Post-quantum science leads to the highest spirituality 2009-10-13T20:17:44Z User 399 http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v399/ OrgSpace NewsLog

Whoever is acquainted with the present state of affairs knows that the present paradigm, the one that still prevails in the scientific world – the one that excludes the spiritual face of reality –, is under siege by many laboratorial experiments and scientists’ papers and consciousnesses. Th...

We have already delineated – in other texts – what is the post-quantum conception of the totality into which we are all embedded and we ordinarily use to name “the universe” or “the world”.
We also made clear why the word universe should be avoided. First of all, because of its ambiguities. Usually “universe” means all that exists, without making clear how wide is the meaning of the word “all”. In the realm of science, however, according to the present paradigm it’s stated that science occupies with the “physical” universe, with the explicit exclusion of the subjective or imaginary face of the cosmic totality. However, we are focusing in the collection of everything that exists, have existed and will exist in all ontological levels, be it in the material or spiritual hemispheres.
Whoever is acquainted with the present state of affairs knows the present paradigm, that still prevails in the scientific world – the one that excludes the spiritual face of reality –, is under siege by many laboratorial experiments and scientists’ papers and consciousnesses. The so-called hard-nose scientists are the supporting group of this conservative “right wing”, those who adhere to a naïve materialist conception of reality, which attained its highlight in the 19 and first two thirds of the 20th century.
In the present time, there is a rupture in the corpus of scientific knowledge between the materialist hard-noses (Freudians, Marxists and other ists) and the scientists of the new paradigm, open-minded to the imaginary/subjective hemisphere of totality. This has caused a schizophrenic crack in scientific knowledge and we usually see, in a congress, elbow to elbow, members of the two slopes into a silent virtual battle, once they have entirely different weltanschauungs (world conceptions).
To our purposes, we use the word “wholeness” to correspond to everything that exists, have existed or will exist in the physical and trans-physical aspects of the universal being. To this totality being we have already suggested it is bounded to a 6-dimensional truss of three dimensions of the order space (x, y, z) and three of the order time (t, u, v). This 6-dimensional frame comprehends everything that can be accessed via our cognitive mind and apparatus. Anything supposed to stay beyond that frame couldn’t be accessible to our knowledge.
We have already defined, in other texts, the consensual character of that thing we used to call “objective reality”, and today we already know that it only “exists” as far as there is a consensus between interacting subjectivities. It’s the interacting of a subjectivity with the already collapsed reality that collapses new functions of Schröedinger, continuously weaving the fabric of reality. It’s the collapse of the quantum function that turns one of the virtual futures in the field of quantum possibilities into an actual present. This way the Copenhagen interpretation shows to be the most fit as a model of wholeness. Consciousness, as a vast spectrum – analogous to the electromagnetic spectrum – is the creative agent of the “reality”, the one we believe to be objective.
This conceptual back-ground and the non-linear character of 2 and 3-dimensional time requires an utterly new subject/object relationship, into an epistemological standpoint rather different of the one adopted today. They suggest the creation of a new approach capable of facing the fact that any notions of succession or chronological ordering have lost their kernel condition, now untruthful as a reliable reference.
In other texts, I’ve already written on the new possibilities open by this new conception of time and what are some of the new ways of using it. However, this subject is too far of its exhaustion.
The logic development of those considerations cannot ignore the impact of those synthesis in the daily life of any of us. How can the post-quantum conceptions influence on people who became aware of this new epistemological standpoint?
The leap is too wide and many are prone to refuse this challenge. It’s a total subversion in the relationship between the subject and the cosmos. It’s an enlarged version of the same kind of what happens in the study and practice of Jungian psychology. You cannot study and apply the Jungian view of the world and life in an irresponsible way, devoid of an ethical standpoint. This is the reason why there are not dishonest Jungian doctors. If he is not honest, all Jungian worldview he tries to impose on reality will be inconsequential or false and he will become nothing more than a charlatan.
By the same token, and in an enlarged edition, we have the post-quantum view in the subjective/objective relationship of the individual with the whole cosmos. This view requires an absolute sincerity of purpose, to be understood in plenitude, once it’s this inner attitude that will establish the degree of sharpness of the cognitive fact. It’s not only necessary a revolution, but a total subversion of the relationship between the individual I (me) and wholeness. If this subversion of scales and values is not completed the understanding of the post-quantum scientific view will not be attained.
In the conservative materialistic view, a scientist could assume a standpoint outside the studied universe – as if he were not part of it. The same way occurs when a Freudian analyst stays outside the patient’s problems, “just applying a theory”.
The post-quantum view doesn’t permit such magic. Each one of us is part of the “reality process” and cannot stay outside it.
We are forced to be honest.
We have already delineated – in other texts – what is the post-quantum conception of the totality into which we are all embedded and we ordinarily use to name “the universe” or “the world”.
We also made clear why the word universe should be avoided. First of all, because of its ambiguities. Usually “universe” means all that exists, without making clear how wide is the meaning of the word “all”. In the realm of science, however, according to the present paradigm it’s stated that science occupies with the “physical” universe, with the explicit exclusion of the subjective or imaginary face of the cosmic totality. However, we are focusing in the collection of everything that exists, have existed and will exist in all ontological levels, be it in the material or spiritual hemispheres.
Whoever is acquainted with the present state of affairs knows the present paradigm, that still prevails in the scientific world – the one that excludes the spiritual face of reality –, is under siege by many laboratorial experiments and scientists’ papers and consciousnesses. The so-called hard-nose scientists are the supporting group of this conservative “right wing”, those who adhere to a naïve materialist conception of reality, which attained its highlight in the 19 and first two thirds of the 20th century.
In the present time, there is a rupture in the corpus of scientific knowledge between the materialist hard-noses (Freudians, Marxists and other ists) and the scientists of the new paradigm, open-minded to the imaginary/subjective hemisphere of totality. This has caused a schizophrenic crack in scientific knowledge and we usually see, in a congress, elbow to elbow, members of the two slopes into a silent virtual battle, once they have entirely different weltanschauungs (world conceptions).
To our purposes, we use the word “wholeness” to correspond to everything that exists, have existed or will exist in the physical and trans-physical aspects of the universal being. To this totality being we have already suggested it is bounded to a 6-dimensional truss of three dimensions of the order space (x, y, z) and three of the order time (t, u, v). This 6-dimensional frame comprehends everything that can be accessed via our cognitive mind and apparatus. Anything supposed to stay beyond that frame couldn’t be accessible to our knowledge.
We have already defined, in other texts, the consensual character of that thing we used to call “objective reality”, and today we already know that it only “exists” as far as there is a consensus between interacting subjectivities. It’s the interacting of a subjectivity with the already collapsed reality that collapses new functions of Schröedinger, continuously weaving the fabric of reality. It’s the collapse of the quantum function that turns one of the virtual futures in the field of quantum possibilities into an actual present. This way the Copenhagen interpretation shows to be the most fit as a model of wholeness. Consciousness, as a vast spectrum – analogous to the electromagnetic spectrum – is the creative agent of the “reality”, the one we believe to be objective.
This conceptual back-ground and the non-linear character of 2 and 3-dimensional time requires an utterly new subject/object relationship, into an epistemological standpoint rather different of the one adopted today. They suggest the creation of a new approach capable of facing the fact that any notions of succession or chronological ordering have lost their kernel condition, now untruthful as a reliable reference.
In other texts, I’ve already written on the new possibilities open by this new conception of time and what are some of the new ways of using it. However, this subject is too far of its exhaustion.
The logic development of those considerations cannot ignore the impact of those synthesis in the daily life of any of us. How can the post-quantum conceptions influence on people who became aware of this new epistemological standpoint?
The leap is too wide and many are prone to refuse this challenge. It’s a total subversion in the relationship between the subject and the cosmos. It’s an enlarged version of the same kind of what happens in the study and practice of Jungian psychology. You cannot study and apply the Jungian view of the world and life in an irresponsible way, devoid of an ethical standpoint. This is the reason why there are not dishonest Jungian doctors. If he is not honest, all Jungian worldview he tries to impose on reality will be inconsequential or false and he will become nothing more than a charlatan.
By the same token, and in an enlarged edition, we have the post-quantum view in the subjective/objective relationship of the individual with the whole cosmos. This view requires an absolute sincerity of purpose, to be understood in plenitude, once it’s this inner attitude that will establish the degree of sharpness of the cognitive fact. It’s not only necessary a revolution, but a total subversion of the relationship between the individual I (me) and wholeness. If this subversion of scales and values is not completed the understanding of the post-quantum scientific view will not be attained.
In the conservative materialistic view, a scientist could assume a standpoint outside the studied universe – as if he were not part of it. The same way occurs when a Freudian analyst stays outside the patient’s problems, “just applying a theory”.
The post-quantum view doesn’t permit such magic. Each one of us is part of the “reality process” and cannot stay outside it.
We are forced to be honest.
]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v399/__show_article/_a000399-000014.htm 2009-10-13T20:17:44Z 2009-10-13T20:21:16Z

In September, 21th, 1908, exactly one century ago, science entered a kind of railroad switch that has taken its development to the point we are now. Today we see how different everything could be if the option were another, in that crucial point of the scientific evolution.

EXACTLY ONE CENTURY AGO

In September, 21th, 1908, exactly one century ago, science entered a kind of railroad switch that has taken its development to the point we are now. Today we see how different everything could be if the option were another, in that crucial point of the scientific evolution.

Let’s see what happened. At that time, in the city of Köln, Germany, was taking place the 80th Assembly of German Natural Scientists and Physicians, where Hermann Minkowsky presented his address “Space and Time”, a document that became one of the pillars of modern science. It opened with the prophetical words:

The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.

In that remarkable paper, Minkowsky enounces – among others – a statement that could re-direction all forthcoming development of Physics if they were properly interpreted till their last consequences.

He stated that time, to fit the equations where it appeared without contradictions should be acknowledged as an imaginary value, and should be replaced with its equivalent tau where:  t.

We can determine the ratio of the units of length and time beforehand in such a way that the natural limit of velocity becomes c=1. If we then introduce, further, t in place of t, the quadratic differential expression ddx – dy – dz – ds thus becomes perfectly symmetrical in x, y, z, s; and this symmetry is communicated to ant law which does not contradict the world-postulate. Thus, the essence of this postulate may be clothed mathematically in a very pregnant manner in the mystic formula 3.105km= secs (our italics).

If this statement were literally understood, the nature of time would be seen in its correct ontological state, as an imaginary entity, belonging to the subjective side of totality. A spiritual dimension, the stone that builders rejected and later became the keystone. But the dominant paradigm of that epoch, which still prevails in materialistic science, couldn’t permit such a view of the imaginary face of wholeness, in spite of its mathematical representation as .
Some years later, Einstein commented in his book Relativity, the Special and General Theory:
Minkowsky's discovery [...] must be found mainly in the fact of his acknowledgment that the four-dimensional continuum of relativity [...] shows a pronounced relationship with the 3-dimensional continuum of Euclidean space. However, to give the right importance to this relationship we should replace the usual coordinate t with an imaginary value  t proportional to it. In such conditions, natural laws that satisfy the special theory of relativity exigencies assume mathematical forms where the time coordinates act precisely in the same way as space coordinates.
Notice that at the end of this quotation Einstein refers to “the times coordinates”, in the plural form, recognizing that time has more dimensions than the linear time adopted in Physics – that cannot see it as geometrical projection of a more complex set.
Another aspect of the nature of time also discerned by Minkowsky and Einstein but ignored by later science concerns to the linear flow, usually associated to a line (as Heraclitus' river) which shoul be seen as a projection of a more complex dimensional set. What puzzles me sometimes is that science, so many times beneficiary of cunning mathematical artifices, inserted in its interpretations and equations as esthetic resources didn't notice and reject the strange and asymmetrical dimensional organization of the world formed by three dimensions of space and only one of time.
In spite of the acknowledgment that t needs to assume its condition of imaginary value to satisfy its own theoretical propositions, this was not interpreted – either by Einstein or any of his successors – as a clear indication that time is 3-dimensional, as an imaginary subjective dimensional set which insinuates in the physical world through a projection. To see time as a subjective imaginary entity is an ancient suggestion of philosophy, poetry and the thought known as "mystical", that for centuries hold their own views on this mysterious and basic field.
]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v399/__show_article/_a000399-000013.htm 2008-09-18T14:11:16Z 2008-09-18T14:22:53Z

What happened to old objective reality, the stronghold we all used to trust? It's dramatic! Many ingenious scientists continue to investigate its disappearance.

Most scientists think the quantum mysteries have only one explanation – theirs – and refuse even to discuss deviant opinions. The problem is the many parties existing in this quantum politics; all of them think to be right and there's no agreement on most points. Even the most impartial critics, such as Nick Herbert, consider as incompatible some views I don't see as contradictory.
In his 1985 book “Quantum Reality”, Nick Herbert lists several parties in the quantum politics scene. He regards them as mutually discordant, and assigns to us the responsibility to decide which one is the correct interpretation. Let's see a brief description of each party's approach, who are their leaders and most distinguished members.


REALITY 1 THE COPENHAGEN INTERPRETATION
Leader: Niels Bohr.
Doctrine: 1. There's no reality in the absence of an observation. 2. The act of observation creates reality.
Leading members: Heisenberg; Fred Alan Wolf; David Mermin; Sir Rudolf Peierls; John Wheeler.
Comments: This is the majority party in the scientific community. It has two factions: those who think only microreality is created by the observing act and those who affirm this extends to macroreality, in everyday life. In his book, Nick Herbert considers these two groups as separate parties.


REALITY 2 THE HOLISTS
Leader: Walter Heitler.
Doctrine: 1. Reality is an indivisible whole. 2. Subject and object are undivided parts of each other.
Leading members: David Bohm; Fritjof Capra.
Comments: A broad and liberal group especially to its members, who sometimes support other parties without renouncing their doctrine.
It's said that holism has concealed sympathizers inside other parties, who don't uncover because they're afraid of being labeled mystics.


REALITY 3 THE GARDEN OF SPLITTING PATHS
Leader: Hugh Everett III.
Doctrine: 1. Reality consists in a multiplying number of parallel universes created in each act of observation or measuring. 2. In each situation where numerous results are possible, all of them actualize, each in its own universe.
Leading members: Paul Davies, David Deutsch, Bryce DeWitt.
Comments: Proposed by Hugh Everett in 1957, it replaces the concept of universe with the idea of a multiverse. When the wave function collapses, it does it in all possible options, each of them generating a new copy of the universe, which multiplies in fantastic proportions. However, according to the doctrine "we're only aware of one of these copies". In spite of its shocking character, unacceptable to our poor common sense, it's the most direct and contradiction free interpretation of quantum theory.


REALITY 4 A NEW LOGIC
Leader: John von Neumann.
Doctrine: 1. Quantum world obeys a non-human form of rationality. 2. It's necessary to learn how to think quantum-logically.
Leading members: Garrett Birkhoff (charter member); David Finkelstein.
Comments: Common objects of daily life obey a rational logic acceptable to our common sense put forward by George Boole in 19th century. Von Neumann and Birkhoff suggested, in 1936, that an understanding of quantum phenomena would require boolean logic to be discarded. This party's body of electors is meager, since it demands a non-human intelligence.


REALITY 5 THE NEO-REALISTS
Leader: Albert Einstein (honorary).
Doctrine: 1. The world is made of common objects, also made of common micro-objects. 2. There's something missing in quantum theory to convert it from probabilistic into causal.
Leading members: Max Planck; Erwin Schrödinger; Louis de Broglie (in the beginning and end of his career, but he spent twenty years affiliated to Reality 1); David Bohm (also connected to holistic party).
Comments: Conservative citadel of the nonconformist followers of Newtonian-Cartesian physics, concedes a honorific distinction to Albert Einstein who as we have seen repudiated his daughter and, maybe due to that attitude, is still in pains at the purgatory, despite being such a virtuous soul. To be a neo-realist, to believe the world is made of common objects easily acceptable by common sense, is the most ominously dark heresy according to Nick Herbert's view. All distinguished members of Reality 5 have already passed away.


REALITY 6 CREATIVE CONSCIOUSNESS
Leader: Eugene Wigner.
Doctrine: 1. Reality is created by consciousness. 2. Physical objects have no attributes if a conscious observer is not looking at.
Leading members: Von Neumann (he also leads Reality 4, but his heart belongs to Reality 6): Walter Heitler (another who plays in two teams): Fritz London: Henri Pierce Stapp.
Comments: If the electorate we're considering also included non-scientists this would be the largest of all parties. A large number of those who aren't afraid of being insulted as “mystics”, easily adhere to that interpretation of the world. Nonetheless I can see Reality 6 party thriving in this beginning of century and millennium as far as experiments, theorems and the feelings of scientists (yes, indeed we have feelings!) point in that direction.


REALITY 7 THE DOUBLE WORLD POTENTIAL/ACTUAL
Leader: Werner Heisenberg.
Doctrine: 1. The world has two aspects, one potential other tangible, real. 2. Tangible reality emerges from a former potential condition, a new kind of physical existence.
Leading members: ?
Comments: The revival of the Aristotelian concept of a potential existence as a distinct state of being, by Heisenberg, recognizes the dual polarity of existing/non-existing as too crude to grasp all nuances of being. The notion of a potential existence is related to the state of quantum entities prior to the wave function collapse. This view has no overt followers, since as a matter of fact it isn't a party or faction, but rather a conception underlying the doctrine of several quantum parties.


Next to our open-hearted examination of these interpretations, comes to my mind the perception that all of them are right, and the observed disagreements are more probably symptoms of philosophical obstinacy than something really incompatible. I'm convinced it's possible to assume a position on a kind of “imaginary singularity” where such differences lose their meaning and we can see all of them as correct in its own way. Immersed in that prevailing mental attitude I devised a Theory of Relational Consistence, which abandons a so called “point of view” and assumes what could be christened a “field of view”, without any privileged standpoint. Evidently a precise account of that conception could only be given in mathematical language, which I'll not use now. However, I'm sure I can make me well understood in the straight and plain daily speech.
We departed from the basic postulation that wholeness comprises two aspects we will call the real and imaginary slopes. The first is the existential locus of the objective world; it manifests predominantly in the three dimensions of space and comprises the physical universe and the material world occupied by objects, and the verb to exist applies to it. The second slope, complimentary to the first, is the existential locus of the subjective world, manifested primarily in the three dimensions of time and to it we will apply the neologism to inist. It consists of the mental, psychical or spiritual world, necessarily centered on a subjectivity – a consciousness – and is occupied by subjects. The prevalent connection of these slopes respectively to the dimensions of space (real) and time (imaginary) doesn't mean they cannot appear in the complimentary dimensional triad: this frequently occurs through geometrical projections. These two slopes are not segregated poles; rather they are in constant interaction. A wide spectrum of complex entities formed by imaginary and real parts in varied proportions resides between these poles.
If we accept the inistence of subjectivities as the imaginary face of wholeness, then we comprehend it's meaningless to assert something exists if that existence doesn't refer to one subjectivity at least. The presence of a subjectivity is therefore indispensable to something exist, and that something can be the entire physical universe.
Embracing a field of view without privileged standpoints, I acknowledge Everett's multiverse as a serious proposition, however I emphasize my disagreement on a very important item, which is the basis of my findings: NOT ALL POTENTIAL UNIVERSES ARE ACTUALIZED, BUT ONLY THOSE CENTERED IN A SUBJECTIVITY. Each subjectivity is the center of a real universe in her or his evolutionary process, her or his own private universe of grief or glory, of frustrations or achievements, of disbelief or plenteousness. There are so many generative centers of parallel universes as many subjectivities exist in every cultured heavenly body of the cosmos. Each one of us live in our own steadily unfolding parallel universe, similar to other universes only if the subjectivities considered are under interaction, and according to that interaction intensity. Besides, each subjectivity has its own proper time and builds its own reality in the chronolinear flow we apparently live in.
“But... isn't there an objective reality, common to all of us, which functions as a reference to everyone?” This is the naive question most of us can ask. “No! It's not like that!” I reply with the same Niels Bohr's emphasis. What seems to be one and only shared reality, common to all of us, is a merely consensual construct, an outcome of innumerable wave functions we collapse to build reality, resulting in the collective illusion of a time arrow. This illusion adjusts the many interacting subjectivities, since there isn't any communal, objective and unique linear time.
“But... how can this illusion be so perfect that effective consequences exist, objective and confirmed as causal to our actions?” Answer: because in this fantastic multiverse everything fits everything correctly according to a principle of consistence, which avoids overlapping and jam of the uncountable parallel, convergent and divergent successive collapses of myriad wave functions. David Deutsch on one occasion said: “Physical reality is the set of all universes that evolve collectively, such as a machine where a cogwheel is connected to others, being impossible to move one without moving all of them.” The only critique I could add to David's statement is that such connections extend to all real/imaginary wholeness where we live, where we settle our “world tubes” – not to physical reality only which is just one side of wholeness.
To conclude, I wish to make clear that the characterization of what a subjectivity is, the delimitation of what is or isn't a subjectivity, is a problem still open to investigation, a topic to be studied and defined.
However, as a starting point I suggest that a subjectivity be defined as an entity endowed with the specific capability of collapsing wave functions, turning existent something that only inisted in a potential state. From that point on it's possible to propose a new conceptual foundation to a better understanding of intelligence, conscience and the individual spirit.
]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v399/__show_article/_a000399-000012.htm 2006-12-21T10:21:18Z 2006-12-21T10:21:18Z

Rutherford has shown that atoms were not tiny pellets but an immense void modestly occupied by a lonesome nucleus one hundred times smaller, surrounded by still more minute electrons madly circling in relatively distant orbits. Latter, more sophisticated repetitions of the two slit experiment made...

Science was banished from the paradise installed by Newton and consecrated by Descartes.
The atom has lost its post of elementary and indivisible constituent of matter: it was made of still minor particles – a nucleus and an electronic crown – shaped somewhat like a minute solar system, the metaphor then used. The atomic nucleus turned to be formed of protons and neutrons and could be broken yielding fantastic energies. By the middle of the century, an astonishing cast of supposedly elementary particles has begun to set foot on stage. They were engendered under special high energy conditions, such as the cosmic rays coming from the depths of the sky or inside powerful machines developed by man to violently penetrate in the intimacy of matter.
The ambiguous nature of light soon extended to all electromagnetic radiation, from long radio waves to the shortest gamma rays, which differ only in the amount of energy conveyed. And more: to deepen the vexation, it was verified that other particles known as elementary, as the electron, the nucleons and all varieties produced in experiments – more than two hundred, then – were also waves, or vibrations, depending on the kind of experiment accomplished. It's important to keep in mind that both electromagnetic radiation and elementary particles have shown to be simultaneously waves and particles. They didn't behave as waves or particles in different situations, rather they incarnate that double personality simultaneously. Only the nature of the experiment carried on would allow the researcher to be aware of one of those faces, but never both at once.
Additional difficulties appeared when scientists tried to know exactly a particle's position and velocity. It was confirmed these two data couldn't be obtained at once: or the position or the speed could be measured separately, but never both at same time. Moreover, the higher the precision of one of those measures, the lesser the other can be known. This hindrance, however, isn't due to the accuracy of the equipment or methods used. Heisenberg has proved this impossibility is an intrinsic property of nature itself in these submicroscopic realms, where all the knowledge we can gather is of statistic and probabilistic nature; it's impossible to learn exactly what happens to a sole particle, even using the most precise instruments. And this was just the beginning of a series of ghostly features that the quantum world has been exhibiting to the astonished researchers.
Perhaps the most incredible is the astounding success of quantum theory in every field where applied, although it's known to rest on paradoxes that challenge logic and bewilder scientists. It's really surprising: technologists and researchers have never found a case to reveal quantum theory is flawed or imprecise. On the contrary, at same time we witness quantum realms vanishing into a bundle of logic paradoxes and cognitive impossibilities, quantum technology lavishly yields wonders like computers, liquid-crystal video screens and holography, brought into being by skilled wizards of electronics and photonics. Technology is still far from exhausted, and the near future will deliver surprises prone to amaze our most daring expectations. It's rather impossible to foresee what's coming ahead.
However, side by side of these joys stood the shadow of a disturbing certainty that's already changing the directions of our philosophical inquiries. It's the proved certitude that solid barriers exist in the path to a rational approach on the intimate organization of matter, energy and the universe. We're wrapped up with an ever increasing variety of communication resources, almost uniting our planet into an integrated interactive information network, unthinkable just a few years ago. Notwithstanding we also must accept our utter cognitive limitations to reach the deepest realms of the universe, in its real, material slope.
The restraint installed by Heisenberg's principle of indetermination is peremptory: it's impossible to know both velocity and position of a particle simultaneously. By the same token our logic mind cannot conceive a vibration which is also a bullet, although every electromagnetic radiation and particle which constitute the stuff of the universe show this is the way they are. After Heisenberg many science warlocks entered the stage, putting their curses on the dreams of absolute knowledge of reality, usually defined as "everything that exists" in the physical universe. Let's hear what they have said.


The year 1927 was particularly prolific as to insights that induced the turnover of our expectancy of a deeper knowledge on the constituents of matter and reality. In that very year, Heisenberg formulated his principle of uncertainty and Niels Bohr – widely recognized as the grand master of the quanta vision of the world – has pushed ahead that new conception, advancing his principle of complementarity. The new principle acknowledged the dual nature wave/particle in every micro-entity, installing a phlegmatic schizophrenia about the interpretations of quantum phenomena or, in other words, abolishing any ambitions on understanding them. "It's a mistake to suppose the objective of physics is to determine what nature is. Physics only tries to establish what we can say about nature." So said the master.
Schrödinger and Max Born have shown, in 1926 that an elementary particle can never be anywhere until it's measured, or became the object of an observation, an experiment. The most we can say on that particle is that possibly, or probably, it could be here or there. Schrödinger propounded his famous wave function which established that probability, and Bohr has shown it's not a wave of anything we could call matter or energy; rather it's an abstract wave of a mere mathematical possibility that such particle appears in this or that place. The ghostliest property of that abstract wave is that, in spite of its nonmaterial character – we should say imaginary, nonphysical – it's submitted to the same phenomenon of interference that characterize real waves, already studied by physics. Now, we ask: how can mathematical abstractions interfere? What interferes with what? Schrödinger's equation doesn't determine where a particle is, only where it can be, and the probability of that occurrence in each point; only when a measure is taken – or an observation –the so called wave function collapse and the particle "chooses" one point and materializes up there. If the experimental procedure continues and many waves are collapsed, we will see particles arranging themselves according to the calculated probabilities, even if it's impossible to know where each one separately will materialize. In this quantum world logic works differently, and determinism is replaced by random occurrences.
By the end of the twenties the random and probabilistic principles of quantum mechanics were established. Regular logic turned to be subverted, making us live together with uncertainty and paradox. In the beginning, uncertainty and paradox seemed to be confined to the submicroscopic realm, leaving our macroworld quietly ruled by the ordinary principles of logic and causality. Schrödinger himself undertook the grim task of liberating us from that illusion with the help of his famous cat. Surely, being a self-respecting sorcerer, Schrödinger also had a cat. As a matter of fact, an imaginary cat.
The proposed experiment is only mental. Imagine a cat in a sealed box where a radioactive source can release a hammer that will break a bottle containing a venomous gas, if in the term of an hour it emits a particle. If this happens the cat dies, otherwise he will be alive after that period. That arrangement settles something of the macroworld – the survival of the cat – as dependent of something that happens in the quantum microworld. If the radioactive source is calibrated to a fifty per cent chance of releasing that deadly particle in the period of one hour, the poor cat has fifty per cent possibilities of survival when the box is open. Quantum theory doesn't allow to forecast if the particle will or not be released, it only informs the chances of that event to occur are fifty per cent. In conformity to master Bohr's sentence, until the end of the crucial sixty minutes, we cannot speak of a dead or alive cat, since it wasn't object of an observation, requisite to the particle opt for one of two states: released or not. Only such an option would make the hammer to fall or not, killing or not the unfortunate cat. Before the opening of the box, thus proceeding an observation, the cat should not be alive or dead, according to Niels Bohr's interpretation – also known as the Copenhagen interpretation. Before the opening of the box the state of the cat should be described through a probabilistic wave-equation, unfit to determine if he is dead or alive. Nonetheless, apart of our awareness on his state, how would be the cat objectively? Answer: the cat should be in a state simultaneously alive and dead, since there wasn't the wave-function collapse and he could be in any of these two conditions at the moment the box was open.
Our reason insists the cat's fate should be decided before the box was opened, that would be a verification of a previously occurred fact. "It's not this way!", declares emphatically master Niels Bohr. The experiments, the mathematical calculations and all theoretical formulations of quantum physics assure a wave-function cannot collapse alone, without an observer's participation. Thus a particle is not able to decide if it will or will not be liberated, so the cat cannot turn into a definite state of being, be it dead or alive.
But ultimately what is the existential status of the cat, in that distressing period of one hour? Heisenberg replies with an old concept introduced by Aristotle: the cat remains in a potentially dead and potentially alive condition, unable to turn into a definitive status. Poor Schrödinger's cat! Involved with a warlock he cannot even to know whether he is alive or dead!
What happened to that cat submitted to such a cruel experiment – fortunately only imaginary – usually occurs not only with electrons, photons and every particle of the quantum realm, but also with large portions of our macroscopic reality, granted we are not observing. New experiments, not only imagined as that one with the cat but actually proceeded, have shown in a conclusive form that quantum schizophrenia extends to the world we live in, lurking in disguised nooks of daily life – provided no one is observing!
The unbelievable feature shown by electrons to cross simultaneously two side by side slits is a broadly acknowledged fact among researchers, as well as the crazy property of light to fit out its wave or particle mask, according to the experiment done. In the optical interferometry laboratories, where extremely precise switchers capable of commuting a light beam opening or closing its passage 300 million times per second, it's been verified that light can change its mask still faster, even changing the mask it had shown a nanosecond before, just to fit another experiment that would only work with the other.
Many scientists, bound up in the logic they learned and in prevalent perceptions of objective reality have performed laborious mental and experimental juggling to keep appearances up and make certain that quantum realm lunacy would not extend to everyday world. However, each new experiment, each new mathematical theorem confirms the certitude that reality is a concept we must entirely review, as much as locality of a physical event, what in fact is an observer – which I prefer to name a subjectivity – and also its interaction process within the so-called objective world.
In this quantum sabbath mathematician warlocks are the most dangerous. They usually demonstrate their curses, making them invulnerable to exorcism. German born Kurt Gödel has demonstrated in 1931 his theorem of incompleteness – which in its innocent enunciation states that we cannot build an arithmetic based on a system of axioms both complete and consistent. In the same way of Heisenberg's curse, we need to chose: or that arithmetic is complete or consistent (non contradictory); never both at once. This statement simply implies that our rational knowledge of the world has an upper limit: it will never be complete and devoid of contradictions. Isn't that distressing?
Von Neumann, the megasorcerer who created the modern computer, published a portentous treaty named Die Mathematische Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik in 1932, soon to be worshipped as "the Bible of quantum physics". In that book Von Neumann simply proves that if quantum physics is correct, then the world cannot be made of common, real, objective things. He even said that "physical objects do not have any attributes if a conscious observer is not looking at". This is known as "Von Neumann's proof". Shouldn't it be more properly called "Von Neumann's curse"?
More recently, another perilous mathematician warlock candidly named John Bell has utterly demonstrated that "no local model of reality can correspond to quantum facts". In other words reality, if it expects to exist, must be non-local: its events and phenomena undergo influences from everything in the universe, even from the most remote galaxy; and that influence is instantaneous, unfettered by the laws of relativity. That achievement has guaranteed him more powerful than Albert Einstein who, displaying that handsome granddad bearing could never become a genuine wizard.
In the 1930's he joined Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen to suggest a mind experiment – he was very fond of mind experiments – that would show quantum theory as flawed or incomplete by way of preposterous outcome. As time went by, thanks to the accomplishments of more powerful sorcerers, the absurd revealed true and the proposed witchcraft has proved the opposite. Sometimes I wonder if this happened to Einstein by reason of his rejection of quantum theory, being one of her founding fathers (he even proposed the term quantum). Till the end of his life, he never pardoned her anarchist ideas and naughty behavior. This could well be a lesson to parents who refuse to understand the new generations.
]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v399/__show_article/_a000399-000011.htm 2006-12-19T18:37:46Z 2006-12-19T18:41:17Z

It's necessary to admit that the contents and concepts of contemporary science, in their essence, are still Greek, and the general approaches that outline its investigation fields are based on non-scientific metaphysical assumptions.

The metaphysical foundations of modern science are characteristically Greek-Roman and Judeo-Christian, applying only to Western science. Bewildered with the outcome of technology, science refuses to recognize other forms of knowledge which rest on distinct assumptions. Searching for the fundamental components of reality, trying to find out the bricks that build matter and the universe, physicists proceed with the Jonic saga without a critical analysis and taking for granted that an understanding of the world will emerge from this pursuit.
Thales used to think the world was made of water; today's physicists think it's made of quarks. The belief in atoms that move in emptiness submitted to mathematical laws immanent to nature goes back to Democritus and Leucippus, in the same way it's well aged the Newtonian supposition that mind is something apart of the physical world and reality can be understood without considering consciousness as a part of it. This way, since Greek antiquity till Modern Age, Western scientists try to understand the nature of physical reality as something separated of human experience and lives, segregating the vastness of their inner world and the subjective and imaginary slope of wholeness as something devoid of scientific value. From this standpoint we can infer the first assumption – almost always concealed – of modern science:

THE UNIVERSE EXISTS APART OF HUMAN PERCEPTION, BUT IT CAN BE UNDERSTOOD BY WAY OF THE PROPER UTILIZATION OF THE TOOLS AND METHODS SCIENCE HAS DEVELOPED.

This is a metaphysical outlook inherited from a scientific tradition rooted in Greece, which is not recognized in other advanced cultures such as those of India and China. Furthermore it has been denied by recent research of Western science itself. This point will be explained ahead.
Another article of faith of modern science whose origin is clearly rooted in Ancient Greece can be enunciated this way:

ALL REALITY CAN BE REDUCED TO MATTER AND ENERGY SUBMITTED TO THE BLIND AND IMMUTABLE LAWS OF NATURE.

This petitio principii is the basis of materialism that Western science has assumed since it denied the existence of the psychical-imaginary world, reducing life to a mere byproduct of complex chemical interactions, as well as consciousness to an emergent epiphenomenon of the nervous system organization. It's clearly restrictive, since it discards our most direct experience: the immediate feeling that we are a subjectivity in its own right. Physical reductionism is not an outcome of scientific research; on the contrary it provides the metaphysical background upon which scientific research proceeds and theories are formulated.
There is another principle underlying Western scientific practice we can ascribe a metaphysical content, since it demands a posture of faith in the work of its practitioners. This principle hardly would survive an evaluation of scientific knowledge evolution and some mathematical discoveries of the 20th century. Its enunciation is as follows:

IN SPITE OF SCIENCE REPEATEDLY ABANDON OLDER THEORIES, IT ADVANCES STEADILY IN THE PATH TO AN ACCURATE DEPICTION OF THE UNIVERSE SUCH AS IT REALLY IS.

The fallacy of this assumption sounds obvious. It's used by science as a marketing appeal aphorism, unable to withstand an accurate survey of the facts in recent history of science. This principle is clearly promotional even in the most utilitarian sense of obtaining funds for research and construction of larger and more expensive equipment and machinery. It doesn't show to be entirely convincing any more: in 1993 the Congress of the United States killed, once and for all, the project to build the mammoth particle accelerator Superconducting Super Collider – SSC, that would have cost the soaring sum of 11 billion dollars. This can mean a full stop in the hallucinated process of constructing equipment always bigger and bigger to study particles more and more minuscule. Underlying that principle there's another assumption hardly comprehensible or acceptable in other culture than our own:

REALITY AS A WHOLE IS A VAST UNIFIED SYSTEM THAT CAN BE GRASPED BY REASON AND PRESENTED BY OUR THEORIES.

These rules are of metaphysical nature; they are not self-evident axioms nor are deduced or can be proved. They are not ubiquitously adopted principles, such as the universals of language are, according to Noam Chomsky's discoveries. Moreover, they are under serious contention in the laboratories experiments and had been rejected by demonstrated theorems of contemporary mathematics. The epistemological crisis triggered by the clash of paradigms has arisen and aggravated throughout last century, and the chances are that the new millenium will face a thriving brand-new science where these assumptions are boldly discarded.
Now we will see how that crisis appeared and hardened, hitting contemporary science in its very foundations.


In the beginning of modern science, the world was a paradise made of light and atoms. Everything in it was determinate and predictable, and Isaac Newton was its prophet.
Light, whose refraction was already studied by Newton in 17th century, had its wave nature established by Thomas Young, in 1803, as his well-known two parallel slits experiment has shown a pattern of bright and dark bands when a passing through light beam hit a screen. Such patterns are clearly distinctive of wave propagation, as we can see in the surface of a placid pond when we throw two pebbles on it, generating interference patterns where the circle waves meet. Till the end of 19th century it was accepted as a fact that light was a wave propagated in a very subtle medium, named luminiferous ether.
Matter, was known to be made of extremely minute different atoms, according to the different chemical elements; each element had its own kind of atom, distinct of other. It was widely acknowledged that such particles were so small and indivisible that any speculations on their inner nature were not physical questions, but rather a metaphysical topic.
In the last years of 19th century, it was thoroughly admitted among highbrow scientists that the understanding of reality was almost entirely achieved, and soon a big picture of the universe would be accomplished setting the world free of its mysteries. Everything worth to be fathomed was already known (or nearly) and the remainder were only details or metaphysical topics, off the premises of science. French philosopher Auguste Comte, the father of positivism, wishing to exemplify a kind of subject to be always out of man's reach had the unfortunate idea of exemplifying with the stars composition. The stars were so far away, he reasoned, they could never be examined. This way thee study of the stars physical nature was a matter of metaphysical order, in the same rank of the speculations on the intimacy of atoms. However, a few years after this confident statement some astronomers were applying Fraunhöfer's findings on the absorption and emission spectral bands of star light to identify the chemical elements present in these celestial bodies. Studying the ideological context of science in the end of 19th century we can uncover several points similar to those in the current view of many scientists.
First, the confusion on the meaning of what a "metaphysical" topic really is. After one hundred years, we see science still favors to conceal the metaphysical basis of its non-explicit assumptions, in the same way it continues to label metaphysical the problems unreachable to presently adopted concepts, putting them outside of the scientific field of study and research. At the closing of 19th century these subjects were the chemical composition of the stars, the inner constitution of atoms, etc. In the end of twentieth-century the same happened to phenomena involving the presence of a subjective realm as an intrinsic part of the experiment. We must be very careful when a scientist says that some topic has a metaphysical nature; and also to be sure if he's really aware of the metaphysical foundations of his work. Or, moreover, if he uses the word metaphysical as a waste paper basket to throw away the problems he cannot handle with his conceptual apparatus and ideology.
The second analogy point in the two century turns is a curious feeling of several most distinguished physicists, in both periods, that a comprehensive picture of scientific knowledge was almost completed, remaining only a few details of minor importance to be filled. This state of affairs, already commented by Prof. Weisskopf in his brilliant lecture on the nature of time, brings together in the same naive viewpoint 19th century scientists and our contemporary Stephen Hawkins – who claimed the throughout understanding of the entire universe and its operation is almost attained.
Scientific endeavor proceeded beyond 19th century's assumed limits to knowledge, and will continue along 21st century as well. However, by the same token science suffered a major change on its bases from 19th to 20th century, these days we are prone to witness the emergence of a new shape to 21st century's physics, one hardly recognized as science to a 20th century physicist without causing a deep discomfort, as he verifies that most subjects discarded as metaphysical will be paramount to the new investigations, under a fresh interpretation of cosmic wholeness.
We live now the unfolding of an epistemological crisis that has matured throughout twentieth-century, originated in two scientific facts of the end of 19th century. The first was the famous experiment by Michelson and Morley, disproving the existence of a luminiferous ether, that became the starting point in the way to relativity. The second, christened the ultraviolet catastrophe, revealed through calculations an entirely unexpected profile to the radiation of a black body, which in the higher frequencies appeared so exaggerated its energy had to be infinite. These results, incompatible with empirical experience, were meaningless, opening the path to the investigations that led to quantum theory. From then on several disturbing discoveries and experiments yielding paradoxical results, and also startling mathematical theorems promoted the steady demolition of the scenery established by classical physics.

(see the following article THE QUANTUM SABATH)
]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v399/__show_article/_a000399-000010.htm 2006-12-19T18:00:50Z 2006-12-19T18:00:50Z

In this beggining of a new millenium, the scientific community faces a deep and painful CLASH OF PARADIGMS - in the epistemological renewal of thought under process. To know what's happening is crucial to understand what's going on.

THE RESURGENCE OF THE SAGES

Born together in the Greek Antiquity, Western Science and philosophy were interdependent for several centuries and constantly under the backing of the prevailing religion.

When proclaiming its independence, from the seventeenth century on, science has fragmented in specializations whose interests soon concentrated on specific problems of those branches. But, if on one side this brought unprecedented successes in many different fields, it also left without solution the widest subjects, those that demand the integration of many themes and objects of study. Such problems cannot be resolved under more perfected observations or for the improvement of new and better instruments.

Specialization is a face of the reductionism that marked the development of science in the last three centuries and contributed in a decisive way to the expansion of the empiric knowledge, for the refinement of technology and all it has created to facilitate man's life on the Earth, in spite of its dark side of destruction and death.

However, in this new millennium, specialization, indispensable to the progress of technology, started to become a serious hindrance for the further development of science – in its broader sense of natural philosophy – because the investigations of many leading fields of the human knowledge such as cosmology, physics, biology, the computer science, psychology and even mathematics, have been showing that a multidisciplinary understanding of their objects is obligatory to generate more daring insights in each one of those areas.

In the most recent scientific research developments we are amazed to observe how theoretical and experimental physics, in their formulas and laboratories, have been forcing the recognition of the researcher's subjectivity to assure legitimacy and sense to the results of their investigations and findings.

We have seen cosmology’s encounter with man's soul in the boundaries of the universe, when it takes refuge in the Anthropic Principle that re-enthrones the human spirit in the center of wholeness, as it verifies that among the infinite theoretically possible universes only this one we live in is suitable to life.

For more unlikely this seems to be, only this universe, with its constants so finely adjusted, is capable to shelter galaxies, stars, life and intelligence. It is man's spirit that paradoxically returns to the center of totality in a surprising way, regaining the privileged place that always belonged to him of right, usurped that had been for some few centuries of transitorily necessary alienation.

We see the science of computation producing the colorful marvel of the fractals, mathematical entities of literally inexhaustible wealth and unexpected beauty, derived of the singular properties of the imaginary numbers. In the shapes and rhythms of fractals seem to gather the most sophisticated technique and an extraordinary plastic wealth that frequently suggest something mystic in the configurations that appear in the monitors, triggered from simple iterations in mathematical equations. We have been seeing in the fractals and their most recent developments a theme that deserves deep philosophical considerations, for there the computer science yields the unexpected aesthetic quality of compositions that were not conceived as shapes by their creators – that just manipulated equations, not forms – generating something mystical, privately concealed in the mysterious realm inhabited by the mathematical entities.

In this beginning of millennium, we must adapt to world visions where the logical categories we inherited from the Greeks no more will be appropriate for the understanding of the cosmic/individual wholeness, the all-embracing objective/subjective universe.

Observing with exemption and rigor the new face of that thing we use to call reality, we see that even the fundamental dualities that spontaneously we used to adopt for the rational discovery process of the world will have to be reviewed or abandoned.

As a consequence of the evolution of the knowledge, that now disembarks in the virgin beaches of the new post-quantum paradigm, notions of subject and object (and, therefore, of subjective and objective), of shape and background, real and imaginary, will become categories relegated to the condition of auxiliary resources of thinking, obsolete manners of considering the phenomena, vices of older generations.

From now on, the distinction among science, the arts, philosophy and religious mythology should be looked at with a lot of reservations, in the limits of a reductionist methodological concession, just adapted to strictly pragmatic purposes seeking empiric results, without superior accuracy for an effective understanding of what happens in the intimacy of the things and the phenomena.

To what everything indicates, we are testifying the ascension for a position of undisputable hegemony in the community of science of those men – surely the most outstanding of our time – that never feared to be qualified as sympathizers of a mystic/unitarian vision of the individual, of the world and of wholeness.

Those men, responsible as they were for some of the most seminal advancements of science, always recognized and respected the depth of the most authentic mystic insights without, however, giving up their condition of scientists of the most noble ancestry, rigorous in their methods and criteria, but without letting to be seduced for the positivist mermaid.

They are men that, having overcome the foolish and selfish self-centeredness, completed their individuation process (as to Jung’s) and moved forward deeply in the sense of accomplishing the synthesis of the individual with the universal. They understood that these two faces, in their true essence, mirror each other and are contained inside a perceptual integration without discernible borders.

Scientists like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, Erwin Schrödinger, C.G. Jung, James Jeans, Eddington, Peter Medawar, John Wheeler, Lyall Watson, Erich Jantsch, David Bohm and many others overcame the limitations of the own ego, conquering this way the right to look behind the appearances and to decipher their own version of the cosmic truth. In his book Mein Weltbild (My World Vision), Einstein declares literally that "in agreement with a single rule I determine a man's authentic value: In what measure and with what purpose he was freed from his ego?".

Many others, however, cling to an illusory and egocentric auto-image that nothing has to do with the true individuation that can be unfolded starting from the integration of the individual being. For these, the conquest of knowledge is more tortuous and more liable to find dead ends, camouflaged of great truths that time overcomes and throws into the basket of used papers of the history of the science.

It seems certain that the standard conceptions of the most including science – physics, cosmology, psychology – no more will resist in admitting the evident verification that science and mysticism have a common final objective: To understand the being's unity, manifested in the always surprising kaleidoscope of multiplicity, inexhaustible as a fractal of fantastic proportions.

The scientists, as much as the mystics, are aware of the ultimate unity of the universal totality; the first ones try to describe it by a theory, an equation, a mathematical formalism; the mystics look for to try it, to live this reality. But both are moved by the same interior pulse and – why not to say? – by the same faith.

With the overcoming of the prejudices that make some outstanding names among the science workers to irritate or feel offended when analogies are suggested between the objectives of their work and the mystics' experiences, we will see once more the surge of the classic image of the sage, the wise one, who is not limited into a logic/conceptual frame, because he or she knows that the wider and deep reach knowledge cannot be contained in the lineal structures of the discursive thought, nor in the quantitative formulas of mathematics, nor to be restricted to any exclusionist forms and approaches.

The classic character of the scientist/mystic, that we usually associate to Emanuel Swedenborg or Giordano Bruno – both looked with restrictions by the historians of the science for they don't frame in the scientist's model that don't let to be contaminated for superstition – in rigor should also include names as the one of Isaac Newton, René Descartes and many others that have been considered representative of the pure scientist, pillars where the contemporary science lean on.

Today, it is already recognized without shame what stayed carefully veiled during centuries for zealous biographers and editors of encyclopedias: That the practice of the alchemy occupied a large part of Sir Isaac Newton’s interests and that René Descartes belonged to secret societies of mystic character, that little or nothing had to do with the rationalism he developed for external use.

In the last decades of the twentieth century we attended, as a refreshing renewal encouragement, the resurgence of men of science that no more fear as threats to their reputation the accusations of mysticism in their proposals and in their practices. And this doesn't mean that those men have given up the rigidities of the scientific method, or have succumbed to the black "tide of the occultism", as feared Freud. On the contrary, what we see is a growing enlightening wave in all levels, the successive collapse of prejudices and logical limitations, the dilution of the barriers that blocked the knowledge, impeding the healthy flow of different approaches for the investigation of the major subjects of the spirit and the universe.

We have been attending the process of adherence of the more rigorous scientific knowledge with mystic insights of the largest seriousness and depth, as a result of the work of men of science that never feared their friends' of more restricted vision pressures, with their scoff laughter and the causticity of their irony. This, when they don't overflow until the aggressiveness, or open hostility, whenever the forbidden themes of the synchronistic phenomena and of the paranormal are approached, themes so thoroughly documented today that its rejection already brings a strong connotation of dishonesty – no more of who investigates them, but of who denies them.

The main obstacle the scientists must face and overcome, in this beginning of a new millennium, is the still hegemonic paradigm: Materialistic, Newtonian and Freudian a framing too narrow that cannot to embrace all objective-subjective wholeness in its entirety.

Stephen Hawking recently expressed his view that very little is missing to complete an all explaining "theory of everything", which would throw scientific research into the dull task of filling up the lacking details of the picture. Hawking didn't show to be aware that he repeats the same illusion of science one century ago, when it was supposed that everything which was to be known about the physical world was already discovered, "remaining only the detailing of minor aspects to be done".

This happened at the same time Lord John Rayleigh was calculating the spectrum of a black-body, discovering the annoying phenomenon called the ultraviolet catastrophe, which cracked from top to bottom the whole building of classic physics. Rash statements like these show the force of the standard paradigm in certain phases of the scientific development, capable to lead men of brilliant intelligence to state foolish ideas, somewhat obvious to those who are not committed to the paradigm enticements.

Under a benevolent view, a paradigm can be defined as a constellation of assumptions and beliefs, scales of values, techniques and concepts shared by the members of a certain scientific community in a moment of its history. In a more accurate description, a paradigm is the set of accepted proceedings, usual ways of thinking or vices of thought, of logic-metaphysical prejudices that limit the scientific development in a certain epoch. These hindrances confine the scientists of a community into a confined universe of study, with a previously established spectrum of acceptable truths and conclusions.

Thomas Kuhn has shown how paradigms establish a priori what can or cannot be accepted as true, in a certain epoch of the history of science. The bondage to a paradigm have leaded respectful researchers to reject entire segments of their own experiences, to deny evident results of experiments, or to neglect facts and possibilities which a less committed look or judgment wouldn't let to escape.

The adherence to a paradigm is essential to any responsible scientific undertaking. However, the risk is that a rigid commitment to its limitations block - as it usually does - the free interpretation of facts which cannot be understood within the field previously established as acceptable. Wholeness offers a multiplicity of diverse aspects to observation and understanding. So, what results of a non-critical acceptance of a paradigm is the jettisoning of entire continents of human experience as improper to scientific approach.

Another consequence of such unrestrained adoption of a paradigm is the establishment of specific forms of questioning nature, conditioning the answers they should yield. An important advice was made by Heisenberg when he remarked that in scientific experiments we do not see nature itself, but rather nature submitted to our peculiar way of inquiring it.

With respect to the specific subject of time curious things have been happening as a consequence of the constraints imposed by the standard paradigm. First, we notice a specific blindness in some of the most outstanding personalities of science to certain results of their own experiments. Hence, a repeated refusal to acknowledge obvious interpretations of facts emerging from experiments, if the case requires a basic reformulation of some aspects of the standard paradigm.

See, for instance, Albert Einstein's refusal to admit that time, being an imaginary value – as suggested in his special theory of relativity, and more clearly stated in Minkowsky's considerations – should be understood as something connected to the subjective world, something imaginary, which appears in the physical-spatial world as a projection of a geometric nature.

Albert "saw" that time has to be imaginary, but he didn't realize its subjective, non-physical character, so he could not develop the unfoldings of this remarkable finding. Through this particular point, which passed unnoticed as a consequence of the Newtonian-Cartesian materialistic paradigm, science could leap - just a century ago - over the metaphysical wall which averts physics of accepting the imaginary, the subjective, the spiritual, the vastness of our inner world that forces its presence in the recent paradoxical experiments of the quantum inquiries.
]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v399/__show_article/_a000399-000009.htm 2006-06-04T13:55:21Z 2006-06-08T10:32:20Z

A few decades ahead humanity will be decimated by the climate disruption and the ultraviolet no more blocked by the ozone layer. The last man on Earth had a project: The Egg of humanity.

THE LAST MAN ON EARTH

Tonio was, since years, becoming used to speak less and less. Mainly because there was less and less with whom. He could spend days without saying a word. Weeks. With whom? When Mike was alive, with him. Then, the compulsory, ultimate silence. Without telephone, without television, without friends or enemies to give news, an oppressive muteness of everything that wasn't more than the silent clamor of the triumphant death.
He only had to conclude everything he organized and do it according to his literally singular situation. All dead, as far as he knew. He left Fort Belvoir at dawn. In the previous day everything was checked: the bottles of drinking water, the dehydrated fruits, the cylinders of fuel, the portable towing device, the steadiness of the anchorage of the cart wheels where the Egg rested inside of the truck-container of the enormous vehicle. Everything correct, just as he designed.
A lot above the human trivia, stars and planets shone indifferent a little before dawn. The Moon, in the west, there was a lot of time had assumed the threatening and aggressive face of who had been offended hardly. But it was the Sun that, furious since appeared in the horizon, attacked. From the generous father it was, he had become cruel, sadist, avenger of the human madness. There were already many years he was not the same Sun as always had been: the life donor. But Tonio still found a way of smiling because he knew that to see the things this way was an illusion: what the Sun now gave us was the same as he had always given; the Sun doesn't change in the human timescale. Unforgivable was to see destroyed his patient work of billions of years: the delicate protection he put around everything he created here – the invisible veil without which nothing could live. The subtle veil of Gaia – the same veil of Maya under another version. But men never got to believe in invisible veils, they never had the feeling of what was this: what such a veil could be.
The shining truck – the last one that still moved – ran effortlessly in the ramp stretches, headed towards the road along the top of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Tonio felt like a monstrous creature of many wheels and a large aluminum womb: the metallic uterus where the enormous gray egg traveled. His red and dry eyes, salty of all of the tears he already cried and had forgotten, Doctor Tonio knew that his trip was the most archetypal of all those already undertaken. The last one. A trip from the definitive solitude to the absolute loneliness, as the last witness of the human insanity. Many of the abandoned cars were shown covered in dust and dirty, already with some rust: there were years they had died together with their owners. Other, more recent, along Tonio's itinerary. Some bodies still emanated their stench, others concentrated in large groups that decided to die together. A waste land.
He arrived to the divisor of waters, along the top of the mountains. Now there would be ups and downs always with wide vision to the east and west, till the far away horizons. Frequent attacks of the erosion making dangerous the margins of that old highway, built to sightseeing, landscapes and tourism, forbidden for trucks, one of the most beautiful of this country, one of the best attractions of a trip to the Appalachians. Yes, the Earth is becoming Mars. From this point here one can see, can prove that Eliot's title-metaphor became literal. Tonio, without any pain or sadness, outlined Shenandoah Park without any concern to side-looking at its vast ruin. Everything dry. Dead. The highway ran along the top line of the mountains, so that he could appreciate with his last eyes the devastated earth extending down the two slopes, up to where his view could reach. And silence. No birds, butterflies, bugs, green plants, nothing. Maybe some insects, if well sought after. If he stopped the truck a little, he could try to listen better some sounds in the distance. But only the cold autumn wind could be heard sometimes when deviated by the trunks and dry bushes close to a gas station abandoned a long time ago. Always many crashed and upside down cars, some burned in the insanity of the final days. There were a lot of decades – Tonio remembered – the landscape here was colored with all the tones the leaves assumed in this season: from the many greens to the oranges, to the ocher, salmon and red. In the spring, wild flowers enhanced other colors of life spilled on the hillsides, still full of vigor. But this was a long time ago, when Tonio was a child. "And there are many years that no more children are made" – he wondered.
Then, lost in thoughts with other visionaries, he obstinately developed his project along more than one decade, convincing each one who could give him support. He went after the government, when there was still a government, he went to Fort Belvoir's command while there was something like a command.
His project: the Egg.
First, a team work. A vast team of high level people, determined people, as if that endeavor could save them from their inexorable fate. A doom that would swallow all of them, like Saturn did to their children. Then, the team went decreasing as everything more. Fort Belvoir had a very convenient crematorium and everything became more hygienic for those who remained alive. There were no longer emotions and they not even commented on the new deaths, when consummated. The last was Mike, in the previous week. The fearsome acute leukemia that, in three weeks dropped their chosen in the raffle of death. Months ago was Mike’s companion, the last woman of whom there was news – certainly the last in the whole planet, given the exceptional conditions of survival preserved in Washington and Fort Belvoir.
As the ultraviolet grew of intensity – an emissary of Shiva to accomplish his extermination mission – "fight for survival" associations appeared and also clubs of suicides, which promoted periodic rituals of collective suicide for those who opposed to stay passively waiting for the pervasive, omnipresent triumph of Death. Strange was the survival of those clubs, where periodically the managers committed group suicide.
After the famine periods in continental scale, that in few years liquidated billions of people, and when all were adapted to the lottery of the death, be it for a cancer, for the widespread immunodeficiency or for the acute leukemia, came out the terrible phase of the urban and regional collapses. It was when it became evident that cities die, in the same way people and dogs die. And the death type that one after the other liquidated the metropolises of the world was a simultaneous breakdown of their vital systems: collapses of communications, energy, drinking water and provisioning. Almost always the garbage collection was already paralyzed from well before, turning cities into enormous pigsties. But pigsties without pigs, nor mice or dogs, now extinguished, killed of hunger – because they were all blinded by the ultraviolet. Only the cockroaches seemed to multiply happily: the party belonged to them.
The multiple flaws of their vital organs left the cities in coma, but the definitive death occurred for thrombosis in the arteries that demanded the exits to the rural spaces. The excess of vehicles and the frenzied, disordered traffic invariably took to accidents and these to definitive, total jams confining millions of desperate into horror sceneries. The survivors of the highways, that occupied the cars paralyzed in double, triple, endless lines separated among those who soon left to continue his escape on foot and the other that refused to abandon their car, their last goods, their final ownerships, being there until finishing the water of their precious bottles – or to see them stolen by others. A few days after its death, the city began to emanate the absolute stink of millions of deteriorating corpses. Each dying metropolis was always enclosed inside of a large halo of bodies and skeletons of those who tried in despair to flee, to flee, to flee... but flee to where, if everything was desolation under the impassive witness of a devastating Sun?
The Appalachian Trail runs – crossing it sometimes – beside the Blue Ridge Parkway destined to the old times wanderers, when the foot trips along sightseeing trails was a popular sport. But that was up to about twenty, thirty years ago. It was when became clear that such practice was more and more risky, for the growing incidence of the ultraviolet as the layer of ozone vanished. "'As the layer of ozone vanished' is an almost poetic sentence" – drifted Tonio's thought. It had stopped existing little by little, the transparent veil of Gaia, abandoning its inaccessible, invisible existence, by itself so close to inexistence. Most of the human population died without understanding the whys and the reasons of the death arriving from the sky. Only the widest and definitive explanation that everything summarized: a revolt of the gods – the explanation that everyone could understand.
When was accurately evaluated the inexorability of the end, when he made the calculations that nobody dared to do – or, if they did, soon tried to forget and to look at the other side – Doctor Tonio, PhD in nano-information science, impelled by a family tradition, began to conceive his project. It was his great-grandfather, Carl Sagan, who created the first messages "to whom it can interest" produced by humanity.
Eighty years ago, when there wasn’t yet a consciousness that the humanity's and life’s end were in the short time plans of the gods, Carl Sagan created special messages to put in the ships that would leave the solar system "forever", heading for the stars and to an unlikely encounter with some remote addressee. In the probe Pioneer-10 followed a plate containing data about the time, the point of the galaxy from where it came and on the beings that produced that craft. In the ships Voyager, some years later, he sent a recording of sounds of the planet Earth, messages of fraternity (Tonio couldn't avoid a feeling that there was hypocrisy there) in hundreds of languages and many other data about the proud civilization that had built that ship. To whom those messages would be destined, whose intact survival in the interestelar space could be of billions of years? For that was known of the immensity of the cosmic emptiness, it would never meet an addressee. Nobody, in the enormity of nothingness that – by far –is the main content of the universe.
And, on the trail of his inspiration, Tonio had accomplished the largest and more complete of all of the messages to Anybody There: the Egg – that contained inside its shell of titanium the most elaborated of all of the syntheses of History, the definitive encyclopedia of the scientific knowledge and of the passage of man on the planet Earth, in trillions and trillions of registered bytes. When Tonio turned to the right to enter the US-64 and took this road to the west and begin the transverse crossing of Appalachians, he felt as the courier of his own message.
There were twelve years of elaboration; a lingering and complex team work that implicated in difficult consensus on what to register and how to focus the controversial subjects, mainly in the initial phases of the project, when there were still discussions on such matters. Behind those debates, the desperate research of technical means to register information in an indelible way, capable to resist for millions of years without deteriorating. This was the horizon of Tonio: millions of years. As for the registered contents the controversies were not prolonged, because although there was still diversity of point of views among groups and ideologies that collectivized thoughts, there was no more enthusiasm, interest or motivation to make positions prevail. In this terminal phase of the humanity, the ideologies, the theories, the verbose elaborations of the intellect lost their value, if it is that some day they had any. Nothing better than to look at those things from the privileged standing point where he was now – smiled Tonio.
The researches on the technical means to register data so that they didn't corrupt drove to the discovery that the best place to record a message is the interior of the crystalline lattices, particularly that of quartz. After thousands of years of evolution of the many substrata for the human writing – from the stone to the papyrus, from paper to the magnetic tapes and the optical disks – the conclusion was that the most reliable of all the support materials is really the good old ancestral stone, now worked by the nano-alterations of individual atoms in their rows, inside the crystalline structures. In thousands of fine slices of unbreakable quartz, Tonio and his team got to register terabytes of data, unalterable during millions of years – that’s what they foresaw.
That research had entirely absorbed Doctor Tonio and his team, whose center of operations and assembly was at Fort Belvoir's laboratories, a research institution right to the south of Washington, DC. He had made calculations – it should be said he had foreseen – with intuition and perspicacity that Washington would be the last city in the world to fall in collapse when the humanity and the whole life on Earth dive into the terminal phase. And, in Washington, the most probable place to resist until the last day would be Fort Belvoir, a scientific base of military origin, endowed with the most complete resources of self-sufficient survival under siege. The up to date technology laboratories installed there would be the incubator, or better, the perfect ovary to produce the Egg – foresaw Tonio successfully, years ago.
The turnpike US-64 also had a row of up and down ramps as the truck crossed the slopes of parallel mountains where lied lifeless dozens of small towns. This was what remained of the old Appalachians, where he had sometimes vacationed in his youth. The succession of slopes would only end when he entered Kentucky, two hundred miles to the west, by the end of the afternoon, after passing by many ghost cities ahead. In fact, so dead they were not even ghosts they left.
In the beginning of the last descent, before the prairies of Kentucky, Tonio stopped the truck for a last night of sleep. Tomorrow, if nothing unexpected happened, he would arrive to his destiny: Fort Knox. Before sleeping he checked the final actions he would have to accomplish to deposit the Egg inside the underground fortress, where the American government stored all the gold he could collect, while still convinced that it was worth to do such gathering. He lied down on the bed above the driver’s seat and slept a deep slumber without dreams. To dream of what?
In the middle afternoon of the following day, he arrived to the formerly secret facilities of Fort Knox, which once had been the better defended place of the country. The succession of prohibitions and warnings of Military Area and Area of National Security had not been removed, even if they already didn’t mean anything, since not even sentries there were anymore. Before the sunset, the Egg had already gone down in its electric cart and, in the heart of the fortress; it was deposited carefully by Tonio in a type of cradle that he arranged amid the piles of gold bars.
Then, he closed the heavy safety doors and walked a little in the roasted external atmosphere, removed the glasses and the protections against the ultraviolet, had a sip of water and sat down hugging the knees in the high of a small elevation. He stayed gazing the red clouds of the west and the Sun already hidden in the horizon. It is what just like he had foreseen: water he had to his side, but no feeding at all. It’s what was foreseen in his plan: from there he would no more get up. Water, he would drink while there was any, but he would feed no more. It is what he had foreseen, as an integral part of his project, however preserved in secrecy until the end: what he would do after having put the Egg inside the supercoffer.
Tonio sat down in lotus position and from that he no more would get up. With the fixed eyes in the horizon, immobile day and night, he moved just a little when had one or two sips of the bottle, to his side, once a day. After twenty-eight days of continuous meditation, his skin peeled by the Sun, Tonio left his daily consciousness and floated in the air. He saw himself from the high and smiled.
He was dead.
]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v399/__show_article/_a000399-000008.htm 2006-05-20T12:05:24Z 2006-05-20T12:05:24Z

This Theory of Relational Consistency is the scientific post-quantum expression of the Vedic and Buddhist view on Totality, and the solution of the age-old problem of its subjective/objective double face. The Theory is well developed and scientifically sound in spite of lacking of mathemathical f...

THEORY OF RELATIONAL CONSISTENCY - as revised in May 2006
Beto Hoisel

SUBVERSION AND REACTION
One of the most daring standing points in the history of science was taken by Niels Bohr, when he announced his principle of complementarity which separated science from Aristotelian logic, as he proposed that wave and particle are two different – however complementary – aspects assumed by matter and electromagnetic radiation. Despite being logically incompatible, both are true and will appear in one or the other manner, according to the experiment done. The wave associated to a particle is the equation of mathematical possibilities that such a particle shall manifest itself in a considered point (Schrödinger's function) and this only occurs when it "collapses" due to a conscious observer's intervention, bringing forth that particle from a potential into an actual condition of existence.

On that occasion, Heisenberg established for the first time a definite limit to the scientists' pretensions to fathom "everything" about reality as deep as they wish. With his uncertainty principle, he has shown the impossibility to know, with any desirable precision, pairs of observables such as moment and position of a particle. The more precise is one of these measurements, the less trustworthy will be the other. And this is not due to any imperfections of the instruments or methods employed; rather it's an intrinsic characteristic of nature itself.

From these principles the so called Copenhagen interpretation established, profound philosophical implications on the knowledge of the sub-microscopic world were introduced. First of all, we have to acknowledge that quantum reality has a probabilistic nature, instead of a determinate one: Only one experiment on a quantum property of a particle doesn't yield a trustful result; or that experiment is made on many particles or it should be done many times on the same particle, in order to obtain the average. The second implication is that it doesn't make sense to say anything about the physical properties of a quantum object without specifying the experimental arrangement used to know it. Or, in other words: In some mysterious form quantum reality is created by the observation act, which causes Schrödinger's wave to collapse, turning actual something only potential.

At this time, Niels Bohr said that "it's a mistake to suppose that the object of physics is to discover what nature is. Physics occupies only with what we can say about nature." That statement opened the way to John Wheeler's declaration that "No elementary phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon", and, more recently, N. David Mermin of Cornell University to utter his famous boutade: "We now know that the Moon is demonstrably not there when nobody looks."

While the quantum revolutionaries, armed with their equations and puzzling experiments, proceeded with the sweeping subversion of the objective reality concept, the rest of the scientific establishment in the universities of the world ignored, or pretended to ignore, what was happening.

However, not all of them closed their eyes to that. And the reaction in defense of the sacrosanct paradigm of realism came in 1935 led by the grand patriarch of science, Albert Einstein, who, with his allies Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, conceived an imaginary experiment that, as they expected, would demonstrate the errors of quantum conceptions. That famous mental experiment, described in many books of scientific popularization, would show that if the quantum propositions were true 1) or things would move to a speed superior to the light, something not acceptable by the theory of the relativity, 2) or then reality could not exist independently of the observer. Ever since, a controversy that lasted for decades was settled on the EPR paradox, as it came to be known. And the result, already confirmed at the laboratory but not entirely digested by the scientific community, is unfavorable to Einstein and his two friends.

There are many different interpretations of the quantum theory proposed and discussed among scientists, but the one that seems less to correspond to the experimental facts and the theoretical formalism is exactly the realistic interpretation, that states the existence of an objective reality independent of whom observes. Now, at the forum of debates of physics, there live together other theories that extend and deepen the quantum proposals and, with varied metaphysical assumptions, try to adjust facts to equations. Some of those theories are based on solid mathematical formalism, and other didn't achieve that much yet, although their concepts seem respectable and convincing. Such theories aim to explain important segments of the individual/cosmic totality, which includes, according to the quantum vision, the mysterious objective/subjective interlacement of the world.

Some of the most respected names of contemporary science, as Henry Pierce Stapp, Geoffrey Chew, and David Bohm risked their reputations as scientists when they acknowledged the evidence of the essential role of the observer of an experiment. Such a view implied to acknowledge consciousness, subjectivity and the spirit itself, that imaginary face of wholeness rejected by the old paradigm's naïve materialism. Following the same path, many other workers in Physics, Cosmology, Neurology, Ecology and other don't fear to mention the spirit as the central agent of consciousness as they acknowledge the imaginary face of wholeness as "the stone rejected by the builders, that later has shown to be the keystone".

Riding this new wave, which comes to wide open the doors of a new millennium, I’m proposing the outline for a new theory of wholeness – the theory of relational consistency.

BEYOND 4-DIMENSIONAL SPACE-TIME
Just like in Geoffrey Chew's bootstrap conception, no aspect of the theory of relational consistency can be considered basic; almost all are imported from other theories and they only subsist due to its interdependence in a coherent configuration, capable of elucidating enigmas that other approaches don't solve per se. This way, relational consistency is a bootstrap theory once it refuses the reductionist conception ingrained into the current paradigm that says the universe to be made of basic elementary constituents, such as particles, laws, constants etc. In the view of relational consistency both 1) the search for minimal elementary sub-particles and 2) the investigation of what happened in the minimum fraction of linear time after the big bang are illusory roads that ultimately will lead to nothing.

A point to be preliminarily considered is the dimensional framework where that part of totality accessible to human knowledge is inserted. It's presented in two slopes, two faces of a same coin made compatible due to an extension of Bohr's principle of complementarity: 1) the face said to be real or objective, manifested in the three dimensions of the space (Euclidean or non-Euclidean, depending on the considered scale or the investigator's option) and 2) the imaginary or subjective face, manifested in the three dimensions of time. This way, the cognoscible being has two opposite and complementary faces in its wholeness, classically known as matter and spirit, that are no more than our peculiar form of noticing what, without this resource, would remain rationally unrecognized. Let's remember Einstein's words: "time and space are not properties of the universe in itself, but just forms we use to notice it".

With respect to the specific subject of time, curious things have been happening as a consequence of the constraints imposed by the standard paradigm that acknowledges time as one-dimensional - the usual linear time. First, we notice a specific blindness in some of the most outstanding personalities of science to certain results of their own experiments. Then, a repeated refusal to acknowledge obvious interpretations of facts emerging from experiments, if the case requires a basic reformulation of some aspects of the standard paradigm.

First of all, let's see Albert Einstein's refusal to admit that time, being an imaginary value – as suggested in his special theory of relativity, and more clearly stated in Minkowsky's considerations – should be understood as something connected to the subjective world, something imaginary, which appears in the physical-spatial world as a projection of a geometric nature. Einstein "saw" time has to be imaginary, but he didn't realize its subjective, non-physical character, so he could not develop the unfolding of this remarkable finding. Through this particular point – which passed unnoticed as a consequence of the Newtonian-Cartesian materialistic paradigm – science could jump over the metaphysical wall which averts physics of accepting the imaginary, the spiritual, the vastness of our inner world that forces its presence in the recent paradoxical experiments of quantum inquiries.

Minkowsky, in his paper "Space and Time" – presented to the 80th Assembly of German Natural Scientists and Physicists, which has taken place in Koln, September 21st, 1908 – introduces imaginary time in his proposal:

"We can determine the ratio of the units of length and time beforehand in such a way that the natural limit of velocity becomes c=1. If we introduce, further, the square root of -1 times t equals to tau (t=tau) in place of t, the quadratic differential expression dtau2 = dx2 dy2 dz2 ds2 thus becomes perfectly symmetrical in x, y, z, s; and this symmetry is communicated to any law which does not contradict the world-postulate. Thus the essence of this postulate may be clothed mathematically in a very pregnant manner in the mystic formula: 3 times 100000 km = square root of -1 secs.

Some years later, Einstein repeated in his book Relativity, the Special and General Theory:

"...Minkowsky's discovery [...] must be found mainly in the fact of his acknowledgment that the four-dimensional continuum of relativity [...] shows a pronounced relationship with the 3-dimensional continuum of Euclidean space. However, to give the right importance to this relationship we should replace the usual coordinate t with an imaginary value =1ct proportional to it. In such conditions, natural laws that satisfy the special theory of relativity exigencies assume mathematical forms where the time coordinates act precisely in the same way as space coordinates."

However, in spite of the acknowledgment that t needs to assume its condition of imaginary value to satisfy its own theory propositions, this was not interpreted – either by Einstein or any of his successors – as a clear indication that time is an imaginary subjective dimension which insinuates in the physical world through a projection. This is an ancient proposal of philosophy, of poetry and of the thought known as "mystical", that for centuries hold their own views on this mysterious and basic field.

Another aspect of the nature of time also discerned by Minkowsky and Einstein but ignored by later science concerns to the linear flow, usually associated to a line, as Heraclitus' river - which he saw as a projection of a more complex dimensional set. It seems curious that physicists' sense of esthetic didn't react to such a painfully unattractive structure of a lattice which has three dimensions of space and only one of time.

A structure formed by three dimensions of space and three dimensions of time can account for all phenomena and possibilities contained in wholeness, at least until the horizons our intelligence, intuition and feeling permit us to reach.

The Theory of Relational Consistency proposes that Euclidean 3-dimensional space adjusts to the objective face of wholeness – that one we call real – the existential locus of matter and objects that physical science recognizes as such. On the other hand, time, which is also 3-dimensional, is the existential locus of the subjective contents – the subjects – that we identify to the imaginary face of being, whose center is inside each one of us.

Today, linear time has the tremendous force of an archetype and the sweeping power of a god. It's true that we are subject to many of its constraints but this is also valid for space. We cannot move without encumbrance along linear, or 2-dimensional nor 3-dimensional time. But the same happens to space: even if we acknowledge its broad 3-dimensionality which unfolds up to the clouds and interstellar space, we are not free to move in it as one pleases. We are constrained by physical limitations, bounded to the Earth's surface, to the size of our ship or to the bars of a jail. The prisoner sees the blue sky and the far away mountains through the rails of the window, but he can only move in the tiny world of his cell.

First, we need to know what 2 and 3-dimensional time really are, and then to study a way – and by which means – we could move in these realms. It seems clear that we can figure out what one-dimensional time is. But, what could be a 2-dimensional time? What should be the metaphor that could adjust to it, or what kind of mental picture can we make of it? Why doesn't 2-dimensional time appear in the instruments and observations of physicists?

To understand what 2-dimensional time is (and also 3-dimensional) it's necessary to accept its imaginary – hence subjective – character, as bounded to the imaginary face of wholeness, which discloses only through subjectivities: Spirits or sentient beings, human or other. It's necessary to become aware that time is something essentially subjective, which manifests in the space of physical things as a projection of geometrical nature. It's essential to understand that transformation, even when it occurs in physical things of space, doesn't imply time, and that time is transformation being perceived by some subjectivity.

Time is imaginary and subjective. The notion of 2-dimensional time emerges when we get aware that each subjectivity has its own proper time, its exclusive worldline, also defined by Minkowsky in that very paper almost a century old, where he has shown the imaginary character of time.

Surface-time can be conceived as the sideways move of an individual worldline through the subjectivities that crowd the universe, human or otherwise. But – it can be argued – aren't these entities known to be discrete, individual, and discontinuous? Certainly not! They are not separate. All subjectivities that aspire to the right of existing (whatever this may mean) are dots in a vast continuity, like the countless emerging peaks of a gigantic submersed mountain range of uncountable complex beings that pervade the entire cosmos embedded in its 6-dimensional lattice.

This way, 2-dimensional time is the fabric of countless subjectivities that pervade the universe, each one bearing its proper time, individual and linear. But – someone could ask – how can the time we see in clocks and calendars seem the same, common to everyone? Initially I reply this is not exact, as states quantum physics, as well as relativity. Then I add something new: I am convinced of the existence of a principle of consistency, which allows the compatibility of interacting subjectivities' individual times.

This new principle of science, which comes out to join others discovered in the beginnings of quantum physics, states that interacting subjectivities' individual times connect to each other in such a way a perfect illusion is created: clock time seems to be the same for all of them, as if they were sharing a common experience. But this can occur only among interacting subjectivities, only if they are in touch or, in a sense, communicating by physical means. Non-interacting subjectivities can be bounded to very different individual times. Or, in other words: to look for equivalence between individual times of non-interacting subjectivities doesn't make sense, once they are bounded to universes that actually are not communicating.

Three-dimensional time, however, remains beyond human skill for abstract thinking and imagination. Three-dimensional time is the realm of gods. But a glimpse of its structure can be attained by the same geometrical expedient we used to understand 2-dimensional time, and should be seen under the strict limits of a metaphor: 3-dimensional time can be generated by a dislocation of 2-dimensional surface-time – formed by the weaving of many subjectivities – in a direction perpendicular to that "surface". This way we create something similar to a "volume", an inconceivable imaginary volume, the absolute volume that engulfs the evolution of wholeness, which contains everything and has no limits nor outside.

Three-dimensional time is the most close equivalent we can conjecture of God's mind, as well as three-dimensional boundless space – the universe – could be a metaphor for the locus of His physical body.

This way, the dimensional frame that supports the cognizable wholeness comprehends the three "real" dimensions of space x, y and z plus the three "imaginary" dimensions of time t, u and v. Everything real and all the imaginary realm, all the "objective" world and also the "subjective" kingdom, all physical and mental phenomena – including those said to be paranormal – can fit in that six-dimensional framework.

In the perceptive system ordinarily adopted, the "real" contents of the universe – the physical universe delimited by physicists and cosmologists as their object of study – are said to EXIST. On the other hand, the contents of the psychological "imaginary" world, as well as the ideal creations of all subjectivities – either human or not – we propose to say they INIST. To speculate on other contents outside of that dimensional framework is pointless, once such contents would not be accessible to human knowledge. The mathematical formulations that describe anything unfit for that framework would exist only, or better, would inist only as an abstract mathematical entity linked to its specific ontological status of the imaginary slope of wholeness.
Observe that, as we admit time as being 3-dimensional and imaginary – the point Albert Einstein missed – the whole problem of the origins and evolution passes to be referred to a non-sequential understanding of the cosmic facts. This is the deepest and most wide-ranging revolution of our proposal. It subverts all the investigation forms related to one-dimensional and linear time, with its arrow inexorably harnessed to the big bang and the second law of thermodynamics.

This puts us in face of the Buddhist's conception of Being. D.T. Suzuki writes:

"Buddha (...) is not one more who lives in a world conceived in terms of time and space. His consciousness is not more the consciousness of a common mind, regulated in agreement with the senses and logic. (...) Buddha (...) lives in a spiritual world that possesses its own rules."

The entity that physicists and cosmologists recognize as being the universe, the cosmos whose secrets they study, in truth is neither unique nor objective, except under a strictly consensual perspective. Each subjectivity, each spirit, each observer, each scientist, each person of any social level or cultural background, each consciousness – be it human or not, be it terrestrial or not – carries around a private universe of beatitude or anguish, of ignorance or light, built throughout the eons of his or her existence. This sends us to the theory of the monads, of Leibniz, a sage who reveals a surprising contemporary view. He had a premonition of important aspects of several recent theories, particularly the holographic vision of the brain (Karl Pribram) and also of the universe (David Bohm).

Our model for the relational consistency is sustained on the shoulders of those precursors.

SUBJECTIVITY AS FOCUS
As to the interpretations of the quantum paradoxes, we emphatically endorse the discovery (we see it as a discovery) that consciousness creates reality, when it triggers the collapse of Schrödinger's function, turning actual (real) what was only a potential existence (imaginary). That process, countlessly repeated in all observational actions, turns actual worlds potentially hidden in quantum possibilities, as it builds his or her parallel universe around that observing subjectivity.

Thus, we link ourselves also to the interpretation of the multiple universes, of Hugh Everett III, as we acknowledge the universe as, actually, a multiverse: An inexhaustible unfolding of universes that can portray small – or much accentuated – differences among themselves.

However, we distinguish our interpretation from Everett's. He admits that all countless versions of universes in some way would "exist", superposed in a hyper-space of endless simultaneous realities as we, collectively, would only have consciousness of one. In our view, conversely, each of these multiple versions can exist only when centralized around a subjectivity that functions as its existential nucleus: Each subjectivity is the center of his or her own parallel universe. We consider as evident that something not perceived cannot be real, as observed John Wheeler. Therefore, universes not provided of a conscious subjectivity as its perceptive nucleus, cannot exist.

Our proposition, however, doesn't mean that each subjectivity is confined in only one parallel universe that, for him or her, would exist "forever" as a single private universe, according to the classic conception. It is nothing like this. In our view, each consciousness is a pole of ever unfolding universes that each subjectivity brings about according to the myriad quantum options embedded in their decisions – conscious or not – that we would call observations, equivalent to what, in formal quantum experiments, is characterized as a measurement.

This way, each subjectivity is a focus of unfolding parallel universes, as predicted by calculations and admitted in Everett's interpretation. However, each one of these parallel universes has a size restricted to the limits of that subjectivity's range of perception. I remark the fundamental difference that, while in Everett's interpretation only one unfolding system exists, actualizing a single hypothetical reality where all of us would cohabit, in our proposal that old reality – independent of observers and common to all – stops having autonomous existence and turns into an existence of consensual nature. Which, for its time, is not unique: There are countless consensual realities, however compatible and consistent with the subjectivities inside them. Consensual realities which are not under interaction can be very different; but if they don't interact there's no problem.

Synthetically, we propose that the thing we call reality passes to be understood as a vast inter-subjective network that interlaces consensual realities shared among groups of interacting subjectivities.

The generation of the phenomena shared by multiple subjectivities happens according to processes of holographic nature, each part containing information on the entire interacting group. This view synthesizes the theories of Pribram and Bohm in only one conception and suggests a dimensional locus – 3-dimensional time – where can comfortably be inserted the implicit order of Bohm; the domain of frequencies of Pribram; the morphogenetic fields of Sheldrake; the said paranormal phenomena; the archetypes of Plato and Jung etc.

We live in a consensual universe mathematically built by our consciousness according to the Fourier's transformation, as it interprets patterns of electromagnetic frequencies originated from other subjectivities as geometric projections of the superior dimensions of space-time. Consciousness is a hologram that reproduces "one" holographic universe in perpetual mutation – a holomovement, according to Bohm – due to the continuous motion of interacting subjectivities. The most present physical processes in the forming of that consensual world are interference and resonance of the entire spectrum of electromagnetic waves – mostly of them unsuspected, however present.

I emphatically agree with the Scandinavian scientist Hannes Alfvén, when he says that "our cosmos is more an electromagnetic than gravitational being".

THE PRINCIPLE OF CONSISTENCY
It remains, now, another problem to be examined. To consolidate those propositions it seems indispensable to provide a formulation of the principle that allows the compatibility of the many universes in their updating process. Around each conscious pole (we call it a subjectivity) the illusion of a single reality seems solid and convincing in the way ordinarily verified. If each subjectivity unfolds his or her own universes, how is it possible that this is not perceived and the suggestion of a single unique reality seems so obvious?

In the tradition of the founding fathers of the quantum quest, whenever a crucial aspect on the conception of reality and the means and limits we have to apprehend it was reached, something emerged as a principle, a basic parameter that establishes a pattern and delimits the cognitive process. This way appeared Bohr's principle of complementarity; Heisenberg's principle of indetermination; Pauli's principle of exclusion and several others. This feature seems to be an intrinsic characteristic of wholeness or, at least, of our process of apprehension of its deeper aspects.

In the same way I glimpsed what can be called a principle of consistency, which makes compatible the many worlds generated by interacting subjectivities, so that the consensual fabric comes out without flaws or fractures. That principle, as general and including as the others we have mentioned, is a key condition that allows the contents of a non-linear time – a 2 and 3-dimensional lattice – to be geometrically projected in our perceptible space-time and interact in its realm.

According to the principle of consistency, the arrow of time comes out from no conflicting sequential collapses of quantum waves (Schrödinger's function). This starts with the endless conscious interventions in the super-hologram, triggered by the individual holograms of each subjectivity. This process forms the super-holomovement we see as reality, or "the world". Therefore, consensual reality is shaped in the linear time by the successive accumulation of myriad quantum collapses in the super-hologram common to the interacting subjectivities. That sequences – which exist only in the linear time of the each subjectivity – spread common views of a reality updated in a growing consensual field, as a growing fractal that continuously incorporates new subjectivities, without contradictions or inconsistencies.

As can be inferred from the propositions above, the now called consensual reality – that to our view replaces the old concept of an objective reality – is formed together with lineal time as auto-consistent patches that grow according to mathematical auto-correlation functions of fractal characteristics, dispersing from different generation centers. As our perspective is holographic (non-local), we admit that such patches exchange information, even if they are not spatially close to each other, preventing they fit together without any cracks when they enter in further contact.

However, that compatibility is not always perfect. Sometimes those processes present flaws that can be detected, if they are not yet healed and adjusted. The more distant in the perceptible space-time and less interacting among themselves, more probable it will be the occurrence of compatibility fissures among different patches of consensual realities in their process of formation.

An interesting example is the case of the neutrinos. For many years in the researches realized in Western laboratories neutrinos didn't accuse any mass, but in Russia invariably they appeared as bearers of very small, but measurable mass. That crack in the pot of reality was healed in January of 1995 when finally the American experiments have found mass in the neutrino.

This consensual conception of reality and the cosmos rests on epistemological foundations rather different from the one that sustained science until the end of 20th century. It also stands largely far from the Western cultural inheritance of Greek roots. Now we need to review countless remaining crucial aspects in many sciences and research methods.

More than a revolution, what is configured now in the relationship between the individual soul and the cosmos is a sweeping subversion of many things supposed to be known in Cosmology, in Physics, in Anthropology, in History, in Psychology. From now on, it will be essential that, with courage and humility – we don't see them as incompatible – all of us became willing to acknowledge and assume the paradoxes and marvels offered to human knowledge and fruition on the verge of this new millennium.


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NOTE: 1: This paper is part of the book The Annals of an Imaginary Symposium, by Beto Hoisel, which is available only in its original Portuguese version as published by Palas Athena Association – São Paulo, Brasil, 1998 (English language publisher is welcome). However, six of the twelve chapters (or lectures) are translated into English and can be read and print from our site Journey Across the Cosmos - of knowledge and wisdom. (site address: http://www.simposio2008.hoisel.com.br ) This paper is at the end of the Lecture #6 – The New Reality, signed by a fictitious scientist christened Sir Philip Quarks F.R.S.
2: The real & imaginary author of this paper, Beto Hoisel (beto@hoisel.com.br) is very interested in making contact with someone skillful in high mathematics to join him and help to create a mathematical formalization to this Theory of Relational Consistency.

Beto Hoisel – October 2005 / May 2006
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To break the vicious circle in which we wrapped ourselves; for us to leave this disturbing drugs combat impasse, I propose a solution to be implemented by the UN that can be summarized in the following points:

1) To distinguish, by an international commission of scientists specialists on the theme, which drugs are clearly harmful from the ones that only do harm if they became object of abuse. Among the first group, certainly there will be heroine, morphine, opium, tobacco and cocaine that create a slavish dependence, liquidating the unhappy users who cannot get free of them. Among the ones of the second group, will be – possibly – marijuana, LSD, alcohol, hashish and others that research indicate.
2) The substances of the first group should have their production and distribution criminalized – as, in fact, it already happens to most of them. Those of the second group will be regulated one by one and liberated, after being evaluated and supervised. Their liberation should be accompanied of permanent and intensive campaign by the media, informing the public of the current dangers of abuse (it will be needed to define clearly what means the abuse of each one of them). The collected taxes will revert to an international fund administered by the UN that will finance the researches and the advertising campaigns.
3) The international commission suggested above should be permanent and linked to the World Health Organization. Their members will be renewed periodically and will have the attribution of emitting statements about the classification and regulation of the use of the psychotropic substances existent in the world, and also of those that go being discovered in nature or synthesized at the laboratories. The regulation will be attribution of each country, however following the model of the UN. An International Treaty will be indispensable, explaining the commitments of the countries members.
4) Linked to UNESCO, a second ecumenical commission of masters, spiritual leaders and priests of the no exclusionists religions, will examine and to emit statements on the therapeutic/spiritual value of the range of experiences that each substance can trigger in the context of the several philosophies, religions and organized sects that make use of them. Except for the cult freedom principle, it will be necessary to look particularly at the level of seriousness and respect, the ritual context and the doctrinaire base adopted in each case.
5) The two commissions above will elaborate an International Statute of Altered States of Consciousness jointly, containing guidelines, recommendations and models so that each country makes its own legislation. The criminalization of the forbidden drugs and the regulated liberation of the others will be the tonic of this Statute, but it suits to observe that the verification of the use of any psychotropic substance associated to harmful actions inflicted to anyone should add seriousness to the charges.

Our proposal is based in the recognition that:

a) The world war against the producers and illegal distributors of drugs is virtually lost and its results are opposed to those intended; we fell in a vicious circle that should be broken.
b) If the drug traffic moves such high values, it is because a considerable demand exists to be supplied, representing an enormous consuming market all over the world. To ignore that is inadmissible naivety or rude hypocrisy, because that market is disseminated by all levels of income and culture.
c) Every human being has in his or her soul a natural pulse for transcendence that needs to be understood as a right that the society should propitiate, together with the other fundamental human rights, as feeding, work, house, health, education, free traffic, manifestation of the thought, sexual option etc.
d) Every human being is responsible for his or her own destiny and if, even properly informed, to insist on staying with practices that can destroy him or her, it is not ethical to anybody to impede that he accomplishes his or her fate, since it doesn't cause damage to property or to other people.
e) The practice of the information and education already has shown its effectiveness in the cases of the tobacco and of the aids, whose statistical incidence is being reduced where the population is better informed; however it’s still high in the areas where ignorance prevails.
]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v399/__show_article/_a000399-000006.htm 2005-03-03T15:22:04Z 2005-03-04T16:19:15Z

How could Jonathan Swift foresee, in his Gulliver's Travels, that planet Mars has two moons which revolve in opposite directions, more than a century before science discovered that?

How did Jules Verne know in his novel From the Earth to the Moon, with an anticipation equivalent to Swift's, that the conquest of the Moon would be attained by an American vehicle with a three men crew that should depart from Florida for a three days trip and in its return would splash down in the sea?

How could H.G. Wells, in his book The World Set Free, describe a war that would take place in the 1950s, where football sized atomic bombs were dropped from aircraft with explosive power to destroy an entire city? This was written in 1913, when no one had an idea of what a chain reaction could be, nor that atoms could be disintegrated yielding fantastic energy.

Finally, to stop an endless series of examples, how could the obscure American writer Morgan Robertson, in a 1898 novel named Futility, describe the wreck of a brand-new liner named Titan, sunk in its maiden voyage between England and the United States, after a collision with an iceberg, with hundreds of casualties due to the lack of life-boats? This book describes with such a wealth of details the ship, the travel and what came to happen in 1912, in the sinking of the Titanic, that it should be a serious object of consideration by everyone who intends to study what time really is.

The flood of premonitions that occur – and the press reports – related to happenings that result in collective emotional shock have been studied in many universities and research centers. A sweeping new conception of time certainly will come up from these studies with important effects on science and philosophy.

My answer is that time is not linear and one-dimensional. Things will become more clear when we grasp the simple idea that time is as three-dimensional as space is [link]
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