sideless

They say there are two sides to a coin.   A coin is a disc, a disc is a slice of a sphere.   There are 360 cubed “sides” to a thing.  There is a perspective for any vector that emanates from the singularity that is the center of a sphere.   Another example of geometry being used abstractly by the conscious mind in order to try and make sense of things.   We use the index of time, we also use the bilateral symmetry of a coin to represent oppositions.   It works, taken as is though it becomes a confining factor in the way in which one may analyse a problem.   Of course there aren’t fifty shades of gray, or black and white.   These are just the best representations our senses can render for us so they are imprinted on the mind as a rule.

If we want think deeper, broader and more meaningfully we have to recognize these aspects of human consciousness and learn how to filter them out of the equation.  Both simplifying and expanding the possibilities of the things which we are considering.  Paraphrasing Plato and others, the world which we perceive is just an imperfect projection of a more perfect world which we cannot fully perceive.  And that’s just referring to the senses and the neurological systems that organize their input.  As the brain evolves during a lifetime it grabs onto concepts that serve it well, as a child and then as an adult they are often never updated to a truer concept of reality.    Most children live on flat earths,  we tell them that the world is round and then all it takes is to point at the moon and say “see another world, far away”.   They take the leap.  Similarly the time concept evolves as we grow and change and age.   We all relate to the story of how a minute seemed to be an eternity to a five year old and as a 60 year old a month seems like a day.  Helping to create the illusion of a “corridor” of time.

It is hard to learn how to think outside of the bounds of time, or to approach a problem without Occam’s razor to cut the disc from the sphere.  Since we are bilaterally symmetrical beings the razor serves us well and can get to the core of most things swiftly. It’s the same razor that cuts the past from the future.  But there is no past and there is no future there is only now.   We can build an account of the past and evolve technology this way, we can make certain assumptions and predictions about the future but they too are as imperfects our accounts of the past. In all this “Consciousness” we seem to be bound this way for the purpose of evolving, iteration, on and on.  Genetically if you are alive and aware then you are an immortal.  It took billions of years of natural selection to deliver us, the thinking being, to ourselves.  Because we don’t know if anyone anywhere else know or cares that we exits outside of deists beliefs.

As the slice of a sphere is the two dimensional shadow of the three dimensional sphere, I suspect the sphere is the four dimensional shadow of a higher plane of existence onto which we are projected. What we perceive all around us in the confines of our 3D world may just be how some greater 4 or more dimensional reality appears to us. The microcosm and macrocosm may just be one thing folded around us in a higher dimensional order.  If that were true, no matter how much we study the universe at the higher and lower scales there may be nothing to learn seen from our perspective.

 

 

Changeless

Entropy.   The physicist will say that as (time) increases, as the universe unfolds it goes from a state of perfect order to a state of perfect disorder.  In the the end all that will be left is a haze subatomic particles devoid of charge, spin and thus meaning. Not even that, the particles will dissolve into the field that bore them along for the life of the universe.  Beyond that..  Pointless to consider.

Like the mental need to view the change going on around us as a dimension in the form of time, the strict followers of entropy as it is interpreted by physics are devoted to a pure chaos.  They see entropy as the process of a pure disorganization, and the word leaves no room for processes that bring about the end result.  How then has the universe done nothing since the big bang but re-order itself in endless iterations of familiar spiral forms?  Soon after the start of the Big Bang atoms started organizing into enormous masses of hydrogen which collapsed into themselves under a force brought about by this aggregation.  Gravity?  Since then a constantly evolving, seemingly chaotic, process of organization has been playing out, no pun intended, as the origin of that phrase “Playing out” seems to refer to the spiral unfurling of a fishing like or phonograph record.

Maybe we should say, in the beginning there was spin. This was the first form, its fractal analog of gravity brought about a field effect that assisted in the construction of the first atoms.  All at once the vast soup of particle sprang forth spinning and from this action began assembling the components of atomic structure.  Initialy in the form of hydrogen these structures aggregated into what would become a stars giving birth to gravity.  Then this process repeated itself at the stellar scale with the solid self similarity at all scales that fractal geometry produces yielding a similar but different and more complex result. The iterative function system driving the chaotic evolution is spin.  This growing aggregation of matter which was brought about by the onrush of energy pushing out of creation has replicated it’s form countless times.   Every now and then a form of energy, a new field or some binding force brings about the evolution of a newer larger scale that resemble the one it is made of, but is now more intricate and also begins to assemble it’s larger components in a similar manner.   All, still bound to the energy that is spin.

Iteration (not in the purely numerical sense) is the term a programmer uses when devising a repeating construct, it’s of course spinning again. Iteration is the earth going around the sun, the moon orbiting the earth,  great big spinning things, made of little tiny spinning things.  At each scale are created forces that bring about fields that bind structure and create organizations of matter. So far this entropy seems pretty organized to me.   There may be truth to the idea that entropy is in the end complete disorganization.  But as long as galaxies, suns and worlds turn the universe is abundant with order and form.  For how long may as well be an eternity from our perspective, but finally these forms will fail and dissolve  into what I described earlier.

But,  for the majority of the entirety of their existence these forms will be undergoing the transformations, working upward from the smallest scale to the largest to create new form.   Organized forms, and because they have form they have meaning.  Meaning that is akin to the relationship between information about a form and its relevance to the form itself. A knowledge based binding construct.  So, the fact that between the time where space, particles and fields are created and begin, this organization, and the time when it all falls apart; the majority of it’s form and presence is ordered.  From this we can derived that it has purpose because it creates increasingly more complicated forms.  And, the beginning is just that and the end also just that.  The remainder is the universal life that turns order into the life we experience as the most complicated geometrical object we can conceive.   Ourselves, life, painted onto a place where all the conditions are perfectly ordered to allow for it to unfold.

For duration of the universe entropy is more like chaos, just form misunderstood.   We don’t understand it because we can’t comprehend the scales involve.  Stars explode and create new forms of atomic substance, then they reassemble and a dance of worlds accompanies them making use of this new substance making a newer more complicated version of the one that preceded it.  Presumably we have not seen the extent to which the universe can order itself and complexity that it will bring about as it reaches it’s completion. Order emerges from apparent chaos again and again.  All by the majesty of spin.   The grandest forms we can observe, galaxies, take the same form but are so big and distant that they seem static when the are actually moving in some cases close to the speed of light.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that words like entropy ( or practically any other word for that matter) do the concept they propose to explain the injustice of being too specific and confining, and some imply too much meaning from them.   Entropy is not disorder, entropy is re-order. Chaos is not randomness it is just an order so diffuse as to preclude our understanding.

 

lesstime

Free will.  Predestination. Which is it, that at the helm of living things..  Does theological need for an order predestined exclude free will.  No.. we all know we are free to take any path we want.  Or are we?   On one side of this coin is our concept of time and on the other the bifurcating of choices that lead to the taking of an action.

Ok.  This is the crux…. If we agree that time is a conscious construct; that it is required by the organism to make sense of the continuous and unrelenting change going on around us, and,  that this change, in all of its entirety, constitutes the current state of the universe as a whole at any singular point in relative space.  Seeing that change itself is a constant then this reveals that time is nothing more than the awareness of the moment by the conscious entity.   If we accept this, then we can look at the nature of consciousness differently. Free will and predestination seen through this lens, one that has no affiliation with philosophy or theology,  it at once becomes clear that the very existence of free will brings about to a certain extent some degree of predestination.

All organisms in their ageless task of evolving with the universe are tuned to the niche they reside in.  They are bound in the choices they can make, to a greater or lesser extent they employ conservative approaches they think will maximize their ability to thrive, meaning reproduce, and minimize the risk that they will in any way fail in this purpose.  Predestination is a byproduct of species and behavior that is genetically programmed, an environmental consequences that bring about adaptation.  Adaptation is the act of free will tuning destiny, changing some of the built in predestined rules of speciation.

Seen from this place where time is known to be not a dimension but only a wave front of awareness; then the organism exercising his strategy in life wields free will in most cases in a way that will produce a form of predestination which results in evolutionary and genetic constructs.   Actions, thought and reaction to the environment force us moment to moment to make an endless choice of decisions, decisions about the slightest to the grandest event that could ever confront us. In order to do this we need the concept of the the ordering of time.   The conscious mind is trapped within itself, moving in accompaniment in an inner dialog working out the direction in which the body is Destined to arrive.   Free will is thus occasionally a haphazard semi-conscious automatic response to the moment.  Then sometimes it is the meditated and deeply considered decision that keeps one from falling from a cliff or concluding what is appropriate for their child.  Something more meaningful in the latter case, but more often the former is all that is required to navigate through the day.  Nevertheless, the total aggregation of these minute choices determine the nature and degree of the predestination we allow to creep into our lives.  The word, the concepts are inadequate in the face of the knowledge of the absence of time.

Why remove time?   Anytime you can simplify the description, definition of a thing you can also just as in a mathematics equation, take a leap closer to the truth at the core of the thing.  The necessity to view living through the yard stick of time is valid.  We all feel that we move through a corridor of time as we live out our lives.   The planetary mechanics of the day and night mark out the ruler in its relentless iterary function system.  But the universe is never static.  Not in any dimension large or small and the change so constant that without the notion of time making up the dimension of our experience of that change, all perception would be meaningless.

We don’t know how many conscious minds there are out there beyond this world, but even on this world consciousness is scaled up and down to all organisms in all there forms.   Even the ant experiences living, the Galapagos tortoise take it all in stride at a pace that only it understands.   All of the change the universe has wrought HAS brought about life on this world.   And the very nature of living makes us dependent on the time concept.  But to remove it is to simplify the equation, it puts the focus on what the universe is doing (including us) and not on an arbitrary and varying scale such as time. The result of this approach reveals more than it excludes when something that is a construct unique to the operation of consciousness is left out.  For physics time is important because it represents a scale that is to some extent measurable and can be factored into the examination of 3 dimensional space at the scale in which live.   In the scale of quantum mechanics or even strings, like gravity it becomes so weak it’s barely measurable.  Beyond the observable universe it is thought that the wave front of the big bang is moving faster than the speed of light.  Another relativity leap of tremendous size.  Up or down the leap between the structure of the very small and the very large is incomprehensible.   Yet, a field of some sort binds them.  They are part of the same thing.  The wave front of creation is our awareness of now.  A concept that is constant at all scales, much like a field to which our minds resonate.