THE QUESTION OF THE DAY
More and more over the past few weeks, I find myself drawn to a concept of
"third order sanity," in which we become more aware and connected to what Carl
Jung called "the spirit of the deep" (in his Red Book). Jung discusses how we can use visual images, among other tools, to deeply assimilate and use any new point of view, so when I tried to achieve more third order sanity myself, I started by visualizing triangles. That worked, and it still works, but lately I
simply think of our cosmos and the Spirit of the Deep as something which looks like the vast neural-like
network web of dark matter which we see in photos taken by gravitational
lensing. See the lower right of this slide.
(1) Einstein's view of
how the cosmos works, rising to
(2) the Everett/Wheeler/Deutsch version of
quantum theory (which is our best approximation now to the statistics of how the
cosmos works), rising to
(3) those streams of mathematics from VonNeumann which
can explain life and mind as we know them as emergent phenomena, rising still
further to
(4) larger scale emergent phenomena like a few kinds of higher
intelligence alive in our cosmos, explaining how and why we have "souls" and
authentic PSI or spiritual experience.
I define "first order sanity" as the same
kind of integration which Freud and Confucius taught. I define "second order sanity" as the integration of brain and soul, as in Jung's extension
of Freud. (That fits the old Western concept of "alchymical marriage".) But
third order sanity would involve fuller integration beyond our personal soul to
the full spirit of the deep, whatever that is.
But what is it? What does that
vast neural-like network in our cosmos really represent? Is it really a mind at
all? I have some fuzzy new thoughts about that this morning, and hope that some
real dialogue is possible to help clarify it all.
HOW MUCH IS OUR COSMOS LIKE A
GIANT MIND, IF WE BELIEVE THE EINSTEIN VIEW?
In the youtube talk, I first explain why I now
agree with Einstein that EVERYTHING we ever see and know comes from what we
experience in a hard core 4D space-time continuum. The talk gives a specific
definition of Hard Core Einsteinian Realism, HCER, the "theory of everything"
that I now believe in.
Does that imply that we live in a cold, mindless
universe? DON'T JUMP TO CONCLUSIONS.
People often look at these equations and
think they must be cold and mindless, because they don't understand what the
math is really telling them. This is where Lagrange and Hamilton, and maybe even
Lorenz (not Lorentz, Lorenz) can help us understand better. FINITE minds, like
what we have in our heads and like what our entire noosphere possesses are born with an inborn sense of purpose (telos or
U), with a striving to learn to make choices which better serve that purpose,
and to better understand the uncertainties they always face BECAUSE they are
finite minds, and do not understand everything. But what about the cosmos AS A
WHOLE, the whole big 4D thing?
In LAGRANGE'S original concept of how it works,
the universe ALSO has something like a sense of purpose or U. In physics, they
use the letter L for Lagrangian, but THE MATH IS THE SAME. More precisely -- in
the neural network mathematics (RLADP) which describes how the brain works ) we learn
how the brain as a whole system (complete with qualia and consciousness and all
that) is based on an equation called the Bellman equation, which tells us how to
maximize U UNDER UNCERTAINTY.
The original equations of Lagrange and Euler, for
the physical universe, are THE SAME EQUATIONS for the special case where there
is no uncertainty. In other words, when HCER tells us that everything in the
cosmos is governed by Lagrange Euler equations (slightly tweaked for curved
space), it is telling us that THE COSMOS IS ACTING LIKE A GIGANTIC BRAIN WITHOUT
UNCERTAINTY. It predicts that the cosmos will BEHAVE like a gigantic perfect
superintelligence, and that everything we ever experience at the finite level
from this willful behavior of the cosmos as a whole. It actually fits quite well
with the image of Creator in Yeshua's writings and in Luria's cabbalah.
Whether we call it "God" or not does not matter so much. What matters is that it is the driving current behind everything which happens in our universe, and that it acts with something like PERFECT intelligence. BUT DOES IT? That is the REAL question I ask today.
The math is important, and the consequences are real.
Lagrange tacitly assumed that L, the "value function of the universe", is
NONNEGATIVE. THAT is what clearly would create behavior like a great mind,
pushing as hard as it can in... its direction, which we are well advised to try
to discern.
But the equally great mathematical physicist HAMILTON argued with
Lagrange. Roughly, he said: "You claim that the universe is maximizing L, a
positive function over all space time. You say it is governed by the
Lagrange-Euler equations, which describes what happens in a universe maximizing
its L. HOWEVER, those same Lagrange-Euler equations are ALSO needed to describe
a MINMAX universe, where some decisions are made to maximize L while others
minimize it." In fact, my "Bible" (The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by
Von Neumann and Morgenstern) explains a lot about how minmax systems arise and
how they work. They are what you get in a zerosum game, an all-out war, between
two players.
And so, once we decide that we DO live in a universe governed by
Lagrange-Euler equations (and maybe some equality constraints like the Lorenz
gauge), we have an obvious choice:
(1) Is it ONE God-like player out there, ala
Lagrange? or
(2) Is our universe the battlefield of TWO players in total
opposition, a bit like God versus Devil, or Zoroastrianism?
In my chapter in
Karl Pribram's book Origins, I describe some simple simulation experiments
showing how the TURBULENCE generated by two forces acting in different
directions may be crucial to nonstatic phenomena like life. COULD THAT BE IT?
How can we know, and what would that say about trying to follow the spirit of
the deep?
THE ANSWER, THE NEW UNIFICATION, WHICH COMES AS I TYPE THIS:
My impression is that thermodynamics may be what really
clarifies this situation. (Hey, that is part of PART 3 of my 4 part story of
reality!)
Ironically, it is the Hamiltonian energy density H (as it appears in
Lagrange-Euler systems!) which may "save us from the devil." It IS possible to
define mathematical systems where H can be negative or can be positive at
different times, in different places. But if H is unbounded IN THE NEGATIVE
DIRECTION, we usually get instabilities which make the system explosive and
undefined in ways we do not see in our experience of the cosmos.
When it is
bounded from below, we get an entropy function... well, actually I worked out
PRECISELY what the entropy function is for this class of Lagrange-Euler system back in 2004! In the youtube video, I discussed what
happens if we try to use Deutsch's vision to predict how life works as an
emergent phenomenon. But as I type this I realize... now that I believe in
HCER.. it is EXACTLY THE ENTROPY FUNCTION GIVEN IN THAT PAPER which contains and
governs all life in our cosmos!!!
It is the positivity of THAT ENTROPY
function which gives us the positivity of our spirit of the deep! Hey, is THAT one the real God Equation? I actually do know something about that equation and
how it works... and how it DIRECTLY can work through the new quantum technology
I discussed two days ago! (Yes, there are levels higher than tQuA level three...
BUT NO, that certainly does not mean we can build a God computer. Like Elon
Musk, I have at times wondered whether anyone else ever did.)
At times, I am reminded of Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan... but even so we small creatures ARE connected parts of a larger system. That's who we are. And it may help if the larger system is less distorted and self defeating than smaller social systems we see sometimes...
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