Stranger wrote: ↑Thu Dec 07, 2023 2:58 pm
I used the word "reduced" here in a sense that the physical laws can be "mapped" to the dynamics of conscious processes in a certain morphic space. This closes the explanatory gap in idealism between the fundamental reality of consciousness and apparent reality of the physical world. But I agree with you on the irreducibility of different morphic spaces, more on it below.
Eugene, what's below is not intended as a comment on something you said but I simply decided to add some thoughts on the topic.
Contemplating the theoretical developments in the recent years allows us to encompass the intellectual evolution from a higher standpoint – if we are willing to do so.
We have used the
Day and Night Escher painting many times to explain how for quite some centuries we’ve been stuck in a very one-sided cognitive stance. Through the ages, human thinking gradually crystalized from the holistic mythological conditions, where the soul felt as embedded in the spiritual Cosmos. The possibility to analyze our existence into atoms and forces goes hand in hand with the development of the intellectual soul. Reality felt much more fluid for the ancients. It would have been bewildering if someone was to tell them that reality consists of separate units that pull and repel each other. This would sound completely contradictory to their dreamy consciousness, where everything felt to be flowing along streamlines of godly intents. Only when the human “I” emancipated itself from this flow and could recognize its existence in its ability to arrange inert thought structures, became possible to see the Cosmos as made of units governed by laws of nature. In other words, we can comprehend reality to the extent we can fill it with our thoughts. As a simplified example, if our thoughts could only take rectangular shape, then we would only be able to grasp existence as made of rectangles.
Things really took off with the work of Newton. From that point on, man was really eager to understand what the World is
made of. What he has been unconscious about, however, is that in this way he was exploring the possibilities of his thinking.
Let me use this Iterated Function System gif again:
We’ve talked many times that it only seems to us that the metamorphoses of our thinking are completely free. In fact, the basic feelings and ideas (and many deeper factors) that are part of our intuitive context, act as the coefficients of the function. For a hands on example, it may be interesting to play with
this tool. Press the NEW button several times until something interesting is generated. Then you can play with the L-shaped gizmos. Each of them represents a simple affine transformation (scaling, rotation, translation) except the large white L shape which acts as the coordinate system. The gizmo is simply a visual way to set the coefficients of the function, instead of inputting them as numbers.
Here the method of generation is different that the accumulation of pixels in the gif above. It is more like video feedback loop, where we start with few rectangles which are transformed by the functions (scaled, rotated, translated in exactly the way the corresponding gizmo is positioned). Then the resulting image is transformed again by the same functions and so on. Nevertheless, the resulting image is attracted to the same shape as with the pixel walk.
The point of these examples is that according to the current ‘coefficients’ of our stream of becoming, our mental states can land only in quite specific patterns.
When we began thinking through the coefficients of the Newtonian worldview, our thoughts could correspondingly form only specific patterns and relations. In other words, by thinking through these iterations, there’s practically no chance to land, for example, in a genuine thought that resonates with something of the depth of spiritual reality. Newtonian thoughts move through attractors where the mental states are experienced as replicas of sensory states.
Quantum mechanics demanded that the coefficients are tweaked such that we can traverse quite unintuitive (from the previous ideal stance) thinking states. To be able to think in terms of quantum mechanics our mental states need to be able to land in patterns that are part of the black area of the Newtonian pattern. We were forced by the facts to think about reality not as things of which it is made but in terms of a superposition of states.
Now what has been the trend in physics thinking in the last decades? Basically, to find general mathematical objects (such as the E8 group), which are general enough that they can fit the observed quantified relations.
(E8 lattice)
What DH is doing, is going even further – he seeks mathematical objects that are even more general, which are not sought for their ability to mimic 4D spacetime, but which are so general that that latter is contained only as a special case.
To make this more accessible, imagine the patterns in which our thinking can move as a simple grid of points.
Then if someone tells us “draw a cat”, we can try but the resulting figure looks only like a bunch of rectangles. By probing more and more our thinking degrees of freedom
in novel ways, it can be said that this grid becomes much finer. Now if someone asks us to draw a cat, we say “Sure” and connect the dots in any way we like.
Such is the direction where something like what DH is doing, is headed. By thinking in terms of these super general mathematical structures, we create for ourselves a very fine thinking grid which can capture much more freely our imagination. Basically, we can connect the dots in any way we like and we can show that any physical theory is already contained as a special case.
In a way, this is bound to happen in the course history. What we’re thus doing is unknowingly coming to know the Day part of the Escher’s painting. Gradually we’ll learn to think about reality not in terms of what it is and what it is made of, but in terms of what it
could be. In other words, reality is not a fixed arena where elements can exist and various permutations but any existential state will be seen only as an instance filtered of the infinite potential of what existence could be. Evolution will be seen as gradual emergence from the attractors (governed by our subconscious interests, sympathies, antipathies, ideas, and all the higher orders of reality) through which our states of existence were metamorphosing.
The big question today is whether we’ll recognize that the intellect is only an
octave of spiritual activity. By refining the intellectual grid we approach the upper boundary of the octave. This is the reason why so many people today believe that by dissolving the intellect into an infinitely fine grid, we have reached the source of all existence. And in a sense, this is already similar to that source but only at a different scale, within a deeper convolution of the Cosmic potential. We have only unfolded one such convolution and the fact that we still continue to walk the Earth and be steered by Karma, is the clear evidence that we haven’t undone the Cosmos.
The challenge now is to have the courage to seek the higher forms of consciousness at whose level can be found the ‘coefficients’ of the patterns that our present flow traverses. Not as some abstract objects but as living spiritual activity of beings. As a metaphor, in Imaginative cognition it is as if we adjust the coefficients in the IFS tool above. For example, by tweaking an opinion that we hold, we can experience in a panoramic way what our mental states could traverse. Our opinions are like filters. They are coefficients which make our thinking life rigid and our mental states can land only in certain patterns. If we can overcome the emotional resistance of our sympathies and antipathies, when we transform an opinion, we immediately become conscious of other mental states that we can iterate.
As long as we avoid to experience our thinking as the expression of our innermost spiritual being, we’ll simply iterate patterns that we naively accept to be our free expressions. We’ll experience ourselves jumping from mental state into mental state and seek the answers within the mental states themselves. Today many already understand that no matter how fine our grid of thinking becomes, as long as we jump around this grid, something of reality remains out of bounds. It is only felt but can’t be brought down in its entirety into the grid points. This is the reason for all the talks about the impossibility of ToE, Gödel incompleteness and so on.
Emerging in the higher octave of cognition demands organization of our soul life and ultimately concentration of thinking. Concentration of thinking is not the same as dissolving our spirit in an infinitely fine grid and calling that pure consciousness. In that case our life still continues to flow in patterns quite unknown to us. When we concentrate our spiritual force (and this requires that we resist the usual patterns), we can gradually begin to sense how the deeper coefficients of our soul life determine the patterns that our intellect traverses in its octave. When we purify our passions, when we overcome our prejudices, unfounded opinions, and when we develop the sacred attitude and reverence towards the Cosmic Intelligence on whose flow our own more limited existence is modulated, then we begin to awaken to a higher being whose spiritual activity is similar to what we do in the IFS tool when moving the gizmos. In other words, in Imagination we smoothly transform the constellations of our sympathies, antipathies and ideal curvatures, which results in panoramic insights about what our thinking being in the intellectual octave would traverse.