How Wide Is The Now?

We’re told to “live in the Now”, but how wide is the Now, given time needed for perception and thought? What was once the Now, is by then the Then – and as such, we are told it no longer exists.

What this tells (or rather, reminds) me, is how we are “trapped behind the eyeballs”. Within our minds, we live in our model of reality, i.e. as we perceive and understand it. Like the famous “This is not a pipe” painting, Zen reminds us of the difference of our taxonomy of objects and the objects themselves. The outside world of such objects do not exist within our mind, and our inner conscious self does not exist in an objective sense “out there”. Thus no surprise that “never the twain shall meet” in chunky time… except in the point of the Now?

Consider the “light cone” concept, where things that are too close in time for the given distance, are outside our universe of experience. That means for a very narrow “Now”, what’s happening to you right now, is outside my light cone. In fact, my feet are outside the light cone of my head – so where exactly is the “me” that is living in “the Now”, outside of which no past exists?

Photons no longer exist

The behavior of radiation obeys the inverse square law, which you can derive for yourself by considering a point source radiating onto a square. We expect photons to obey this law, and they do – sort of.

Just as temperature is the average movement of particles, saying nothing specific about the movement of a single particle, so radiation is the behavior of multiple photons, saying nothing about a single photon.

However, whenever a photon is observed, it has ceased to exist; the observation has “collapsed the waveform” by pinning down either where it was absorbed as a mass of energy, or where it passed through as the velocity of a wave, and Heisenberg had something uncertain to say about that.

Even when you know the velocity and origin of a photon, e.g. by generating it under suitably controlled circumstances, you are simply reversing the arrow of time – the photon didn’t yet exist when you predicted where it would go.

Everywhere and nowhere

This video postulates space/time (i.e. square root of c in Einstein’s famous equation) “doesn’t exist”, or rather is not fundamental, but emerges from a deeper layer; that makes sense to me. When the Now is within the Planck scale, where our known physics does not apply and space/time has yet to emerge, a photon may not be the middle panel as per this model…

Photon in past or future, as created or observed (consumed)

…but this one instead:

Photon in the Now (time = 0) is everywhere (space = infinity)

In this Plank-level pre-space/time, you may imagine a return of ye olde “Aether”, e.g. all those virtual-particle electron-positron pairs. A sufficiently energetic photon may stop dead in this to produce a spontaneous pair of particles, one being the anti-particle of the other. If these meet, they consume each other to produce a sufficiently energetic photon.

Now consider c, “the speed of light in a vacuum”, the space/time element in Einstein’s famous equation. If you consider “vacuum” to be empty space, this implies an expanding universe. If you consider “vacuum” to be filled with virtual particles that propagate photons as a series of wave-particle interactions within that fabric of virtual particles, then that process can explain the slow-down normally attributed to the Doppler effect from universal expansion.

Science is a Joke

Specifically, the scientific method works like a joke. This is not to dismiss the value of science; instead, up-scale your understanding of how jokes work!

More specifically, the result of an experiment is the punchline of a joke – needing the rest of the joke for context, else the meaning is lost.

This is what I mean when I extrapolate “the observer affects the experiment” to “the observer is the experiment”, in that it is the observer who creates the context within which the results appear.

Consider the behavior of charge flowing through a transistor junction. Is that natural science, inasmuch as that’s just what charge does? Or is it “applied science”, given that transistors don’t exist until we create them? If so, what is the role of the creator here – is it a part of our conscious self? If so, where was it in the year 1800, did it exist somewhere outside of ourselves as yet another entity, perhaps what we call Zen?

Next, we’ll consider the photon in “How wide is the Now?“…

Little Quirke’s Paradox

When I was very young, and I’d learned about infinity for the first time, I thought:

• In all the infinite universe, there must be something that never happens or never exists.

• Yet in the infinite universe, everything must eventually happen or exist.

Later, I learned to put “the” in quotes… and so the ever-emergent nesting began. In this year’s reading, I recognize this logic in Russel’s Paradox, Cantor’s Set Theory etc.

Set Theory was a big thing in junior school; our teachers seemed to struggle with it, while I found it exciting – possibly from the egoistic challenge of learning so easily, something teachers found hard, but also possibly because it was taught on a more peer-to-peer basis, teachers and us learning together.

You can deduce the nature of Zen from applying this logic to apparent dualities in general. For every duality there is an observer who creates it, forming the apex of a triangle – and that triangle constitutes a model set within a larger “all”.

At the top of our personal triangle, we see an irreconcilable duality of our experience of our self, and “everything else”. What is the observer of this duality? If “everything else” is understood as “everything that exists”, maybe there’s more; things that don’t exist, y’know? We can use the third part of the duality as a “dumping ground” for such stuff, and when we do, everything snaps into focus as a triangular fractal.

Or you can break the integer “fourth wall” and leave the observer on its own, and lump “everything else that isn’t everything else” as an undefined quantity. Hello, Pi!

The Study of Ignorance

To build knowledge, it is helpful to understand (and consciously experience) the nature of ignorance. To this end, consider the following tools; two “algebraic”, two “geometric” and one conceptual.

How would you understand X if all you know was Y?

In line with Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies and Edward de Bono’s Lateral Thinking, populate the above with words from two lists – then scramble these lists, then merge them. Examples:

soccer, movement of the ball
soccer, movement of money
politics, movement of money
politics, needs of the people
computers, electricity accurately measured but only once a day
computer processing, looking only at power supply rail activity
diabetes, the taste of urine
the brain, electricity down axons

How would you understand X if you did not know Y?

Similar approach to above, slightly different “algebra”; sufficiently useful to list as a tool of its own. How would you understand computers if you did not know electricity, e.g. if you were from the pre-electric age of mechanics and happened to find a computer, tore it apart, and studied the circuit boards as “maps”?

The gamut graph

This is drawn like a radar display disc, with lines of various aspects radiating from zero at the center, to maximum at the edge. For example, a color gamut has wavelengths of visible light as the “spokes”, with perfection being the full disc; various sensors, display screens, printers etc. would have blind kinks where particular colors were sensed or displayed poorly. Consider mixing radiative vs. absorbed red and green, producing yellow and brown respectively; how would you print yellow if red and green were the “primary colors”? Where can you see brown in a rainbow?

The gamut graph is a useful way to consider dissimilar information across contexts, e.g. if you took the lists used to feed the first two tools and mapped their apparent usefulness, e.g. “soccer, looking only at power supply rail activity” might score 0, but “diabetes, electricity down axons” might eventually score higher than expected.

The triangular relationship

So many formulas are “X = Y times Z”, e.g. voltage = current x resistance, distance = speed x time, pressure = temperature x density, etc. and these often nest and feed into each other, e.g. power = current x current x resistance, or energy = space/time x space/time x mass.

In each case, the product of the multiplication starts as the top of the triangle; then you tumble the triangle to undermine notions of cause and effect.

This helps to break down dualistic thinking, including the observer in the apparent duality. It also helps spot when emergent factors start to break the expected behavior of the duality. Both of these tap into the last tool, described next.

Consider the duality of self and universe, with Zen as the observer. More prosaically, consider the standard duality of trade and commerce, that of service provider and consumer. Originally, the top of the triangle could be ignored, as the consumer paid the provider, but in today’s world, the funder is an independent (and often dominant) factor.

Layers of abstraction

I wrote about this here, but may describe it differently now. Each layer arises from a layer beneath and drifts or breaks into something else above. Within the layer, certain truths hold that may or may not apply elsewhere. You can study a layer from the top down, e.g. how you experience life, or from the bottom up, e.g. what you know about computer chips and logic to understand the infosphere. Each may be considered as a system, but Goedel may break conservation laws, and Heisenberg may break the top-down view while chaos breaks the bottom-up view.

Usually, you’d expect the dominant stresses within a layer to break everything down to a diffuse end state, but in practice, tensions between these may generate complexity. This complexity is inherently a learning system, where “what works” comes to persist and grow. This is life; to game the system into creating, maintaining and extending these islands of complexity, flowing against the expected grain of decay. Selfhood, sentience and consciousness may emerge as winning strategies in this learning game of life.

The layer of human experience is within mind and language, where we model our understanding of the universe. Zen points to that which exists outside language, a la Goedel – i.e. the system of language (and mind?) is incomplete. Our sentience and ethics are here, but rest on (and are betrayed by) layers below.

The body is that of a multicellular animal in the biosphere, glued to a conveyor belt of time while free to move about in space. This scale is the most familiar to our dominant senses, and where the mind/brain generally operates. But the energy needs of such a large and active body requires us to consume the biosphere, even though our sentience finds this unethical. The inescapable sin; we cherish life, but are obliged to destroy it to live.

Within the body are various macroscopic organs, mostly tubes of one kind or another. This extends down in scale to the cellular level, bounded by membranes separating watery and oily domains. This layer is made up of very large and complex molecules, growing into the microscopic from the nanoscale and below.

The next layer down is chemistry, which is all about electron shells; this, rather than macroscopic space and time, is where our bodies arise. The inward intelligence of our immune systems operates from here to the cellular scale, and our oldest and all-but-forgotten senses of smell and taste operate here as well.

Below chemistry is the nuclear scale, affecting which elements occur in what quantities, and whether these are still (radio-)active or not. Below this is the Planck scale, which we define as where physics ceases to be measurable or make sense to our minds.

The thing about these layers of abstraction is they may involve strange loops, where emergent layers affect the deeper levels from which they arise. As humans, we do this all the time – hence the need to “tip over the triangle”, to check our assumptions about what arises from what, and what if anything is “fundamental”.

It’s only by studying ignorance, that we can follow Goedel’s escape from the tyranny of the measurable.

Biology: Turing-Complete Mechanics?

If a Turing-complete computer is one that can do any computation, determined only by the input program, then what would be the mechanical equivalent? A mechanical machine that could configure itself to do any mechanical task, determined only by its mechanical program?

The biosphere is a mechanical system at the molecular scale, encoded via the genetic language of xNA. The configurable mechanics are based on proteins, a modified form of which hosts the genetic language. The resulting machines operate at scales from moving atoms around (e.g. ion pumps) to moving whales around, or growing trees as durable structures. Impressively close to “Meccano–Turing complete”?

This is a step in our own scale, from limbs, tthrough slave beasts, crafts, manufacture, to self-assembly. The biosphere operates at the last of these levels, at the same scale as our nanotech.

We created Turing-complete computers, so we know what the fundamental components would be; memory cells, addressing, NAND gates, etc. and in keeping with the Turing philosophy, we’d seek to reduce these to the minimum set of different parts; RISC vs. CISC, if you like. At face value, the minimum set for the biosphere would be the amino acids as active components (“transistors”) and various other “found” atoms as the passive components (“resistors”, “capacitors”, “coils” etc.)

However, just as today’s PC processors are more like computers themselves than RISC or CISC, so it is that the biosphere’s mechanics are more layered and complex than a set of cogs, levers and blocks.