The Field, Part I
I’m about halfway through Lynne McTaggart’s “The Field”, which is worthwhile even if a little New Agey in style for my current tastes. She does a good job of telling the stories of scientists who have been studying consciousness, and painting a picture of a universe of quantum coherence that consciousness can tune like a radio. In many ways I agree. If I had to flatten my model of the universe, it would probably look just like The Field. I can almost accept a universe of vacuums full of energy and matter as charged space, but I think with a simple inversion, we can find ourselves in a universe of sense and reality, rather than simulation and holography.
I feel that Multisense Realism picks up where The Field leaves off. The notion of zero-point field and holographic transformation of wave interference patterns through microtubule quantum superposition being responsible for human consciousness is visionary, and I think almost true, but it still doesn’t jump from the easy problem to the hard problem. This view doesn’t explain why, if you have holographic interference patterns that contain tremendous amounts of information, why would it get transformed into anything other than what it is? Why does the transmission and reception of zero-point light feel like something?
If we turn this model inside out however, we might say that it is not wave interference patterns that are transformed holographically into experience, but multidimensional experience casting a 3-D shadow as holographically interrelated waving objects. It’s not wave patterns being reconstituted as a simulation or projection, but fantastically rich experiential realism that is being stepped down into flat quantitative mechanisms across space.
In the same way, the observation that “Consciousness at it’s most basic, was coherent light” would make more sense as “Light, at it’s most basic, is coherence (sense)”. Instead of this metaphysical notion of matter being eddies in a cosmic sea of light, we should ask why it is that our naive realism always seems to show us the opposite – a universe of objects in space, islands of light and coherence in a field of emptiness. We should ask why it is that tiny bits of substance can profoundly impact our minds and bodies, but rhythms and frequencies don’t seem to have much of a universal semiotic consistency. Seeing a graphic visualization of music has only vaguely consistent association with the aural experience of it. I’m not advocating naive realism, but rather than a counterintuitive metaphysics of quantum mechanical waves in space time creating a holographic consciousness, I suggest a counterintuitive physics of matter creating time and space by waving at itself. We are who is waving. Hollow, boundary-less, and eternal, but concrete and real – local temporal confinements of a timeless experiential firmament. There is no ‘light’ in space, only in our experience. Our ability to sense visually is activated through illumination of the sense organs themselves.
Where we are now, most of us can only conceive of an exteriorized universe. Even though our every moment of life is clearly spent as an interior narrative of an exterior circumstance, we assume that this is limited to living creatures. If we extend the possibility of interiority to all matter, we find that the external symptoms of consciousness – energy, coherent light, patterns, zero point field, etc is only the surface layer that is available to us through the stepped down architectures of our body and the instruments we have made for it. In a universe where matter is literally experience, the temporal distortions of General Relativity can give us a clue as to how different kinds of perception might co-exist, nested within each other, not just holographically but holotemporally. Time within time that can be modeled as inertial frames of scale from microcosm to macrocosm, confined to particular ranges of experience by frequency and wavelength. Not energy in space pretending to be matter, pretending to feel, but feeling through time re-presenting itself as energized matter across space.
Leave a Reply
Recent Comments
 | multisenserealism on Multisense Taoism |
 | Marc on Multisense Taoism |
 | ptero9 on Multisense Taoism |
 | Multisense Taoism |… on Continuum of Sense |
| Multisense Taoism |… on War of the Worldviews |
Multisense Realism 
Would you have any objection to postulating that all matter is a form of concentrated energy (E = mcc), and that all energy is aware-ized?
I agree in a sense but I think we can go further than that. I would say that energy is nothing except awareness in the efferent-output mode (motive), and matter is awareness in the afferent-input mode (sense). E=mc² gives us the measure of how the two modes relate to each other. When we talk about energy, we are referring to a quality of dynamism of events to persist through time and across space. To say that matter is concentrated energy is more true if we mean concentrated in time than concentrated in space as density.
To say that matter is concentrated energy conjures an image of a bright glowing haze being squeezed into a particle, which I think we could say is figuratively true, but not literally. It is *as if* that were happening as far as particles can be destroyed and there is an explosive dynamism produced in surrounding matter, but I don’t think that there is actually any bright glowing haze to begin with. If we use a sense-based model instead, with energy as nothing more or less than the experience-behavior of things (particles, objects, cells, bodies), so that empty space cannot in any way contain energy, I think it makes more sense in addressing our experience, and no less sense as far as interpreting physics. Energy is a notational concept of how things happen to matter statistically, but I think our mistake is to model it as a pseudosubstance that literally exists.
Instead, energy condenses as matter not through space but through time. It is not frozen energy but an accumulated history which has been perceptually collapsed due to the defining conditions of our subjectivity. We see a slice of the whole history of the thing from the outside as a 3D object.
Remember too that both fission and fusion produce energy. Most of that energy is not from particles being turned into energy but from mass being lost as nuclei are either “move into the same apartment together” under fusion and thus save on “rent”, or in fission by breaking up big businesses by selling off divisions. It’s interesting that it works both way – apparently because of the Iron Peak: Matter lighter than iron wants to be heavier – it’s looking for roommates. Matter heavier than iron wants to get rid of employees. That’s my goofy understanding anyhow. I think that particles can actually be lost but the amount of energy generated by that is surprisingly low. The power is in changing the relation of materials, not in converting them directly to energy.
It’s really a whole different way of looking at energy that I’m trying to get across. Once we can let go of our inherited 20th century models of energy and try out the sense-primitive model instead, I think we recover a great deal of our native realism. We experience energy directly. We see light, we feel heat, we hear sound. None of those things can be described in any meaningful way as objects in space. Our instruments and observations only tell us what they are experiencing, how the event changes them. The 20th century gave us a brilliant unifying vision of energy as an underlying quantitative omnipotence, but I think that is only true in the most physical and qualitatively flat sense.
I think a new understanding of energy must recognize the disunity of sense channels; the qualitative deepening of material experiences driven from top down significance attraction as well as bottom up accumulation. By breaking up the monolith of physics, we unify the outermost definition of the cosmos with the definitions which are evolving within (biology, neurology, anthropology, psychology, etc.). By breaking up Einsteinian spacetime relativity into sense-motive perception, we unify qualitative subjectivity with quantitative objectivity.
I enjoy reading the blog and the reply. I love to read things I would love to understand but I do not understand and the joy comes that it twists my mind to try to understand it lol. But the one thing that stuck out the most in the blog was….’we are who is waving’. I cant explain exactly why but I feel this as I look at stars, the sun, the changing of the moon, and nature. I feel as if Im looking at myself in some strange way, as if I am saying ‘hi’ to myself, just by observing nature around me.
Thanks! I’m grateful that there are people like you who take the time to suffer through the trouble of trying to understand something that may not be understandable. As far as saying hi to yourself, yes. There’s that poem: A Thousand Winds (Mary Elizabeth Frye)
Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.
I guess that’s a kind of animism, where we can either see as evidence of all things reflecting a common source or as our personal desire to escape mortality. With Multisense Realism I’m trying to map those two extremes as points within the continuum of perspectives. The more your consciousness is materialistic, the more you view the universe through the lens of an isolated object – a body in a world of distant bodies. The more your consciousness is idealistic, the more you view the universe through an Eastern, Indra’s Net kind of perspective where bodies are insubstantial reflections of a single entity or feeling or Aum.
Ah yes, the words of that poem helped me after my mothers death. Its amazing the power of words sometimes. It seems so obvious to me that there is an illusion here that we are separate ‘things’ (some dont see it as an illusion and just because I call it that, does not mean its without purpose, not sure if illusion is the right word anymore)…what Im trying to say though that to me, it seems obvious that ‘life’ is not separate things at all, but it just seems that way on the outside. lol using words like ‘outside’ and ‘illusion’, Im going to have to find better ways to describe what Im wanting to say. But anyways, topics of conciousness are very entertaining to me and I wonder sometimes as I look out into the world and people are so caught up in all the distractions around them, why is it that some people are more interested in the universe down to its very working of particles and some dont give such things even a thought through the whole life.