conscious of our being alive.  Awareness of being alive leads down cultural paths, warrior class, all social groupings.  Political parties use conscious energy to accomplish unconscious goals such as war and destruction, or to facilitate creative goals like making a living and raising a family.  Groups are punished on the model that rule of law can be manipulated.  Life needs an out, and if this means destruction, life destroys life.  Evil manipulation and good manipulation amount to the same old thing.  Freud and Thanatos, his death and destructive impulse, unconscious factor, leads to cathartic ecstatic celebration of whatever it is including joy at taking away life and consciousness and measures us.  The flip side of unconscious evil is conscious good.  The bifurcation of consciousness culturally emerges in institutions of congress.  Systems emerge from congress and evolve, devolve, integrate, analyze, and act.  The systems do not act, and they are but projections themselves.  Projection of content, making the unconscious conscious, changes things; moves things around; creates ideas to make into reality our dreams.  Projection creates change.  Dreams create projections and are projections themselves.

PROJECTIONS ARE PSYCHOLOGICAL.

My desire to measure psyche emanates from my logical, analytical being.  Taking hypotheses and measuring these hypotheses constitutes psychological testing.  What is consciousness and how can consciousness be measured:  my above incoherent exposition needs some order.  Let us proceed to order the disorder.

Psychology frames quantum reality

As projections are psychological, conscious knowing acts upon material macro, 4 dimensional reality.  The thinking of something changes quantum reality by the field of potential the projections constellate (to use a Jungian term meaning organizing unconscious “material”).  There are points at which quantum potential settles into a macro world expression that we experience as reality.  I refer to these as phase transitions.

At a phase transition the organization shifts.  When Kurt Lewin describes gestalts he refers to them in the abstract.  As such they are mathematical and therefore well within the measurable and observable universe we inhabit and investigate by all means possible, including psychologically.  How can we measure the phase transition of the vital force—where physics meets psychology?  The alternate universes we can as conscious living vital beings inhabit develop out of choices that are resonant frequencies of vitality that exist just as clearly as particles—sub-atomic and atomic—are resonant frequencies of superstring theory.  Physics does not mention life or vital yet physicists, such as Leonard Susskind, ascribe to the anthropic principle—the mind creation principle, the world as a hologram principle, i.e., a projection principle founded upon quantum reality which describes both a subatomic “world” and frequencies beyond observation.  Here again physics and consciousness measure the same thing.  Analysis explores limits.  Limits mark phase transitions.  Mind becomes real.

HYPOTHESES AND NULL HYPOTHESES

Did I mention these are hypothetical issues?  As such, they might be measured statistically if set up as null hypotheses.  Why do that?  Because scientific thinking requires it.  Instead of proving it, you have to prove it is not not true at a significant level, preferably at the .01 level.  Follow me down the path of disproving the proof.  If we can’t, the proof must be true as operationally defined.

• Consciousness cannot be measured.
• If consciousness can be measured, then consciousness in living organisms cannot be measured.
• Starting with homo sapiensa measurement of consciousness needs to be scaled down to lower and lower orders on the evolutionary scale (as it exists on earth):
  • Eukaryotes are not conscious.
  • Prokaryotes are not conscious.

Putting it positively, consciousness can be measured in humans and so can artificial intelligence (AI).  I am not getting into machine intelligence (yet).  If I were to suggest AI answers some of the rules of the proving of the Turing Test as a form of consciousness, then I will need to convince myself that consciousness also accrues to man-made machines.  And if I go down that path, the next idea is to test if any of the visible bodies, cosmologically or sub-atomically, ascribe to consciousness.  That being the case, I can only suggest this should be re-examined once AI has not been disproved.

How can rules of what operationally defines intelligence be made into a reliable and valid test that can be scaled up and down?  Such a test requires a creative test development person to construct it.  Once this test is developed and validated we can begin applying the principles to lower and lower organisms.  So firstly it must measure not intelligence—don’t need to get sidetracked here—but consciousness in all mammals.  Proceeding to the reptiles, birds, and cold-blooded fauna, and then into vegetable flora, let us proceed down to the cellular level (eukaryotes) and the more primitive cellular level (prokaryotes).  If I’m missing a lower living thing, add it at this time.  Scalability of consciousness form depends on Jung’s theory of psychic energy and Jung makes an excellent case for the scalability of consciousness, in concert with Freud.  Psychodynamic psychotherapy relies upon such a foundation.  Cognitive behavioral psychotherapy also relies upon this as a substratum of information theory, which might constitute a route towards the construction of such an instrument.  Mindfulness theorists ought to have something to add to this discussion.  Advocates of phenomenology who follow Husserl could, if any still exist, process-orient the way questions or judgments about experience are asked.

WELCOME TO MY WORLD.

ANNOUNCEMENT ANNOUNCEMENT!
I have constructed my own web page. It contains musings, research, soundfiles, links to collaborative musical adventures on SoundCloud. If you like the play of ideas–musical and otherwise–give it whirl. And please comment.

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.