A low-cost future

Anything that can break down will one day break down. We live in a universe governed by entropy - the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Heat always moves from hotter objects to colder objects, unless energy is supplied to reverse that direction of heat flow. Out of order comes chaos. The Second Law of Thermodynamics asserts that a natural process runs only in one way, and is not reversible. Place a mug of hot tea on your desk, leave it for long enough, and it will cool to room temperature. Energy runs down. We age, we die. A freshly picked strawberry eventually rots. Light bulbs burn out. A car wears down with use. Entropy is a one-way process. 

In practice, in our daily lives, we cannot turn it round or stop it. But we can slow it down.

Buy a cheap pair of shoes and they will wear down quickly. Buy a well-made pair of shoes, using stronger materials, and not only will they last longer, but they can be repaired. 

The more things, however, we possess, the more there is to break down, to wear down, to decay. The more things that break down around us, the more we worry about having to repair or replace them, the more money we need to spend to fight the entropy that is all around us.

So buying fewer, but better things, we can slow down that process - and thereby reduce the cost - of mending or replacing. And the things that we do need to have (rather than just want to have) should be taken good care of, so they last longer.

The other day, while waking up, a spontaneous intuition flashed through my mind unbidden - {{ LoCoFu - Low-Cost Future }}. Wow! I like it! We can all do with getting by on less. So much that surrounds us is unnecessary. Much of what we have is because 'that's the way it's always been'. Dinner service for twelve. A fireplace for burning logs. And above all - a big car. Because our next car just has to be bigger and better than our last car.

This unthinking consumerism is costing us our planet - it also makes us prey to people who play on our insecurities to sell us things we don't need to impress people we don't know. Do we really need to impress our genuine friends with the material niceties we surround ourselves with?

It is our unconscious, unthinking, unreflecting drive to promote ourselves along the status hierarchy that gives rise to much consumerism. Any company car-park in the 1970s would be a place where the pecking order of executives and salesmen was displayed by trim-levels of their cars - the low-grade L, the middle-ranking XL, above it the GXL, and then sportier models. 

If we are to survive as a species, the rich world (us) needs to pedal back on our material aspirations. Fewer things - but better things. By better, I mean not gaudier, but more sustainable. Made to last. Made to withstand the entropy that increases as the result of daily use. 

So - if you can avoid buying something - do so, thinking of the long-term. You will not only be contributing to a more sustainable future - you will be saving yourself money.

This time last year:
Evolved Consciousness

This time three years ago:
Goodnight Belarus - may God keep you

This time eight years ago:
Motorbike across Poland to buy fine Polish wine

This time nine years ago:
Eat Polish apples, drink Polish cider

This time ten years ago:
Hottest week ever 

This time 11 years ago:
Progress along the second line of the Warsaw Metro 

This time 12 years ago:
Doric arches, ul. Targowa

This time 13 years ago:
A place in the country, everyone's ideal

This time 16 years ago:
I must go down to the sea again

Time and Consciousness

I wrote two weeks ago about consciousness and spacetime; I'd now like to separate time from space in the context of consciousness.

A few recent podcasts, in particular Lex Fridman's conversation with Donald Hoffman, have reinforced my appreciation of consciousness as the fundamental property of the Universe. Consciousness, I believe, is not something that emerged as a result of the evolution of life, but something that sparked the Big Bang and drove evolution. Donald Hoffman posits that spacetime is a product of consciousness, and not merely something found within spacetime, here and there, exclusively on planets hosting sentient life.

I want to consider the nature of Time in the context of Consciousness. Stephen Hawking's well-known A Brief History of Time, and Carlo Rovelli's (better, in my opinion) The Order of Time. Hawking's approach is purely scientific - attempting to define time in an objective, empirical manner. Full of black holes and entanglement, the book is the approach of a mathematician and physicist anchored in the 1980s. The term 'consciousness' does not enter in to it. 

Rovelli has the advantage of writing 30 years after Hawking, and so his book is more up to date with recent scientific thinking. Rovelli's big insight is that entropy is the only way of telling the direction of time. A mouldy strawberry will never recover its prime. A strawberry in its prime can only rot - it will never return to its seedling state. Hence, the Universe can never run time backwards. Most reactions are reversibly -  entropy is not. Interestingly, entropy hardly figures in Hawking's book; its first mention is on page 102, and then mainly in the context of black holes.

There's objective time, moving from past into future at the steady rate of one second per second. But - as Hawking and Rovelli both point out - that 'objective' time can be distorted by gravity. From Einstein on, the Newtonian notion of time being fixed across the Cosmos vanishes. Instead, the notion of time as witnessed by an observer at one specific location in the Cosmos takes over.

So time is subjective, rather than objective? Subjective time - time as perceived by you or me. This time cannot be measured by a clock, it can only be felt. We all feel that time passes more quickly as you get older. This is because at the age of 50, a year is just 2% of the life you've experienced thus far, while at the age of ten it is 10% - so at 50, a year feels five times shorter than it did when you were ten. And here, I believe, entropy kicks in. We feel we're getting older, there's less and less time left. So we are more determined as middle-aged adults to get stuff done - pressure a child does not feel. [As an aside, if you stroke your purring cat for five minutes, and then feel guilty that you must leave it and do something else, remember - you've been stroking it for 20 cat-minutes. From the cat's subjective experience, of course.]

You can slow down time, subjectively. Assume the plank position - legs and back ramrod straight, propped up on your elbows. Before you start, open the clock app in your phone, place it on the ground in front of you, select the stopwatch function and press 'start' as you begin holding the plank. And hold. Minute, two, three... four... five? Time's dragging... every tenth of a second that passes seems to do so more slowly. While I'm holding the plank, I listen to podcasts - ones that grip my attention. I focus on what I'm listening to, rather than looking at the stopwatch. Or toggle between the two for an interesting effect of time passing slowly and quickly, simultaneously.

[British spiritual philosopher, Rupert Spira, says that the past is where our forgotten memories go. If you still remember something, it remains - as a memory - in the present. I like this concept.]

Subjectively, your consciousness looks forward in time to an event or events, whilst elapsed time is measured in memories. When did that happen - two weeks ago or three weeks ago? A diary, calendar - or indeed blog - is useful for recalling the objective moment in time, but subjectively, some events stand out more than others. Qualia memories that have a habit of resurfacing from the past. I lived (as I wrote the other day) in Coventry for two academic years, but two specific days stand out far more strongly than all the rest.

Non-local consciousness is a supposed phenomenon that gives rise to remote viewing. The US government's Project Star Gate (parodied in the film The Men Who Stare At Goats, starring George Clooney) is claimed to have had one major success to its credit - finding a Soviet nuclear bomber that crashed in the jungle in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1979. This is an example of remote viewing across space, but another project the US government (allegedly) embarked upon dealt with remote viewing across time - the recruitment of 4,000 people who claimed to have the ability to see into the future to ask them to 'view' the year 2050 - from 1978 to 1991. What the experiment's organiser, Stephan A. Schwartz, was looking for was a consensus; salient points that featured across many of the remote viewings. Having predicted - or rather foreseen - the breakup of the Soviet Union and numerous pandemics, it seems they are on to something. [If this tickles your interest, here's a recent talk about it.]

My personal belief is that some of us do indeed have psychic powers to 'see' across space and time, but those powers are weak and they occur rarely across society. But collectively, there could be something in this approach.

The question is - to what extent is this intuition, to what extent educated guesswork, and to what extent a genuine supernatural power to peer accurately into something that hasn't happened yet? If the latter, then how does consciousness permeate across time? If, as some panpsychists claim, consciousness is uniformly spread across space - could it not also be said to be uniformly spread across time? 

And if consciousness exists simultaneously across time - what does that mean for notions of reincarnation and spiritual evolution? From this point of view - my long-held belief in a journey from Zero to One must be examined to consider whether we're at Zero and One at the same time - or is it neither and both? I suspect that the unfolding of the Universe is a one-way process that does indeed follow time's arrow from (imperfect) past to (perfect) future. There's only one way to find out... Live on, in curiosity, in observation.

One for me to ponder on for future posts.

This time last year:
Altered states - higher planes

This time six years ago:
Warsaw-Radom line modernisation - Czachówek

This time 12 years ago:
Climbing Mogielica

Aliens, angels and daemons - Lent 2022, Day 11

The biggest single thing that has changed in my thinking since last year's Lenten reflections has been the mounting body of evidence that craft from other worlds are here, on our planet. The report to the US Congress from the Director of the Office of National Intelligence made public on 25 June 2021 was revelatory. The US military admitted that it has recordings of unidentified physical craft not of any known human-made origin. This was followed up by the Gillibrand-Rubio amendment to the National Defense Appropriation Act for 2022, which required the Pentagon to log all data pertaining to unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) and release a report by 31 October of this year.

Even a cursory examination of what's happening - from the 2017 release of the so-called 'TicTac' video on - suggests that simply ignoring the issue of unidentified flying objects is unwise. Scientists who for decades have ridiculed UFOs are beginning to approach the subject with a more open mind - Avi Loeb, astronomy professor at Harvard being one example, Stanford's Garry P. Nolan being another. 

There's a lot going on, if you're prepared to look. In essence, the US military now admits to having many documented cases of UAP recorded on multiple sensor platforms (radar, infra-red cameras, eyewitness accounts from aircrew etc) that it is unable to explain away in rational terms (data anomalies, digital artefacts, Venus low in the sky, flocks of geese, weather balloons etc). This leaves the possibility of adversaries' technology (highly unlikely), US technology (unlikely given the presence of UAP in restricted airspace, posing a danger to pilots) or alien craft.

So this leaves the last explanation - craft from other worlds - as looking increasingly probable.

What are the spiritual implications of the existence of other beings (who could just as well be from another solar system, another time or another dimension)? Why are they here, visiting Earth - what is their purpose? Are they benign, malignant or just neutral observers? Assuming the Pentagon's so-called 'five observables' (instantaneous acceleration/trans-medium travel/no visible form of lift (wings/ rotors)/no visible exhaust/some form of cloaking), they are beyond our current understanding of physics, and may be demonstrating technology thousands of years ahead of ours. So what is their understanding of the Universe - indeed, of consciousness, of life, of a Deity?

Where do they fit into humanity's views of God and Heaven? 

Consciousness is the key here. Imagine beings that are millions of years in advance of us, who can guide their craft by mind power. ("Internet of things? We have telepathy of things.") Tapping into the fields of quantum spin to will desired outcomes from out of myriad possibilities. Powers that we can barely imagine, the result of being millennia of evolution of consciousness ahead of us. Where do we fit in? 

Constructing a cosmology that accepts the presence of alien life here on Earth will require a shift in our perceptions greater than those required when Copernicus proved that mankind was not at the centre of the Universe, but that our planet was one of several orbiting our sun. And far greater than those shifts required when Hubble stated that our galaxy is merely one of billions in the known universe

The Fermi Paradox ('if the Drake Equation is correct, where is everybody?') is explainable in terms of the North Sentinel Islands, inhabited by indigenous people who have been protected by the Indian government. A 'no-contact' policy has been enforced, and no one is to approach within three miles of the islands, allowing the North Sentinelese to live without any external interference.

This would seem to be the case with alien entities and mankind An exception - perhaps - being that aliens might intervene to prevent planetary destruction by nuclear holocaust. This theory is proposed by those ufologists who point to numerous historical sightings of UFOs over nuclear weapons bases.

I can accept the notion of an alien presence on earth, and even tales of alien abductions of humans and some form of hybrid alien-human breeding programme. The classic 'greys' - four foot tall, big heads and eyes, skinny arms and legs - could be biological drones, von Neumann machines, built of local material (human DNA), to be sent off into space to explore distant star systems. We are clueless. Maybe our governments know more than they can let on to, for fear of social disturbance. One part of that disturbance would be to our science - the other part, to our religions.

This time last year:
Reconciling science and spirituality

This time two years ago:
The metaphysical journey as I see it

This time five years ago:
Spirit of Age, spirit of Place

This time six years ago:
The crux of the matter

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

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

This time 11 years ago:
Old Town, another prospect

This time 12 years ago:
W-wa Śródmieście - commuters' staging post

This time 13 years ago:
Filthy ul. Poloneza

This time 14 years ago:
A sight that heralds the coming of spring

Monism, dualism and non-dualism - Lent 2022: Day Seven

An important part of this Lenten series of posts is to re-examine my spiritual beliefs in light of everything I have learnt since last year's Lent. In this post, I revisit to a theme I have explored in past Lents (here and here) - namely whether the Universe is exclusively physical, or whether there is also a non-physical, or metaphysical aspect to it. Or indeed, whether it is neither and both...

Cartesian or Mind-Body Dualism posits that alongside all that is material is the realm of the mind, the non-material soul; Christians, for example, hold that God resides outside the material world, as do our souls. After our deaths, our souls will find themselves in heaven, with God. The two realms are separate, intersecting in our minds.

Monism - physicalism - holds that everything is material, there is nothing above or beyond that. Our consciousness is merely an emergent property of our evolution - any thought of souls or God is wishful thinking and pseudoscientific bunk - "woo woo," to use the term coined by scientific sceptic James Randi.

Yet there is a growing number of spiritually inclined philosophers and scientists who talk instead of 'non-dualism' - ruling out an immaterial heavenly realm, while seeing consciousness as an intrinsic property of the Universe, alongside mass and charge. Non-dualism has its roots in Hinduism and Buddhism, stressing the unity of body and soul, rather than ruling out the latter as reductionist materialism does.

This is very much the way of my thinking. God (which I see as the guiding principle, the unfolding, the destination, the purpose of the Universe) is of this Universe, not of a separate realm. 

But what is material? What is matter? Physics is edging towards a view that matter is a property of specific vibrations within fields that make up space time. At the molecular level, we have an intuitive appreciation of what matter is - it's stuff. Atoms. But go into the atom and you enter a strange world of charged particles that also act as waves demonstrating wave-particle duality, the particles being made up of quarks and force-fields (gluons) - all of which is difficult to grasp from our human scale.

Science has not made much progress in unravelling the secrets within the atom since the predicted discovery of the Higgs Boson in 2012. Ten years without major breakthroughs in particle physics, after a century of triumph after triumph in scientific discovery, suggests that something is missing. I would posit that consciousness should be seen as an integral part of the cosmos, a property as inherent to matter as mass and charge.

The big question is whether consciousness is everywhere, or emerging only within intelligent nodes at those points inhabited by our minds - or in lesser forms of life - plants, amoeba, bacteria - or even in a basic, elemental form, in inanimate matter. 

I hold that God is of this Universe, within this Universe, the destination of this Universe - and the reason for this Universe.

This time last year:
Who are you - no, who are you really?

This time last year:
Find your own holy places

This time two years ago:
An introduction to quantum physics

This time three years ago:
Right and wrong in science and philosophy

This time five years ago:

Free thinking at the Second Vatican Council

This time seven years ago:
Getting ul. Karczunkowska ready for Biedronka opening

This time eight years ago: 

God's own risk

This time nine years ago:
A third of the way through Lent

This time ten years ago:
Balancing surfeit and shortage

This time 11 years ago:
Congruent consciousness

This time 13 years ago:
Intimations of spring

Quantum jumps, quantum luck and the atomic will

For my brother, Marek

This is ground-breaking stuff. This Yale University experiment has the potential to change everything we've learn over the past 95 years or so about how quantum mechanics actually work in practice.

Here's the crucial paragraph: "With their high-speed monitoring system, the researchers could spot when a quantum jump was about to appear, 'catch' it halfway through, and reverse it, sending the system back to the state in which it started. In this way, what seemed to the quantum pioneers to be unavoidable randomness in the physical world is now shown to be amenable to control. We can take charge of the quantum."

Wow. "We can take charge of the quantum."

But how? By willing it so? By the simple act of observation? But we know that as soon as you open the box, the cat that's both dead and alive becomes one or the other. So to avoid the collapse of the wave function caused by conscious observation, the Yale team led by Michel Devoret used something (that I can't understand) called a 'second excited state' which reacts to decay (or not) within the first. Let's assume the whole thing works and is real and the results are as ground-breaking as claimed...

Until now, quantum events were considered to be entirely random, upsetting the Newtonian apple-cart. Newton's laws, which shaped human thinking about the physical universe for around a quarter of a millennium, stated that there must be cause and effect. Without an action, there is no reaction.

Quantum physics, however, suggested that atomic decomposition is an entirely random phenomenon. You might know the half-life of an isotope, but you cannot predict when decay will happen. This lack of predictability bugged Einstein, who couldn't bear (at first) this entirely novel notion of randomness at work in the universe. "God doesn't play dice," he said about this. Now, the Yale experiment seems to side with Einstein and Newton, rather than with Heisenberg and Schrödinger, the bringers of Uncertainty. The change in quantum states is neither random nor instantaneous, it seems. It is, they say, deterministic.  Heisenberg's uncertainty principle states that a subatomic particle's position and momentum can not be measured simultaneously. Here we have some guys claiming we can.

If so, we need to rethink cosmology!

For me, the uncertainty of quantum mechanics provides the key to the magic of the universe. The key to consciousness, the key to chance. And the key question - can you alter the outcome of a quantum event by thinking it one way or another?

I believe you can - not in a lab, repeating experiments aimed at measuring telepathy or extra-sensory perception, but practical ways. Above all, forestalling personal mishaps by consciously precluding the possibility of them happening - my definition of 'quantum luck'. Whether this new discovery about the nature of quantum events - in particular the possibility of reversing them - has any bearing on how my personal 'quantum luck' works for me, remains to be seen!

This time last year:
Under the sodium

This time two years ago:
"Further progress? Hell yes!"

This time 11 years ago:
The 1970s and the 2000s

An introduction to the mystery of quantum physics

Lent 2019: Day 3

Until physicists started to understand what was going in within the atom in the first decades of the 20th century, the scientific model of the university was based on measurable certainties. When it was first posited that within the shell of an atom, electrons can move from one energy state to another without any external cause, Einstein was shocked. He retorted famously that "God does not play dice". For there to be effect, there must be cause - thus spake Newton.

Several quantum effects outraged Einstein, including the communication between entangled pairs of electrons, where the spin of one affected the spin of another instantaneously, despite the two particles being a long way apart (therefore faster than the speed of sound). This Einstein called "spooky action at a distance".

The first decades of the 20th century saw rapid advances in mankind's understanding of the subatomic world, leading to the invention of the atom bomb and the nuclear power station. Yet for most of us, who do not probe the atom's inner workings, the model taught in schools during physics classes is the nearest we ever get to grasping it. This model is out of date and over-simplified. Reality is so counter-intuitive that it's hard to find everyday metaphors that can help us understand. Even those who do probe deeply have difficulties in making philosophical sense of it all.

The hydrogen atom - as simple as it gets. One proton in the nucleus, one electron whizzing around it in what is a shell of probability. To scale, imagine the dome of St Paul's Cathedral with a pea in the middle of it representing the proton, and a grain of sand - the electron, somewhere on the periphery. That grain of sand is in perpetual motion around that proton. Imagine a guitar string vibrating. Now imagine it not only vibrating up and down, but also side to side - and indeed in all directions. And then bend that stretched string until its ends meet, forming a circle around that proton.

So is an electron a wave then?

Consider the famous double-slit experiment. (Google this; there are many fine YouTube videos just several minutes long that do it justice with explanatory graphics). An effect first found by Thomas Young in 1801, it took on greater significance more than a century later when physicists were trying to determine whether light was formed of particles or waves. Turns out it's both - but only until the moment you check - and then it turns out to be purely particular in nature. How can this be?

Consider light passing through two parallel slits in a thin sheet of metal. The light - made up of photons - that passes through to the other side falls onto a dark screen beyond, where it forms a series of parallel lines, caused by the ripples of waves interfering with one another, the light bands where two waves peak together, the dark bands in between where the waves cancel each other out. OK, so light is waves.

Now repeat, firing one photon at a time. It will pass through either slit. Photon after photon, a pattern emerges - yes, it's the parallel bands associated with wave interference. Now here's the weird part: place a photon detector by each slit, to measure definitively through which slit each photon has passed. Monitor and observe, consciously. Will it be slit A or slit B?

We watch, we measure. Now what happens on the screen that records all the photons on it? No - it's not parallel bands. It's just two single lines. Now that we are watching, consciously observing, the photons behave differently. Not as waves this time, but as particles. No interference, no ripples, no waves. Particles travelling in straight lines. Again, this freaked Einstein out. He believed that light was particles, not waves. And proponents of light as waves were also proved wrong. Light - photons - is both waves and particles, until one observes them close-up. Then they behave like particles. The act of observation that causes light to alter its behaviour leads to what is called the collapse of the wave function.

Now here's the most interesting part of this experiment - conducted many thousands of times around the world over the decades - if you leave the photon detectors in place by the two slits, but this time you don't bother recording or observing the outcome - guess what - the resulting pattern is once again parallel bands. In other words, the lack of a conscious observer in the experiment results in there being no collapse of the wave function.

This discovery literally changed everything. No longer was Man a passive object in a preordained universe that majestically sweeps along its destined path. Now, human consciousness has a part in how this universe is perceived - and how it unfolds.

This discovery delivered more questions than answers, questions to which we don't have answers. Will we ever have answers? In the heady days of the 1920s, nuclear physicists believed that mankind was just a few years - months maybe - from solving all the essential questions of the universe.

Perhaps we never will.

This time last year:
Right and wrong in science and philosophy

This time three years ago:

Free thinking at the Second Vatican Council

This time five years ago:
Getting ul. Karczunkowska ready for Biedronka opening

This time six years ago: 

God's own risk

This time seven years ago:
A third of the way through Lent

This time eight years ago:
Balancing surfeit and shortage

This time nine years ago:
Congruent consciousness