True science, whether first person or third person (Kuhn's story on what science IS), never views itself as a propaganda organ telling people what the one true theory of the cosmos is. Yes, it does include the search for the "law of everything," the mathematical principles which describe the underlying dynamics of objective reality. we usually do try to find at least ONE candidate which fits all the third person evidence, but even when we think we have a credible candidate which fits, we don;t just say "Hey, it fits, therefore I have proven it is true." In treal science, we immediately look for the most promising ALTERNATIVE theory (or a few of them), and try to do justice to those aspects of experience.
I. BEFORE the alternative: what Einsteinian realism is and why I give it 50%
As of now, I do believe that hard core Einstenian realism actually does fit everything we know not only from physics but also from a wide variety of credible "psychic" or "spiritual" phenomena.. That is a small minority opinion now, but I have probed vey, very deep into all these things. For example, werbos.com/religions.htm links to papers (and photos) giving a few basics. Strict Einstenian realism assumes that we live in a curved Minkoswski space, where the underlying dynamics are PDE exactly in the form given by Moshe Carmeli in his book Classical Fields.
A year ago, I gave this view of reality only a 30% probability of being true. (This is a first person probability assessment, the kind of probability explained by Howard Raiffa in his great popularization and explanation of Von Neumann's view, expressed for example in The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior.) How could a theory in a mere four dimensions of space-time accommodate the macroscopic Schrodinger cats we now see so much evidence for? But this year, I have reviewed the mathematics of my extended P representation (see arxiv), an infinite dimensional generalization of the old Sudarshan/Glauber P map. The underlying dynamics give rise to a statistical mix of possibilities which LOOK like a kind of Schrodinger equation. In practice, applied to quantum optics, it leads to a network of posisbilities which BEHAVE like quantum interference in the middle world we live in, even though the underlying level is deterministic. It fits everything, from the lab to PSI. An old style propaganfdist would say "Agha! This MUST be the whole truth." But --
How sure are we?
Aside from certain weird unpublished spreadsheets from certain ttriphoton experiments...
People like Deepak Chpora have hinted that there might be another levelof PSI beyond what my noosphere species model could allow.
This is why anyone who believes in true science would naturally ask for alternatives, NOt as an exercise in neurotic attacks on modern life and on the search for truth itself, but as an attempt to be open to very different, new unifications opening us up to new experience and experiments we can try to explore. That is what leads me to
II. TWO ALTERNATIVES (SOMEWHAT OVERLAPPING): ASTRAL REALISM AND PARWIN
Astral realism I have mentioned before. In truth, I first heard of that theory from an old friend, whom I bcc here,
and will say more about if and only if he is interested in joining this discussion,
The simplest version of astral realism is formally EXACTLY the same as the noosphere species theory I discuss at werbos.com/religions.htm (and a whole lot of later comments and applications). In that theory, we here are basically just part of a great organism, the noosphere of this solar system. What changes is where WE are in that picture.
In the original version, we look out at the real galaxy we live in through our telescopes. We are a symbiosis of a body which hard core real, made of solid atoms, linked to a PART of the "\brain of that noosphere, somehting like a special brca region for the "soul" of each person or archetype. But in astral realism, WE are ALL "astral", all just images held in the brain of that noosphere. The world we THINK we live in is "just another astral plane," subject to mental alteration like all those other dreams we visit in astral travel.
However, "astral realism" also includes alternative, more general theories in which these astral planes ae all that is here, in which the apaprent atoms are JUST mental constructs.
And so, when deepak says "You guys as you see ourselves are really just fictional characters.You are asral projectsoins of hyour real sleves, just like the made up other people, clouds, dragons and so on which people do project t9 at times in astral travel." So in the end, these illusions may all dissolve away, and we may find ourselves.. where? A cocktail party in the REAL REAL world (if that exists)? Or as a totally different mental kind of entity in a world without anything like physical bodies?
I have often wondered: IF that MIGHT be true, what would it change? How should we change our behavior>
(I have spoken a lot about how Arjune responded to that thought, but the details are too complex and varied for here and now.)
My main response: it would call for more attention to the PARWIN concepts of how we should lead our lives, the idea that the People Are Real World Is Not. (Or SOME people? To varying degrees?)
I have been reminded lately again and again of the ancient western commitment to LLL: Life, Love, Light.
Could love be more fundamental than consciousness in some VERY fundamental way? If LLL is the primary source of q1i or energy which keeps us alive, both in a spiritual AND material level, in these seriously challenging times,
this is much more than just a formal intellectual concept. And yes, it connecte sto a certain strand of Christianity which urges us to pay ral attention to how we interact with people, on a deep emotinal level, regardless of whether thge material world around us just dissolves into nothing.
As it may well do sooner than we would like. Those very real risks are part of what gets me thinking on these ,ines.
This is just an opening to a VERY large area of discusiosn, with lotsofcontent, but right now there are real peopleinthe room where I am typing, so I will wait for later before syaing more.
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