Essay Abstract
Are you kidding? The essay is the abstract.
Author Bio
John Merryman has been at least moderately disturbed by the way the world is run his entire life. After sex, drugs and Rock'n Roll proved to be an inadequate solution, he turned to philosophy.
John
This is an extremely well-thought out manifesto for the residents of spaceship Earth.
One can call it Das Energieinformationen
I agree with everything you did mention, but worry about its practicality - for one it is very well to prove by physical arguments that God cannot exist, but tell that to the large proportion of humanity whose life revolves around the belief that she (as you put it) does! Madame Curie once said something that she would not say anything to believers about of their faith.
Best wishes
Vladimir
Vladimir,
Thank you.
To a certain extent, the clue is in the title. No one is going to listen to what I have to say, but simply getting it out as something to consider and let it seep into the conversation and when the various systems finish blowing themselves up and crashing into each other, then people will be looking for new 'code' to operate by. It's not atheistic, but rather a bottom up theology, rather than a top down theology. Historically top down theologies have been promoted as political validation of those dominating society, from divine right of kings to George Bush saying it's God's will to put him in charge. I think that a lot of people who are not fanatic, but simply spiritual, would be fine with a bottom up theology, but it's just an idea that needs to seep in naturally and not be in your face, like the overgrown cults most religions seem to be.
In this contest, it's probably the irate mathematical platonists and atheistic materialists who will be giving me the most grief. The irony is platonism is a top down belief system and materialism is nowhere near explaining consciousness, so the logically simplest tactic would be to assume an elemental basis for consciousness and pare it down to its most essential state, which is what I'm doing.
Mr. Merryman,
Once upon a time there was a book called HUMAN ECOLOGY. This book has long been out of print and alas, I cannot recall the author's name. The book explained how the Bank of England actually worked. When the Bank of England made a loan say of 100,000,000 pounds to the government, it created for itself an identical credit of 100,000,000 pounds for its own use. The books balanced. The bank charged interest on the loan, which made the loan irredeemable. All banks worldwide do this. The only function of government is to produce debt. CERN cost 11 billion pounds. The lending institute that put up the 11 billion pounds probably credited itself with 11 billion pounds and the books balanced. CERN seems likely to squander all of the 11 billion pounds leaving the lending institution 11 billion pounds of clear, untaxed profit.
Joe,
They don't teach you much about how the banking and monetary system works, in school, because they really don't want you to know. The Federal Reserve isn't really entirely a function of the Federal government, so much as it is one of those public/private enterprises and is conveniently designed so that much of the profits of banking accrue to the private sector, while most of the liabilities are on the public purse. You could start with Andrew Jackson and his fights over the Second Bank of the United States, or even go back and examine the Bank of England and the Rothschilds. The fact is that there isn't much objective reporting, because the 'the powers that be' don't much care to publicize the relations and those outside like to paint a dark picture. The fact is that it is a necessary economic function and has been a major factor in creating the world as we know it and if those running it did cater to that necessary civic utility function a little more assiduously, they could be taking the situation 'to the bank' for a long time to come, but the business has been taken over by a bunch of short term thinkers and they are trashing it.
Dear John,
As time paradox is inevitable with the current developments in Physical sciences, Carbon dating cannot reveal past time in reality and thus the human evolution history is not confirmatory. Thus restructuring of atomic analogy is imperative for the Humanity Steer the Future.
Jayakar,
The question of time is one I addressed in two previous contests; The Nature of Time and Questioning the Foundations
We exist as single points of perception and so experience change as a sequence of events. Thus we exist in this state of progressing from prior to subsequent events, ie. past to future. Physics, in its obsession with the measurable and with reductionist patterns, distills this to measures of duration and how they relate to measures of distance. Given our existence as mobile points, this is a natural relationship. The problem is that in the big picture, it is the physical dynamic creating and dissolving these events which we experience. So from this view, time is not a single vector from past to future, but the dynamic process by which future potential coalesces into events and recedes into the past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth spins.
Now this makes time an effect of action, quite similar to temperature. As a comparative analogy, time is to temperature what frequency is to amplitude. Unfortunately so much of physics is built up on this speculative foundation of time as some underlaying physical property in which all events exist in that fourth dimension, yet the basic process mitigates against it. In order for change to happen, those prior manifestations do have to give way and dissolve. They cannot physically exist.
Now I did try to only allude to this issue in this essay, since the whole stringy, inflating multiverse mess is based on time being that metaphysical dimension and hopefully this contest doesn't get lost in the endlessly arcane fights over everything from non-locality, to firewalls, to multiverses and all the rest of the mathematical speculation overwhelming physics today. Given the problems actually facing the world, it all seems extremely delusional.
Hello John,
I'm happy to see you have an essay here again this year. I will comment further once I read it, and I'll have my own essay ready to share before long.
Good luck!
Jonathan
Jonathan.
Thanks for the consideration. Given all the political and even religious implications of the contest question, it should be an interesting contest. Hopefully one which sheds as much light as it will heat.
Regards,
John M
Hi John,
Good to meet again in this essay-contest.
I read your essay with great interest as i know that you are a multi-interested individual.
The COOL God is a nice phrase but I think it is only one aspect of the Total, the ultimate other side is ultra-hot and , yes in-between are ALL the other possibillities. My description of GOD is the "TOTAL SIMULTANEITY".
The ALL knowing is inmy perception only meaning the all knowing of humans, which may be a little part of he whole story.
About erasing Old info and adding New: it is our consciousness that is every moment creating a new history/memory adapted to new found information. The "spiritual" energy you are mentioning is in my perception the non-causal part of our consciousness.
The linearity you are mentioning is the causality I think.
About your approach to economy there are lines that are congruent with my own opinions.
I liked your essay very much, if you would take some time to read my essay and perhaps comment it or even rate it then thank you.
I wonder if you agree with the two others who rated me on 3 and 1, if so okay I accept it, but perhaps don't understand it.
Wilhelmus
Wilhelmus,
Thank you very much. Yes, the theological argument I posed here is a but one sided and brief, but I think a large part of presenting an argument with any hope of affecting the course of history, is that it has to be very focused on as few key points as possible. In basic terms, as soon as any bottom up process starts, it will begin to develop top down structures. I do, from personal experience, think there is more to spiritual development than just its biological forms, but I understand the human audience well enough not to go too far into that swamp, or it will create more than enough static and blowback to obscure anything else I wish to say. Which is to say I have a good deal of understanding of where your essay comes from, but that it fails the topic at hand, because it is too broad and deep to coalesce into that sort of hard little knot of an argument that you can really hit people over the head with and get their attention. So when I do get around to scoring, which I'm not doing until they are closed, I will probably give you a 6, or maybe a 7, or maybe a 5. Depends on the curve. It's a topic I take very seriously, even if this entry was a bit satirical.
Regards,
John M
thank you very much John,
You really hit the nail on the top.
The score(s) you gave me is whet gives me more confidence, you don't even have to realize it here in numbers, for me it is perfect, because after the "1's" I began to loose the mentality and thought that my thinking was inappropriate.
I understand that the so called "realists" cannot accept my way of thinking, but in my turn I say that also the "realist" way of thinking is an availability in Total Simultaneity, they only have their own "program" or available explanation. And... In Total Simultaneity they are also represented, so if they they do not agree, they do not agree with themselves.
good luck and thank you
Wilhelmus.
Dear John
Thank you for your encouraging words.
I posted this answer also on my thread, but now you will know thet I reacted.
Of course the what we call BB , a something from nothing , is not my favorite explanation of reality ether, you are right when yoy say that a dynamic universe without a zero point is more understandable as a deterministic ad infinitum till zero. It is nice to think of the heartbeat of the universe, the only thing is that this comparison has one default , there is a beginning and an end to the heartbeat but just because of the fact that we humans see ourselves as causal and so mortal. Once we leave the causality that is the origin of the arrow of time we are FREE.
You mention a very important thought : "The present seems to move from the Past to the Future, it is actually changing the future int the past" of course this is pure logic, because "every future" will be a "past". Which means in my perception that ALL possible FUTURES are available in TS as Pasts, so future memory , so available as a future past in our time/life lines. Your energy coupling in this perception is something I have to think about, but when we are regarding e=mc2 , and in this way trying to achieve that our reality is non destructible, so real real and not just a thought or a creation of our consciousness, then I am tended towards the thought that this energy/mass problem is also only a deduction to try to explain our reality (one of the infinity).
Each human being has a "bubble of awareness" as you are citing. Indeed this bubble is referring to my SSS, the Subjective Simultaneity Sphere ( see http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1370 "The Consciousness Connection". You see consciousness as an energy I see it as a field that is like a catalyst for the mergence of excitations of the matter field, but both views are a form of "energy".
And indeed John, people are explain everything with data that they receive from their bubble of awareness, which in his turn is limited by the horizon of his observations, once we thought that the earth was at the center of all, but for those people it was "real", now we think that our bubble was inflated (BICEP) but we are only still observing a little part of the whole shabang, like people before us. Imagine the heartbeat of your universe but then expanded to an infinite amount of bubbles...beautifull isn't it ?
Wilhelmus
Wilhelmus,
I'm a bit in Joe Fisher's camp, about the importance of the singularity of perception. I know when I, as an individual, start trying to multiply my perception, that signal of my own awareness would be quickly lost in the cacophony. It is possible to take a generalized view, but that also is refined and defined to a particular range of input, frequency and amplitude, with much of the detail of incorporated foreground and background edited out. The problem with science these days is that it tends not to take the general view, dismissing it as shallow. This leave professionals very knowledgeable about a small range and often divorced from context. While people with a broad view tend to be remiss in many of the details.
As I said, this is because knowledge is a function and consequence of definition and so by its very nature, has to be limited. Thus I'm only really concerned with the conditions and how to improve them on this planet, not what could theoretically happen across a range of other planets, galaxies, universes, etc.
Regards,
John M
John,
I like the way you take such an arcane subject as money, credit, banks and such and successfully relate it to energy, information, religion and money's antithetical roles.
You paint through metaphor and analogy a clear picture but unfortunately I fear it's lost to the biased perceptions of those with power and control - "like monarchs who could not see beyond their self interest to understand their larger role and function in society."
Your apt description perhaps dooms us until the collapse you mention. But even then, I wonder. The last collapse seemed to do little to foster sane "awareness."
Jim
Jim,
Thank you very much. I think the collapse is not only inevitable, but natural. As individuals, nature determines it most efficient for us to die and fresh versions to be born. The big reset button. Complex systems have a way of creating too much 'bad code' and this world is certainly full of it. It's essentially a wave pattern and we have been on the up side for a long time. The last time, in 2008, they simply used a bit of electro-shock therapy to revive the patient, but did nothing to change its behavior. The consequence being the bubble is only larger, with fewer safety valves. They are risking the viability of the currency to save a corrupt banking system and inflated stock markets. It's little more than an addict doubling down on bad habits.
We really won't know what will rise from the rubble, but I'm naturally optimistic. As I point out, the larger issue is that the earth's resources can't sustain the current economy indefinitely, so having what amounts to a self induced heart attack will be a serious monkey wrench in that process and who knows how it ends up.
This contest question just allowed me to express some ideas I've been thinking over for a long time and I had fun putting it together.
Regards,
John M
"Biology deals with this wave pattern of increasing and collapsing complexity by having individual organisms die and pass on their genetic code."
I found this fascinating, but confusing. Are you saying that human minds (and bodies?) get too complex for the universe's good, and so they have to be "edited" through the process of dying, thus leaving only their DNA (and memes) behind for the next generation to use as ingredients with which to sort of start over? That sort of makes sense to me.
Also, I think you might be interested in an idea I've been promoting, which is creating a global brain database that collects and shares (freely) all the ways individuals have found to "use X to get Y", with X being excess resources and Y being needed resources. (It would be categorized using Pascal's triangle, with "matter" and "energy/information" as the top two elements, and then breaking the possible combinations of those two things down for each level of detail, to eventually, theoretically, cover everything in existence.) Having such a simple, searchable, bottom-up (emergent) database of proven results/solutions is a way to organize all the "conflicting interests" that you mention.
Turil,
I think it goes much deeper than just biology.
One of the contentions I keep making in the blogs here at FQXI is that time is not so much the present moving from past to future, but the process by which future becomes past. To wit, the earth is not traveling some fourth dimension, or Newtonian flow, from yesterday to tomorrow, but rather tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth rotates. Current Physics treats time as a real dimension, called 'blocktime,' where all events exist on that fourth dimensional universal narrative and our sense of the present is as subjective as our point in space. Since I've had this argument many time here, I didn't go into it extensively in this contest, but have presented it in two prior ones; The Nature of Time Essay Contest and Questioning the Foundations;
Which of Our Basic Physical Assumptions Are Wrong?.
The problem with it being considered is that it means time is an effect of action, like temperature(Time is to temperature what frequency is to amplitude). This not only seriously would upset much of the physics applecart, but would eventually have serious sociological implications, since the concept of memory, history and thus human civilization is based on that narrative assumption. In a sense, we would start to think of life and action more in terms of a thermodynamic medium, in which many of our actions balance other actions and vice versa and understand time as a singular effect of individual motions, encountering a sequence of events.
Therefore information is constantly being created and dissolved, as the physical activity constantly changes. Our lives are very much a manifestation of our actions. When we think of living forever, it is in some ideal situation, where we are physically young, but mentally experienced. It just doesn't work that way. Our lives are meant to be spent. Yes, there is lots of pain, but pain is the price we pay for being able to feel in the first place. Ideals are illusions, produced by our mental process of editing out all the complexities. Currently religion assumes the spiritual absolute is some form of moral, intellectual and judgmental ideal, but absolute is basis, not apex. The zero state where all detail is balanced out. So a spiritual absolute would be the essence from which we rise and positive and negative emerge, not some ideal state from which we fell and seek to return.
What you propose is a medium of exchange. That is a concept that will have to be extensively re-imagined, when this current capitalist notion of money as some form of commodity eventually blows itself up. It would be useful to begin to develop a network of people to begin to develop such a model. Ellen Brown of Web of Debt seems to be the only one really focused on this, but more in terms of promoting public banking, which would be a part of it. I am more of an idea person, than someone with a large network, so any efforts you see fit to try to start, I would be happy to participate, but I don't have much in the way of organizational talents. Professionally I work with racehorses in a family situation and while it is quite educational in understanding how nature works, isn't particularly networked to any larger intellectual community.
Regards,
John M
Dear John,
I appreciate both your paper and your beautiful reply. I mostly agree with you and what you say made me stop for a little while in my job, walk out and start considering your concepts, one by one, under the trees of a park. The result of those thoughts are expressed in the following lines.
Basic sciences have shown, from their very beginning, the greatest interest to understand the world as well as the laws governing it. They have assumed again and again that knowing reality and predicting its behavior, both aspects are the same thing. Nobody doubts, even building on such oversimplified basis, that sciences have provided numerous and overwhelming examples of their validity; one can find at the present time that most scientists uncritically accept that the initially unavoidable assumptions, made in order to go straight ahead in research, those assumptions are in fact the immovable principles for the functioning of the world. The initial breath of fresh air that signified the birth of science, quickly vitiated and today prevents us from seeing with new eyes the complexity of the world, of human beings and their becoming. Science has betrayed her own consciousness.
This is why it is absolutely necessary to review, with a critical sight, what we mean by knowing, by doing and by knowing what to do. Hence the false choice between theory and praxis, forgetting that every theory finds its justification in experience; abstraction, as the explanation of reality by means of the impossible, the search of universals as an extension of the strictly local, towards the global, and its summit, action, developing a response ability for our movements at the interior of existence, all that needs the resources of humans. And, on their side, humans mustn't be alienated by a science being stubborn about considering the world as if we weren't there! I think it should be quite the contrary, namely, as science is one of the main achievements of human thought, provided she ennobles man and makes him living with responsibility.
The "antidote" to prevent the inability in considering men as integral part of the stuff developed by sciences, a spiritual blindness, is the implementation of an integrating discourse without leaving anything outside which concerns humans. The old disjunctive between the ideal and what actually happens in the flowing of time, between necessity and contingence, between universal and particular, puts the solution not at the decision point, but at the enriching fusion of both branches. That's the way the universal particular and the particular universal emerge as the solution to the contingence of the laws of nature. Reality manifests as a play of contingence, Yes, man can take himself into account while knowing and describing the world by fusing the contraries, in a never ending and never complete hug, because whatever is touched by human beings turns into an enigma, as he is himself one.
What can we do? Even though science is not the only possible answer, she certainly is a privileged path so to structure the human intellect; this is so because of the direct projection of the structure of human intellect that mathematics actually is. In other words, science, which is a product of human mind, goes back to man in order to draw him once more. Nonetheless, this is not a consistent lie undistinguishable from truth; it rather is the helicoidal construction, which cannot go on a straight line, since straight lines are the product of induction, which hardly fits into natural thought, unless mathematics becomes integrated to the structure of the spirit.
Concluding, sciences shall accept that the only possibility for them to keep their consciousness intact is... being willing to change (i.e. to inspect their basic assumptions) whenever is necessary. Like seeing is the function of view, believing is the function of childhood, and only children know that the horizon, even it looks like a border line, is the mark of the beginning of the invisible. From the horizon as the limit of knowledge (Kant), up to that treat with things, fixing the horizon (Zubiri), passing by a construction of a vital horizon (Ortega y Gasset), human beings surely roam through their lives thinking, acting, dreaming...Capable of the highest ideals, as well as the worst nightmares, man will always be a god while he dreams, but a beggar while he thinks (Hölderlin).
Best regards,
Alex
Dear John,
I thank you very much for your openness of thinking. As I already told you, I completely agree with you and I celebrate that you like to watch from a distance: open spaces are essential to have an idea of the entire landscape. So, after that, you deserve that I widely open my heart to you in a matter as fundamental as time is. But before that I must prevent you that, as it seems to me is your case, I am not a draft animal, I mean that I usually don't react after whiplashes, on the contrary I frequently resist: I have payed a high price for my freedom in thinking, and I'm sure you know quite well what I'm talking about. I am convinced that a construction of scientific knowledge without taking into account that science is nothing without scientists who, before being scientists, are humans, is a ridiculous, irresponsible, absurd and even monstrous and grotesque task.
We often mistake considering time as equivalent to duration. Starting with the works of Galileo, the isomorphism between time and the line of the real numbers, stablished once and for all that instants in time are points on a straight line. This, of course, banishes us from the whole panorama of the description of nature. That is a consequence of pretending that things are as they are independently of our presence or absence from the cosmic stage. Certainly not, and quantum mechanics, dipping in the same deterministic point of view, still had to recognize that the observer was there for a reason, and he couldn't be innocuous in knowing reality, whilst measurements are on the way.
Well, that is the reason why I've been thinking since almost thirty years ago, when I talked a lot with my supervisor in the PhD in physics, Professor Prigogine, that all this story about multi-dimensional, multi-cosmic, "reality" is nothing but a projection of our deterministic brains. In fact, all we know, all we experience about reality is always past: we cannot see the present, we usually suffer it, one way or another. So the things, in one occasion I said to Prigogine, "well Professor, then there exists only one dimension, namely, TIME, and what we actually call SPACE is nothing but the trace of time, this is to say, past". Professor Prigogine looked pensive after my statement; few minutes later he said that my idea looked a little bit extreme, however I might be right since I was young... I am not young any more, but I still think the same. The only way one can dip into the present is dying. Time is not duration and that is why practically all the equations of physics are perfectly indifferent about the sign of "t": if you change t by -t you will get exactly the same result in all the differential expressions based upon classical mechanics. Even Schrödinger's equation is deterministic, of course, as well as the mathematical characterization of Boltzmann's theorem. That is why time cannot be either a parameter nor a fourth dimension: it's got to be some sort of "operator", comparable with momentum, position and total energy (hamiltonian) operators. Only then Heisenberg's uncertainty relations will have a real meaning.
So, speaking frankly, I think we have really missed the mark from the very beginning (i.e. more than four centuries ago!). The amazing thing is that we have said few things not so stupid. But it is time now to rethink the role of mankind in the generation of knowledge. Self confidence is a good thing as far as it doesn't lead us to be arrogant: you say well, our knowledges and movements in the cosmos are so "viscous", slow, clumsy, naive, that we should be extremely careful about the range of our achievements. In the scope of time, past is space already done (faith, oblivion), future is space not yet done (hope, ignorance) and present is time itself (love, knowledge). Forgive my pseudo-theological allusions, but what I want to say is that we should take seriously all human nature, not just the part that suits me.
I am sorry, dear John, for I've been too long in my reply but, I feel good "talking" with you by this means. As a matter of fact, besides the contest, which is pretty interesting, the "colateral effect" of these communications among the different authors is the best part of it. Thanks for your patience and I hope all this be of some usefulness.
Best wishes.
Alex
