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 1 Oct 2008 @ 08:40
Consciousness, Mind and Information
Mystics and indigenous cultures talk of a cosmic shift in consciousness occurring in the early part of the 21st century. The Mayan calendar even gives a date for this process late in the year 2012. It is appropriate then for me to consider the subject of consciousness and see if any light can be shed on it and these events.
As you may recall, Hegel spoke of the process whereby Spirit “alienates” itself into matter and then develops, through many forms, to return to itself in Mind. In an earlier article I proposed a “translation” of these terms into scientific ideas. Thus for Spirit we have Energy, and matter remains as matter, with the added idea that it is frozen or alienated energy or spirit. Also matter is discrete, individualised whereas Spirit is continuous and undifferentiated. So also we imagine is energy continuous and undifferentiated. Now when we arrive at the third term of Hegel’s triad, namely Mind, we reach the very thing we are concerned about today. For Mind, in an alternative formulation is the same as Consciousness. The consciousness of the godhead. In that essay “Mind Identity” I put forward the idea that Mind is translated by the scientific and journalistic term “Information”. Hence consciousness and information are related in some way. What I am suggesting is that just as matter is a discrete form of energy, both of which find their synthesis in “Mind” or consciousness, in the same way information is both individual, discrete bits of data/information, and also continuous like a field or wave. In other words information is the union of energy and matter in the same way as Consciousness/Mind is the union of Spirit and Matter.
Now there are many issues connected with these ideas. Indeed, everything I have written about, such as identity, and Schrodinger’s “Law of Identity”, alienation, archetypes and sub-personalities, are all connected in various ways with this.
Information is usually regarded in the context of computers and networks. And for many years there has been information science. But we don’t have to be specialists in this field to know that it is relevant to our present inquiries. Just looking at the events of the past few years is enough to confirm the belief that information is central to what’s happening and about to happen in the world. In this country (England) there have been numerous examples recently of lost or stolen information/data concerning thousands of people and their identities. This never used to be an issue but it is now. Also, it is said “information wants to be free” which puts it on a par with spirit which also tends to greater and greater freedom. Money is becoming less and less material and more and more digitalised and ethereal and spiritualised. Indeed it is becoming electronic information. Money has been proliferating for a long time at an uncontrollable rate and so has data/information. In the realm of culture the Matrix movies portrayed consciousness as pure information many times. All this, and the growing dominance of the information class, the media, suggests to me that information is the springboard by which we will all reach consciousness and identity with God. More >
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9 Sep 2008 @ 08:58
The Other Erwin Schrodinger
I was recently reading a small book by Physicist Erwin Schrodinger, noted for his Nobel prize and contributions to Quantum theory and the paradox of “Schrodinger’s Cat”. What is not well known is his mystical approach to certain things for example his concept of “negative entropy” to explain some unique characteristics of life itself. Writing over 50 years ago he states that classical physics has reached an impasse and has to change its ideas in some ways, in order to be able to advance further. The first way is to adopt what he calls the “Law of Identity”, which he borrows from the Hindu religion. This asserts that we all share in our consciousness in the consciousness of God. Schrodinger sees the question of whether this involves souls as an unnecessary complication, and seems not to believe in them. Linked to his view of consciousness is his profound belief that the split between Subject and Object, central to Classical Science, is an illusion. He believed that it is really a split in our minds, in our consciousness, that creates this illusion of a separation between observer and object. His views were remarkable at that time and are still cutting-edge today. I completely agree with his analysis and add here a few thoughts of my own. Recently I have been thinking and writing about “the Other” and it is clear to me that the split between Self and Other, which is the cause of so much trouble in the world, is a split in consciousness similar to what he describes. Self/Other is a false dichotomy, an illusion, on a par with that between Observer and Observed. It is caused by a split in our consciousness, our way of looking at things, and I will now elaborate why.
Schrodinger’s “Law of Identity” says that we all share, in our individual consciousness, in the consciousness of God. This is the Hindu view and that of many mystics. But most world religions resolutely deny that we are part of the Godhead and consider it blasphemy to say this. Yet it is this very same denial, I believe, that is the cause of this split in our consciousness that leads us to create “the Other” and “the Object”. First we deny that we are like God, then we start to perceive God as the Other, then we perceive parts of ourselves as other, then Nature, Woman, Gays, Blacks, Muslims and so on. This condition is called Alienation. In these circumstances the alienated Self, the Ego, itself splits into countless inner others. To the alienated, everything is other, nothing is self. In reality everything is God, but alienated people cannot see that. One consequence of this estrangement from God, and ourselves, is that we try to destroy everything we see as other. But this is impossible. The other is everywhere. It is like our shadow. In attempting to destroy the other all we do is destroy ourselves. All the environmental problems we have, such as climate change, come from this unconscious desire to destroy the other, and Nature is a huge other. The remedy for this malaise and all such, is to accept that there is no Other; Everything is Self, Everything is God. More >
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2 Sep 2008 @ 11:30
Sexual Identity is Basic on the Material Plane
In the past, since the beginning of modern progressive thought, it has been the case that anti-racism was the touchstone of the movement against the hatred of Difference, which is better described as discrimination and Fascism. In my last article, ”HomoRacism” I questioned this fact and put forward the idea that if we are to consider priorities it is not in fact racism which is fundamental. I put forward my personal opinion that sex, gender and sexuality are even more basic than the colour of our skin. The emergence of contradictions in the different attitudes of minorities who themselves discriminate against other minorities shows that a new and complex situation is developing. It is actually my belief that whereas the material identity that is crucial is the one outlined above, namely sexuality, the spiritual identity is something different. Specifically I believe in what Erwin Schrodinger, the famous Quantum physicist, called the “Law of Identity” that we all in our consciousness are one with God. This is the real identity which I believe will be revealed in the era of post-modernism. And this accounts seemingly for the huge importance which people are placing on questions of spiritual identity and particularly Religion. So I do think that the traditional paradigm on identity and ant-fascism has to be critically looked at and the new realities taken into consideration. More >
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31 Aug 2008 @ 09:19
HomoRacism : Homophobia and Racism
I’ve never really liked the terms Islamophobia or Homophobia because people don’t take these terms very seriously, even though they reflect the truth of the problems some people have with Muslims and those of different sexuality. The public consider these terms psychobabble and have always seemed to prefer more gutsy terms like racism, fascism etc. for analogous conditions. I would like to suggest that we rename the hatred of gays as HomoRacism.
Desmond Tutu, the former Anglican Archbishop of Capetown, said a while ago in defence of gays that the hatred people showed for them was the new Apartheid and the new racism. Desmond Tutu, in my opinion, is one of the greatest men alive and a beacon to all. With religion playing such a large part in this new homoracism, it is noticeable that a large number of black people are themselves the perpetrators of this new form of racism. This seems paradoxical, and to an old-fashioned liberal a person of colour could never be a racist. But this is patently true. This fact makes us look closer into the complexities of being human, and makes us question the belief held almost as a truism that racism is the basic form of fascism. Similarly anti-racism is held to be the corner-stone of Anti-fascism. The Truth is that this view is too simplistic. Fascism is a huge problem, and always has been, with Identities and the Other.
Gays have always been persecuted, just like Jews, through-out history even in societies like the Roman Empire which was completely multicultural, and where racism was unknown. At that time it was a capital offence to be homosexual, and also the Jews were persecuted on account of their monotheistic religion, because they would not worship the emperor, and not because of their race. It is my personal view that identities based on sex are more fundamental than those based on race or religion and the modern emergence of the contradictions referred to earlier confirm this fact.
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27 Aug 2008 @ 08:32
Theology of the Other
It is my basic belief that the fundamental contradiction of the human condition, our basic duality, is that we are all both human and divine. We are all human but we also partake of the nature of the divine godhead. This has been known to mystics for millennia and perhaps before that to the people who shared the Perennial Philosophy as part of their indigenous culture.
It is also my belief that it is the denial of this fact that leads to the problems people have with “the Other”. It is not just minority groups or Nature itself that represent our problem with “the Other” but essentially our denial that we are divine. It is indeed ironic that traditional “civilised” accounts of the “Fall” of man and woman portray it as a result of the “hubris” of wanting to be like God. Our “hubris” consists rather in thinking we are greater than God in our isolated individuality, cut off from ourselves, each other, Nature and the Source itself. Putting our faith in this isolated individuality, and all hopes of global salvation based on it are the two main fallacies that have to be tackled by humankind. The reality is exactly the reverse. It is the Self-conscious level of awareness which cuts us off from this knowledge of the real duality of our nature. We don’t have to become like God, we have always shared in being so, and the “Fall from Grace” is a forgetting of this basic truth. Original Sin is not thinking we are Gods, but that we are greater than God/dess on account of our isolated, alienated individuality. Our extreme individuality, narcissism, is an expression of this. All the problems which are besetting the world today from racism, war, homophobia, sexism, hatred of disabled people, all sorts of scapegoating of others, and particularly climate change all stem from this crisis of identity. Everything in the world is teaching us the same lesson concerning “the Other”. God is the real Other, and our denial of all “the Others”, within us and society, is the same thing on a different scale. More >
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24 Aug 2008 @ 15:14
This is a restatement of the classic Twin Prime conjecture in a more particular and provocative form
If you take any prime number greater than 2 and square it then take the next prime above the original one and square that,then the intervening numbers will always contain at least two pairs of twin primes.
example: 3 squared is 9 and 5 squared is 25 and between the numbers 9 and 25 you will find two pairs of twin primes namely 11,13 and 17,19
Comments appreciated More >
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4 Aug 2008 @ 09:07
Why is Dialectic Important
In an article a while ago I contrasted the Taoist approach to solving problems with the Confucianist one. Taoism tries to grasp the essence of anything it analyses or any problem it is trying to solve. Confucianism, on the other hand, seems content with looking at and considering secondary, superficial, irrelevant and numerous inessential aspects of a subject or thing. Occasionally this leads to a solution, but usually this is arrived at only after years of piecemeal efforts by different people. The Taoist approach often yields a quick answer to the solitary enquirer.
The Confucianist way is analytical but reductionist, it splits things into a myriad of incoherent aspects that seem to lack a connecting thread. This is the method of traditional science. It is also very anxious to eradicate qualitative aspects of the matter in favour of purely quantitative ones. As part of this it gets rid of any analysis of the problem into complementary opposites or dialectical categories.
One can say that there is almost a phobia, as yet unnamed, which people have when dealing with qualitative and dialectical angles of the problem or idea. And I will tell you why. This fear, almost pathological, of qualities and opposites is very similar to the fear of intimacy which you find in a neurotic person, usually men. Because dialectical analysis, literally, is a way into the heart or Essence of a thing. And just as many people shun intimacy, likewise many people feel very uncomfortable with the essence of anything, preferring instead all sorts of distractions, secondary aspects and irrelevancies.
The analysis of anything in terms of its opposites and contradictions is a time-honoured method of getting to the heart or essence of it, and has been part of the Perennial Philosophy for thousands of years.
Some people think that the Taoist way of solving problems always involves an incredible “Eureka” moment, akin to a moment of mystical Enlightenment, which relies on the complete grasping in one stroke, of something’s essence. It does sometimes happen like that, but often it involves the hard work of thoroughly analysing and understanding the opposites and contradictions in the thing and their mutual connections.
More >
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3 Jun 2008 @ 09:12
Phi, The Pentagon and Self-Similarity
It is my contention that there is just one unified knowledge, there is just one mathematics, not straight mathematics versus “mystical” mathematics, or straight geometry versus “sacred” geometry, just one science which is the union of the strong points of mysticism with the strong points of quantitative science.
To this end I am putting forward the assertion that Phi (1.61803….) is the constant of Self-similarity and that they are always found together.
I have previously shown this to be the case where we have the Fibonacci sequence and also the Pythagorean theorem ( through the use of self-similar right-angled triangles). Now I will add to this by demonstrating that the so-called “mystical” pentagon exhibits self-similarity, and that the well-known prevalence of Phi in anything connected with pentagons, pentacles or pentagrams is connected with this fact and not anything other-worldly.
Phi (1.61803…..) is a very unusual ratio and is demonstrated by Euclid in his Elements where he calls it division “in the extreme and mean ratio”. What this means is that in any straight line, if you cut it at a certain point where the ratio of the whole to the greater part is exactly the same as the ratio of the greater part to the smaller part, that ratio will be the irrational number Phi, approximately 1.61803989. Then Euclid goes on to use this line to construct a regular pentagon and the regular solids based on it. All the remarkable properties of pentagons are based on the fact that the diagonals of a pentagon cut each other in this ratio of Phi. What has been overlooked in all this is that if you draw all the diagonals of such a pentagon, then they cut each other in this ratio and they create in the middle of the previous pentagon an exactly self-similar pentagon, rotated 180 degrees, whose sides are smaller than the larger pentagon by a factor of Phi squared. This is well-known but its significance seems to be ignored. Clearly if we construct diagonals of this smaller pentagon we create a smaller one and so on ad infinitum. This is clearly a case of self-similarity as I have sought to demonstrate as the basis of Phi. I would also speculate, though this is unproven, that the expression for Phi =(1 + SquareRoot(5)) / 2 is but a specific example of a general formula which links the number of sides of a polygon, in this case 5, to the ratio of the intersecting diagonals of that polygon, whether it has 5, 6, 7 or more sides. In other words this remarkable ratio is produced by ordinary mathematical processes, which need to be explained and clarified and not mystified. The real deep mysteries in all this are self-similarity,fractals, chaos and complexity theory which as yet are imperfectly understood. More >
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23 Apr 2008 @ 09:25
Pascal’s Triangle, Self-Similarity and Phi
In maths the simple operation of adding two consecutive elements in a sequence and then iterating, which process is well-known to us in the Fibonacci sequence, leads to many of the more remarkable properties we come across in nature and mathematics. The Fibonacci sequence, as I pointed out in my last article, is based on self-similarity and exhibits the mystical number and proportion called the “Sacred Ratio”, approximately 1.618… which is an irrational number.
Now something very similar occurs in that very famous table of numbers, known to the ancient Chinese, but known to us as Pascal’s Triangle. This is a symmetrical table, with ones at the apex and at each edge, with the intervening numbers created by adding together the two numbers directly above and to either side. Pascal’s triangle has a multitude, maybe indeed an infinite number of remarkable properties. Every interesting thing in mathematics more or less, can be found in different ways in this pyramid. Fibonacci itself, can be found in sequence if you add the short diagonals. This of course yields Phi, the Golden Proportion. However, this is a bit misleading, because Phi is conspicuously absent from the other patterns you will find in this triangle. This is because if you divide any two of the numbers in the table they will be a rational fraction, not irrational. Adding different numbers together, as in the Fibonacci example, is the only way to get a sequence which gives Phi. The whole structure is based on the iterative technique mentioned above, and I suspect that this technique is a cornerstone of self-similarity, though I can’t demonstrate it as convincingly here as I did in my previous article on Fibonacci.
I believe, since Nature produces Phi all over the place, and Fibonacci sequences in the number of petals of flowers and the spirals of shells, that at an early stage in the evolution of life, in plant RNA and animal DNA, the simple iterative technique I refer to, was encoded and passed down to following generations. Thus we find Phi everywhere in Nature. Why it leads to very remarkable properties in mathematics is another issue and one I will address in a later article. More >
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13 Apr 2008 @ 09:47
Mysticism and Science: A new Union
1. Phi is the constant of self-similarity
It is my belief that the way forward involves the coming together of mysticism and science, to give a new holistic discipline which will combine the quantitative strengths of science with the holistic and qualitative strengths of mysticism.
What I am writing is not “sacred geometry” or “sacred mathematics”, but just plain true knowledge. My first assertion is that the number or ratio Phi, known from antiquity, is the constant of self-similarity. Let me illustrate this with a simple numerical example. Take the Fibonacci sequence
1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 … … …
each number is the sum of the previous two terms, thus 8 = 5 + 3. It is very significant that if you divide any term by the immediately preceding term you derive a fraction which is alternately greater then less than Phi, and which quickly closely approximates its value of 1.618…. For example 89 divided by 55 is 1.61818, whereas 55 divided by 34 ( the preceding number) is 1.617647058
Now, the next thing to observe is that this sequence is self-similar:
1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144
0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21
taking away each previous term, in sequence leaves a sequence which is identical to the original one. The whole thing appears to be nested and self-similar, and this process can be repeated ad infinitum.
Now let us look at the famous right-angled triangle and Pythagoras’ theorem. There are, it seems, hundreds of valid proofs of the theorem that the square on the hypoteneuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. One of the least well-known of these proofs is the one which uses the fact that the two small right-angled triangles formed when you drop a perpendicular from the original right-angle to the opposite hypoteneuse, are similar to each other and to the larger triangle. In other words this is another example of self-similarity. It is possible to construct spirals ad infinitum around the vertices of the ensuing smaller and smaller right-angled triangles which you can construct within these two triangles. And where you find equiangular spirals you will always find the ratio Phi, approximately 1.618
There are many other sequences e.g. the Lucas sequence, which like the Fibonacci show the Phi ratio, and they always display a form of self-similarity. I will leave it to you to investigate.
Phi is indeed the constant of self-similarity. More >
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