WHEN THE IMPOSSIBLE HAPPENS!

nc

« Anyone like myself, who has had the rare good fortune to experience in a spiritual exchange with Wilhelm, the divinatory power of the I Ching, cannot for long remain ignorant of the fact that we have touched here an Archimedean point from which our Western attitude of mind can be shaken to its foundations. » Carl Gustav JUNG: (Comments on “The Secret Of The Golden Flower.”: Appendix: “In Memory of Richard Wilhelm”.)

 

How can that be?! To manipulate some straws randomly, to discover an aphorism at least thirty centuries old, lost in an abstruse spell book from a polar opposite culture that refers to neolithic ancestors, to their esoteric rituals… and to find yourself stunned, paralyzed by the suitability of the moment, to understand synchronicity with your gut, to see in front of your way a door that opens towards the unknown and another door shutting behind you on a world vision you instinctively admitted as obvious, beyond any question…! It is an understatement to say: « we have touched here an Archimedean point from which our Western attitude of mind can be shaken to its foundations. »

A synchronicity discovered 4 decades ago, repeated regularly and as staggeringly relevant today than before.

So, even as incredible it may be, it is possible to trigger synchronicities voluntarily, as if we were living in a Great Game and not in a material world, as if we could call upon a Joker to see things differently, from a superior dimension, in a way.

So great an incoherence between the experienced event and the world we perceive – the current paradigm – requires an explanation, a new look on the basis of reality as we can understand them. And the amazement repeats itself, again and again, as we discover the deep disruption initiated by the Theory of Relativity then Quantum Mechanics. To the happy surprise of Jung the physicists answer with deep confusion:

« The great extension of our experience in recent years has brought light to the insufficiency of our simple mechanical conceptions and, as a consequence, has shaken the foundation on which the customary interpretation of observation was based.»
« Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. » Niels BOHR

« Whatever matter is, it isn’t made of matter.» Hans Peter DÜRR

« […] the nineteenth century […] saw a certain divorce taking place between scientists and philosophers […] But such a separation could only be prejudicial both to philosophy and to science […] many scientists of the present day, victims of an ingenuous realism, almost without perceiving it, have adopted a certain metaphysics of a materialistic and mechanistic character and have regarded it as the very expression of scientific truth. One of the great services that the recent evolution of physics has rendered contemporary thought, is that it has destroyed this simplified metaphysics, and with the same stroke has caused certain traditional philosophical problems to be considered in an entirely new light. Thereby the way has been prepared for a reconciliation between science and philosophy […]» Louis de BROGLIE

« The more success the quantum Theory has, the sillier it looks!» Albert EINSTEIN

« Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‘But how can it be like that?’ because you will get ‘down the drain’, into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.»
« The theory of quantum electrodynamics describes Nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it agrees fully with experiment. So I hope you accept Nature as She is — absurd.» Richard FEYNMAN

 

No need to quote all the physicists deeply destabilized by their discoveries. Many became schizophrenic in a way: handling elegantly and successfully the foundations of reality in their laboratories, but immersing again in the worn-out paradigm in everyday life! Even if they are perfectly aware that it gives us a deeply false idea of reality! Four centuries of scientific discoveries led Science to be soaked by Physicalism:

There is only one realm and not two as postulated by Descartes. Reality is made of matter only and matter obeys the Laws of Physics; everything else comes from emergence. The material brain secretes thoughts as the liver secretes bile! There is no such thing as a spiritual realm that is distinguishable from the material realm; the soul is an overused concept. The scientific paradigm, the absolute frame in which every rational spirit has to be, is a Materialistic and Realistic Monism.

But this is old stuff! Twenty’s century Science destroyed what ninety’s century Science thought to have found! And physicists, maybe too much disturbed, didn’t succeed to communicate their conclusions.

« Galileo was able to educate the world to understand that the Earth goes around the Sun … yet physicists today have utterly failed to inform the public to understanding the purely mental nature of the universe with all that that implies for the meaning of human existence. That is a tragedy, and it should be rectified. I wish I knew how.» Richard Conn HENRY

So Jung’s amazement is far from lone; it reverberates among the specialists of the real world, as a myriad of images mirrored from one-another. And things go on as before: business as usual!

But we need rethink our paradigm; we need instinctly to rely on a paradigm since it is the only way we have to understand the world we live in and, therefore, to survive in it.

This Blog tries to think about the features of the new world view we’re meant to find. A paradigm in which we could take for ourselves the discoveries of physicists, but also the discoveries of Eastern philosophies and of mystics that help to understand what Science has to say. Indeed, Science and Spirituality can be associated to help us in this quest for reality.

« SIMULISM: Are we living in a virtual reality? » is a pdf file that takes advantage of hypertext to separate presentations from deepening and makes very easy looking for definitions, complements… on the Net.

 

The File can be downloadable here.

A « Print-friendly » version is available here.

THE NEW DUALISM. 3: WOULD DESCARTES BE A DUALIST TODAY?

Source

”

“All along this time, explanations become complex, overcomplicated… but resist until the environment becomes favourable to the great jump.”

 

1: THE CARTESIAN DUALISM.

Today Descartes’ ingenuous idea that is at the origin of our scientific culture seems obvious. But it is the result of its great success; four centuries of discoveries and innumerable applications opening new perspectives overshadow the revolutionary concept that led Descartes to distinguish matter from what is immaterial: the realm of objects that occupy space from the other that is invisible because it belongs to pure thought. Before Descartes the universe was alive; animals could be prosecuted because of inadequate behaviour; a natural disaster could be assigned to a malevolent intention that could bring its author to be burned at the stake: the paradigm of these days allowed magic to act on the material world by the thought only. It was obviously impossible to acquire objective and reliable knowledge about a material world that was subject to somebody’s intentions.

But Descartes built an impervious wall between matter and thought, while admitting as an aside a mysterious link that should remain secret! He created the scientific methodology in order to apply mathematical logic to the search for reliable answers to questions we could ask about the material world only; which doesn’t remove for him the importance of the immaterial realm which constitutes a specific attribute of our species. Animals became machines unable to think and our body also. But he postulates an immaterial soul that is a gift from the creator and which is our true nature. It is our soul that gives us free-choice, reason, emotions… and manages our material organism.

Due to the success of the scientific methodology, the philosophers who became scientists, changed progressively their world’s image. At the end of the 19th century the cartesian Dualism turned into a Materialistic Monism: only matter is real and thoughts emerge from the material brain; the soul fades out! Because of concentrating on quantifiable objects and procedures, scientists materialise the realm of thoughts, in a way. They become convinced that an adequate analysis of the quantifiable workings of a brain could open one day the immaterial realm to science. We could enter in one’s thoughts in a way, and, why not, build thinking robots.

But this view confuses correlations with causality! It isn’t because a measurable electrical activity in a specific area of a brain is correlated with an emotion or a thought that it necessarily is its cause! Nothing forbids it to be only a consequence of the emotion or the thought! We would find the same correlation if Henry Bergson was right and the brain would only be a sort of antenna able to pick up thoughts out of an immaterial realm, but able to trigger physical reactions in our material world.

« A cloth is joint to the nail to which it is hooked; it falls if the nail is pulled up; it moves if the nail moves (…) it doesn’t follow that every feature of the nail corresponds to a feature of the cloth, neither that the nail is the same as the cloth; and even less so that the nail and the cloth are one only thing. » Matter and Memory: 1896

What would Descartes think if he could come back today? Would he accept a Materialistic Monism?

The loss of Dualism would not be the only source of amazement for Descartes. He would surely be very amazed by the modification of our civilisation’s values.

2: A COLLATERAL DAMAGE DUE TO SCIENCE’S OBJECTIVITY.

For a result to be considered as scientific, it shouldn’t be dependent on the subject who found it; the experimenter has to become insignificant since, in an ideal world, even an appropriately programmed robot should be able to achieve exactly the same results in the absence of any human. And after four centuries of letting the experimenter become insignificant, the scientists in their great majority, finished by loosing all significance to the world, life and humanity! The scientists forget that this insignificance was only part of the methodology and not a reality.

« The scientific world-picture vouchsafes a very complete understanding of all that happens — it makes it just a little too understandable. It allows you to imagine the total display as that of a mechanical clockwork which, for all that science knows, could go on just the same as it does, without there being consciousness, will, endeavor, pain and delight and responsibility connected with it — though they actually are. And the reason for this disconcerting situation is just this: that for the purpose of constructing the picture of the external world, we have used the greatly simplifying device of cutting our own personality out, removing it; hence it is gone, it has evaporated, it is ostensibly not needed.

In particular, and most importantly, this is the reason why the scientific worldview contains of itself no ethical values, no esthetic values, not a word about our own ultimate scope or destination, and no God, if you please. Whence came I and whither go I? » Nature and the Greeks (1954) Erwin Schrödinger.

What would Descartes think of this evolution if he could come back today?!

3: THE OVERWHELMING SUCCESS OF THE METHOD OF SCIENCE.

Even if he his in good part at the origin of the scientific methodology, Descartes would perhaps be amazed to discover how much it shapes today our Western Culture. He would acknowledge the soundness of his choice and would enthusiastically discover our world. To concentrate on the material realm only and to consider it as real, independently of the observer, led to astounding discoveries that shape today a completely different world than the one he lived in.

Astrophysics would show him a series of copernican revolutions that followed the first one he experienced: the Earth just abandoned its privileged position in the center of the universe in favour of the Sun. Which conserved the place until the beginning of the 20th century when, abruptly, it was found lost on the fringe of a branch of a gigantic galaxy, itself relativized between billions of other ones in an immensely large universe.

Descartes would be glad to understand how much his postulate was potentially rich. The exploration of the physical reality showed how far it is from the picture our common sense gives us. Einstein’s space-time is not what common sense tells it is. Common sense fools us! The world we perceive and understand instinctively is not the real world discovered by scientists! The latter remains completely incomprehensible, even to the physicists who describe it! They can only understand the abstract mathematics that describe its nature, but can’t understand their discoveries through their common sense that isn’t a faithful counselor for this question.

Since the beginning of the 20th century there is an accumulation of very disturbing results that profoundly defy the world’s image we live in!

« Is it possible that Nature is as absurd as it seems in these atomic experimentations? » Werner Heisenberg: Physics and Philosophy: 1958.

Space and Time are the absolute fundamental foundations of the world we perceive and in which we live. This world’s image is so rich, precise and real that we forget it is subjective only! It is totally created in our brain out of myriads of perceptions that are dissected, analyzed then coded by our sense organs, in a totally automatic and unconscious way. Nearly always this subjective image is exquisitely well adapted to our needs in order to live in the best possible conditions in the real world. Rarely do we observe a discrepancy between our image and reality; for this to happen we have to induce our senses in error through optical or hearing illusions…

The foundations on which our common sense relies to understand the world lost their solidity: space and time became relative! They are elastic; and therefore they are not perceived similarly by everyone! An event can take place before another one for an observer and after the same one for another observer! What a profound abnormality! Descartes’ method let us build a logic world but how weird… very far from what our common sense teaches us unconsciously, beginning with our birth and even beyond since our world’s image is shaped by the culture and the discoveries of our ancestors.

« The hope that new experiments will lead us back to objective events in time and space is about as well founded as the hope of discovering the end of the world in the unexplored regions of the Antarctic. Some physicists would prefer to come back to the idea of an objective real world whose smallest parts exist objectively in the same sense as stones or trees exist independently of whether we observe them. This however is impossible. » Werner Heisenberg Physics and Philosophy: 1958

4: THE IMPORTANCE OF THE WORLD IMAGE.

We feel we live in the world, but actually we live in an image of the world. And this image is a model only; a map, not a territory! A legacy from birth continuously enriched by experience through the working behind the scene of an instinctive engine that nourishes the common sense.

Natural selection favours the individuals best adapted to perform a fast and adequate analysis out of the informations perceived from the environment. It doesn’t favour the most « real », the most true perception of the world, but the most useful one! Our perception organs display an infinitesimal and flawed part of a hypothetical reality that only science and philosophy can help us to imagine… partly.

Let’s identify with our brain for a while. It is enclosed in a dark box, well protected from the world in which it has the responsibility to adapt us in the best possible way. But only myriads of short electrical impulses enter the brain, coming from specialized cells reacting to light, pressure, specific molecules… The environment has to be reconstructed out of electrical impulses that will be decoded then associated through huge neural networks in charge of giving a meaning to them. The brain is a superb engine working in order to give meaning through a spate of prioritised associations that we begin to imitate through Artificial Intelligence. The brain’s vital goal is to understand our environment in the fastest and best possible way; it must be able to react rapidly and fittingly. To do that, it works out perceptions to build a map of the world and compare it with what instincts and experience can offer in order to give it a meaning. The result is the common sense that is neither objective, nor universal, even if we feel instinctively that it is. Common sense is responsible for our survival, not for giving us an exhaustive and truthful image of an hypothetical reality outside us.

An event that isn’t compatible with our world’s image is felt as very disturbing, even frightful! The first reaction would be a rejection of it in the world already well known, a tentative to bring back everything in an understandable and predictable world in favor of survival.

Scientists are maybe the most prone to reject disturbing events because they are trained to be critical in their work. A critical mind is one of the fundamentals of the scientific methodology but it can be sterilizing if one doesn’t take in account an instinctive rejection of what isn’t compatible with common sense. Sometimes this reaction is so powerful that it becomes contrary to the scientific methodology that puts experience before theory!

«Doubting is fruitful, at the condition of doubting about ones doubt. » Didier Norton.

5: A COLLECTION OF ABNORMALITIES.

After trying very hard to find a solution without success, Max Planck publishes an equation adapted to what physicists find in their experiments but completely absurd! The equation suggests that energy quantities can only change according to whole natural numbers: 1, 2, 3…

The date is december 1900. Planck doesn’t really believe he found a real solution to the problem, just a tentative way to describe mathematically what remains incomprehensible for the common sense. He is convinced physicists will find a way to bring understanding to their discoveries. But physicist continue to find results defying the common sense… until today; and nothing seems to give hope in finding a sensible explanation in the future!

We perceive a continuous world when physicists discover a quantized world, pixellized in a way! In the world of atoms and molecules there is no slopes, only stairs! A particle that looses or gains energy does so abruptly, disappearing from a stair step at once and appearing on another stair step immediately, never finding itself in between! Profound abnormality!

Matter which builds reality and us with it, is 99,999999999999% emptiness! It seems solid but isn’t really. Electrons repel violently each other and a mysterious law forbids two of them to have the same attributes; that’s why matter seems hard, but it is essentially void! Profound abnormality!

Common sense allows to measure at once the position and the velocity of a vehicle. It’s impossible to know at once and precisely these two properties for particles or atoms. Whatever means implemented, each progress towards more precision in one property will automatically diminish the precision on the other one. Profound abnormality!

Common sense lets us understand the movement of a stone thrown towards a pond then the waves on the surface of the water after the splash. A stone occupies a defined space when a wave can potentially cover a very large space. Nothing is more different from a particle than a wave! But particles, atoms, molecules… every matter is at once particulate and wavy, depending on the way the observer measures it! Profound abnormality!

Common sense convinces us that the Moon is in the sky even if nobody looks at it. But in the world of atoms and molecules nothing is real unless it is observed! Only an interaction with a tool able to measure them can give them the characteristic we find indispensable in order to describe a real object: movement, direction, spin… Profound abnormality!

Common sense convinces us that an empty box contains nothing, not even air if it has been pumped out. Nevertheless physicists discover that the void is full of energy and virtual particles that appear then disappear continuously. Profound abnormality!

Time and space seem to have nothing in common. We live in a space described by a length, a width, a depth in which objects exist through time that flows from past to future. Yet time and space can’t be separated and are part of a forth dimension that we can’t perceive as such. Profound abnormality!

6: ABNORMALITIES AND PARADIGMS

In his fundamental work in 1962, the historian of sciences: Thomas Kühn, described how scientists agree implicitly on a blueprint that will circumscribe their imagination and in which they will be able to understand their results. This agreement is implicit because it is the world’s image built instinctively. Einstein already, before Kühn, understood that in reality theory came before experiments, and not the other way out as scientific rationality would suggest!

Heisenberg told how astonished he has been when Einstein notified exactly the reverse of what he expected! They were walking after a lecture given by Heisenberg about his experiments on quantum physics; Einstein didn’t agree with their interpretation. It’s much later that Heisenberg understood with Einstein how much the inspiration, the choice of an experimental protocol… are linked implicitly but powerfully, to the conceptual blueprint in which the theoretician or the experimentalist finds himself. This frame became the paradigm described by Kühn and it directs the way we understand the world in which we evolve. With other world’s images, other ideas would have inspired the theoreticians and the experimentalists. Other attributes would have been tested to give, eventually, very different conclusions than the ones that are dominant today!

To change a paradigm takes much time, notably because it is difficult to act on the fundamental instincts that make us able to understand our environment: the world’s image we inherited at birth and then through our experience and our culture. Abnormalities accumulate… They are prone to complicated explanations. Ptolemaïc ancient Greece understood the planets orbits through very complicated epicycles… and the copernican revolution greatly simplified this understanding.

Much time and an accumulation of disturbing abnormalities are needed to prepare a leap in the dark: a new world’s image: a new paradigm has to be ready. It is like if a fish had to jump out of its jar: it could survive only if a new aquarium were ready near the old one. Time is needed to prepare, enrich and consolidate a new paradigm before becoming able to accept the drastic changes of the world’s image that our instinct leads us to build. All along this time, explanations become complex, overcomplicated… but resist until the environment becomes favourable to the great jump.

The copernican solution to the weirdness of the planets’ orbits took time because a paradigm had to be changed. The Earth wasn’t anymore in the center of the universe: the Sun took its place. And Copernic then Kepler tried this solution to simplify their calculations of the orbits.

Today, physicists are still puzzled, more than a century after the creation of Quantum Mechanics in 1900 and Bohr’s atom in the 1920s. They try to understand the shoking abnormalities that accumulated continuously since a century. They try to understand their experimental results in a way that is compatible with the understanding of the nature of reality given by our common sense: a material world made of discrete particles with specific properties. Specific properties that shouldn’t be modified by non-local events; objective properties that shouldn’t be prone to modifications resulting from observation only; particles that shouldn’t change their state without being touched, heated, illuminated… The problems began especially from the moment the results of experiments weren’t anymore compatible with the cartesian separation between object and subject!

7: WHAT THE QUANTUM DISRUPTION CHANGES.

Even if the Quantum Disruption began more than a century now, there are still some physicists who hope that a savior will one day dissolve the abnormalities displayed in the microcosm in the classicism of the macrocosm! Yet these abnormalities accumulate, especially since the second half of the 20th century. Since some physicists decided to explore the weird microcosm with critical eye but open mind to a change of paradigm.

While waiting for a savior who will bring back the microcosm in the reassuring materiality of the macrocosm, some physicists call upon a Multiverse in which an infinity of universes would explain that, by chance only, we live in the only one in which all physical constants are particularly adapted to the apparition of life and intelligence. They seem to forget that, in order to eliminate the disturbing dualism between the quantum and the classical worlds, to dilute the weirdness of an universe born from nothing… they postulate an infinity of universes! All born from nothing too, of course!

But if we remain objective and open-minded, we are brought to accept the abnormalities and reconsider our paradigm because it can’t take them into account. What are the principal abnormalities that we discussed in the first part of this work?

– The world isn’t continuous but made out of quanta of matter-energy, and probably of quanta of time and space as well.

– There is no absolute simultaneity: two events that are simultaneous for an observer can appear differently for another observer. Space and time are differently elastic for different observers.

– The properties of an object measured by an observer depend of his experimental choices: they have no independent reality; absolute objectivity is impossible.

– We can describe the evolution of the properties of an object through space and time after having measured them. But the equation we use has to do with wave functions which can interfere in a way we cannot understand in our world composed of material particles. These equations bring in weird unreal mathematical objects like the square root of -1. And finally, these equations give us only probabilities, never certainties: only a physical measure will give the values looked for.

«But if the ultimate physical reality corresponds to the wave function, then what sort of beast is a wave function? What’s made of? What’s Hilbert space made of? As far as we know, nothing: they seem to be purely mathematical objects! » Max Tegmark “Our Mathematical Universe”: 2014

– We can’t find all the properties of an object with great precision. When the precision on one property grows, the precision on a conjugate one diminishes.

– Objects can behave as if they were entangled in a-local and a-temporal relationship. As if there were a parallel reality conjugated to ours and through which objects could be linked without being separated by space and time.

– Matter and energy are two different and exchangeable forms of the same reality. With its form as energy field, matter seems to be defined but not manifested. It’s only when there are interactions that matter-energy manifests itself with measurable properties.

«This idea that there’s a bunch of numbers at each point in space-time is quite deep, and I think it’s telling us something not merely about our description of reality, but about reality itself (…) a field is just this: something represented by numbers at each point in space-time. » Max Tegmark “Our Mathematical Universe”: 2014

Galileo was the first to describe the universe through its language: mathematics. Four centuries of discoveries lead to the description of the nature of the universe: mathematic! It’s not only a convenient way to describe it: mathematics has become the fundamental reality of the universe, as Plato or Pythagorus thought it was!

And yet we perceive a real physical world with plenty of different sensations, very far from abstract mathematical formulas; how come? It’s probably due to the new dualism: the association between a fundamental purely mathematical reality which calculates the reality that is ours: the physical one.

8. A NEW DUALISM: SIMULISM.

Descartes’s dualism helped create Science but has been deeply shaken up by it afterwards. First, dualism melt in a materialistic monism, then reappeared in the inescapable duality that separates the quantum world from the classical one. But this new duality is unsharp; it isn’t really defined by an objective boundary between the microcosm (the realm of particles, atoms, molecules…) and the macrocosm (the world we perceive in our everyday life). Interactions are continuous through the two realms; the conditions in which the measurements are made are more important than the size of the object that is measured. The order with which the measurements are made determine the evolution of the wave function that describes the quantum object. The dualism that distinguish microcosm from macrocosm doesn’t make a difference between the objects that take a place in space and time from the ones that exist only in the realm of thoughts. The observer and his consciousness seem to intervene in the determination of quantum properties. This new duality that separates the quantum world from the classical one has to be placed in a very different context than the one Descartes chose four centuries ago.

The microcosm doesn’t show definite properties unless it is observed. It evolves in a completely different reality than we do. Space and time aren’t the obstacles they are in our realm. What we perceive as well defined objects in our reality (Physical Reality) seem to manifest themselves out of another reality we can describe with mathematics (Mathematical Reality) involving imaginary numbers and wave functions. In this weird realm objects evolve and interfere in a way only waves could interfere in our realm.

(Quantum phenomena) « support the view that non-material principles can steer the material world. » Antoine Suarez; http://www.quantumphil.org

Thus the realm of objects that occupy space and time isn’t the fundamental realm, but depends on a realm in which space and time haven’t the reality we find for them in ours. In the fundamental reality space and time have only a mathematical existence. Reciprocally, the mathematical properties that describe physical objects can be influenced by the events that happen to them in the physical world. It is no more possible to separate the world of objects from the world of thoughts as Descartes did. Today Physics describes two worlds that aren’t separated from one another as Descartes postulated, because the one we perceive is a reflection from the other, itself under the influence of the first. The world that seems concrete to us – and which is, in a sense – seems to arise out of another, purely mathematical one. Physicist David Bohm named the world we perceive « the Explicite Reality » that is an emanation from another one: « the Implicite Reality ». Plato defined our world as the one of shadows that depends on another world which is the true reality.

Some philosophies (Hinduism, Yoga…) describe this duality between a reality that is manifested, thus perceived, but secondary to a fundamental reality that isn’t manifested, although it has enough properties to be considered as real. An image of this duality could be found in Physics’ concept of matter-energy fields. Empty space can potentially act on a specific object that moves through it, as if space is structured in a way that can express itself only in specific conditions: A non-manifested (Implicite) versus manifested (Explicite) dualism. The world we perceive would be an illusion built out of a deeper but not-manifested reality.

Simulism could explain such a quantum dualism. Perceived reality would be the result of calculations that are displayed only when there is an interaction with a physical (material) or organic (living) object. It’s the collapse of the wave function introduced by the « School of Copenhagen ». Perceived reality is relational and isn’t based on objects with physical properties independent from the act of perception. What we perceive as independent objects defined by specific properties are only limited expressions in our space-time, of purely mathematical attributes that follow the wave function discovered by Physics.

… « we live in a RELATIONAL REALITY, in the sense that the properties of the world around us stem not from properties of its ultimate building blocks, but from the relations between these building blocks. » Max Tegmark “Our Mathematical Universe”: 2014

Plato’s realm of Ideas, Bohm’s Implicite Reality… would be a simulation mathematical software and the display of the results of calculations would be the reality we perceive: Plato’s shadows or Bohm’s Explicite Reality. Physicist Wolfgang Pauli would maybe be satisfied with a paradigm that would integrate this fundamental concept of simulation. He tried with psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung to understand the origin of synchronicity. He wrote:

« The most satisfying would be that (…) Physics and Psychics could be considered as complementary aspects of one reality. » “ Synchronicity: an a-causal connecting Principle. “ 1952.

Simulism doesn’t make a difference between matter and thought: both are reflections of a more fundamental reality that is virtual and purely mathematical; the one Pauli used to think about.

« psyche and matter are governed by common, neutral, not in themselves ascertainable ordering principles. » Atom and Archetype: The Pauli/Jung Letters, 1932-1958.

Finally, would Descartes be a dualist today? Yes, but…

He would maybe define a world that is perceived and another one, more fundamental, which would create our perceived reality. The first realm would put together objects and thoughts coming from the working of the material brain. Thoughts could be separated in two types, according to whether they are directly generated by the material brain, or by the more fundamental, a-local and a-temporal quantum realm. The first could belong to the « mind » and the second, to the intuition or the « soul » since they come from outside the limits of the material body. The organic brain would be able to create thoughts and to perceive intuitions. Its first job would be attributed to the mind, the second one to the Subconscious, still so mysterious.

Cartesian dualism which defines the realm of objects and the realm of thoughts would have evolved in two new realities. The first one would be a hybrid since it associates an aspect which has an extension in space-time: the objects, to another, immaterial but that comes from the first through the analysis of perceptions: the mental working of the organic brain. The other realm would be a-local and a-temporal: a purely mathematical realm.

Physical Reality associates matter-energy and its emergent abilities that are emotions and thoughts. The underlying a-local and a-temporal Mathematical Reality could be understood as a software running continuously in the background to define properties that are essentially relational and describing a reality that is indivisible because it obeys only to wave functions. The illusion of an objective world composed of independent objects would be the result of the collapse of the wave functions calculated for a discrete place of space-time… Maybe when there is an interaction with the Subconscious, a soul, which belongs to the Mathematical Reality but could also have an influence on the mind, the result of the working of the material brain?

IS THE UNIVERSE A MATHEMATICAL OBJECT?

«Mathematics is the language in which God has written the universe.» Galileo

Mathematising the world has been the initiative which enabled science to understand and gain some power on it. Mathematics keeps amazing physicists by its power of prediction! Many physical laws have been discovered by applying a mathematical tool which was created by a mathematician only to satisfy his own logic. As if the intimate fabric of the universe was mathematical!

Max Tegmark gathered his reflexions in his book: “The Mathematical Universe Hypothesis: My quest for the ultimate nature of reality.” (2014).

«If my life as a physicist has taught anything at all, it’s that Plato was right: modern physics has made abundantly clear that the ultimate nature of reality isn’t what it seems.»

And Tegmark: the son of a mathematician and physicist himself, continues:

«Our reality isn’t just described by mathematics – it is mathematics, in a very specific sense.»

«At the bottom level, reality is a mathematical structure, so its parts have no intrinsic properties at all! In other words, the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis implies that we live in a relational reality, in the sense that the properties of the world around us stem not from properties of its ultimate building blocks, but from the relations between these building blocks.»

In this important and entertaining book Tegmark applies very fruitfully his experience as a teacher at MIT. He knows how to present a question and what will illustrate the answer in the best way.

As an example here is how he explains the crucial discoveries in the 1920s that the universe is expanding. He asks to imagine oneself giving a lecture and discovering that the attendees sitting just in the first row are all very old. And the further one looks, the younger the attendees are! With babies laying at the farthest seats! Just in front of a black void! That’s how our universe looks like when we look for galaxies: the farthest they are, the younger!

Everyone fond of astronomy knows this of course, but it’s rare to find an illustration that speaks as much to the imagination! And Tegmark’s book is full of such nice findings.

He presents the findings of “the precision cosmology” to show how it “highlight the mysterious utility of mathematics for understanding our world.” Then he expands the concepts laid by the inflation model of the universe and Quantum Mechanics to define different levels of Multiverses. Tegmark suggests that “Fine-tuning is arguable evidence for the Level II Multiverse“. I.e. that the explanation behind the astounding fine-tuning of the 32 constants that make our Universe suitable for life and intelligence is that there are an infinity of these, each with different values for these constants and that we live in the only one that, by chance, have the good values!

Level III Multiverses are Hugh Everett’s ones. Here again, Tegmark illustrates the Many Worlds hypothesis in new and clear illustrations.

Information is introduced and its importance emphasized. “The quantum weirdness doesn’t go away, it just gets censored” (about the difference between microphysics and macrophysics). Or “I concluded that quantum mechanics requires secrecy: an object can only be found in two places at once in quantum superposition as long as its position is kept secret from the rest of the world.” “Quantum observation isn’t about consciousness, but simply about the transfer of information.“

The last part of the book describes the M.U.H or Mathematical Universe Hypothesis.
The M.U.H implies that we live in a relational reality, in the sense that the properties of the world around us stems not from properties of its ultimate building blocks, but from the relation between these building blocks.”

Strangely, Tegmark doesn’t “bet on a computable universe.” Even if all his work seems to point towards Simulism!

So the universe would be a structure, a purely mathematical object, thus a set of informations, which is compatible with Simulism.

WHO ARE YOU?!

Are you just a piece of flesh and bones… with no future except for some ashes? Or are you more than that… an immaterial consciousness that extends largely out of your skin? This question is by far, one of the most important that should be answered in order to build a philosophy of life. Yet it isn’t really explored as it deserves.

What should you do to convince yourself that you’re more than a material body only? What sort of evidence do you need? Well, religion is dogmatic and can’t really convince the critically minded. Could Science do the job? Yes and No!

No, because the Method has been created to study matter, and only matter. Therefore it’s not appropriate to study immaterial questions from the beginning. Yes, because Science evolved and created some tools that help to acquire evidences even on immaterial questions, as in psychology. But an important obstacle remains: Science tends to become as dogmatic as Religion! So much that even impressive evidence can’t be accepted by some scientists, and experience shows that, whatever you do to answer their criticisms, it’l be useless… They’l always claim: “OK, the experiment is well done but… it can’t be true!” Because it doesn’t agree with the current paradigm which is only materialist!

So what?!

The only way out of this dead-end is to change your own paradigm, or at least be ready to do so when you accumulate evidences for yourself. One way to do that is explained in detail here. https://simulismblog.wordpress.com/blog/

To help you on your journey there are fortunately a great number of observations and experiments that point since long ago on the priority of consciousness on matter.

Paradoxically, biologists nowadays are more materialistic than physicists! This is so because the materialistic paradigm we inherited from the 19th is the main one to biologists who inherited it from physicists and therefore they are mainly convinced that the brain secretes the mind as the liver secretes the bile! But this is only faith and not scientific fact since it relies only on correlations and not on causal relations!

Physicists are confronted since more than a century to observations and experiments that demonstrate that: “Whatever matter is, it is not made of matter!” P. Dürr: physicist! Or: “Matter hasn’t the properties we usually think matter should have!”: N. Bohr: physicist… Physicists know (even if they don’t accept it easily) that the materialistic paradigm has to be changed! Some are even convinced that Consciousness is all what it is about and that matter is an artifact of consciousness, in a way! (Sir Arthur Eddington or Sir James Jeans…)

To convince yourself that conservative scientists won’t change their mind, whatever experiment you make, you can see a video made 40 years ago and that was qualified to “make history!. Yet nearly nobody reminds of it today!

It should have made history as you can be convinced by yourself. A group of researchers guided by Stephen A. Schwartz, set an experiment to see whether informations could be found without the implication of our bodily senses but from outside our body. In other words, does our personality go beyond the limits of our material body? Does consciousness belong to a realm outside our material brain? A realm that transcends space and time?!

You can watch the video here and make your mind for yourself! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEC-GBTTLBg

It seems to me that the answer is clearly yes: our consciousness (whatever it is: this question has to be confronted also, of course) can fetch informations from outside space and time. Therefore our personality is not made out of matter only; and this has huge consequences on one’s philosophy of life, of course!

Stephen Schwartz doesn’t bother to reproduce again and again his experiments as dogmatic scientists ask all parapsychologist to do. He decided to continue on his track and make use of psi abilities instead of loosing his time trying to convince the dogmatic people. You can find many astounding discoveries on the Internet. For the scientific minded, you can also find a great number of very well conducted scientific experiments on Dean Radin’s website. http://deanradin.com/evidence/evidence.htm or on “Weiler Psi” Blog here: https://weilerpsiblog.wordpress.com/2017/04/23/a-tale-of-em-waves-and-a-sunken-ship/  But the best way to convince yourself remains your own observations and experiences! Wish you a good job!

THE THIRD ONTOLOGY.

 

Is the universe deterministic? Einstein thought it was, and if true, then free will would only be an illusion of course. Except if we had a soul of another realm than the universe one.

Is the universe fundamentally random like Bohr and Quantum Physicists think? If true, then free will would be at the core of reality.

This video explores a third possibility. If the universe is the result of a language (thus only information!), then it won’t be completely deterministic nor completely random but somewhere in-between! THis is because a language is built upon symbols and syntax. The association between a symbol and what it means is determined. But the syntax lets one play with the order in which the symbols are organized and this order can change the overall meaning of the sentence, letting some randomness in the organization of the future. This third possibility explores “The Code Theoretic Axiom” and is very clearly introduced by Klee Irwin, at the head of “Quantum Gravity Research” group which gathers physicists and mathematicians interested by a Theory of Everything.

The axiom (a principle that cannot be proven) is that the basic stuff of the universe which is energy (Einstein proved that matter is a form of condensed energy), is INFORMATION.

But what is information?! It is MEANING described by SYMBOLS. A square is a geometrical symbol that describes an object which has 4 units of space, linked together with 4 identical angles, and which defines a hypothenuse etc… If one uses symbols to play with, one SIMULATES different meanings generated by the ordering of symbols. So reality would be a SIMULATION!

The idea explored here is that the hardware, the software and the simulation output (which is reality) is one and the same. The hardware would be a geometrical object in 8 dimensions. The software would be its projection in a 3 dimensions space and the output would depend on the movements of the object in its 8 D space. Moreover, if there’s a language, there must be a CHOOSER of the symbols and the syntax!

There’s much more in this video (consciousness, emergence, efficiency of codes…), some too technical for non-specialists, but always expressed in a very clear language, without reading a prepared file, which is rare. Another video on the same subject is much more illustrated and presented in a professional way. It’l maybe be introduced here later. It’s address is:

PARADIGM SHIFTS

ither

In his seminal work, the historian Thomas Kuhn described in 1962 how scientists implicitly agree on a frame in which their imagination and understanding work. How did he came at this discovery?

Kuhn is completing his phD in Physics in 1947. Technology is celebrated in these post-war times; it has to be introduced to the many! His director asks him to teach the copernican revolution to non-physicists students. Kuhn tries to understand Galileo’s approach and discovers that he didn’t benefit from a theory on Mechanics. It didn’t exist! Galileo had to create one out of nothing!

Why didn’t Aristotle create it?! He was a very keen observer of nature! Stunned, Kuhn finds that what Aristotle said about Mechanics is simply absurd!

He understands that Aristotle doesn’t interpret his observations as we do today, but according to another world’s image! To Aristotle, movement is a quality, a drive, not a quantity: it can’t neither be quantified nor measured. Aristotle wasn’t absurd but he overgeneralized the knowings of his time and extended them to fields considered today as incompatible with these associations.

Aristotle’s world is made of five fundamental elements. Beings and objects obey to their nature: their essence. This nature is expressed through rest and movement. Nature has a goal; beings and objects aim at their goal. Movement is the result of two potentialities: an active and a passive one. The entity that initiates a movement transmits his essence to the entity being moved. The stone flies because it received movement from the thrower’s nature. It falls back because its nature is passive. On Earth movements are straight and finite; in the sky they are circular and eternal.

So Aristotle wasn’t absurd but the world’s image in which his intellect reasoned was very different from ours! To understand the creator’s genius we must immerse ourselves in their world that is often very different from the one that seems so obvious to us today!

Kepler’s world is the alchemists’ one. There are two realities: one for the Sky and another for the Earth. The Sky is perfect; it’s God’s realm. Earth isn’t; it’s the devil’s realm. The Heaven is good; Earth is the realm of temptation and potentially, sin.

Humans are souls and therefore are of divine essence: they can unite with God. The material body is dispensable. The soul can’t be quantified; only its qualities can be measured. Only matter can be quantified. How would it be possible to measure kindness, faith or passion?! Nevertheless they are real values, when what can be measured are only measures!

The universe is of spiritual essence and has a material form. The spiritual essence can’t be measured and is its most important feature. The priority is to link with God, not to the world. Empirical researches are useless since they belong to the material world; one has to beware from reasoning. Faith is much superior! Kepler has a spiritual vision about the universe. The Sun matches with the Father, the celestial sphere with the Son and the space between matches with the Holly Spirit. Kepler gives a soul to the Earth to explain how the Sun can give her its movement. This force diminishes with distance and this explains why the planets move less and less fast depending on their distance from the Sun.

The universe is full of symbols created by God to lead us towards relief and Kepler takes advantage of them for his discovery. The symbols’ language is close to the psyche’s one (archetypes…). The fundamental elements have drives: lead desires to become gold, antimony, silver… The medieval human lives in a world full of purposes: each object, each plant, animal, human… has a goal; its life is full of meaning! The alchemist is one with the elements’ spirituality. When he transforms them materially he purifies them spiritually, and himself by the way. This unity is compatible with magic: the spirit’s power on other spirits or on matter.

Kuhn realizes that Galileo wasn’t the objective scientist one would have liked him to be! He didn’t find any proof for the Earth’s movement around the Sun but he was convinced, nevertheless! (The first direct proof was discovered by Bradley in 1728). If Galileo was to be objective, he should have considered both hypothesis (geocentrism and heliocentrism) together.

Descartes’ world is as dualistic as Kepler’s but Descartes restores to favor the material world, in a sense; he gives it a reality in itself: it isn’t anymore the imperfect reflection of the Heaven. With other philosophers he creates the Scientific Methodology that will profoundly change the way we understand the world. The unquestionable successes of Science opened the way to the present frame of thoughts inherited from the 19th century which left out spirituality. Due to quantifying materialistic reality and discovering the huge potentiality of Science in understanding the properties of the material world and putting it to our use, our current world view considers only one realm: materialistic reality. What was attributed to spirituality until the 19th century became an emergence from matter’s properties. In other words, it’s the brain which secretes the ideas and not a supposable soul.

Kuhn discovers that Science doesn’t progress in a linear way but by revolutions, when a new vision takes the place of an old one! One can’t evaluate objectively two different visions: they simply aren’t comparable with the same criterions. Western allopathic medicine can’t be directly compared to shamanism because the world’s images in which the physician and the shaman belong aren’t compatible. Kuhn names them paradigms.

A paradigm is an implicitly and largely accepted representation that enables to imagine models, theories. It is very useful to deepen, to precise and find solutions in their adequate reference frame. But it can’t evolve. A seeker will easily find subsidies if he proposes to work on the question: “How the brain secretes mind?”. But he’d have a hard time being taken seriously on the question:” Does the brain syntonizes itself on an exterior consciousness?”. The english biologist Rupert Sheldrake knows this in spite of scientifically correct protocols and results!

If a paradigm doesn’t evolve, how can we change our world’s view?

Kuhn suggests that conceptual revolutions are needed in order to change a paradigm; revolutions that follow an accumulation of anomalies unexplainable with the current paradigm.

«Scientific development depends in part on a process of non-incremental or revolutionary change. Some revolutions are large, like those associated with the names of Copernicus, Newton, or Darwin, but most are much smaller, like the discovery of oxygen or the planet Uranus. The usual prelude to changes of this sort is, I believed, the awareness of anomaly, of an occurrence or set of occurrences that does not fit existing ways of ordering phenomena. The changes that result therefore require ‘putting on a different kind of thinking-cap’, one that renders the anomalous lawlike but that, in the process, also transforms the order exhibited by some other phenomena, previously unproblematic.”

There is a creation of a new way of thinking, a new frame in which thoughts evolve. These are revolutions and not simple accumulation on knowledge.

«The transition from a paradigm in crisis to a new one from which a new tradition of normal science can emerge is far from a cumulative process, one achieved by an articulation or extension of the old paradigm. Rather it is a reconstruction of the field from new fundamentals, a reconstruction that changes some of the field’s most elementary theoretical generalizations as well as many of its paradigm methods and applications. During the transition period there will be a large but never complete overlap between the problems that can be solved by the old and by the new paradigm. But there will also be a decisive difference in the modes of solution. When the transition is complete, the profession will have changed its view of the field, its methods, and its goals.»

Einstein already, before Kuhn, understood that in the real world, the theory comes BEFORE the experience: not the other way as science’s rationality would suggest!

Heisenberg relates how astonished he has been when Einstein told him exactly the contrary of what he expected. They were walking after a lecture Heisenberg gave on his works in Quantum Mechanics whose interpretations weren’t readily accepted by Einstein. Only later he understood Einstein was telling him that the inspiration about the experiments to do where implicitly, but heavily, related to the experimenter’s worldview. This frame became later Kuhn’s paradigm and directs one’s understanding of the environment in which one lives. With another world’s picture, other types of experiments would have been tested with of course, potentially very different conclusions!

The paradigm shift is slow, notably because it’s very difficult to change the fundamental reflexes built since birth in the environment which is ours: the one we learned implicitly to understand out of our perceptions and our culture.

Anomalies accumulate… They are tentatively explained with theories that become complicated, like Ptolemaic tried to explain the planets’ movements between stars with epicycles upon cycles. Copernican’s explanation was much simpler but wasn’t discovered before because of the paradigm shift it needed.

Normal Science usually doesn’t look for radical anomalies but tries to increase the precision of already known facts. A “good question” is a question for which the scientist can think of a protocol able to lead him towards a solution. And this protocol must obey to the regulations with which Science works! The scientist must be subtle and ingenious, not a revolutionary!

«Under normal conditions the research scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those which he believes can be both stated and solved within the existing scientific tradition.»

«Once it has achieved the status of paradigm, a scientific theory is declared invalid only if an alternate candidate is available to take its place.»

A new theory must be already available! It’s not possible to live without a working world’s image!

A paradigm is essential to build the concepts that will open new ideas for research, the tools to do it and the critical analysis that are essential to find means for the work. The paradigm is self-maintained.

A paradigm is essential to perception itself since a new perception is built upon the understanding of former ones: one can see only what one expects to see! One can imagine experiments only if one could understand their results from what one knows already!

«Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like»

To be convinced that the world is made only out of matter is more linked to faith than to knowledge! Faith in Occam’s razor!

The understanding of a new paradigm is often the result of an epiphany. Archimedes’ “eureka”; Newton’s apple…

Physicists’ aim is to make the experimental results fit with the usual way of understanding reality: a universe that is material, composed of particles that are real by themselves (not affected by events that can’t interact locally with them); particles are objective, they don’t depend upon the fact that we observe them. Looking at them without touching, heating, lighting… them, can’t change their properties. The problems began to accumulate notably when the results didn’t fit this observer/object separation!

Today physicists are still struggling, more than a century after the creation in 1900 by Max Planck of Quantum Mechanics, then Niels Bohr’s model of the atom in the 1920s. Fundamental anomalies accumulate since a century and nothing indicates that a genius is close to rescue Quantum Physics!

 

IN THE HEAD OF A DOLPHIN

 

Probably never Science will let us share a dolphin’s consciousness, but it lets us discover a much richer world’s view than ours when we explore its environment! Its vision is largely complemented by the perception of an audible environment much richer and precise than what we can discover ourselves! A cloudy water, darkness, don’t prevent it from perceiving its environment. If we were to imagine its world we should benefit from powerful lights linked to our eyes and able to bring light and colors on hundred of meters around us!

It’s above all out of its hearing than a dolphin’s brain perceives its neighbourhood; the other senses bring less informations. It could be that its language is much richer than ours to communicate with other dolphins! We must symbolize the information we want to share but a dolphin could maybe display directly an audible image of the object it would want to share, like if we could display pictures of what we’d like to share on a biological screen on our chest! If it were so, no symbolic language learning any more: a picture of an object would be displayed directly with its features as perceived by the animal’s sonar!

Science shows us that a given environment can be perceived very differently by species in relation with their specific adaptations to it. Evolution led them to perceive the informations the most important for each of them, depending on their potentialities and their specific behaviour. We don’t react to electric fields that guide some fishes in the turbid water of the Amazon river. We can’t perceive magnetic fields whereas many animals can take this opportunity to migrate along thousands of kilometers. The world is much colorful for some insects or birds than to us… Science lets us discover than each species live in a specific world that can be very different from the one we perceive and nevertheless each individual is sure to perceive reality as it is! We must conclude that our own perception is just a representation of reality and not the fundamental reality.

Moreover Physics shows since more than a century that fundamental reality – and especially the world of particles – is so different from what common sense suggests that it seems completely absurd to us!

That two so different philosophies as Science and Vedanta teach us that fundamental reality is only made of energy, that objects we perceive as separate are issued from the same energy field and that interactions only determine their properties, seem to indicate their importance on the way to a better understanding of reality, beyond appearances we perceive as our world.

SIMULISM: an answer to quantum weirdness?

 

1: THE WORLD IS DISCONTINUOUS BECAUSE IT IS DIGITAL

From the early times of computer science, one of the toughest problem has been to avoid programs that had no ending: that could potentially turn for ever. The first way to achieve this goal is naturally to work in a well defined and finite frame and with finite integral numbers.

The universe is quantified: only some defined properties are real and they evolve with integral numbers. Electric charges in particles or atoms are 1, 2, 3…n times the unit value and never whatever value in between. The energy of a particle is 1, 2, 3… n times the unit value and it seems to jump instantly from one state to another without ever being in between. A particle that seems to travel in space and time does so by bursting from one unit of space to another and from one unit of time to another without being in between… as if it lost its reality in one unit of space or time to recover it instantly at another unit of space or time. We would expect exactly these features if the particles were virtual and the software that calculates their properties would do so with integral units. For each unit of time the software would calculate the value of space where it should belong according to the properties it expressed and the interactions this particle had with its environment in the previous units of time and space. There’s no reason to imagine a concrete particle continuously flying from one place to another: only numbers reflecting the properties of a virtual particle would change at one address in the computer’s memory to be replaced by new numbers calculated as described and saved at the same place.

The simplest way to understand why it’s impossible to go beyond Plank’s length is because it’s the unit of length used by the software. The same applies to Plank’s time, Plank’s energy… The software that calculates the universe does so with well defined units of each property needed to build it.

In our real world we can’t understand how two entangled particles can interact instantly even if they are separated by such a huge distance that even light couldn’t transfer an information between the two. Quantum mechanics finds that the properties of entangled particles are strictly linked: if one has its spin in the “up” direction, then the other is forcibly of the “down” type. But quantum mechanics also finds that their properties aren’t defined before an observer measures them. Every particle seems to be in a superposition state: spin would be at once in the “up” and in the “down” directions, which is clearly impossible! Then how could we understand that when one of the entangled particles is observed, the other “knows” exactly and instantly what should be its property, even if there can’t be any communication between the two?

When viewed like virtual particles whose properties are calculated by a software and the result memorized somewhere, one can understand how in real world – which is, for us observers, the result of the calculations – we can observe instant interaction between two entangled particles even if they are separated in space with such a distance that even light can’t link them and explain a communication between the two. Indeed, space looses its reality in a sense: it becomes just numbers: coordinates for the software that has to calculate the particles’ properties. And the calculations are the same whatever the numbers of the coordinates that define where the particles should be.
The same applies to the understanding of instantaneous jumps observed in quantum mechanics. The properties are calculated, then refreshed at once in the memory location that defines each particle.

There are no slopes in the MicroWorld: only stairs! Energy changes take place suddenly, from one fixed value to another, at once, with no time shift. A particle does the same when changing its energy level (its position in space in relation to other particles). Sudden changes from one fixed value to another one.

2: MATTER IS ANONYMOUS BECAUSE IT IS MADE OUT OF NUMBERS.

Particles have no individuality, they are fungible because they don’t have any reality: they are just numbers recorded in memories. These numbers define specific states like electric charge, spin, mass… but the result – the particle – is just a bunch of informations, not a real thing! If these numbers are such and such… then they’l define a certain type of particle but no more a specific one that the number 12 can be different from another number 12!

What is specific though, is the sum of the properties that direct the particle’s behavior: its position in space, its movements in time… To illustrate the difference between the nature of a particle and its specific properties, let’s compare a particle with a share on the market.

Specific properties of a particle will change with time somewhat like the value of a specific share on the market with time. If a particle acquires energy it could accelerate; if your share is appreciated it’ll acquire more value… But if you sell your shares, you’l sell virtual ones; you wont sell the specific ones you bought before. Actually, they never existed as such; shares aren’t anymore made out of real paper… they’re just writings in computers’ memories; and that’s why they are fungible like particles are.

So there’s no specificity to find in the fundamental level of reality: the particles that make matter. But the specificity is acquired through the interactions between the particles and their environment: these give them their specific behavior; interactions give rise to atoms, molecules… and us! Our real nature is the result of interactions only!

Particles or waves can’t be differentiated from one another: they are FUNGIBLE like numbers! They have no identity.

3: UNOBSERVED REALITY IS UNREAL BECAUSE IT’S MADE OF SOFTWARE EQUATIONS.

Quantum physics describes an impossible micro-world in which particles have an infinity of states at once, between two that are the only possible ones in our macro-world. They are in a superposed state that can’t mean anything tangible in our reality! Quantum physics lets a particle behave as a wave distributed in a large space, then makes it collapse at once in a microscopic region of space when it interacts with another one!… This is because there’s two very different realms and a clear distinction between the two.

The micro-world isn’t one in which particles behave as micro things… but as numbers in wave type equations. As such they can occupy what, for us, is perceived as a large space, before collapsing after an interaction. They are just numbers involved in calculations, following the rules defined by the software that builds our reality. When an interaction happens, the equations give a result that defines the specific properties of the particle. It’s at this moment that it changes from the imaginary world, ruled by wave-type equations, to our realm in which we perceive particles. It’s at this moment that a specific number is calculated out of the superposition state and given as what we’ll perceive as reality. The micro-world is completely outside our perceptions: it’s made of virtual numbers processed by a software in a computer that isn’t of our world. Our reality is made of the results of the calculations only and is perceived in a completely virtual realm that has nothing to do with the real realm: the one in which are the computer, the software and… the Programmer and the Gamers, of course!

The universe could be composed of discrete units: addresses in a huge computer’s memory where the properties of what we see as particles or even quanta of space and time would be memorized.

4: MATTER IS MADE OF WAVES IN EQUATIONS AND OF PARTICLES IN THEIR SOLUTIONS.

Nobody can know for sure where a particle is before looking at it because it isn’t anywhere in our realm: it belongs to the software’s one in which it is represented as a bunch of numbers implicated in wave-type equations.

The equations evolve according to the software until an interaction takes place. When this happens, a specific calculation is made, according to the software and the state of the particle. The result of the calculation is perceived as the collapse of a particle to specific properties.

It’s possible that the state of all the other particles that interacted once with the one whose properties are calculated, are also taken into account… A hologram has such a feature: it takes into account all the waves that were interfering with one another when the hologram was made. Every piece of the hologram contains all the information that is incrusted in it, because it’s made out of waves and their interferences; a hologram is a-local, as what we find when we measure the state of entangled particles.

This holographic nature of reality and the hugely complex interactions that is inherent to waves interacting, could explain why the result of the calculations – the collapse of a wave in a particle – seems to be a probabilistic one… It would be for the same reason the result seems to be probabilistic when tossing a coin. We know, in theory, what should be the equations to solve and what numbers we should measure and put in the equations in order to calculate the result of each tossing! It is determined by different factors that we could, in theory, measure before and during the tossing of the coin and use them to calculate the result. But too many factors have to be taken into account for us to be able to do it in practice… The only thing we can do is to work with probabilistic equations to find the answer. For the same reason it could be that each particle’s collapse could be exactly calculated beforehand but that we can’t do it because we haven’t the tools that could make us able to take into account all these numbers, much too large for our calculation’s power.

When there are no interaction anymore, the particle disappears from our realm and resumes its evolution in the wave-type equations of the fundamental realm: the one in which are the computer, the software and… the Programmer and the Gamers, of course!

What we perceive as matter can behave as waves OR particles: never both at a time!

5: THE QUANTUM INFORMATION IS CENSORED IN ORDER TO KEEP OUR WORLDVIEW UNDISTURBED!

Everything seems to be under the influence of a malicious god or devil that plays and continuously mix the informations to keep us unable to decide exactly which path the particle travelled before being measured! One feels as if one plays a game whose rules are arbitrary chosen by its creator out of a logic that remains incomprehensible!

The Lord’s paths are inscrutable… and we shall do with it! Today it’s clear we should rename the “Uncertainty Principle” in “Indistinguishability Principle”: many experiments show this!

It’s interesting to remember how Heisenberg discovered his famous Uncertainty Principle: he had the intuition of it when he was struggling with contradictions between observations and the mathematics of Quantum Physics. He realized suddenly that we should change the way we interpret the observations! A particle seems to cross the measurement tool – a bubble chamber for example – because we see a continuous track materialized as bubbles. We imagine the particle entering at one end of the apparatus, cross it part to part and leaving it at the other end. But nothing says that it’s the same particle that entered then left the bubble chamber! We would reach the same conclusion if a mathematical function determined the particle’s properties at different places and different times. Nothing forces us to admit that it’s the same particle that we looked at all along its trip!

Actually we can’t identify a particle, put a mark on it, to assure that it’s really the same that entered the chamber then left it! Each bubble that let us see where a particle was is a new measurement and, in a way, creates the event that follows mathematical functions that we interpret as the trajectory of a particle with well defined properties. But nothing gives us the right to say that it’s the same particle that created each bubble: we couldn’t mark it with a paintbrush to assure that it’s really the same that crossed all the chamber!

It could be that what we see as only one event is the result of different ones! Quantum objects are fungible and indiscernible from one another. What we see as a real object could actually be a cell in a cellular automat and its properties as calculated from its associated memory that keeps – for the refreshment time of the grid – the numbers that’ll give it its properties. What we take as a real object crossing a chamber could actually be an illusion, based on the continuously changing properties of immobile cells in the grid of a cellular automaton.

“There must exist, beyond mere appearances … a ‘veiled reality’ that science does not describe but only glimpses uncertainly. In turn, contrary to those who claim that matter is the only reality, the possibility that other means, including spirituality, may also provide a window on ultimate reality cannot be ruled out, even by cogent scientific arguments.”

From “Traité de Physique et de Philosophie”; 2002.
Bernard d’Espagnat is a physicist specialized in Particle Physics. He did his research in France at the CNRS and at the CERN between France and Switzerland . He has been a professor at La Sorbonne in Paris and in several american universities.

6: NOTHING EXCEEDS THE SPEED OF LIGHT BECAUSE IT IS LINKED TO THE COMPUTER’S CLOCK FREQUENCY.

Einstein found why light’s speed is independent of the speed of the torch that generates it. And the answer is absolutely incompatible with the common sense! Here is a way to understand what happens:

Imagine an observer sitting near a railway track by night. He sees a train speeding up in front of him. You are in the train, looking at a strange and peculiar watch: it’s a watch made of two mirrors and of a particle of light, a photon. The two mirrors face each other and the photon is reflected back and forth between the two perfect mirrors. You’ll be able to count the number of times the photon is reflected and decide that when it has made, let’s say… one billion reflections, you could define a unit of time and call it: a “billiond”: it would be the time taken by the photon to be reflected one billion times.

As in a wristwatch that includes an oscillating spring which is the heart of it because when the number of oscillations reaches a precise number, then the watch adds a second and the needle will show that. One could do the same with the photon reflecting at a constant speed between the two mirrors. And that’s why the tool with a photon oscillating back and forth between two mirrors is a watch!

If the traveller in the train and the observer near the railway could look at the same watch – the one in the train – they’ll count the same number of reflections for a given time: say one billiond. But as the train moves, the photon that the observer at rest would see would travel a longer path that the same photon watched by the traveller. This is because the photon will travel one billion times the distance between the mirrors for the two observers, but the one near the rail-track will have to add the distance the train, and the photon with it, moved between the moment they both began to count the billiond and the end of the counting. Both agree with the number of reflections: one billion – but they disagree about the distance the photon travelled during one billiond.

But speed is distance divided by time, therefore time is distance divided by speed. The speed of light is a constant and the distance is larger for the observer at rest. Therefore the time will be longer for the observer at rest than the one he will measure for the observer moving with the train. Time will flow faster for the observer at rest than for the traveller! Time is no longer an absolute value that takes its origin outside space: it’s definitely bound to space. And the reverse is true since, for the traveller, it’s the observer near the rail-track that moves! For the traveller, time will flow faster than for the observer at rest near the rail-track! We live in a world in which our perceptions depend on our movements: they don’t have an absolute value, independent of movement and speed… Time and space get connected because movement takes place in space.

Since Einstein’s discovery, time lost it’s absoluteness and became relative. In the physics formulae at least, if not yet fully in our imaginary and our common sense!

Now how is it that time can be different depending on the observer’s movements?

In a computer there’s a clock that directs the speed of the calculations. They take place very orderly, one after the other, in pace with the clock. If there are many calculations to do it’ll take more time obviously and the limit will be dependent on the computer’s clock frequency which is fixed by the programmer and the hardware. The number of steps that the software can direct per unit of time is limited by the clock’s frequency: it can’t exceed it!

In our virtual universe space-time is calculated and the number of steps this calculation can do is limited by the computer’s clock frequency. The more movements to calculate, the more steps needed to do the calculations of course. The more informations to handle, the more steps needed also.

Einstein found that the mass and energy are two facets of a same reality. He discovered also that the mass of particles that have mass is linked to speed: it seems to us that mass grows with speed and becomes infinite when the speed of light is reached. This becomes understandable if mass and energy are the same and if they must be calculated as informations changing in the virtual universe’s space-time. The more informations change with movements in space-time, the more steps will be needed to do them and the limit will be the computer’s clock frequency of course.

To illustrate this, one can imagine a cellular automata which cells are four-dimensional Planck hypercubes. The state of each cell must be calculated in turn for each round of refreshment. The photon is the easiest particle to calculate since it has no mass: the software will have to take in account only spin, phase and direction of polarization. Planck’s length is nearly 10-35 m; in one second the photon will travel nearly 300’000’000 m in the void. The software will have to calculate the state of 10+43 cells at most: this would be the maximum number of calculation steps the computer can do at each refreshment of the cellular automata. If the mass-energy of a particle becomes bigger, then the number of calculations would become larger too and the number of Planck’s cells refreshed for each cycle will be less. We would see this as a slowing of time.

Nothing can go faster than light. In a Cellular Automata, no change in a cell can appear faster than the computation made according to the rules and its neighbors’ states! A change in a cell’s state is done according to its direct neighbors’ states. This puts a up limit to the number of changes that can take place: only one per generation and per cell.

7: TIME AND SPACE ARE RELATIVE BECAUSE THEY ARE JUST NUMBERS THAT DESCRIBE A VIRTUAL UNIVERSE.

Time and space don’t exist as such: as absolute, real properties of the universe. Instead they can change according to local properties of other objects moving through them. They are flexible: time can flow with different rates for different observers. Dimensions of an object can change depending on the movement of the observer because space also is flexible. They are just properties that can change with the nature and the behavior of objects that are described in the four-dimensional screen of the virtual universe.

The mass-energy of an object will distort space-time and this will be perceived as gravity. What we perceive as a distortion is the influence of attributes to the Planck’s cells in the cellular automata; influences calculated according to the software that drives the computer.

Space and Time can be introverted one in the other!

8: THE UNIVERSE IS BIO-FRIENDLY BECAUSE IT IS PROGRAMMED TO BE SO!

If we live in a virtual reality, then obviously the Game had a beginning, and what we perceive as space and time began with it.

What we’ll never know is if the Programmer succeeded in his goal at once, or if he had to try many times before creating a well-programmed universe that would evolve as he hoped, to become constantly richer in informations, creating galaxies, planets, life and intelligence… and that would seem to us bio-friendly. Maybe he had just some adjustments to do; this we could never know neither since the bugs could have been completely erased and replaced by new code and new results. Maybe he had to go through many trials and errors to find out what the constants should be! And that would be why they seem to us so finely tuned to lead to a universe bearing life and intelligence.

What’s for sure is that the bio-friendlyness we discover finds its easiest explanation in the virtual reality, of course. If so, the Anthropic Principle should be understood in its more radical interpretation, obviously! This answer seems the simplest between the other two: an infinity of universes and ourselves living by chance in the only one that combines the good numbers, or an incomprehensible and unexpected way to tie up all these numbers as:

1) to make them dependent from each other and

2) a way that explains how something could burst out of nothing!

 

The Earth is BioFriendly from the beginning.

SOME NOTEWORTHY ANOMALIES

The classical paradigm is the result of four centuries of discoveries in Science. They have changed, slowly but powerfully, the worldview that was prevalent at the birth of Science. Then, objects and subjects could be related magically: intentions were all what was needed from sorcerers to make miracles… Now intention isn’t sufficient: direct or indirect interactions are necessary! Spiritual matters don’t interfere with material ones!

The world in which we live is formed out of matter, itself built with particles interacting according to local laws: no information could go faster than the speed of light to interact with something. This classical worldview is MATERIALISTIC REALISM. “Materialistic” because it says that everything comes into existence out of matter only. I.e consciousness is secreted by the material brain, as bile is secreted by the material liver. “Realism” because the universe is perceived as made of objects that have their own nature, independently of ours.

But more and more “anomalies” accumulated with this worldview since 1900 and the birth of Quantum Mechanics, then 1905 and the Theory of Relativity. Some of these are briefly presented here and confronted with another worldview: SIMULISM

1: SO THE WORLD IS DISCONTINUOUS!

We feel ourselves as a whole, naturally… When we move we don’t do that by pieces stuck to each other but in an harmonious and continuous movement. Or is it?!

Actually if we look carefully at our body, we have to question our apparent continuity since we’re made of cells, separated from each other by a membrane. But they’re so little and so well bound together that we’re sure we’re continuous.

And what about the cells themselves?

Actually they’re also discontinuous since they’re formed of many organelles clearly distinctive from one another, like the nucleus, mitochondria, ribosomes and so on. And each organelle is composed itself of discontinuous molecules, which are assemblies of discontinuous atoms… and so forth until…?

Well! Until Planck’s length which is the lower length our science of the micro-world can work with, even if it’s by very far impossible, not only to approach it, but even to be able to imagine what it is, really. It is indeed on the order of 10 with an exponent of minus 35 meters, which is a 0, followed by 35 0, each new 0 adding a division of 10 of the length! Not amazing that everything seems to be continuous with such a unit of measurement. It’s like digital pictures, or TV signals… We know they’re all formed of pixels – dot like units of the image’s definition – but we perceive the picture as formed of continuous forms and colors: which they aren’t.

But is this very important to remember when we look at the nature of the universe?

It is! And here is why!

Space is discontinuous and there isn’t such a thing as a slope in the micro-world: every modification in height goes by stairs. Sometimes with very small stairs, so small we perceive them as a slope, but it isn’t! Why is this so?!

Even more. If we were small like atoms and if we were to move across this strange micro-world landscape, we’d see that there’s no time flow when jumping from one stair to the other: We’d disappear at once from one place, to reappear suddenly elsewhere…! How could that be?! Nobody knows, really… but it is, beyond any doubt! And this feature of matter make us wonder what really matter is, since it can disappear and reappear like ghosts! Why is this so?!

There are no slopes in the MicroWorld: only stairs! Energy changes take place suddenly, from one fixed value to another, at once, with no time shift. A particle does the same when changing its energy level (its position in space in relation to other particles). Sudden changes from one fixed value to another one.

2: SO MATTER IS ANONYMOUS!

If matter isn’t really anonymous since it’s composed of atoms, molecules that are combined in a way that can be specific, the core of it – subatomic particles – has by no mean any individuality. One can’t recognize which is which in this micro-world. If you observe a particle that can exist in only one of two states – up or down for example – you can make the difference between two particles if they are in a different state from one another. Let’s name Alice the one that is in an “up” state, and Bob the other. One seems to be able to associate a name – hence an individuality – to a particle, since you can make the difference if you observe its state. But imagine that the state is now inverted: Alice’s state becomes “down” and Bob’s changes to “up”. Could you say now that the particle that was named Alice changed its state? The answer is surprisingly “no”! The only thing you could do is to associate a state with a name, but you’ll never be able to tell for sure that it’s such and such particle that changed: one can’t see any individuality between similar particles.

Suppose that you decide to measure how many different combinations of two particles in any state you can see. You could find Alice and Bob in the same “up” state, or Alice and Bob in the same “down” state, or Alice in an “up” state associated with Bob in a “down” state, or, finally, Alice in a “down” state associated with Bob in an “up” state; that makes four different combinations… Observe that by answering that you expect four combinations, you implicitly decide that you can individualize the two particles as Alice or Bob. But if you can’t make a difference between these particles, you’ll have only three different combinations since you can’t say which is Alice and which is Bob… You’ll have two possibilities where the two are in the same state: up or down. But you won’t be able to make a difference if they are in a different state because you can’t give a specific name to one or the other! And that’s what quantum physicists find again and again! Particles of the micro-world are fungible like the money is. One won’t recover the same coins he left to his bank, but the same amount made of anonymous coins. But if one can engrave a recognizable pattern on a coin to give it some individuality, it’s impossible to do so in the microworld. What could that mean?!

You’d expect such results if particles aren’t really made of matter with defined properties but are just some blend of informations that can be completely mixed with other blends of informations for a while, then recover new blends of informations when they are individualized as lone particles, anymore in association with another one. In other terms, Alice is Alice when she’s alone, while Bob is Bob when he’s alone. But when they behave in couple, they form a new entity that is AliceBob. And if they separate from each other there’s no way at all to define which was Alice before the separation and which was Bob. What could that mean?!

Particles or waves can’t be differentiated from one another: they are FUNGIBLE like numbers! They have no identity.

3: SO UNOBSERVED REALITY IS UNREAL!

Is the moon in the sky if there’s nobody to look at it? Sure! But not for the reasons we think of!

Micro-world’s particles don’t have defined properties if they’re not observed! It’s as if they belong to an odd world where many different properties are possible at once with not any one precisely defined, until an interaction is performed between a particle and its environment. They are fuzzy, so to say, if they’re not looked at, and acquire defined properties only after an interaction. The measurement of a particle is such an interaction and it seems to really create the properties of the particle, not on stringent cause and effect logic, but out of probabilities that become defined realities only when the interaction happens. It’s not the revelation of unknown properties the particle had before the interaction: it’s the creation anew of characteristics that are in accordance with the nature of the particle, its history of precedent interactions and the features of its environment.

Moreover, before the interaction the particles are in a superposition of the different states in which they can be, until the interaction forces them to take one of the probable states the quantum mechanic’s laws allows.

These results seemed so strange that Schrödinger didn’t believe they were true: he thought that there should be another interpretation of the results that would be easiest to accept. And to make his argument clear he created his renowned cat in a box!

He imagined a device that would trigger the distribution of a deadly poison in the cat’s box only if a given atom of a radioactive element was in a defined state: not yet decayed, or already decayed. Even if a physicist is able to foretell with good accuracy how many atoms in a given mass of a radioactive element will decay in one second, he’s absolutely unable to foretell when a given atom shall decay: all he can do is to calculate with which probability it’ll decay with time. It could happen the next second or… in millions of years! Moreover quantum mechanics states that if the atom isn’t looked at, then it’s in a superposition state: i.e it’s at once decayed AND not decayed! Only when somebody opens the box to see in which state is the atom, it’ll take one only of the two possible states! If this is really the case, ironized Schrödinger, so our cat in the box should also be in a superposition state: alive AND dead at once! Clearly impossible! Or is it?!

Well, the experimental results all point to the correctness of the quantum mechanics’ interpretation: i.e that the atom is in a superposition state until it is observed! And an evidence of the reality of this superposition is found in the current research on quantum computers which take advantage of it. Instead of calculating only with bits that can take one of two states: 0 or 1, as in our computers today, they work in the quantum world where qubits (as they are named) could take an infinity of superimposed states between 0 and 1, and therefore could boost the computer power to unimaginable heights!

How could it be that unobserved particles in the microcosm haven’t defined properties until they’re interacting?! Why is this so?

So is the moon in the sky if there’s nobody to look at it? Yes it is… because it’s so big that its constituents interact continuously and instantly with their environment and acquire their properties by the way, not because it has a reality by its own, independent of the environment! Why is this so?!

The universe could be composed of discrete units: addresses in a huge computer’s memory where the properties of what we see as particles or even quanta of space and time would be memorized.

4: SO MATTER IS BOTH WAVES AND PARTICLES!

Wave or particle? This question divided physicists for three centuries. How odd this question is since waves and particles are so different from one another! It should have been simple to decide!

Waves are coordinated, interactive oscillations of an underlying substrate, while particles are independent objects. The very nature of waves is movement while the nature of the oscillating substance is not really important, except for the speed with which they spread. On the contrary, particles can stay quiet. Actually their very nature is to resist to movement with inertia. Waves convey information about a perturbation that happened somewhere; their direction, their amplitude and frequency can be analyzed to get an image of an event that could be far away and ended a long time ago. Waves cover a lot of space at once while particles are confined in a tiny location. Waves can easily interact and interfere with other waves on a large scale, both in space and time, producing new patterns of waves which can be very complicated, while particles usually preserve their nature after an interaction with other particles.

Why physicists didn’t agree albeit the difference between wave’s and particle’s nature? The answer is because light and matter express both natures… but not really at once! It seems that in the microworld, matter behaves as waves do, as long as it doesn’t interact with something else than itself. When it does, the wave nature of matter collapses and seems to give birth to a particle, somewhere in a discrete place, although its wave’s nature made it potentially everywhere at once! How does matter chooses the discrete place where it’ll collapse? By chance!

Physicists were stunned when they realized that matter’s waves weren’t real waves, but only probabilities which can be calculated with the mathematics typical for waves. Nobody can know for sure where a particle is before looking at it! And nobody knows really what is its nature; only that it reminds us of a hologram, since it can express its nature non-locally: potentially in all space-time at once. Physicists can only calculate (but with an extraordinary precision) where it could be if it was looked at. And when it is looked at, it looses its holographic properties and reveals itself like a defined particle restricted in space-time. How could that be? What could that mean?

What we perceive as matter can behave as waves OR particles: never both at a time!

5: SO QUANTUM INFORMATION IS CENSORED!

Physicists have been very smart trying to get around Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty Principle”. Einstein never renounced even after severe failures. Unfortunately, experiments today continue to make him wrong: it remains impossible to measure precisely at once what are the speed and the position of a quantum object!

Still stranger! An isolated particle that encounters on its path a screen with two slits will go through both at once, thanks to its wave nature; the experimenter will find on his screen the interference fringes that are the signpost of waves.

But if the experimenter tries to determine exactly through which slit the particle will cross, then it doesn’t anymore take its wave nature but behaves like a particle. And it’ll go through one or the other slit but never through both as it did with its wave nature! Interference fringes are replaced by localized points on the screen, exactly as expected for point like particles. How could it be so? How does the particle react to such an experimental device?!

The experiments are largely smart enough to forbid an easy explanation such as the destruction of the interference fringes because of a perturbation coming from the measurement instrument. Several teams showed that complete atoms – and not only isolated particles – behave as waves. And even these atoms loose their wave nature when observed at the slits, even if the experimenter marks only one electron from the atom’s outer layer!

Suppose that atoms could be big enough to be seen with naked eyes. The scientist would be near one slit to paint a mark on the atom that rushes through the slit to recognize where it’ll impact the screen. He would give a little brushstroke on one of the electrons in the outer shell of the atom. The movement’s energy of the atom is concentrated in its nucleus that would have the diameter of a golfball and would weight something like ten billion tons at this scale. It’s impossible to accept that a little stoke on a tiny electron, moving at a distance of one kilometer from the nucleus and weighting half a milligram could change the course of the entire atom and disturb the interference fringes!

We must accept the fact that it’s really the measurement itself that creates the event, not the disturbance! The interpretation today is that the very fact that one could know through which slit the particle moved, forbids its wavelike nature and replaces it by its localized point like nature.

The microworld relies on secrecy: a quantum object expresses its wavelike nature and its corresponding specificities like the possibility to be at many places at once, or to be entangled to another object roaming at the edge of the galaxy… only if these properties are maintained secret. If they could be transmitted to another object – conscious or not – then the quantum object instantly resume its particle’s nature! How could that be? What could that mean?

“There must exist, beyond mere appearances … a ‘veiled reality’ that science does not describe but only glimpses uncertainly. In turn, contrary to those who claim that matter is the only reality, the possibility that other means, including spirituality, may also provide a window on ultimate reality cannot be ruled out, even by cogent scientific arguments.” From “Traité de Physique et de Philosophie”; 2002.

Bernard d’Espagnat is a physicist specialized in Particle Physics. He did his research in France at the CNRS and at the CERN between France and Switzerland . He has been a professor at La Sorbonne in Paris and in several american universities.

6: SO NOTHING CAN EXCEED THE SPEED OF LIGHT… EVEN LIGHT!

Imagine you’re near a railway track and a train is running on it; on the roof of a carriage somebody is sitting and throws a pebble in your direction. Of course, if you could measure the pebble’s speed, you’ll conclude it to be the sum of the speed the man on the roof of the carriage gave to it when he threw it, summed with the train’s speed… Imagine – for instance – that the train moves at 100 km/h and the man on the roof threw the pebble with a speed of 10 km/h in your direction; then you should measure the pebble speed at 110 km/h when the train is coming in your direction and 90 km/h away from you if the train is going away from you.

Now, imagine the same experience, but, instead of the pebble, the man on the roof will light a torch and we’ll measure the speed of light when it reaches you, the observer along the track. From what we’ve just seen, we should measure different velocities if the train is coming towards you while you we’re standing near the track, or if the train is moving away from you.

But it isn’t so! The observer measures exactly the same speed of light, when the train comes towards him or when it moves away from him! How could it be so?!

But actually Einstein found also that it’s space-time that changes; and as the speed rises, the length gets smaller in the movement’s direction. At the speed of light, each traveller would seem to be thinner than a piece of paper to an observer at rest! Moreover, the traveller would need an infinite amount of energy to accelerate to light’s speed because the mass rises with the speed… Why is it so?!

Nothing can go faster than light. In a Cellular Automata, no change in a cell can appear faster than the computation made according to the rules and its neighbors’ states! A change in a cell’s state is done according to its direct neighbors’ states. This puts a up limit to the number of changes that can take place: only one per generation and per cell.

7: SO TIME AND SPACE ARE NOT ABSOLUTE BUT RELATIVE!

The main discovery Einstein did, is that simultaneity is relative, and by being relative, looses most of its meaning. And this loss could have profound outcomes on our nature.

Consider for example the moment a new life begins: Arthur takes his first breath, or the last minute of another life: Carol expires her last breath. These are the boundaries which seem to define clearly a lifespan. Nothing before birth, and no more life after. Let’s imagine that these two events are simultaneous for an observer: Bob. But if simultaneity is relative, these so-called well defined life spans become somewhat fuzzy. Another observer – Alice – will not see the birth of Arthur happen “at the same time” as Bob will see it. Alice could very well observe that Carol died before or after Arthur was born, depending on the relative speed with which she’s coming close or she’s moving away from Arthur and Carol.

The very fact that an event “A” can appear to happen before, or after, another event “B” to different observers is profoundly odd! And when one thinks about it, one is logically driven to the conclusion that, somewhere, these two events exist already, independent of one another, since they are clearly not linked by an absolute time flow. Again: the same event can happen before or after another one, depending on the observer! And that’s because time is not absolute but relative to each observer and its state.

Now, if events are not linked to one another in an absolute time, if they don’t happen always in the same order to different observers, if the past of an observer can be the future of another observer, one can imagine that all the events that happen in the universe exist already, independently of what we perceive each of us, as the flow of time. In other words, the flow of time doesn’t link the different events that happen in our universe in the same order to everybody. That suggests that they exist already in a four dimensions universe of which we perceive only three as space and the fourth as time only, although it’s more than that: it’s actually a space-time dimension.

Every observer is stuck on what he perceives as a fleeting “now” which moves with the speed of light across an unimaginable four dimensions universe: describable only through mathematics and forever stranger to our perceptions. The only way for us to understand this picture of the universe, would be to make it fit to our perception which is only a three dimensional one for space plus a sense of change that we take as time flow.

Let us delete by thought one dimension of our space, the height. The other two dimensions left become easily represented as a surface. This surface is a simplification of our 3D universe, so that you have to imagine yourself extending only on a surface and reduced in your height to the thickness of the sheet of paper, not more. Imagine a book, laying on a horizontal surface. Each page of this book will represent a “moment” , a “now” and the state of the universe (and you in it) at that moment. And each page has a length and a width: it extends in a two-dimensional space, the third dimension (height) is inexistent and replaced by the pile of pages, one for each “moment” of time. Each page has a 2D surface which represents our 3D space, liberating one dimension of space so that we can imagine it to be tied to the flow of time.

We know that if we are to perceive a movie as flowing swiftly, every frame of the film has to stay still on the screen for 1/24 second before being replaced by the following motionless frame for 1/24 second and so on. What we see then is a good image of what we perceive with our sense of vision in the universe.

Einstein seemed to view the universe as a 4D block that in our simplified model would be a 3D block like a huge book with each page representing space at a moment, like a frame of a movie represents space at a moment. Our consciousness would travel through the pages at the speed of light, perceiving time as the change between each frame. But what Einstein discovered also is that we can travel at an angle from the horizontal line and that’s the reason why time is relative and can flow at different rates for different observers.

This takes place when two observers travel at very high speeds on different directions. Every traveller has his own space-time through which he crosses the pages at right angles. But the higher the relative speed between the two travelers, the more their pages will be at an angle with one another; like if the two books that represent their specific space-time would cross each other at an angle! Therefore an event “A” that would happen after another event “B” on the pages of one traveller could happen before the same event “B”, for the other traveller! And if the two travelers were separating from each other with the speed of light, then each one would see the other as immobile in time: each of them would live a normal life but would see the other as if time stopped and didn’t flow for him anymore! Why is it so?!

Space and Time can be introverted one in the other!

8: SO THE UNIVERSE IS BIOFRIENDLY!

Not long ago we were convinced that the universe was eternal: that it had no beginning and no end… but we were wrong!

Astronomers discovered that our universe was born in a Big Bang 13,8 billions years ago. At that moment it gave birth to space and time and both are expanding since then. Cosmologists and physicists working on elementary particles have been able to retrace its history to an infinitesimal time after its birth and to reconstitute the history of energy and matter. They can play with the physical constants in the equations that govern its evolution: changing them to see what happens to the structure of the simulated universe. Nobody was prepared for the results: it’s nearly impossible to change these constants, even very slightly, without jeopardizing our presence in these virtual universes! Are only coincidences at the root of the stringent values the universe needs to evolve life and intelligence? Why is it so?

Surprisingly the total energy of the universe is zero: negative and positive energy balance exactly and the result is our existence. Had the expansion been slightly more energetic, no star could have formed, no planets, not even the chemical elements that we’re made from could have been created in the stellar furnaces. The universe would have remained simple, and lifeless. Had the expansion been slightly less energetic, stars would have formed but would have lived much less time than necessary to create the complex chain of nuclear reactions from which such heavy chemical elements like carbon, oxygen, iron… would have been formed. The universe would have been simpler than it is now, and lifeless. Cosmologists have discovered that the Big Bang has been amazingly fine tuned so that the universe could become complex and harbor life and intelligence. Why is it so?

What are these strange numbers: the 30 or so constant values that we can’t calculate with our equations because we don’t understand their origin? We can only measure these constants out of observation and experience; it’s therefore pertinent to see what would happen if they were different from what we find. What would look like an universe in which the gravitational constant would be slightly different from what we measure? How much carbon would be made in stars if the ratio between the gravitational and the electromagnetic forces would have been slightly different?…

The answers are invariably the same… The simulated universes won’t harbor life and intelligence! If the relative strengths of gravity and the weak force is slightly displaced in favor of the latter, then the universe would be only made out of hydrogen. If it was displaced in the other direction, then the universe would only be made out of helium. It’s the value found experimentally that gives exactly the ration of helium to hydrogen that is necessary to trigger the complex evolution of stars that can, in turn, lead to planets, life and intelligence! Why is it so?

These discoveries were so widespread that they were extended as the “Anthropic Principle” which states that the conditions in the early universe were the ones that could lead to the evolution of life and intelligence. And this principle has even been put to practice with predictions about the details of nuclear reactions at the origin of carbon that is important for life. In the fifties, the understanding of nuclear reactions involved in stars weren’t able to explain the formation of carbon. A cosmologist predicted specific behaviors for the nuclei of carbon, beryllium and oxygen, based on the Anthropic Principle and the predictions were confirmed by experiment! Why is it so?

We seem to be left with a choice between three possibilities:

Either all the constants are interdependent in a way we didn’t yet find but that couldn’t be different for a reason to be discovered;

Or our universe is part of an infinite number of different ones where the constants take all possible values. It’s only by chance that we happen to live in the only one that expresses the collection of constant values compatible with life and intelligence;

Or these values have been fine-tuned since the origin for the universe to evolve life and intelligence.

Which answer seems the simplest?

The Earth is BioFriendly from the beginning.

IS REALITY REAL?!

A hiccup…; a trickle of amniotic fluid crosses the lifeless lips… that wake up suddenly; a first breath rushes in the new-born’s lungs, the first of a very long series. A tremendous venture in airborne life begins after an aquatic start, nine months before. Innumerable cells work together to perpetuate life. Two hundred thousand years of adaptive history in our species introduce the baby to a series of vital behaviours: s/he expresses oneself, asks for help, looks for nipples, memorizes her mother’s odor, her relatives’ voices…

But our instincts are rather restricted compared to other species. Some young can even manage without parents since birth. It’s about slowly evolving species that live in rather stable environments. We are very young and bet on a fast adaptation to a changing world. On the other hand we must learn the world, gravity, the danger from fire… An instinctive learning engine gives meaning to our perceptions. This instinctive engine is fundamental for every species harbouring a nervous system. Effects are associated with causes and their recognition can help to foresee what could happen after specific perceptions, and to prepare an adequate response in order to survive in the best way. Every object, every situation will be listed according to its importance for survival and life’s quality. This instinctive engine builds progressively a world’s image and gives meaning to it.

Probably no species perceives Reality as it is, but an illusion forged while it adapted to its specific environment; an image enriched by the history of the individual. For humans, oriental philosophers discovered long ago that it is MAYA: the illusion of a universe composed of different and independent objects that are, for Yoga, only dynamic forms of interacting energies.

Since childhood our instinctive engine that looks for meaning works with our rational mind in order to build what becomes our “common sense”. It’s not only the association of perceptions to discover causal relations, automatically, but also a conscious analysis of the relations in order to build a rich and personal world’s image.

This image is largely enriched by our culture. We are a species so dependent on learning that to become humans we must communicate with other humans! We benefit from millenniums of cultural discoveries that complement our personal world’s image. And this representation becomes so powerful that it’s very disturbing to look at it as a mere illusion!

QUEST FOR MEANING

In the realm of culture, this quest expressed itself through Religion then Philosophy which in turn, gave rise to Science. Experimental Science questions Nature and looks for links between causes and effects to deduce (or induce) a model for the world, a model useful as a guidance in our life to benefit from intellectual satisfaction, serenity, comfort, pleasure and helps in our search for bliss. Since 4 centuries Science models more and more this world’s image, sometime to the detriment of religions, mythologies and even philosophies.

Since its origin in the seventieth century, Science opened our perspective from the Middle Age’s world which was centered on humans only. It led us through many copernican revolutions that made us more and more insignificant, in a larger and larger universe, and it became weird and incomprehensible since 1900 and the new Physics. Common sense, acquired in our childhood through our five biological senses, isn’t anymore able to make us understand the universe. Only mathematics can help us because it can work with logics only and beyond our biological limitations. We can’t imagine a four dimensional universe… but we can calculate its behavior! Science gave us tools to change our world’s image and even to find meaning in it!

Descartes and his friends were looking for reliable answers when they questioned the world we live in. A series of three founding dreams one night of 1609 led Descartes to understand that his goal could be reached by applying the mathematical way of thinking to the understanding of the MATERIAL realm, and of this one only! The creators of Science knew that it couldn’t be applied to the spiritual realm: that didn’t lead them to deny any importance to spirituality! But, after four centuries of continuous and overwhelming discoveries thanks to Science, the great majority of the philosophers, now called scientists, convinced themselves that only matter matters! That wasn’t the conviction of the creators of Science! They only knew that the method wasn’t appropriate for answering questions about spirituality and let these to philosophy and theology.

Finally, at the end of the 19th century, a radical interpretation of Science gave rise to Positivism; it has an interest in objects only and denigrates the understanding a subject studying the world could have about them. Positivism condemned every subjectivity, every interpretation that wouldn’t come from quantification only. And this destroyed any possible quest for meaning, of course. We are very far from the creators of Science who looked for an understanding of the world. Unfortunately an excessive valuation of objectivity dehumanized the world’s image Science suggests today.

One of the method’s pillars is OBJECTIVITY. To be accepted by Science, a result needs to be reproducible by everyone who gives oneself the material and intellectual tools to repeat it: it shouldn’t in any way, be related to the personality of the experimentalist. Said another way: the experimentalist must become INSIGNIFICANT and in an ideal world, a well programmed robot should be able to repeat the experiment and collect the same results! Again, the majority of scientists forgot that this feature was only a powerful tool on the way to understanding and not reality! It led them to the loss of meaning through the insignificance of the experimentalist which progressively, became the insignificance of humans… and the world with them! It wasn’t at all the conviction of the creators of Science! They would be stunned if today, they could come back to see how their invention evolved! The paradigm today is very different from theirs! It was a dualistic world in which matter and spirituality were the basis of two fundamentally different realms. It became a monist and reductionist world in which only matter is real and composed of different parts that can be unrelated to each other. The soul no more exists and ideas are only an emergence from brain’s activity.

BUT ANOMALIES ACCUMULATE!

« Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. »; Niels Bohr

« As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter. »; Max Planck

We are far away from radical Positivism! Science is finding back the values it lost on its way since four centuries. While looking for the ultimate constituent body of matter… it found the quantum vacuum that creates matter-energy! In pursuit of absolute objectivity, it found the fundamental importance of the observer… Experiments display disturbing anomalies that seriously shatter our convictions… What we see as continuous is not; what we perceive as solid matter is essentially void; paradoxically the void is full of energy which is one of the two states of matter, as space and time build together an invisible dimension that put into perspective what we feel as absolute; objects can be at many places at once… if not observed; they can disappear then reappear elsewhere, instantaneously… Instead of being resolved by new discoveries, anomalies accumulate, diversify and become more and more disturbing to physicists!

What we’re left with, is the creation of a new paradigm: these unconscious frames in which our concepts are built, where our imagination assembles mental images which we absolutely need to understand the world. A conceptual frame of thoughts that should be compatible with all the stunning results found since a century and that seem to point in the same direction… a participative universe. We are in a turning point in history, reminding the Renaissance, when every dogma inherited without critical mind was analyzed and subjected to rational personal conviction instead of being blindly accepted. Today our most fundamental convictions are found to be false: there is a “veiled reality” beyond what we perceive directly, whose nature is wavelike and subtle. What seems to us separated in space and time is fundamentally linked through this veiled reality… To take in account these realities, inescapable since decades already, invariably reproduced and confirmed since a century for some of them, forces us to think anew the nature of reality and our place in a new world.

Paradoxically this new paradigm should be more like the one in which the philosophers created Science in the 17th century, than the one in which their heirs live today! Indeed, since the birth of Quantum Physics in 1900, Science is finding back the values it lost on its way since four centuries. While looking for the ultimate constituent body of matter… it found the quantum vacuum that creates matter-energy! In pursuit of absolute objectivity, it found the fundamental importance of the observer… and one discovers that meaning is coming back in the procedure!

What we’re left with, is the creation of a new paradigm. A conceptual frame of thoughts that should be compatible with all the stunning results found since a century and that seem to point in the same direction… a participative universe. A universe where interactions seem more real than the objects which interact; an ecological universe, more spiritual than material in a way!

« Small amounts of philosophy lead to atheism, but larger amounts bring us back to (spirituality). » Francis Bacon