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Return to E-mail Discussion page Previous in threadNext in thread Hello Maya, I have re-read your very astute observations and questions and although I too acknowledge my great, in fact “abysmal” ignorance, perhaps you’d permit me to wander within your comments and questions and interject some thoughts that might help us move in the direction you suggest? Please see below: Maya]: Todd, thank you for this. What I don't understand is why the spacetime in the small SHOULD answer to the rules of the large. Obviously, volume matters in forming characteristics, in biology as in physics (presumably). Is this not assumed? Is GR supposed to apply with the space of an atom? That seems counterintuitive to me. And, while GR is itself supposed to be counterintuitive with its time/space warping results, I admit that it does not seem so to me and that, further, despite this general consensus, intuition still seems to frequently play a part in scientific theory and discovery. Sid]: It seems to me that David has put his finger on the problem in terms of how we do science. David]: I do agree with these positions so my concern is with our choice of a reference frame. Sid]: I am not certain that GR is necessarily confined to any particular reference frame other than what we choose to ascribe, but I see no reason why GR would not apply to ‘small’ as well as the ‘large’. The concept of Relativity is that it is all ‘relative’ so perhaps the reference frame is relative too? Maya]: I did read the Wikipedia entry on Quantum Physics and couldn't understand it well. There is a section that talks about the attempts to free quantum theory from a fixed OR dynamic background, but again, I have to ask, is it not obvious that space and time won't display the same properties within an atom as they do around 8 Billion atoms. Sid]: I hate to do this so soon in our discussion, but perhaps it ought to be on the table too --- so to muddy the waters --- I’d like to introduce a perspective that has been developed by some of my email acquaintances, specifically Alan Rayner in the UK And Ted Lumley in Canada, as well as many others over the past few years. The concept is “INCLUSIONALITY” and its major concept or reference frame, is putting “space” in primacy as compared with our current thinking where we automatically put objects in primacy and space is there, but ignored for all intents and purposes. Here the atom or 8 million atoms, are functions of space, as a vortex is a function of the ocean or of the river in which it ‘lives’. My précis of this concept is hardly complete and consequently is flawed, but if there is interest, I would be happy to provide references to more precise and complete text. The consequences of this approach free the constraints of the reference background and dimensions and instead place everything together including ‘ourselves’. Once we are included, as QM requires us to be, the reference frame becomes the place that we find ourselves. This is much more fully and clearly explained by a post I received serendipitously today from Ted Lumley with regard to some questions regarding the work of Bruce Lipton. However, I will snip from his post and append the sections that I feel might address your questions here, but from a totally unexpected perspective. I would love to hear your response to this, even if it seems a bit off course. Thanks. Maya]: Do the attempts around a unified theory say that, if this is so, if the nature of spacetime changes with volume to require different description, this new view should naturally come out of the equations? And since it doesn't, we're back to square one? So, not that spacetime around an atom needs to behave identically to spacetime around a planet but only that, whatever difference does exist should be integral to the equations that describe spacetime, as they should apply across to board to all volumes. I understand this as well but then I still feel like asking the question over anyway. SHOULDN'T there be a difference between the two views. My theory (please excuse the arrogance) is that QFT *describes* spacetime and so is necessarily dependent on a "fixed background," since any observation of field properties is also a snapshot of spacetime in the making. Outside of the minute world, the combined effect of "fixed background" phenomena produces the familiar GR theory of gravity. That is, the pixels that are the individual events of spacetime are alone when observed in QFT and only have properties in themselves without making a full picture, but when together form a conglomerate image. And the fact that it appears for Quantum work to be necessary to work within traditional spacetime is something we impose on it. Quantum events take place in what appears to us as spacetime because *we* exist in macro spacetime. But the events themselves do not have to account for this macromorph, because they are its building blocks. Sid]: My question to the BB referred to this very conundrum, because QFT and QM in general have been framed within the assumption of Euclidean Space. The linear aspects of this perspective, is strangely contradictory viz it assumes the observer and object are separate, and it assumes that the subatomic particles move in straight lines against, as you say, a fixed background. If we were to revisit our preconceived notions about reality, we would find that nothing in space or time is linear. If space were linear then time would in fact be a linear arrow, but in curved space time’s trajectory is also curved as it is part of space. We would be hard pressed to find the fixed background. In cloud chambers, the paths of particles were observed to travel in positive and negative time and materialize and dematerialize at random. We in our wisdom have imposed a rational perspective that is not in touch with reality. Maya]: From the great ignorance from which I observe this topic, it feels as if the reconciliation between quantum theory and general relativity attempts to place GR squarely within the quantum domain. But to my mind, that's like trying to put the entirety of a large inflatable ball inside each of its plastic molecules. Or to ask that the properties of a green plant leaf be fed at the beginning of the biological equation, into the properties of the germinating seed and root. Sid]: Indeed, but in a holographic universe, of which we are part, there is no conflict here, as the germinating seed, root and leaf all contain holographic signs of one another and their apparent differences are in response the their surrounding dynamic. Thanks for your stimulating ideas. Maya]: I am spewing all this out so someone may tell me where I am wrong and so we can continue to clarify. Thanks again, Todd, for your initial post in answer to my question. Maya Sid]: Here follows a snip from Ted Lumley’s correspondence. I am certain he won’t mind. Ted Lumley]: it seems to me that we have to revisit the reality of our experience, particular our experience with living in a spherical space. the first thing to note is that we can intuit continuity around the dark side of the earth (the side we can’t see) so that ‘we know more than our visual perception delivers to us’. similarly, since our vision is ‘one-sided’, we cannot see behind us at the same time as we can see ahead, but we have an awareness of inclusion in space. that is, we are aware that there is ‘something going on behind us at the same time as something going on in front of us’ even though we can’t see it. furthermore, what is going on behind us could be part of what is going on in front of us and it could include us. we used to ‘play with this’ when young by having one person quietly crouch down on his hands and knees immediately behind the target of the joke, and the other person come up to him, face to face and give him a slight push, whereupon he loses his balance and fall over backwards. what this joke brings out is our fore-and-aft (radial) awareness that we are using all the time (we assumed that we could move our feet back to balance ourselves but we could not, ... it would be the same as if a cliff suddenly opened up immediately back of our heels.). could we, OR DO WE, define ‘where we are’ without starting from ‘the center of our self’? the pacific northwest natives claim that this is not only possible but it is the primary way and that we can never be lost when we accept that where we are comes from our inclusion in nature, everything in nature giving meaning to ‘where we are’. so much for descartes’ existential questioning; ‘what am i’? ... ‘cogito ergo sum’ ... i.e. we are center-driven thinkers. surely this question of a-centric awareness, ‘a-centric consciousness’ is worthy of exploration. if we are moving across a large and crowded exhibition ground, we are like the man in the space on the surface of a sphere; i.e. ‘where we are’ is relative to where everything else is’. we cannot use our self-center to push off from. when we look into the crowd we see flowing channels, stationary islands, some open seas, ... all made of people, ... all giving us a sense, by inclusion, of where we are and where we are going. what if this was the pervasive nature of the world we live in? no fixed reference points, our self being defined from the outside-inward. but where we are is not fully determined ‘outside-inwards’ since we are active participants in this ‘movement’ (spatial-relational transformation). and the outside-inward establishing of where we are and the inside-outward establishing of where we are together, simultaneously give us a meaningful understanding of ‘where we fit in’. ‘where we are’, within the writhing crowd on the exhibition ground depends on everyone and no-one in particular. it is all relative. if the world were a-centric like this we would go back to reading heraclitus. “Upon those that step into the same rivers different and different waters flow. . . They scatter and . . . gather. . . come together and flow away. . . approach and depart.” --- Heraclitus the mathematics of a-centric space is the mathematics of complex numbers. In gabor’s quantum theory based communications, asserting and accommodating are a dynamical one-ness. he gives the example of a rotating magnet in a dynamo, the asserting magnet and the accommodating field are a dynamical one-ness, the field being ninety degrees phase shifted from the asserting, equivalent in mathematics to multiplication by ‘i’, the square root of minus one. this is the same relationship as between acceleration (which we feel) and motion (our motive response to acceleration). so, a-centric dynamics are expressed in terms of complex (real and imaginary) mathematics. we can ‘see’ motion (tangible things moving) but we can only ‘feel’ spatial-accommodation. when we walk across the crowded exhibition ground we can see the tangibles moving and we can feel the press of the crowd lifting as a ‘channel’ opens up before us. which is more meaningful, the moving things or the accommodating of space? which should we focus on? which should we try to understand? there is just one dynamic on the crowded exhibition ground and we can inquire into it in these two ways (a) the movement of tangible bodies, center-based phenomena which we can see, (b) the evolving accommodating shape of space, a-centered phenomena that is purely implicit, imaginary, ephemeral, invisible, but something we can feel/intuit. intuition is unlike logical thinking. logical thinking proceeds in its development in a (time) sequence like an arithmetic series while intuition is the bringing of a multiplicity of real and imaginary experiences into coherent confluence in the mind, and meaning comes by way of an instantaneous illuminatory blitz. it is by intuition that we experience our inclusion in our a-centric living space. ‘where am i’ gives meaning to our ‘self’ that has no need of a ‘center’ in the foundational role. ‘what am i’ is inquiry that is ‘theory-laden’ and presupposes a center. ‘where is it’ is a more meaningful question in a continually transforming world space than ‘what is it’, ... since the moment our utterance prounounces ‘what it is’, it no longer applies. ‘where is it’ seems to be a natural exploration for us, ... we start off not knowing the world we are included in and we explore, ... all the while developing meaning as to the nature of our ‘self’ through ‘where we are’. sure, we may retire to a cottage in the country after many years of exploration and recount ‘who we are’ or ‘what we are’ in the self-centric terms of ‘the deeds we did’, ... but surely the a-centric ‘where we were’ was in a natural primacy, being the prerequisite for the self-centric ‘what we did’, i.e. as t.s. eliot puts it; "We shall not cease from exploration_And the end of all our exploring_Will be to arrive where we started_And know the place for the first time._Through the unknown, unremembered gate_When the last of earth left to discover_Is that which was the beginning;_At the source of the longest river_The voice of the hidden waterfall_And the children in the apple-tree_Not known, because not looked for_But heard, half-heard, in the stillness_Between two waves of the sea._Quick now, here, now, always—_A condition of complete simplicity_(Costing not less than everything)" how can we get to the self-centric question of ‘who are we?’ or ‘what are we?’ without first addressing the a-centric question of ‘where are we?’, .. how could our ‘self’ have any meaning out of the context of our unique inclusional situation in our shared living space dynamic?, ... out of the context of the spatial accommodating that opens up here for us and closes down there, as in our navigating of the exhibition ground. how can we reasonably describe our actions even in our passage through the crowded exhibition grounds in self-centric terms describing ‘what we did’, ... ‘i went straight ahead, then turned left, etc. etc.’ lipton, like most scientists concerns himself with the centric inquiry into what THINGS do. that word ‘thing’ is already theory-laden with ‘centricity’ and constrains our inquiry-framing. it is the same centricity that lipton complains about that gives us ‘gene theory’. he wants to dilute the centricity of gene theory so that we can escape from our psychological dependence that our health and development is predetermined by our genes, and he does dilute it, by passing the centricity over to ‘the magic cell membrane’ and the ‘mind and spirit’, the former extracting ‘knowledge’ of the ‘outside world’ on an individual basis that the latter combining the ‘perceptions’ of fifty million tiny eyeballs peering out into the world. but what lipton gets is one big composite eyeball that is condemned to report on things in time-series. had he retained the somatic awareness of all those little eyeballs looking out in all directions and sensing the world a-centrically he might have had something. why do the centric integration? do we have to have a paternalist central controller/regulator managing everything? is this just born of the sentimentality of having had a father to take care of us when we were growing up? can we not be the ‘one-ness’ of the balancing between outside-inward and inside-outward as so much of nature suggests?, ... as relativity and quantum theory suggest. as the above t.s. eliot excerpt from ‘little gidding’ testifies, it is not the poets who are making us captive to the ‘centric’ view, but the scientific minded thinkers, the descartes. another poet, allen ginsberg, speaks to this very point in an interview; DJB: Do you see the earth as being like an organism? Allen: No, no, no, absolutely not. None of that bullshit! No Gaia hypothesis. (laughter) No theism need sneak in here. No monotheistic hallucinations needed in this. Not another fascist central authority. DJB: That’s interesting, that you see the Gaia hypothesis as monotheistic and fascist whereas other see it as liberating. Allen: Well, you’ve got this one big thing. Who says it’s got to be one? Why does everything have to be one? I think there’s no such thing as one - only many eyes looking out in all directions. The center is everywhere, not in any one spot. Does it have to be one organism, in the sense of one brain, or one consciousness? DJB: Well, it could be like you said earlier, about how reality is simultaneously real and a dream. Maybe the earth or the universe is many and one at the same time. Allen: Well, yeah, but the tendency is to sentimentalize it into another godhead and to re-inaugurate the whole Judeo-Christian-Islamic mind-trap. lipton assumes centricity at the level of the human organism, ... lovelock and margulis at the level of the earth organism, ... dawkins at the level of the gene, ... in order to get by this, we have to suspend our belief in ‘the existence of objects’, and there is really no ground in our natural experience for believing in the existence of objects. they are the fallout or the tautological complement of conceiving of space as an absolute container that provides a place for populating with objects and a fixed operating theater for that actions/transactions/interactions. our modern physics is screaming out at us to relax all this absolutism of absolute fixed containing space and absolute objects, persisting closed forms with their own absolute centers, ... and instead accept an a-centric spatial relational dynamical view of the world wherein what we were declaring ‘objects’ are instead spatialrelational flow-features, inclusions in the spatial-relational flow that can in no way extracted and equipped with their own centers from which their behaviour outwells, other than by the free-ranging dynamics of our imagination which can impose fantasies on itself that are in no way imposed on nature. our natural experience is not capable of validating ‘centricity’ in objects of any type, genes, organisms, the planet earth. poincaré points this out with his observation that it doesn’t make any sense to say ‘the earth rotates’ since the motion we associate with the earth originates a-centrically from the simultaneous mutual influence amongst a multiplicity of ‘bodies’ (themselves a-centric flow-features). so, our centricity is a ‘habit’, a ‘convention’ as he says, and its utility is well known, since it lends itself to schemes of central control as in machinery, computers, communications, organization, ... but this is man’s (and particularly western man’s) centric implementation within an a-centric world and all of these center-driven implementations, ignoring as they do ‘where they are’ in the world, are like so many bulls in the china shop. what they do is to put centric ‘knowledge-driven’ (pushed out from the center) dynamics in an unnatural primacy over a-centric ‘experiencebalanced’ (allowing the actualizing of knowledge guided assertive potentials and the accommodative spatial backpressure mutually shape the actualization in a balanceseeking manner) dynamics. we will not be able to restore a-centric experience-balance-seeking dynamics to their natural primacy over centric knowledge-driven dynamics until we can get science to acknowledge the artificiality of the centric representation of nature (the euclidian space-framed representation of nature). the poets have been working on it, and the season is here for science-artists need to turn the heat up to HELP ACCOMMODATE the transformation that is building pressure within the realm of the imaginary and wanting to birth itself into the tangible dynamics. it is not ‘what we do’ that is going to count, but ‘what we help to accommodate’ (after all, ‘doing’ is at that same ‘accommodating’ when it is ‘done right’.) with apologies to shakespeare, ... a few modifications to the poetic conspiracy discussed by cassius and brutus in julius caesar may help to make the point; “There is a tide in the affairs of men_Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;_Omitted, all the voyage of their life_Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat; And we must take the current when it serves Or lose our ventures --- shakespeare” There is an accommodative space-pull in the affairs of nature’s creatures That sensitively complemented by our manner of actualizing potentials, opens up a Continuing balance and harmony in our common living space. Ignored, the self-centered knowledge driven voyage of individual lives Imprisons ‘self’ in the one-sided dance of disconnection In such a space-pull are we now and ever included And we must give ourselves sensitively to its balanced fulfilling Or find the warmth of our dancing partner replaced by the chill void of our own disjointedness. mitakuye oyasin, ted _________________ "To know even one atom fully would imply knowledge of its relations to all other phenomena in the infinite universe." - The Dalai Lama |
