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Some good books worth reading The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light "Anything can deliver us from our loss of memory of the soul: science,
history, art, or the sunlight on the grass taitami mats in the Zendo.
And anything can enslave us: science, history, art, or the militarism
of a Zen monastery." "The Fall into time is not so much an event itself as the conditionaing of time-space out of which all events arise... The Fall of the One into the many, the emergence of the physical universe out of a transcendant God, the Fall of the soul into time, the entrapment of an angelic soul into the body of australopithecus afranesis, or the Fall of an unconditioned consciousness beyond subject and object into the syntax of thought pounded into form by each heartbeat." "...yet it is sometimes precisely the heretical myth that opens a doorway into the archetypal world. The power of myth is so strong in challenging our racial amnesia that priests respond with exaggerated fury, and the myth is pushed out of religion into fairy tales, children's songs, and the work of heretical artists... but every medium of transmission inevitably distorts the message and so along the way the signal picks up noise. What the Receiver must get is a mixture of noise and information. If there is only one message, then the Receiver has no way of sorting out the noise form the information; but if the message is sent over and over again in many different ways, then the Receiver can line all the versions up in a single imaginary space, see the common structure, and sift the information from the noise." "The split in our culture is not a healthy separation, but a fracture, for our science tends to be reductionist and our spirituality mindlessly undiscriminating and occult. In the future, I hope we will have an integral culture that affirms that there are two different paths up the mountain, each provided with beautiful, but quite different, scenery but each coming to the same summit of human understanding. "Certainly the great physicist, Neils Bohr, prepared his colleagues
for such an appreciation when he said, "the opposite of a correct statement
is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be
another profound truth." God and the New Physics "The wise man regulates his conduct by the theories both of religion and science." (J.B.S.Haldane) "Failure of the human imagination to grasp certain crucial features of reality is a warning that we cannot expect to base great religious truths (such as the nature of the creation) on simple-minded ideas of space, time and matter, gleaned from daily experience." "What stuff is the soul made of? The question is as meaningless as asking what stuff citizenship or Wednesdays are made of. The soul is a holistic concept. It is not made of stuff at all." The User Illusion "In 1987, Varela wrote, 'The LGN is usually described as a 'relay' station to the cortex. However, at a closer examination most of what the neurons in the LGN receive comes not from the retina (less than 20%), but from other centers inside the brain.'" "...what we see... is the result of an extensive inner processing where data from the outside is linked to inner activities and models." "There is no out there out there." "...the conscious experience if projected back in time exactly in the same way as a stimulation of the sensory cortex is projected out into the body." "There is a difference between the I and the person as a whole." ""But the problem lies in giving the Me this freedom. It requires trust on the part of the I. A trust that comes through practice." "The bandwidth of language is far lower than the bandwidth of sensation. Most of what we know about the world we can never tell each other." "...the idea that we possess control over ourselves is manifested in national states and standing armies (which arose at the same time as the mirror and self-consciousness)." "...children use comforters and teddy bears. Later on, more advanced things take over: art, religion, alcohol, pills and books. The fundamental angst arising from the idea that we are separated from the world is dulled by whatever means we can find." "The world began as something that can be described using just one single bit. That is the only hidden information it contains. The rest of the disorder came later. In principle the astronomers manage to describe the universe back to the very first bit but no further. Then the laws break down. (Planck time.) One bit is enough information to answer yes or no to a question. But not to ask it. What was the question?" " Computer viruses are just as alive as biology's viruses, which similarly exist on the edge between the living and the dead. It seems that whenever there is a medium capable of supporting large amounts of information, organizational patterns emerge that propagate themselves by taking over the resources of this medium. Man has created a vast flow of information in the global computer networks. They are about to catch life." "The tendency of civilization toward linearity is therefore precisely the power of consciousness over nonconsciousness. The 'I' is linear the 'Me' is non-linear. Art seeks out the non-linear; science the linear." "But information society presents another danger -- a lack of information. For just as there is far too little information in a linear city, there is far too little information in information society -- a society where most people's jobs are performed body, mind and soul via the low bandwidth of language. Granted, many people are already complaining that information society means far too much information. But the opposite is true: Where man is equipped to manage millions of bits per second in a meaningful way, he now processes only a few bits per second from the computer monitor. The sensuality of material processing has been stripped from the work process, and consciousness must make do with very few bits per second for nourishment. It is like fast food: There is almost nothing to digest, no bones and fiber to discard during and afterward. Information society can seem stressful because it contains not too much information but too little. Sensory poverty is on its way to becoming a major problem in society, provoking a cry for meaning amidst the flow of information. Man has moved down to a lower bandwidth, and he is getting bored." Schrodinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality:
Solving the Quantum Mysteries The bottom line is that the Copenhagen Interpretation works, in the sense that it provides a series of recipes - involving uncertainty, the collapse of the wave function, probability, the role of the observer and the holism of experiments - which physicists can use to predict the outcome of experiments. But it doesn't explain anything. The three dimensional world around us is essentially a shadow from four dimensional space-time. And how does time flow for a photon? ... it doesn't. The Lorentz transformations tell us that time stands still for an object moving at the speed of light. And under such extreme conditions, the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction reduces the distances between all objects to zero. You can either say that time does not exist for an electromagnetic wave, so that it is everywhere along its path (everywhere in the Universe) at once; or you can say that distance does not exist for an electromagnetic wave so that it touches everything in the Universe at once. ...the very close agreement between the results of the NIST experiment and the predictions of quantum theory shows, however, that if it were possible to monitor all the ions all the time, then none of them would ever change. ...clearly something very strange is going on in the cosmic version of the delayed-choice experiment. The whole Universe seems to 'know,' in advance, what experiment and individual human being is going to carry out... "Local,' in this connection means no communication faster than the speed of light; 'reality' means that the world exists independent of our observations of it. If the Bell inequality is violated (which it is), then local reality must be abandoned even if quantum mechanics is completely wrong. Bohm developed further the idea that everything is connected to everything else, and affected (instantaneously) by everything that happens to everything else, through the pilot wave. A very simplistic analogy might be with the shadow of a dancer, thrown onto two screens on opposite sides of a stage by spotlights. As the dancer moves about the stage, each of the shadows changes. If you could see only the shadows, it would seem as if they were interacting with one another in some mysterious way, involving action at a distance; in fact they are both responding to a deeper underlying reality. Reality is what we make it to be... is it really true that electrons and protons were lying in wait to be discovered... Or is it more likely that... incomprehensible aspects of reality... are being put into boxes and labelled... for human convenience. I stress again, that all such interpretations are myths, crutches
to help us imagine what is going on... They are not, any of them, uniquely
the 'truth,' rather they are all 'real,' even when they disagree with
one another. "The way to become human is to learn to recognize the lineaments of God
in all of the wonderful modulations of the face of man…Man himself is
now the crucial mystery. Man is that alien presence with whom the forces
of egoism must come to terms, through whom the ego is to be crucified
and resurrected, and in whose image society is to be reformed. Man understood
however not as "I" but as "Thou"; for the ideals and temporal institutions
of no tribe, race, continent, social class, or century, can be the measure
of the inexhaustible and multifariously wonderful divine existence that
is the life in all of us… And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal-
carries the cross of the redeemer -not in the bright moments of his tribe's
great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair." "It follows that reality is a much bigger thing than it seems, and most of it is invisible." "While I was writing that hosts of shadow Davids were writing it too. They too drew a distinction between tangible and shadow photons; but the photons they called 'shadow' include the ones I called 'tangible,' and the photons they called 'tangible' are among those I called 'shadow.' Many of those Davids are at this moment writing these very word. Some are putting it better. Others have gone for a cup of tea." "We can see that the ancient idea that living matter has special properties was almost true: it is not living matter but knowledge-bearing matter that is physically special. Within one universe it looks regular; but across universes it has a regular structure, like a crystal in the multiverse." "...life and thought have generated the largest distinctive structures
in the multiverse." The God Particle "...Pauli went to heaven and... was given an audience with God. 'Pauli, you're allowed one question.' 'Why is alpha equal to 1/137?'" "It was about ten days before Christmas in the winter of 1925. Schrodinger was a competent but undistinguished professor of physics at the University of Zurich, and all college teachers deserve a Christmas holiday. Leaving his wife at home, Schrodinger booked a villa in the Swiss Alps for two and a half weeks, taking with him his notebooks, two pearls and an old Viennese girlfriend. Schrodinger's self appointed mission was to save the patched-up, creaky quantum theory of the time. The Viennese-born physicist placed a pearl in each ear to screen out distracting noises. Then he placed the girlfriend in bed for inspiration. Schrodinger had his work cut out for him. He had to create a new theory AND keep the girl happy. Fortunately he was up to the task. (Don't become a physicist unless you are prepared for such demands.)" "I have a favorite slide that pictures a white-gowned deity, with halo, staring at a 'Universe Machine.' It has twenty levers, each one designed to be set to some number, and a plunger labeled, 'Push to create universe.' ... It's not the way any self-respecting God would organize a machine to create universes. One parameter -- or two, maybe... our experience with the natural world leads us to expect a more elegant organization." "From time to time we are terrorized by frustrated policy makers who want to focus science on the immediate needs of society, forgetting or perhaps never understanding that most of the major advances in technology that have influenced the quality and quantity of human life have come out of pure, abstract, curiosity-driven research. Amen." |