"Honey, it's Post!"

Regular quote from my children, delivered in the American accent of their Californian cousins. From midnight, it's Lent (post in Polish - it rhymes with 'lost' and 'cost', rather than 'host' or 'most'). For the 28th year in a row, there no alcohol for 46 days, no meat, no salt snacks, no confectionery, no fast food. Will I be able to cut fish and dairy too this year? I'll give it a try, but if my hotel (the Mercure in Gdynia) can't offer me a breakfast with enough non-meat/dairy/fish protein to get me through to a late lunch, I shall fall at the first hurdle.

But Lent is not just about giving things up. That's but a start. The aims should be to do new things. Over the years, Lent has been starting new habits. This blog was launched during Lent; my exercising similarly (press-ups etc); kicking salt snacks and over-salting food (before even tasting it) - Lent is about the will to stop doing bad things, but also to develop good practices.

Over the years, Lent has become a time of enhanced spiritual ambitions - seeking answers to life's existential questions. How to place that spiritual search within a scientific framework that avoids being New Agey wishful thinking?

This year I will be looking at two things - quantum physics - what we know (and more importantly what we don't know) - and consciousness, in particular, memory.  Last year's Lenten search drew heavily on Stuart A. Kauffman's Humanity in a Creative Universe - a book that drew a line under the certainties of the Newtonian worldview. This year, I will take a broader look, considering Adventures in Memory: The Science and Secrets of Remembering and Forgetting by Hilde Østby and Ylva Østby, In Search of Schrodinger's Cat by John Gribbin, and the 1975 classic, The Tao of Physics, by Fritjof Capra. I want to delve as deep into the science as I can, and draw conclusions as to the purpose and sense of our lives, and in particular the nature of consciousness, what it means to be me, and you - and whether our consciousness can exist beyond our physical bodies.

Phew! A long way from kicking salt snacks to contemplating eternal life, but then that is what Lent is there for.

Sitting here in Gdynia, I am finishing a bottle of Fortuna Czarne Whisky Wood, a strong black Polish beer brewed with shavings from whisky barrels (7.5%). Intense, yes, the whisky's there - but for my palate it's OK but too sweet. Well, that's it - next alcohol will be downed at 00:01 on Sunday 21 April. In the meanwhile, time to grow, and move along that path towards greater peace of mind. Healthy spirit within healthy mind within healthy body. The spirit - consciousness - is all important.

Credo: "I believe in one God, the maker of all things visible and invisible." Yes, still true. But defining 'God' is crucial. More on this over the coming 46 days.

This time last year:
Consciousness, and the war between Science and Religion

This time two years ago:
The atoms within us

This time five years ago:
Our house gets connected to the town drains

This time six years ago:
No more revelations

This time eight years ago:
Free will vs. destiny

The Good News

For my brother Marek and for Richard B., both of whom have given me significant pointers.

For the second time in my recent life, I have had that profound feeling of 'good news' - rather as those who first heard the Gospel must have felt. It is an exultant sense of revelation, a feeling that life does have meaning and that a rational yet spiritual path exists between that of reductionist science and organised religions.

The first such moment of enlightenment came during my reading of Stuart A. Kauffman's  Humanity in a Creative Universe. The second came a few days ago, while watching Nikola Danaylov interviewing Stuart Hameroff. Now, Prof Hameroff is well-known for his work on consciousness  with Sir Roger Penrose, mathematician, physicist, philosopher and author of The Emperor's New Mind. So I was expecting a good interview.

I'm not one for the medium of video or podcast; I prefer the written word. But in this case, I watched from beginning to end, sensing a profound confirmation of my instinctive beliefs in the direction of where truth ultimately lies.

"Consciousness is really the most important thing there is... Without consciousness there is no purpose to life," says Prof Hameroff. "We can't measure or detect consciousness directly," he says, referring to David Chalmers' concept of the philosophical zombie - a human that appears exactly like us but lacking the subjective experience of awareness. "The brain is a pinkish-grey piece of meat with a hundred billion neurons which talk to each other through synapses; most people say the brain is a computer, neurons are like bits; if you get complicated enough computation and consciousness emerges as a novel property. But no one can explain why it emerges. We have many things that are complex that are not conscious... So computation and complexity are not the answer."

Prof Hameroff mentions the philosophical enigma known as the hard problem of consciousness - how and why sentient organisms have qualia or phenomenal experiences. "The predominant opinion among neuroscientists, artificial intelligence researchers and computer scientists is that the brain is basically a straightforward classical Newtonian computer, do you agree with that?" asks Mr Danaylov. "It is for certain things, for non-conscious behaviour. But for consciousness, you need an extra ingredient. You need quantum mechanics, I believe," replies Prof Hameroff.

He then sets out the Orch-OR (Orchestrated Objective Reduction) hypothesis, devised by himself and Sir Roger Penrose, which posits that consciousness originates from processes inside neurons, rather than from connections between neurons. This is a quantum-physics process called objective reduction, orchestrated by microtubules within the neurons.

"The brain has a 100 billion neurons, each neuron has 1,000 synapses, each switching at around 100 hertz. That gives you 10¹⁵ to 10¹⁶ operations per second for the entire brain. So the [artificial intelligence] Singularity types say when we have a computer that can do 10¹⁶ operations per second we'll have brain equivalence, it will be identical to your brain, consciousness can happen in it. Now the trouble with that is that when you go to the microtubular level there's 10⁹ tubulins - that's the subunits within the neuron - switching at 10 megahertz so that's 10¹⁶ operations per second per neuron, and there's 10¹¹ neurons in the brain, so to simulate a brain you need 10²⁷ operations per second." Prof Hameroff draws our attention to single-cell organisms such as amoeba and paramecium, which display feelings and signs of learning.

He mentions his cooperation with Sir Roger Penrose, which happened after the publication of The Emperor's New Mind, a counterblast aimed at the AI/Singularity proponents. Sir Roger argues that human consciousness is non-algorithmic, suggesting that it occurs at the quantum mechanics level. While Sir Roger had the maths and physics, his book did not posit any biological mechanism through which these quantum decompositions could happen - Prof Hameroff proposed microtubules, and Orch-OR was born.

"Dreams are quantum information. Time is all screwed up, you have multiple co-existing possibilities, the logic is backwards, bizarre things that match quantum information which has not reached collapse. If it does, you have a conscious moment," says Prof Hameroff, whose day job is as an anaesthetist and sees people slipping in and out of consciousness routinely.

Mr Danaylov asks about how the publication of Orch-OR was met by scepticism from prominent scientists who said that absolute zero was needed to perform quantum computing. "For a while, it was theory vs theory," replies Prof Hameroff. "Ours is the most comprehensive theory," he said (the interview was conducted in 2013) "because it covers neuroscience, physics, philosophy and quantum biology." No other theory of consciousness, he says, puts it all together. "Quantum mechanics is the most successful theory ever put forth. It predicts things out to 25 decimal points. Yes it's mysterious. Just because it's mysterious doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It's clear consciousness and quantum mechanics are related." The quantum effects in photosynthesis prove that absolute zero is not necessary, he says.

AI has, over the past 20 years demonstrated ever greater intelligence, but no sign of anything near artificial consciousness, says Prof Hameroff, doubting that computers will ever reach that state. "Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, it will happen when computers reach a certain level of complexity," proposes Mr Danaylov. Prof Hameroff decries such thinking. "Consciousness emerging from complexity... is a desperate explanation."

"In the philosophical sense, if the Orch-OR theory is correct, it means that consciousness is really happening at the level of space-time geometry, at the Planck scale [1.6x 10^-35m], the lowest level of the universe, between the ears, in the microtubules in the brain." Prof Hameroff talks about patients with cardiac arrests and near-death, out-of-body experiences. "They saw a white light, a tunnel, in some cases they floated out of their body. Maybe - and I've seen this happen - in normal circumstances the space-time geometry is in the brain, but when quantum coherence is lost, the blood stops flowing, the energy is lost, the quantum information isn't destroyed, but it sort of dissipates and leaks out into the universe at large, but remains entangled, a sort of quantum soul, if you will; the patient revives, it goes back in, the patient says, 'hey I was floating above my body'. Or maybe if the patient dies it persists indefinitely in the universe at large, maybe even goes back into a new organism or creature - reincarnation. It makes these things possible. It makes afterlife a plausible scientific possibility."

This is amazing.

Mr Danaylov asks Prof Hameroff whether he is a dualist. Prof Hameroff says "I am not a dualist. I think that the soul would be in Planck scale space-time geometry, not outside science. It is outside of the classical [Newtonian], material world. The quantum level is pre-material, because the collapse hasn't happened yet. Material emerges from quantum, it's at that point that consciousness happens. Quantum information can exist in space-time geometry at large in the universe... You can't say 'no' until you prove what consciousness is."

Summing up then, "consciousness is more than computation. Consciousness is something deeper, more profound, connected to the quantum structure of the universe. It bridges between science and spirituality." Wow. This aligns most perfectly with the way my thinking on these matters has evolved over the decades.

If these quotes have piqued your interest and you want to watch the whole interview, please feel free to do so - I'd be interested in your reactions!

 



This time last year:
Jeziorki railway modernisation - update

This time three years ago:
On the death of my mother

This time four years ago:
Marek Raczkowski on All Saints' Day

This time five years ago:
Disclosure of UFOs - are we ready? 

This time six years ago:
Jeziorki pond development

This time seven years ago:
Captain Wrona's perfect gear-up landing

This time ten years ago:
Where's the daylight gone?

This time 11 years ago:
All Saints' Day - Wszystkich Świętych

The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli (Pt 3 of 3)

[For Part 1 of the review, click here]

The final part of Carlo Rovelli's The Order of Time pulls away from the physics and takes the human view of the phenomenon. "We inhabit time as fish live in water." The very source of time, suggests Rovelli, is our own perception. We see things emerge, unfold, become; the process runs forwards, never backwards. Evolution is a continuous and one-way process, as is entropy. "The entire difference between past and future may be attributed solely to the fact that the entropy of the universe was low in the past."

Rovelli asks us to imagine being on a high mountain, looking down into a valley covered by a sea of white clouds. The surface of the clouds gleams white, immaculate. We start walking down. The air becomes more humid, less clear, the sky no longer blue. Eventually, we find ourselves in a fog. What happened to that well-defined surface of the clouds? "It vanished. Its disappearance is gradual; there is no actual surface that separates the fog from the clear air above. Was it an illusion? No, it was a view from afar. It's like that with all surfaces. This marble table would look like a fog if I were shrunk to a small enough, atomic scale. Everything in the world becomes blurred when seen close up."

This is actually a huge insight, not only in terms of time and physics, but indeed economics and politics too - detail blurs perception. We tend to want our truths clear-cut; yet the more we drill down, the more complex it all becomes.

Back down at that atomic level, the glass of hot water left to cool on the kitchen table is abuzz with vibrating molecules shedding heat energy over time. It is the act of observing those blurry vibrations (always slower than before, never faster) that generates time. Rovelli speaks of 'thermal time' and 'quantum time', though this is not time as we experience it, rather it is the granular, discrete, packets of time, determined by the speed and position of a molecule. For it is down here, that the direction and evolution of time becomes a phenomenon of physics, and not a matter of human perception.

"It took us thousands of years, but in the end we managed to understand the revolving of the heavens: we understood that it is we who turn, not the universe..." furthermore "...perhaps the flow of time is not a characteristic of the universe, but is due to the particular perspective that we have from our corner of it." The entropy of the universe was low in the past, as the second law of thermodynamics demands, it is increasing. As it does so, "memories exist, traces are left - and there can be evolution, life and thought."

Yes. Rovelli moves into the human sphere; it is memory that allows our consciousness to perceive the passing of time. Marcel Proust's famous madeleine cake from À la recherche du temps perdu (those memory flashbacks prompted by long-forgotten smells and tastes) gets the status of chapter heading. "Proust could not have been more explicit writing... 'Reality is formed only by memory'. And memory is a collection of traces, an indirect product of the disordering of the world, of that small equation, ΔS ≥1." Here on earth, the human brain is the ultimate time keeper, storing across a network of many billions of brains, past, present and to come, the memories and the traces of lives measured down the millennia. "We are time. We are space, this clearing opened by the traces of memory inside the connections between our neurons. We are memory. We are nostalgia. We are longing for a future that will not come."

The final chapter heading, The Sister of Sleep, looked familiar. Of course - it is also a chapter heading from Tischner/Żakowski, Death, our Sister. Tischner is quoting St Francis of Assisi; Rovelli is quoting Bach. Death marks the end of each individual human's time - then what? "We see just a tiny window of the vast electromagnetic spectrum. We do not see the atomic structure of matter, nor do we see the curvature of space." We are too limited in our understanding to comprehend. The nearest most of us can get is through music, he suggests. "Song, as St Augustine observed, is the awareness of time. It is time. In the Benedictus of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis the song of the violin is pure beauty, pure desperation, pure joy. We are suspended, holding our breath, feeling mysteriously that this must be the source of meaning. That this is the source of time. The song fades and ceases. The silver thread is broken... the earth returns to dust. We can close our eyes, rest. This all seems fair and beautiful to me. This is time."



On his Wikipedia page, it says that Rovelli sees the conflict between science and religion as unsolvable because most religions demand the acceptance of some unquestionable truths, while science is based on the continuous questioning of any truth. Yet it is clear from this book - as it is from Stuart A. Kauffman's Humanity in a Creative Universe - that the author's position on their being some greater, mystical power at work is far removed from that of Richard Dawkins. We are far more than meat robots in an accidental universe!

This book is relatively accessible to the general reader (if you made it through Hawking's A Brief History of Time you'll find this easier and - dare I say - more artistic). Every science writer has their strengths; Rovelli's for me has been his understanding of the role of entropy in the universe. Here and there, he argues in favour of his loop quantum gravity theory; but then you'd have to understand string theory to get this. Shortcomings? I'd like to have read what Rovelli makes of dark matter and dark energy (and how a universe that's expanding at an accelerating rate sits with second law of thermodynamics). And also about quantum entanglement, superluminary transfer of quantum information (which in effect suggest that there is such as thing as 'instantaneous', by inference positing the theoretical possibility of universal time).

Above all, how the idea that atoms seem to defy entropy; electrons in position around their neutrons for ever. Are they only defying entropy - or are they defying time itself?

I like the small hardback format, the paper stock, the clear 12/14pt type and page layout; physically the book is a nice object to have in your hand.

Many thanks to my father for getting me the book; now I look forward to reading Carlo Rovelli's Seven Brief Lessons in Physics; look out for my review on this blog in early June.

This time last year:
The year's most beautiful day

This time four years ago:
W-wa Wola became W-wa Zachodnia Platform 8 two years ago today 

This time five years ago:
From yellow to white - dandelions go to seed

This time six years ago:
The good topiarist

This time eight years ago:
Wettest. May. Ever.

This time ten years ago:
Blackpool-in-the-Tatras

The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli (Pt 2 of 3)

[For Part 1 of the review, click here]

The past is fixed; the future is open. The present, suggests Rovelli, that fleeting intersection between what was and what will be, doesn't exist. "Nothing is. Things happen, they don't exist." Impermanence is ubiquitous. Just as things can be disassembled into their ever and ever smaller components, down to subatomic particles, so events can be taken apart. "A war is not a thing, it's a series of event. A storm is not a thing, it's a collection of occurrences... Things are, in themselves, events that for a while are monotonous"; for example, a large rock or mountain that is constantly shedding molecules under the influence of atmospheric phenomena. At our level, it seems permanent, a thing. Yet at the molecular level, its surface is undergoing continuous change.

A human being? "It's a complex process which food, information, light, words and so on enter and exit... A knot of knots in a network of social relations, a network of emotions exchanged..."

Understanding the world, the universe, on the basis of things rather than events means that you end up ignoring change. Change happens across time; here I feel that Hawking explains the temporal aspects of Big Bang better than Rovelli, who's better at the level of planet Earth than the expansion of the universe 13.8 billion years ago.

The notion that the past, present and future are all equally really, and that the passing of time is merely an illusion is called eternalism; Einstein wrote "People who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion". Eternalists have devised the concept of the 'block universe', a single block; all equally real; only the passage of time from its beginning to its end is illusory.

Prof Rovelli is not, however, an eternalist; like Stuart A. Kauffman, he sees the future as being something that isn't predestined; it is unfolding, becoming (both men use these two words to describe the future). Kauffman has the advantage of being an evolutionary biologist. Not a single, set block of time encompassing the entire universe from its beginning to its end, rather something that in itself is creative.

Our languages are inadequate, says Rovelli, to discuss time. When we observe an event upon the face of the sun, we see something that occurred eight minutes and 20 seconds ago, yet we describe it in the present tense. There's no tense that captures the phenomenon of time stretching over distance. Earlier today, the BBC ran a story about the discovery of oxygen in a distant galaxy as it was just 500 million years after the Big Bang (in other words 13.3 billion years ago). The oxygen, the oldest ever found, itself was the result of an even earlier galaxy that existed some 250 million years after Big Bang. And yet it was only just spotted recently; mankind lived in its ignorance until now. Is that oxygen still out there today? We can have no idea. Watch this space for 13.3 billion years!

Moving from language to physics, Rovelli is keen to promote his own field of expertise, namely quantum gravity (where there are several competing theories). Rovelli champions loop quantum gravity (based around something at the Planck-length scale named 'spin-foam'). The other main theory is string theory. Both (and other less well-established ones) aim to unify Einstein's General Theory of Relativity (which places gravity into the context of spacetime) and the other three fundamental forces (electromagnetism and strong- and weak atomic forces). Suffice to say, I am entirely out of my depth when trying to really understand either loop- or string theory, even by way of metaphor. However, the idea that gravity can be quantised - broken down into discreet particles at the Planck level - I grasp. One way or another, the problem of time is central to an understanding of gravity, which is why Rovelli is so fascinated by it.

Equations without time, is what Rovelli is angling at here. "Time and space are no longer containers [of the universe]. They are only approximations of a quantum dynamic that knows neither time nor space. There are only events and relations [between events].

In Part III, Rovelli returns to the human scale, to our understanding of the passage of time, and gets metaphysical.

This time last year:
The fossil-fuel powered car is dead

This time three years ago:
With Blood and Scars by B.E. Andre - book review

This time four years ago:
We can all take photos like Vivian Maier - can't we? 

This time five years ago:
Ethereal and transient

This time six years ago:
Wrocław railway station before the Euro football championships

This time seven years ago: 
By tram to Boernerowo

This time nine years ago:
Food-Industrial Shop; rural USA or Poland

This time 11 years ago:
Twilight time, Jeziorki

The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli (Pt 1 of 3)

Having read Stuart A. Kauffman's magnificent Humanity in a Creative Universe, and the late Steven Hawking's best-selling A Brief History of Time, I am thankful to my father for buying me another excellent pop-science book, Carlo Rovelli's The Order of Time. For those to whom the name is unfamiliar, Prof Rovelli is the author is the Seven Brief Lessons on Physics (a million copies sold, translated into 41 languages); my father is reading this right now (so I look forward to reviewing it next month).

Compared to Prof Hawking's book about the same subject, The Order of Time has two advantages. One is it was written 30 years later, and science has advanced somewhat. The second is that the author, being a historian and philosopher of science as well as a purely theoretical physicist, places the science into a broader context of human wisdom.

Divided into three parts, Prof Rovelli strips away our perceptions of time as something that flows uniformly from the past, through the present and into the future at a regular rate. Einstein proved, over a century ago, that time contracts and stretches, being affected by mass and velocity. Time passes more slowly the nearer one is to a massive object than further away; time passes more slowly the faster one is travelling. Today for a few thousand dollars, says Rovelli, you can buy a timepiece accurate enough to show the difference in time between sea level and mountain peaks, and between a stationary observer and one flying at supersonic speed. So there is no objective 'universal' time; spacetime is stretchable. The reason that we don't notice this is down to scale. We see the sun as it was over eight minutes ago, the moon as it was 1.3 seconds ago. It doesn't make any difference to our lives unlike international time zones, an artificial construct.

Rovelli doesn't mention (as it is as yet inconclusive) the notion of information being passed between entangled particles instantly - faster than the speed of light, stuff that Kauffman touched upon. A large-scale experiment conducted this month seems to confirm Einstein's worries about 'spooky action at a distance'. If confirmed, it suggests that information can travel at superluminary speed - question can that happen at interstellar distances?

Entropy, the key to understanding time

Rovelli brings to our attention the idea that Rudolf Clausius's equation for entropy change (ΔS ≥1) is "the only equation of fundamental physics that knows any difference between past and future. The only one that speaks of the flowing of time." Indeed, ΔS ≥1 is the only equation in the book's main text (much like the only equation in Hawking's book is E=mc². ). This is because it is significant in the age of quantum mechanics; other equations are reversible, whereas if you leave a glass of hot water in a cold room, the water will only tend to get cold. It is here we can witness the passage of time. But again, there's a notable gap - like Hawking (who at least mentions it), the role of dark energy pushing our universe apart at an accelerating speed - isn't mentioned by Rovelli.

The quanta of time attract Rovelli's attention. Just as light is both particles and waves, so time is fluid and yet granular. The shortest unit of time is Planck time; a hundred millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second (That's ten to the minus 44th). In other words, you cannot have 'half a Planck time'; Plank Time is indivisible. Similarly, out there at the subatomic end of spacetime, Planck length ("the minimum distance below which the notion of length becomes meaningless") is a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimetre. Down at this level, electrons have no precise position, everything is a blur - until observed by the conscious observer.

Essentially, Rovelli is tearing down everything we instinctively feel about time and its passing. He asks us to imagine the moment Copernicus watched the sun set and having the insight that it is not the sun descending below the horizon, but rather him sitting on a planet that's spinning backwards as it orbits a stationary star. What this paradigm shift means for science - and for philosophy - I will cover tomorrow in Part 2 of this three-part review.

This time two years ago:
Brexit and Trump - a political fiction

This time six years ago:
The law of diminishing returns disappears up its own fundament

This time seven years ago:
A night at the Filters (Museum Night 2011)

This time eight years ago:
Warsaw's Museum Night

This time nine years ago:
Exploring my anomalous memory events

Religion and Happiness: Lent 2018 summary

Day 46: Easter Saturday

My annual period of self-denial and spiritual focus is coming to an end; this is the 27th year in a row - the first was in 1992. Then I gave up nothing more than giving up alcohol, confectionery, fast food and salt snacks between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday. Over the years, I've forsworn more items (meat in particular), but more importantly, I have begun treating Lent as a time for spiritual growth rather than just giving up things.

After the excesses of Christmas - the alcohol-fuelled merrimaking and excessive food consumption that sees you though the dark, cold and miserable time of year in  our hemisphere, I look forward to the beginning of Lent more and more with each passing year; it's both a welcome detox for the body and a chance to revisit those most important aspects of what it is to be human, to be conscious, to be alive, to think, to reason, to feel.

As those of you who've followed by Lenten quests over the years, a key issue for me is to seek a clearer path towards the truth. In general terms, I believe it lies neither in the received truths of organised religions nor in the reductionist materialism of traditional science. Rather, I intuit that we humans do have a spiritual nature that is metaphysical and indeed supernatural; that consciousness evolves, that the universe has a purpose, and that God exists - but we have yet to come anywhere close to an understanding of what God is or means. All we can do is seek - our seeking should be based on insights, intuition and reason, on reading widely from many sources, looking for highest common factors, looking for commonalities between cutting-edge science and human tradition - and intuition.

Some of us have a need for a spiritual search, a search for meaning - others don't. Those that don't may feel the need to dismiss my personal search as misguided. But the search is moving me in the right direction, and this Lent I have found much inspiration in Stuart A. Kauffman's Humanity in a Creative Universe. While taking great pains not to write off classical Newtonian science and all the advances it has brought us over the past three centuries, Kauffman opens doors to new ways of looking at our universe that do not dismiss an intuitive approach.

Doubts in my mind have often been engendered by that cold scientific approach. It is born of the faith that consciousness resides in the brain and that death means a final snuffing out, an extinction of self; nothingness. Classical science based on certainties plotted by quadratic equations would posit that thinking otherwise is nothing but self-delusion. But Kauffman - and other serious scientists too - are pointing to a new view of reality, based on the uncertainties at the heart of quantum mechanics, and on the rejection that we're not far from uncovering a final grand theory of everything. The evolving universe is too complex for that, says Kauffman, who posits that the laws of nature themselves may be evolving. I found myself several times during the course of reading this book having insights that not only brought on new horizons - they actually made me feel happier. [I felt a 'Good News' moment of true joy when I read that a serious theoretical physicist arguing that dark energy and dark matter might indeed be consciousness, or that consciousness might be a property of matter along with energy and mass. I was overjoyed to read these ideas.]

Yes - happiness. Being optimistic and positive is a far better way to approach life than being pessimistic and negative. I have met people, ostensibly successful, wealthy and driven, whose worldview is dreadfully negative, whose negativism and misanthropy acts as a black hole sucking in all the hope of people around them. We should avoid contact with such people.

Happiness brings about greater mental health, health and happiness are linked; if you feel there is sense to life, that life is about moving forward on that great universal continuum from Zero to One, then your life has more meaning, you are more likely to fulfil your human potential.

This time last year:
Health and fitness in a Quarter of Abstinence

This time five years ago:

Easter Sunday in the snow

This time seven years ago:
Cycling to work - the new season begins

This time eight years ago:  
Five weeks into Lent

A Brief History of Time review, Part 2

Lent 2018, Day 44

My Lenten quest this year strolls along the boundary layer between Science and Religion; an important area of inquiry through which few humans tread. I have come to have a deep respect for Stuart A. Kauffman's Humanity in a Creative Universe - the words 'humanity' and 'creative' being all-important descriptors of the word 'universe'. Kauffman's world view is more open to notions of the universe having a direction and purpose; of a universal consciousness that's continually evolving. Steven Hawking's A Brief History of Time hails from a passing age, in which it was believed that before too long, science would be able to explain everything.

As I wrote yesterday in Part 1 of my review, Hawking's bestseller remains a milestone in popular-science writing. It sets out the two theories of how we understand this universe in which we live, at the subatomic level (quantum mechanics) and at the galactic level (relativity). It also explains black holes, the radiation (subsequently named Hawking radiation) that seeps out of them, despite previous theories that nothing should escape their gravitational pull. And Hawking describes Time as an arrow that flies only one way - and why that should be.

So there we are, at the end of chapter 9, cheering on scientific progress in its quest to unify all theories into one, so we end up understanding everything. But hold on... Chapter 10 is called The Unification of Physics, and in it, Hawking explains the current (as of 1988) thinking in terms of unifying quantum theory with relativity. It was all meant to be so simple... "In 1928, physicist and Nobel prize winner Max Born [said] 'Physics, as we know it, will be over in six months'. " Hawking continues; "I still believe that there are grounds for cautious optimism that we many now be near the end of the search for the ultimate laws of nature."

Aafter introducing the then-trendy superstring theory (space-time was thought to consist of ten or 26 dimensions back in 1988), he asks: "But can there really be such a unified theory? Or are we perhaps just chasing a mirage?" Kauffman believes that a Grand Unified Theory, a single set of rules that consistently describes and explains everything, is exactly that.

Hawking sets out three possibilities:

"1) There really is a complete unified theory, which we will someday discover if we are smart enough.

2) There is no ultimate theory of the universe, just an infinite sequence of theories that describe the universe ever more accurately.

3) There is no theory of the universe; events cannot be predicted beyond a certain extent but occur in a random and arbitrary manner."

I intuitively rule out possibility 1) on the grounds that we are not smart enough. The complexity of the universe (be it just our biodiversity or our human economy here on planet earth) is growing so rapidly that it would be folly to believe that we could. I'm happy enough with 2); an infinite sequence will take an eternity to unravel - to me, that feels instinctively right. And 3) also seems right - until eternity minus one chronon, when all (and I mean ALL) will become totally clear.

Hawking then sets up a straw-man argument... "Some would argue for possibility 3) on the grounds that if there were a complete set of laws, that would infringe God's freedom to change his mind and intervene in the world. It's a bit like the old paradox: Can God make a stone so heavy that he can't lift it?" Reductionist materialist scientists can take pops at medieval views of God and they can do it well; but it's time for religions to reconsider the notion of a supreme deity in much the same way that scientists (including Einstein himself) had to reconsider the laws of nature once the theory of quantum mechanics was proven to be correct.

Kauffman could also suggest a fourth possibility, namely that the laws of nature, the universal constants, the boundary conditions, are themselves evolving - so science is ultimately chasing a moving target. Kauffman's view of the universe is far grander that the dry calculus of classical physics. Positing consciousness as a property of matter, along with mass and energy hugely complicates mankind's search for a final theory. Those biologists who insist that the seat of consciousness resides exclusively in the human brain (and in the brain of higher-order animals) have yet to prove it, just as theoretical physicists have yet to unify quantum theory and relativity.

But then Kauffman has yet to prove that consciousness resides in subatomic particles; experiments into the way the conscious human observer can influence the outcome of quantum experiments by force of will are are a long way off from showing any conclusive results.

One way or another, science is far from 'over'; it behoves those of us who take the view of the universe as being purposeful, travelling in an untidy line from Zero to One, through chaos to order, to keep up with the latest discoveries in cosmology and particle physics.

Let me give the last word to Hawking: "What would it mean if we actually did discover the ultimate theory of the universe? If the theory was mathematically consistent and always gave predictions that agreed with observations, we could be reasonably confident that it was the right one. It would bring to an end a long and glorious chapter in the history of humanity's intellectual struggle to understand the universe." But Hawking acknowledges that this is not all... "Even if we do discover a complete unified theory, it would not mean that we would be able to predict events in general." This is because of a) the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics limits our powers of prediction and b) the equations would be, says Hawking, too complex to solve "except in very simple situations."

But even so, "A complete, consistent, unified theory is only the first step, our goal is a complete understanding of the events around us, and of our own existence." Phew! Here's Hawking getting very close how I see Heaven, Nirvana, Valhalla what have you - total consciousness, awareness of everything.

Well worth taking the trouble to read. Steven Hawking's great message to mankind was "be curious, be determined." He most certainly was both. He inspired many people to inquire more deeply into the nature of our universe. Striving to make the most of our potential as human beings is a noble aim.

On my own journey from Zero to One, I feel that this Lent I have taken another small step forward; life is a quest to learn; don't come to me for spiritual answers but for an open-ended discussion from which I hope all parties will increase their understanding at least a bit. See this life as but a short stage in an eternally long learning process.

This time three years ago:
"We don't need no [tertiary] education"

This time four years ago:
Arthur's Seat - Edinburgh's urban mountain

This time six years ago:
Heaven

This time seven years ago:
A wee taste of Edinburgh

This time eight years ago:
First long bike ride of the season

This time nine years ago:
Life returns to Jeziorki

This time ten years ago:
Early spring dusk

A Brief History of Time - review, Part 1 - Introduction

Lent 2018: Day 42

Never before in my 60 years has a stranger on public transport ever asked me about a book I was reading. This week, two fellow passengers did just that, as I was sat there with my copy of Steven Hawking's best seller. That a book by the British scientist, who died on 14 March, should so well known as to prompt comments from people here in Poland says much about its fame.

On hearing of Prof Hawking's death, I reached for A Brief History of Time from my father's bookshelf. Like many of his books it is neatly bound in clear polythene, and catalogued (with the number 19). My father wrote 'Xmas 1988' on the half-title page; the publisher's copyright pages says this is the seventh(!) reprint, dated 1988 - of a book that first appeared in 1988. Verily, a best seller, with over ten million sold by 2008.

Pencilled notes in the margins and underlined phrases or sentences from beginning to end, plus numerous newspaper and magazine cuttings (including one from Scientific American, dated December 1991) suggest that not only did my father read the book from end to end, but he continued to return it as and when new stuff came to light. Looking at my father's notes from nearly 30 years ago, when he was 65, I can see a vital interest, intellectual curiosity and broad background knowledge.

Thirty years is a long time in science. The number of subatomic particles know to science has grown, as has the number of galaxies in the known universe, and the number of stars within those galaxies. The age of the universe is given as being between 10 and 15 billion years, today scientific consensus says 13.8 billion years. Gravitational waves had never been detected. Planets orbiting other stars had never been detected. Dark matter is mentioned only in passing, just three sentences in a paragraph about the rate of expansion of the universe. Dark energy is not mentioned at all (now reckoned to be 67.3% of everything the universe consists of). We now know far more - and the more science discovers, the more it realises it still doesn't know. "Ultimately," writes Hawking, "most physicists hope to find a unified theory that will explain all four forces [gravity, electromagnetism, weak- and strong nuclear force] as different aspects of a single force. Indeed, many would say that this is the prime goal of physics today."

Having read Stuart A. Kauffman's Humanity in a Creative Universe (2016), it seems that that goal has been abandoned as astrophysicists and nuclear physicists peer further into the unknown and come up with more questions than answers. Hawking is still of the Newtonian old school of reductionist materialism, believing that mankind was on the verge of discovering all the answers through quadratic equations that elegantly piece together the pieces of the jigsaw into one Grand United Theory. Kauffman is far more cautious - and more metaphysical. He believes there's far more out there than phenomena that are calculable; his background in theoretical biology gives him a messier cosmology than Hawking's. Kauffman mentions Steven Weinberg Dream of a Final Theory (1998), and says that the "hard-headed realism" of scientists who chase such a theory, who try to tie up all the loose ends and tell us - "here it all is, finally solved " - robs our human lives of mystery and magic.

I feel there's more than a little of that with Hawking. While he does a grand job of explaining the incredibly complex and often counter-intuitive cosmos down to the subatomic particle, I detect a certain intellectual arrogance - the universe as a problem for the scientist to solve, to reduce down to numbers and formulae.

A Brief History of Time should not be attempted by a lay reader without some basic understanding of the building blocks of our universe; the notion of spacetime, singularity, quantum uncertainty. Coming at this cold expecting a Dummy's Guide approach will not work. Having said that, Wikipedia is a wonderful tool (for me, the biggest single achievement of the Internet Age), and the ability to pick up at least a superficial grasp of a new concept (such as the Pauli exclusion principle) is very helpful in tackling this book.

Hawkings breaks the subject down into chapters dealing with the universe, the elementary particles, black holes, and of course, time itself. This makes is easier to get one's head around it all; plus, for the lay reader, there is famously only one equation in the book, which is E=mc².

The rest of my review of A Brief History of Time here.

This time last year:
Eyes without a face

This time two years ago:
London blooms in yellow

This time three years ago:
London's Docklands: a case-study in urban regeneration

This time four years ago:
Scotland and its language 

This time five years ago:
Death, our sister

This time six years ago:
First bike ride to work of the year 

This time eight years ago:
Poland's trains ran faster before the war

This time nine years ago:
Winter in spring: surely this must be the last snow?

This time ten years ago:
Surely THIS must be the last snow?

Afterlife - a myriad possibilities, now that the Magic has been brought back

Lent 2018 - Day 39

I mentioned David Eagleman's Sum - Forty Tales from the Afterlife in my last Lenten post. Written by a neuroscientist, it is another in a line of books which shows that the magic in our lives had not evaporated when Isaac Newton laid the foundations of classical physics. Building on the new panpsychism that Stuart A. Kauffman outlines in Humanity in a Creative Universe, I'd like to posit my current views on consciousness and the afterlife. This post follows on from the question left at the end of this post.

For many thinking teenagers brought up in traditionally religious households, there comes that 'Santa doesn't exist' moment when the comforting nostrums we grew up with are blown away by a confrontation with science, rational thought and logic. For me, I never really let go of a deep belief in a deity, though certainly not the deity that traditional (Polish) Roman Catholicism tried to instil in me. Unlike the great majority of my generation, I have not abandoned belief in an afterlife. And unlike that minority of my generation who still go to Mass regularly, my version of the Nicene Creed stops after 'I believe in one God, maker of all things visible and invisible'. Of course, what's meant to me by 'God' and 'maker' still needs a lot of shaping, and this is central to my spiritual quest for clarity and understanding. But God, a Lord, a King, male, two eyes, nose, mouth and beard - no.

And with that goes a rejection of an afterlife floating on a cloud with a harp. My own experiences of anomalous memories going back to childhood suggest that I am currently living what could be called somebody else's afterlife, although the feelings are not that powerful, they are consistent and ever-present. Entangled waves/particles interacting  across space and time?  I'm not ready to answer one way or another, but at least science is open to the possibility.

Kauffman's book promised the magic to re-enchant us, to show us what science can now consider possible with current interpretations of quantum mechanics. To bring back the magic that Newtonian physics had replaced by rationalism, dry and calculated.The conscious observer is required to determine the outcome of the quantum experiment. The conscious observer's will might affect it one way or another (though science needs to prove this). Even if this effect is weak, my belief is that it will grow, evolve. [The placebo effect is now reported to be stronger in humans undergoing clinical trials than it was half a century ago.]

But beware - moving forward from Newtonian certainties does not mean we can indulge in any sort of mystical woo - healing crystals, miracle cures, dream catchers etc - there does need to be a tangible bridge to scientific method. Repeatable and peer-reviewed experiments.

So can we will our afterlives? Many won't care; lacking the sensitivity to the vibes of the universe; agnostic whatever their background (people who go to church without really thinking about why); lacking the curiosity, insufficiently observant of the world around them. They who did not place a true value upon their consciousness will not be rewarded in the hereafter - and it won't unduly bother them to know that. But those of us  that do, those of us with that curiosity and sensitivity, those of us that want to live it all again but next time round at a slightly higher level of consciousness, greater sensitivity and awareness, just that bit nearer the unity of the eternal and infinite - "then if you will it Dude, it is no dream".


This time last year:
Warsaw photo catch-up (Rotunda going down)

This two years ago:
Conscious of being conscious

This time four years ago:
New road and retail

This time six years ago:
Warsaw's Northern Bridge - its name and local democracy

This time eight years ago:
What's Polish for 'commuter'?

This time nine years ago:
Four weeks into Lent

Humanity in a Creative Universe - what have I learnt?

Lent 2018 - Day 31

Time to sum up my summing up of Stuart A. Kauffman's book. This is the book I'd been waiting for many years to come along - but I had to be mature enough to read it. big A thank you to my brother; he bought it for me for Christmas 2016, but it would be a year and six weeks before I'd get round to reading beyond page viii of the preface.

This is a book written by a scientist who feels that the way science has progressed over the past three centuries has closed the door to our innate sense of magic and wonder. The reductionist materialism of classical Newtonian physics has made us feel that we're nothing more than meat robots witnessing a meaningless universe - we're born, we live, we die - that's it.

Yet many of us intuit that there's far more to life and the universe than those sets of quadratic equations that can prove where everything's from and where it's all heading. Rather than being yet another quasi-mystical hippy quest for a transcendental something, this is a book based on the career of well-rounded scientist with a strong knowledge biology, theoretical physics and mathematics.

The enigma at the heart of quantum mechanics - namely how can something be and not be at the same time - until it is consciously observed to be either one or the other - opens the doors to a far more open-ended worldview than that offered by classical physics, suggests Kauffman.

Our universe is open ended, expanding at an accelerating pace; our society - our technology and economy is likewise unfolding exponentially in terms of what's possible, ever building upon and recombining with that which came before, creating a future that's intrinsically unknowable.

Kauffman's worldview is that it is better to be positive and optimistic and open to new possibilities than to be otherwise. One's outlook ought to be a worldview that makes one happy; good mental - and physical - health comes from being positive and optimistic. Living in fear of a vengeful God or else mired without hope in a meaningless universe over which one has no control does not engender a positive, optimistic outlook.

These are general thoughts. But on to my deeper, more personal responses to the book.

As my regular readers will know, from my earliest childhood I have had anomalous memory experiences, every bit as real as unbidden and untriggered flashbacks from my life - but they are not of this life, but from another time and another place. I have written much about this phenomenon of my mind (most fully here).

Kauffman's book has opened up the notion that the vector communicating anomalous memories may be quantum-related. It may be (as I wrote before), be dark matter or dark energy related. I am now certainly a long way from believing in reincarnation as a religious concept, though it has occurred to me that for such a belief to take hold, many more people than I must have also experienced 'past-life flashbacks'.

The other notion that I've held since childhood is that of 'edge of chaos'; that our lives are in perpetual risk of tipping into disaster or tragedy, and that by consciously discounting the dangers that we could fall prey to, we can ward them off. This idea would neatly fit with Kauffman's (as yet unproven) assertion that the outcome of quantum experiments can be willed - and not just neutrally observed - by the conscious observer. And that we can therefore affect our fate by our will. Our greatest enemy in this worldview is complacency. "If you will it, Dude, it is no dream."

Eight years ago, I read another book suggested by my brother, neuroscientist David Eagleman's Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. Eagleman, a Possibilitarian, espouses the view that we cannot definitely rule out - nor rule in - any form of afterlife. Click! Given Kauffman's notions about the Poised Realm - moving from the Possible to the new Actual, which then creates new Possibles - the concept of 'Possibilianism' becomes, well, possible.

Let's go back to Schrodinger's cat. Alive and dead until the conscious observer peeks into the box. Assume Dean Radin is right, and the conscious observer can will the outcome of the experiment. "Hurrah! My beloved cat lives!" - or "Meh, I don't really care." Or: "The cat poos on my bed, scratches my furniture - this experiment is a good opportunity to be rid of that pest."

Could it be this way with God? With an Afterlife?

Those that want one, peek into the box upon their physical demise - and get what they willed. Those that deny, or simply do not need a God or an Afterlife, or just don't care - their consciousness is extinguished the moment their bodies cease to function - open the box and that's that. An eternity of nothingness, no consciousness to observe it.

Now ask yourself - what is your will?

[Coming soon - a tribute to Steven Hawking in the form of a Lenten review of A Brief History of Time.]

This time five years ago:
Always let your conscience be your guide

This time six years ago:
Lenten recipe with prawns 

This time nine years ago:
Polish economy - recession thwarted

Knowing and being... and intuition

Lent 2018: Day 31

A sign of a good book is when an air of sadness descends over me as I approach its end, like knowing that a good conversation with a friendly mentor is drawing to a close. And this I feel as I begin the penultimate chapter of Stuart A. Kauffman's Humanity in a Creative Universe, a book that has not so much transformed my thinking as clarified it and put it into a far more scientific framework. More on that in my conclusion tomorrow.

Kauffman states his wish for "a gently transforming civilisation", or indeed multiple woven civilisations (of which Kauffman claims there are around 30 on this planet right now). I hope so too, but fear that human progress to date has been achieved in fits and starts, with bouts of destructive chaos smashing against order and progress. “Reason alone cannot guide us sufficiently for living our lives forward,” says Kauffman, quoting Kierkegaard. What is needed is intuition.

Intuition, rather than reason, is what happens when rather than working something out logically, we stumble upon an answer in a flash of inspiration, building on something that went before, often something unexpected or unplanned. So often, in science, in economics, in the arts, what happens is a recombination of old ideas and new questions, creating new concepts that become new Actuals.

Kauffman gives as an example the way that improvisation comedy works. Unscripted, a comic throws in a line, an idea, and the next one works it into something comedically appropriate, then the next comic, following the thread, but giving it a twist, taking it to a higher level. He cites Beyond the Fringe - the classic British comedy revue of the early 1960s, in particular Peter Cooke and Alan Bennett's Great Train Robbery sketch.

Oscillating between the electron, the galaxies, the evolution of the biosphere on our planet and human creativity - Kauffman attempts to place the works of Shakespeare, Keats and Dylan Thomas in an unprestatable universe of quantum mechanics.

Is there then a place for God in such a worldview? Kauffman is careful not to use the vocabulary of religion. He says 'consciousness' and 'Mind' rather than 'soul' or 'spirit'. There is no omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent Deity; neither is there a Supreme Architect nor Watchmaker who created the mechanism, wound it up, set it off and watched it unwind from a neutral distance. Rather, there is an Unfolding, a Becoming, a Perfecting; an infinitely patient process of creativity, the evolution of Mind becoming exponentially more complex.

At the heart of Kauffman's worldview is the science of quantum mechanics, the notion that without a conscious mind to observe the outcome of a quantum experiment, the electron hovers in superposition; the Schrodinger's cat remains dead and alive until a human opens the box to see. Now, Kauffman, drawing on the controversial works of Dean Radin, moves a step further to say that the conscious observer can influence, or will, the outcome of the quantum experiment. "I want the cat to be alive! And hey! It's alive!" Verdict - still needs plenty more experimental work to show that this is the case. The next scientific question mark hovers over the the seat - and indeed - the nature of consciousness. Does it reside exclusively in the brain of higher-order animals (a cat, a mouse, an octopus yes - an ant, no) - or controversially - is consciousness also to be found in single-celled life forms like amoeba and bacteria such as E. coli?

Kauffman goes further. He claims, on the basis of intuition, that consciousness resides at the subatomic level. I have posited such an idea on this blog, but with no scientific background whatsoever, it is pure poetry on my part. The notion that the dark energy and dark matter - invisible, unmeasurable - that is believed to make up over 95% of the universe's mass-energy content - could be consciousness is also something I have considered.

Science will either one day show this to be false - or true. Or metaphorically true. Or neither and both. We shall see - or not.

A final summing up of Humanity in a Creative Universe in my next post.

This time last year:
Rzeszów [coincidentally, I was back there just yesterday]

This time four years ago:
A tipping point in European history

This time five years ago:
Random sentiments from London suburbs

This time six years ago:

Stalinist neo-classicism in Warsaw

This time seven years ago:

A week into Lent

This time eight years ago:
Afternoon-dusk-night in the city centre

This time nine years ago:
A particularly harrowing reality

This time ten years ago:
Wetlands waiting for the spring

Observations from another time

Lent 2018: Day 27

Early morning, West London. I'm sitting at the desk in my father's spare room when suddenly PAFF! There it is - that absolute moment of congruent consciousness. All of a sudden I experience a flashback, prefect in sensory detail. Unbidden, unprompted. It is the 1960s, summer, seaside. It could be Stella-Plage in France or Eastbourne; a family holiday. Nostalgia. A longing. The smell, the smell unbidden comes to me - back from a day at the beach, the tang of salty skin, suntan oil, damp towels and swimwear; a sunlit hotel room.

Exactly as I felt it half a century ago.

This type of experience is not unusual for me; these unbidden memories of past qualia [singular: quale] have been a feature of my existence for as long as I can remember. Reading Stuart A. Kauffman's Humanity in a Creative Universe, over the past weeks of Lent, I can appreciate these flashbacks in physical terms; when they happen, for a split second I can observe - as in observing a quantum experiment, electrons in superposition, observed. Spin up or spin down.

Kauffman, drawing on his own work and that of others, posits that electrons may possess a property other than mass and charge, namely consciousness. Consciousness, will... memory? Ethics, even, as my brother suggested to me in a recent email.

I wrote these words a year and half ago to describe my flashback experiences:

This is deepest memory; where does it reside? In the bones? In the optic nerve? There are memories that can be recovered by thinking back to an event; there are memories that can be triggered by a smell, taste or (as in this case) a sight, a sound, a feeling; there are memories that spring into your consciousness unbidden. 

Those moments when that 'time slide' happens fill me momentarily with a yearning to return and to relive them - a brief feeling that evaporates all too quickly, leaving a residue of hope - an expression of experiencing a continuity of consciousness...

A "memory hiccup". The seaside holiday flashback is one that's entered the canon of my stored qualia; another is the Uxbridge Road in West Ealing in the run-up to Christmas, mid-1960s, looking into the shop window at F.H. Rowse's at the seasonal display of toys, in particular a Corgi model of an Aston Martin DB4 in mint-green and white, racing number on the doors, running around a toy race-track. There's a nip of frost, snowflakes in the air, a busy evening, people and cars rushing, Christmas is just days away...

Comforting; familiar.

Detail. Observation is very important in life; coupled with curiosity, observation is one of the fundamental building blocks of the desire to learn. Talking to my son the other week as I drove him to the airport, he was telling me about his memories of Warsaw Okęcie airport from his childhood, before the Etiuda terminal was open. His memories are extremely detailed (such as the fact that prior to 9/11, security was conducted at the gates, the colour of the seats in the old terminal, border control procedures prior to Poland entering Schengen).

This is conscious memory; as a child, my son was vitally interested in air travel in all its facets, and made mental note of his surroundings. So many people just pass through life without really noticing. Yes; but take one of those people who pass without really noticing and prompt them - maybe some sparks of a more detailed memory emerge.

The most interesting phenomenon of memory is the unbidden, unprompted stuff. I can't recall, when on a family seaside holiday, I ever stopping to think - "Ah, there's that combination of smells again..." And yet those qualia return, they do so as precise and sharp as ever, bringing with them those emotional yearnings, and savouring them is so, so sweet.

What does one need to be open to such experiences? A certain sensitivity to klimat, atmosphere, spirit of place, spirit of time (Platzgeist and Zeitgeist), a sense that such recalled qualia are an intrinsic part of what it is to be you.

This brings me to my own, highly personal, quest - to find the causes of the anomalous recalled qualia that have the same intensity and reality as the ones described above - but are not from my lifetime. Again, I have a canon of these experienced over my 60 years; familiar, consistent in place and time; I have catalogued them most fully in this post, here.

What I've learnt so far (two crucial chapters still to go, for those who've followed my Lenten explorations this year) is the importance in quantum mechanics of conscious observation. If I have been the observer of the qualia that occurred on a childhood seaside holiday in Eastbourne, was I not also the observer of the qualia that occurred at a State Fair in the US sometime in the 1930s? Or watched fleets of silver B-29 bombers flying over the Pacific, headed for Japan? Or approached that low, long white building among the pines and birches that was my office in the 1950s?

"The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine." - J.B.S. Haldane.

This time last year:
Spirit of age, spirit of place

This time two years ago:
The crux of the matter

This time four years ago:
10,000 steps is a lot for one day

This time five years ago:
Bary mleczne - Warsaw's cheap eateries 

This time six years ago:
Nikkor 45mm f2.8 pancake lens reviewed

This time seven years ago:
Old Town, another prospect

This time eight years ago:
W-wa Śródmieście - commuters' staging post

This time nine years ago:
Filthy ul. Poloneza
[Now re-named ul. Kujawiaka]

This time ten years ago:
A sight that heralds the coming of spring