Posted on 05/25/2004 8:01:29 PM PDT by Ronzo
Edited on 06/07/2005 12:27:06 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Can you access the flash of emancipation you felt the first time you were able to stay up on a bike or propel yourself through the water? Can you remember the way your new knowledge enhanced your life? And can you recall the gratitude you felt toward those people who had the skill and the patience to pass that knowledge along to you?
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
RWA: You need to find a larger picture of Lisa! Did you take that pic yourself?
It's actually one of the pictures featured on Harvard's physics faculty website.
I'm sort of looking forward to it, although I'm disappointed that they didn't use the great Harlan Ellison screenplay (sure, Harlan's a left-wing prick-but he's OUR left-wing prick, and we love him for it!). Still, Alex Proyas's Dark City is the best science fiction film of the last ten or fifteen years, and Will Smith is surprisingly effective actor (he's a VERY intelligent man), so I'm still somewhat hopeful. It's too bad the original BBC adaptation apparently no longer exists, as it would be interesting to compare the two.
The idea that the universe might be “holographic” in essential structure is simply fascinating to me, Alamo-Girl. Thinking about this subject has led to some rather bizarre thoughts that you might find amusing!
The mechanism by which holography works “has to do with the properties of waves that enable them to encode information and also the special quality of a laser beam, which casts a pure light of only a single wavelength, acting as a perfect source to create interference patterns…. The other strange property of holography is that each tiny portion of the encoded information contains the whole of the image, so that if you chopped up your photographic plate into tiny pieces, and shone a laser beam on any one of them, you would get a full image….” (Lynne McTaggart, The Field, 2002).
Here is the case of the part containing the whole within itself. Or to put it another way, the part recapitulates complete information about the whole of which it is a part. It may be that the whole of biological life is, in a certain sense, present in all of its parts. For all living systems are found to be made up of “lesser” living systems. As Menas Kafatos and Robert Nadeau point out, “it could be that all organisms (parts) are emergent aspects of the self-organizing process of life (whole), and that the proper way to understand the parts is to examine their embedded relations to the whole” (The Non-Local Universe, 1999).
“As Ernst Mayr put it, living systems ‘almost always have the peculiarity that the characteristics of the whole cannot (not even in theory) be deduced from the most complete knowledge of components, taken separately or in other partial combinations. This appearance of new characteristics in wholes has been designated ‘emergence.’… If … we assume that the whole exists within the parts, emergent properties at a higher level can be viewed as properties of a new whole that exists in more complex relation to biological life…. From this perspective, organisms are not mixtures or compounds of inorganic parts but new wholes with emergent properties that are embedded in or intimately related to more complex wholes with their own emergent properties.”
Fundamentally, it seems to me that everything in the universe is made up of exactly the same “stuff” (“parts” -- that is, matter). And yet everywhere we see a plethora of distinct and possibly unique living forms (wholes). If everything is made of the same stuff, then how do we account for the emergence of apparent differences that characterize particular life forms? Two requirements seem to be key: information, and the ability (energy) of life forms to process that information.
A popular biological model suggests that inorganic matter is capable of spontanteously generating sufficient information content of the complexity necessary to support life in all its functions, and also to spontaneously generate the information-processing equipment necessary to access and interpret this information. And yet the Second Law of Thermodynamics seems to suggest that this phenomenon – called abiogenesis -- is not possible. For the law predicts that systems near equilibrium will always move toward disorder, or entropy, rather than move toward the generation of complexity necessary to create and sustain life.
To put the matter crudely, the constituents of a closed physical system are inexorably drawn to the “fate” of entropy, or “heat death.” In this scenario, where is the motive for emergent behavior? The Second Law says that, given the natural “habit” of its constituents left to their own devices, the system just winds down to a state of perfect equilibrium. In order for complexity to arise, it seems necessary for the individual components to stop expressing as discrete parts, and start acting together, as assemblages of parts constituting wholes larger than themselves. But this would seem to require a certain minimal degree of intelligence. Physics so far hasn’t explained how intelligence can enter such a picture, nor has biology.
What we do know or seem to know is that life requires a certain minimum threshold of complexity. The greater the complexity, the higher the life form on the scale of being, and also the greater ability of the organism to successfully “read” and process the information necessary to the carrying out of its life functions and, in the case of higher life forms, to express its nature as a thinking, choosing, willing being. Complexity appears to be related to an organic system’s free energy, which is related to the organism’s degrees of freedom. Since all existents in the universe are thought to be coupled into universal fields of various kinds – and since each such field, being universal, represents potentially infinite degrees of freedom –only man, because he is microcosm (see below) – holographically speaking here -- has the capability to read and process information relating to cosmic law; and moreover has the ability to act as a free, intelligent moral agent. Which would explain why he is drawn to the discovery of the laws of physics, of life, and of consciousness itself.
However speculative the immediately foregoing may appear, it seems even more speculative to think that a physical system can become a living system sui generis. As Dean Overman writes, “The Second Law is time’s arrow which points in the direction of equilibrium so that in any spontaneous change, the amount of energy available (free energy) decreases and the randomness increases, i.e., the more time available, the greater the entropy or disorder. Life in these systems could not have developed by chance processes….
“The probabilities of abiogenesis appear greater when considering an open system with an energy source maintaining the system far from equilibrium and from the disorder which inexorably occurs pursuant to the Second Law in equilibrium processes. Although the earth has an energy source from the sun, energy alone is not sufficient to support abiogenesis…. For abiogenesis to occur, energy flow must be joined to a mechanism which will direct it to generate sufficient information content into inert matter. Information content is the minimum number of instructions needed to specify the structure…. Energy flow simply maintaining a system far from equilibrium and protecting it from the effects of the Second Law may sustain the order in a system, but energy flow alone is not sufficient to explain the complexity of life’s origin” (A Case Against Accident and Self-Organization, 1997). [bold added]
Thinking through Overman’s statements, I find myself “resonating” to this fascinating observation:
“We must bear in mind that every ‘experiment’ of Nature, that is, every living being, every living organism, represents the expression of cosmic laws, a complex symbol or a complex hieroglyph.” (P. D. Ouspensky, A New Model of the Universe, 1961). The terms “symbol” and “hieroglyph” seem to refer to the particular informational complexes that specify particular existents, perhaps to mathematical objects shaped by the geometries of cosmic law itself which specify the essence or nature of particular living things. Which is a concept at least 2,500 years old.
Plato said that the Cosmos was One living being, and that man was the microcosm – the “reflection” and recapitulation of the total Cosmos – the ultimate “part” which contains the ultimate “whole” within itself. Hermes Trismegistus described the Cosmos this way:
“The world is a living creature endowed with a body which men can see and an intelligence which men cannot see.”
The space-time categories which are normative for us allow us to see the physical part, but not the informational part, the intelligence part, the consciousness part, of what is going on in the entire Universe in all its parts. It seems to me consciousness, intelligence, information – being immaterial – ought to be referred to the “category” of Spirit, which arguably is the ultimate “energy source” (working through the physics of the primary universal vacuum or “zero-point” field???) that prompts the emergence of the “holograph” we call Reality by means of waveform “interference,” from whence actionable information is transmitted to and intelligently used by living beings in the world. In this manner, “mere matter” is drawn into life, is drawn into relation with All that Is, into Life’s goals and purposes, as “Part” resonating to “Whole.” For at some deep level of reality, part and whole are tuned into the same cosmic wavelength.
In short, “mind” and “matter” do not represent the poles of the Cartesian split, but are synergistic complementarities whose action together expresses the Life of the One living Cosmos – and if I might add, the purpose of its Creator.
Thermopylae, you wrote: “Since God spoke the world into being (see Genesis 1) would it not also make sense that he controls events in all dimensions through sound?”
That would seem to make sense, IMHO. Perhaps everything from the “music of the spheres” (the cosmic microwave background radiation) to the harmonics involved in the waveform interference patterns of consciousness and physical processes involve spectral frequencies that have the quality of sound. Whether there are ears around for which such sounds would be audible is a separate question. Perhaps such sounds are not normally heard within our 4D space-time block….
A parting thought from Lynne McTaggart: “When we observe the world…we do so on a much deeper level than the sticks-and-stones world ‘out there.’ Our brain primarily talks to itself and to the rest of the body not with words or images, or even bits or chemical impulses, but in the language of wave interference: the language of phase, amplitude, and frequency – the ‘spectral domain.’ We perceive an object by ‘resonating’ with it, getting ‘in synch’ with it. To know the world is literally to be on its wavelength.”
A-G, thank you for your many beautiful posts of the past several days. I've haven't been able to do much writing lately, but I can find the time to read you! (Nobody at FR does a better job of making cutting-edge science accessible to the general reader than you. You have my deepest thanks.)
You wrote: "I strongly believe that God limited our vision and minds to 4 dimensions to accomplish His will concerning us. After all, faith is the evidence of things not seen. Praise God!!!"
Amen! Maybe God chose to limit our vision and minds to 4 dimensions because the limits of direct perception keep us ever curious, ever on the move to supply their deficiencies. And so God lets us "see a whole lot, just by looking" around in 4D space-time (paraphrasing Yogi Berra). One of the things we can see "just by looking" is God Himself -- If we see by means of spiritual vision, the "sight" of heart and soul, to which the Holy Spirit ever draws us....
Thank You for the analysis! Not being well read on these topics, I appreciate you sharing your views. I feel like I am learning something new everyday.
And that's what it is, Thermopylae -- a view. There are others, to say the least. I feel like I'm learning something new every day, too. Thanks for writing!
Plato said that the Cosmos was One living being, and that man was the microcosm – the “reflection” and recapitulation of the total Cosmos – the ultimate “part” which contains the ultimate “whole” within itself.
Now you have raised yet another possibility which is ringing true and will surely spur yet another round of research! The first part (from the above excerpt) is a transformation from an information construct as an existent to its mathematical construct expressed as a geometry specific to its nature or essence. The second part is "information, intelligence and consciousness" as the generative factor which manifests those existents as or in 4D:
Again thank you so very much for all your wonderful insight and challenges! And thank you for all the personal encouragements, too!
What I want to know is where do those single shoes come from that you find along the highway?
Half of a pedestrian.
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