Monday 5 December 2022

Matter, materialism, metaphysics and magic

I wake up in the night for a wee, touch my phone to check the time. It's 3:33am. Three three three. Half of six six six - half of the Number of the Beast. One night later, on the train to Szczecin, I wake up for a wee, touch my phone to check the time. It's 3:33am. Physicist Richard Feynman would dismiss this as a meaningless coincidence; biologists would point to a well-functioning circadian clock. But I feel that in our Cosmos, swimming in a sea of consciousness, there could be just a little bit more to this.

"Tell me Rabbi - what could such a sign... mean?"

Since then, I've had a couple of conversations about frequency - in the context of tinnitus and binaural beats - so is 333 significant?... I look up 333 Hz. This: "The 333 Hz frequency is said to recalibrate your DNA, opening up some sort of new consciousness for the listener." Pseudoscientific woo-woo? [Here's a classic example] But should I be so quick to dismiss, just because of the language in which this framed ('ascended masters', 'angelic messages')? Is there anything worth considering about numerology?

"How does God speak to us?"

Science - based on rational materialism - is running into a wall. This, of course, is not to belittle the achievements brought to us by science that enrich our lives - in the technology we use every day. Our lives are longer, healthier, fuller of things, more comfortable, less inconvenient, all thanks to science - but have we not lost something along the way? Rational materialism has also impoverished our lives, robbing them of much magic. 

And yet there are too many open questions, preventing mankind from having a complete understanding of the Universe. And it is here, through the cracks, through the gaps in our knowledge, that the magic shines back through. The 'God of the Gaps' - coming up with supernatural explanations for what we cannot rationally explain, was in full retreat since the Enlightenment, as more and more gaps were closed by scientific reason. But in recent decades, those gaps - those unanswered questions - seem to be growing in number and in size.

Primarily, these questions pertain to the most fundamental levels; the scope and nature of what we currently perceive as the observable Universe and all that is in it, down to the subatomic scale. 

Let's start with what came before the Big Bang and the ultimate fate of this Universe - and is it one of many? Was the Big Bang one of a series of Big Bangs - indeed, an infinite series thereof? Don't know.

What is the nature of time? Can entropy be reversed? Is faster-than-light travel possible via wormholes or warp drives? Are there only three dimensions plus time - or are there ten dimensions plus time, but we happen to be unaware of the remaining ones? Is there another, parallel, universe just five minutes ahead of our one? Or five days or seconds ahead?

And what is the nature of matter? Does the Standard Model encompass every subatomic particle that there is - or only those that we can currently perceive? Although it is believed to be theoretically self-consistent, it leaves some phenomena unexplained. In particular, the Standard Model is inconsistent with the theory of gravitation as described by General Relativity.

And what is dark energy? Without it, galaxies would not be flying apart from each other at an ever-faster pace. We can neither see it nor measure it - "dark energy is an unknown form of energy that affects the universe on the largest scales ... [t]he best current measurements indicate that dark energy contributes 68% of the total energy in the present-day observable universe." What is dark matter? Without it, galactic clusters would tear apart. Something invisible is holding them together. A galaxy must have several hundred times more mass in it than the stars alone can explain. The rest? "A hypothetical form of matter thought to account for approximately 85% of all the matter in the universe." Like dark energy, we can neither see it nor measure it.

Onto biology. What explains the leap from non-life to life? Does it happen frequently or rarely across this and other galaxies? And if frequently, and that life evolves into civilisations, "where is everybody?" - to quote Enrico Fermi. Or maybe they are here, but we can't (or shouldn't) see them?

But the biggest mystery of them all - and the biggest ontological divide between philosophers and scientists - is the nature of consciousness itself. Is it an emergent property, found only within brains that have evolved within complex life-forms? Or is it a fundamental property of all matter, along with mass and spin? Or even a fundamental property of the Cosmos, along with matter and energy?

All science has right now are 'currently accepted theories'. Accepted - with caveats - until a better theory is presented.

In the meanwhile, we can dream, imagine, speculate freely and widely. What if we can affect our material reality by way of consciousness alone? Affecting our fate, our health, our comfort?

Coming back to numerology, it's worth taking a peek at this section of the Wikipedia page on the subject, from the scientific perspective.

I'll mention a quote from British mathematician I.J. Good (1916-2009), he was a cryptologist at Bletchley Park with Alan Turing. Born Isadore Jacob Gudak to a Polish Jewish family in London, he later anglicised his name. The originator of the concept now known as 'intelligence explosion', he served as consultant on supercomputers to Stanley Kubrick, on 2001: A Space Odyssey

Good wrote: "There have been a few examples of numerology that have led to theories that transformed society... it would be fair to say that numerology was the origin of the theories of electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, gravitation.... So I intend no disparagement when I describe a formula as numerological."

Good implies that intuition is guiding minds to formulate materially useful solutions, and that attributing meaning to numbers is part of that process.

So then - 333 Hertz. Here's a bit of flaky woo-woo - it might just work...


Also - if you experience tinnitus, I recommend visiting Tomasz Szynalski's site, with this useful tone generator (use it to find the frequency of your tinnitus - mine comes in at around 8,500 Hz). Now, if you play the above piece of music and set the tone generator to 333 Hz, the effect is greater...

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