WHAT IS LIFE?

WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT?

We are living at an extremely exciting time! Science is finally beginning to escape the confining box of materialism! Check out the work of Dr. Gary Schwartz of the university of Arizona and the founding members of the Academy for the Advancement of Postmaterialist Sciences. Their work is amplified with my quantum calculus, the Neppe-Close consciousness-based paradigm shift TDVP, and the discovery of Gimmel, the non-physical part of reality. If this isn’t exciting, then you haven’t yet understood what is happening. It is the advent of a major scientific paradigm shift!

According to the current scientific paradigm, life is nothing more than an accident resulting from a big explosion that happened about 13.8 billion years ago - an epiphenomenon of physical evolution. From a purely intellectual point of view, it would be nice if that were true. It would make things really simple: You are born, you struggle through the pleasures and pains of life, you die. End of story. That way, it would make little or no difference what you did or didn’t do during your individual lifetime. Your life, pleasures and pains, accomplishments and failures, good fortune and bad, triumphs, and defeats would all be, as Bertrand Russell famously said, doomed to disappear in the great heat death of the universe. But, of course, it really isn’t that simple.

Let’s look a little more closely at the origin of Russell’s statement. It is based on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which was just being formulated as the basis of scientific materialism during his lifetime.  It says: “Every process occurring in nature proceeds in the sense in which the sum of the entropies of all bodies taking part in the process is increased. In the limit, i.e. for reversible processes, the sum of the entropies remains unchanged.” For those not familiar with the physics word “entropy”: It is a negative term meaning disorder, or lack of meaningful structure.

To explain the second law in terms that anyone can understand: If I lose my grip and drop my coffee cup onto a concrete floor, a natural process occurs: it shatters into hundreds of pieces, flying in all directions. The ordered, meaningful structure (the cup) becomes disorder (the pieces). We never see this reversed in a natural process. For example, no one has ever seen an old, neglected run-down house reverse its natural process of decay and revert to its once beautiful newly constructed state without the input of a lot of intelligently directed material, energy, and time! And that’s the point: The natural decay of finite physical structures can only be reversed by input from a source external to the structure.

If reality were finite, the second law of thermodynamics would always apply, and Bertrand Russell would be right: the physical universe, without any input from an external source, would eventually “run down”, reaching the equilibrium of maximum entropy, i.e., total disorder. In addition, if the universe originated in the explosion of an extremely hot, extremely dense concentration of matter, as the current scientific paradigm hypothesizes, then it would be flying apart like the bits and pieces of the coffee cup.

In an ever-expanding universe, also hypothesized by current mainstream science, none of the pieces would ever encounter each other, because they are forever flying apart; and even if they did, the second law would assure that any momentary accidental structure would rapidly decay, lacking any outside intervention. So, why is it that we have a physical universe? As Leibniz said: The most important question, the question that science should answer first, is why is there something rather than nothing? It turns out that the answer is simple: Reality is not finite. Any spiritually conscious person knows this. Every new-born child knows this. But it is hidden from the mainstream scientist by his inability to see outside the box of materialism.

The truth of the infinity of reality is not revealed by our finite physical senses. We are only capable of seeing a finite portion of reality through our physical senses, so the universe appears to be finite. In fact, it is not. Also, it is the nature of scientists and philosophers to further obfuscate the truth by inventing new words and pretending that they represent a new understanding of reality better than the old words. So yesterday’s materialism has become today’s scientific physicalism. But a handful of dirt is still a handful of dirt regardless of what you call it!

Even biologists, psychologists, and others who study consciousness, easily fall into this intellectual trap, because they admire the simplicity and clarity of the materialistic sciences like physics and chemistry. And they think that if they can invent a word for something, then they actually know what it is! They fail to realize that there is not a scientist alive who knows what gravity is, why one compound has all the distinct qualities it does, what light is, or why we experience things the way we do, never mind what life and consciousness are!

The discovery of Gimmel changes all this! If you haven’t read some of the hundreds of papers, and two or three books written by Dr. Vernon Neppe and this author, you may not be familiar with the term “Gimmel”. Like all the words in any language, it hides more than it reveals, but it is our attempt to provide a name for the third form of reality. The axiomatic basis of the belief system of our current mainstream science recognizes only mass, energy, space, and time as the basic measurable parameters of reality. The discovery of Gimmel, the third measurable substance of reality in addition to mass and energy, adds consciousness to the equations of science.

The existence of Gimmel is not a philosophical or scientific hypothesis. It is a mathematically and physically demonstrable fact of nature. It is not something that I and/or Dr. Neppe invented. I happen to be the one who made the discovery sometime in 2011, and I have been amazed ever since by the way it explains so many things that are either poorly explained, or simply ignored by mainstream science. I am happily grateful to God or, if you prefer, the universe, to have been the one to discover Gimmel, the measurable non-physical part of reality. Not that anyone else could not have discovered it, they could have, because it is there, just like the sun is there. Of course it is not as obvious as the sun, but never-the-less, it is just as real.

Bottom line: Gimmel is the up-until-now mysterious something that makes the difference between existence and non-existence, converts physical energy to life force, enlivens inert matter, and produces conscious organic life forms!

The development and application of a quantum calculus was necessary for the discovery to happen, but the precise demonstration of the existence of Gimmel can be understood by anyone with a rudimentary understanding of math and physics. Dr. Neppe and I have made peer-reviewed scientific papers available to the scientific community, and I am currently preparing a series of online courses to make the discovery available to everyone. It will begin with basic concepts, and proceed in short logical steps to the demonstration of the proof of discovery. The series of online courses will become available through the Academia Ars Moriendi, an organization promoting the enjoyment of the reality of life and death, founded by Grig Oprea in Europe. Stay tuned!

ERC – 21^st of June 2020

SOME MAINSTREAM IDEAS ARE SCIENCE FICTION – PART 2

Let’s look at the four scientific theories favored by mainstream scientists today that, in the previous post, I have said are demonstrably false:

THE BIG BANG THEORY

The Big Bang Theory is defined in an online Science Dictionary as “A cosmological model which describes early development of the universe. It occured around 13.798 billion years ago, resulting in extremely hot and dense state of the universe which began to expand rapidly.”

This definition, found on a website proclaiming itself to be “The World’s Largest Online Science Dictionary” is, in my opinion, an inaccurate, confused and confusing definition that is internally inconsistent and raises more questions about the big bang theory than it answers.

The first sentence contradicts the meaning of the word theory by flatly proclaiming that it, the big-bang cosmological model, describes [the] early development of the universe. It would be more accurate to say that it attempts to describe the early development of the universe, because whether it actually does or not, is unknown. That’s why it is called a theory. A theory is a hypothesis until it has been proved to be true, and an accurate description of what actually happened “around 13.798 billion years ago” by direct evidence. That hasn’t happened. It is still a theory.

The second sentence is grammatically incorrect because the subject of the sentence, “It”, ostensibly refers to the subject of the first sentence, the big bang theory, “a cosmological model” which I’m pretty sure did not occur around 13.798 billion years ago. It is meant, of course, to refer to an actual explosion, which has not been indisputably proved to have happened at all.

Incidentally, grammatically necessary connectives are absent in both sentences, and the word ‘occurred’ is misspelled in the second sentence on the website. But these  syntactic errors are so insignificant relative to the other problems with the definition, that it’s hardly worth mentioning them. I do so only to point out that it is consistent with the sloppiness of the entry and reveals that it was not checked for grammar or spelling.

The more interesting problem with the second sentence is the implication that the big bang occurred in a state and environment of absolute nothingness “resulting in [an] extremely hot and dense state of the universe which began to expand rapidly.” This tries to avoid the question of what was before the big bang. Thus this ‘definition’ implies that the big bang theory is a form of creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing), a doctrine invented by early Roman Catholic theologians after the original teachings of the pre-Christian Judeans, Jesus and the first Christian theologian, Origin, were subverted by the Emperor Justinian in his anathemas against Origin, in 553 AD.

What appears at first glance to be a better definition, offered by the American Heritage Dictionary, is: “A scientific theory describing the origin of all space, time, matter, and energy approximately 13.7 billion years ago from the violent expansion of a singular point of extremely high density and temperature.”

This definition avoids the logically indefensible creatio ex nihilo, but runs afoul of logic, perhaps even more profoundly, by saying that everything was in “a singular point of extremely high density and temperature.” If it was a singular point (a mathematical singularity) the density and temperature would have been infinite or  undefinable, not just “extremely high”, and then the question arises of how everything got into that infinitely compressed state in the first place.

Another definition that avoids creatio ex nihilo is found on Princeton’s Wordnet. Big bang: “The theory that the universe originated sometime between10 billion and 20 billion years ago from the cataclysmic explosion of a small volume of matter at extremely high density and temperature.”

Their use of the word “cataclysmic” is a poor choice because cataclysmic means catastrophic, disastrous, dreadful, or devastating. This raises the question: What existed before the big bang to be devastated? The assumption that a “small volume of matter at extremely high density and temperature” existed before the big bang raises the questions of how that small blob of matter came to exist, and what caused it to suddenly explode?  If the big bang was the original event resulting in everything that exists today, It could not have been “big”, or a “bang”, or catastrophic. Such terms are attempts to describe something indescribable, suggested by evidence that the universe is expanding, in terms of things that exist today.

While very popular because it is easily visualized, the big bang theory has been plagued with serious problems from the beginning. When inferred by simply running cosmic events backward in an expanding universe, the big bang theory fails because the universe has objects in it, determined by independent evidence to be older than the universe itself. This problem was addressed by proposing that there was a period of rapid expansion, when the universe was expanding much faster than the speed of light. This had to have occurred before any matter as we know it came into existence. But, like quantum mechanics, the rapid inflation theory requires that time and space are not what we think they are.

The fact is, the big bang theory is only one possibility that can be inferred from the evidence that the universe is expanding. A much more logical possibility is that there was no absolute beginning before which there was nothing, and the expansion is either an illusion, or it has a cause. The idea of a universal origin event is dependent upon the concept of absolute nothingness, which is logically indefensible because it requires creatio ex nihilo. Does this mean, as some scientists claim, there is no need for a creator, a higher intelligence or God? No, it does not. It means that something has always existed, whether it was a physical universe or something else, which may have included a primary form of consciousness. With the application of the calculus of distinctions, a quantum calculus, leading to the discovery of gimmel, the non-physical aspect of reality, the existence of an eternal primary consciousness is implied.

Conclusion: There was no big bang as hypothesized by materialist science.

THE FINITE UNIVERSE THEORY

The 13.8 billion-year finite age of the universe is estimated based on the mistaken idea that there was a big bang. But there was no big bang.

Conclusion: The universe has always existed in some form, and will always exist in some form.

THE AGE OF THE PLANET EARTH

Modern science estimates the age of the Earth based on radioactive dating methods. Using these methods, the oldest rocks found on Earth (small zircon crystals found in Western Australia) are dated at about 4.4 billion years. the oldest known minerals found in meteorites are dated at about 4.567 billion years. Scientists conclude that this puts the age for the solar system and the upper limit for the age of our planet at about 4.5 billion years. Reference: Dalrymple G. Brent, Ancient Earth, ancient skies: the age of Earth and its cosmic surroundings. Stanford, 2004.

There are two problems with this conclusion: radioactive dating assumes that the flow of time is uniform and constant over all space and time, which we now know is not true; and the entire crust that forms the surface of the Earth, including the meteorites that fall on it, is recycled by plate-tectonic subduction and continent building approximately every 2.5 to 3.8 billion years.

Conclusion: The age of the oldest rocks and minerals found today on or in the crust of the Earth, is not necessarily the actual age of the solar system or the planet Earth.

CIVILIZATION ON THIS PLANET

The idea of something from nothing (creatio ex nihilo) is not supported by empirical evidence, and Einstein’s general relativity shows that the measurement of spacetime is relative to the motion and proximity of the observer to massive objects. So time is different in different inertial systems, and in different parts of the universe. All available evidence supports the mathematical accuracy of describing dynamic change in cycles advancing through multi-dimensional spacetime, not absolute beginnings and ends. There is no reason to believe that the development of civilizations is immune from cyclic change.

In The Holy Science, a book written by Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri, an astronomer and life-long student of Vedic wisdom, the period of the rise and fall of consciousness on this planet was calculated to occur in about 24,000 year cycles, consisting of 12,000 years in an ascending arc, and 12,000 years in a descending arc, for a total of 24,000 years. (See the Figure below.)

Ascent            1894          500 AD                             Descent

In addition, he calculated that, at the time he was writing the Holy Science in 1894, we had advanced 194 years into the ascending Dwapara Yuga, the first period above the lowest point. Since the ascending Kali Yuga (the ascending half of the lowest Yuga, the period of nearly total absence of mental virtue, science and spirituality) is 1200 years, the nadir of development in this cycle was about 500 AD, very close to the year (553 AD) when Justinian usurped the power of the Pope and subverted the teachings of Jesus and the writings of Origen. We are now, in 2018, about 318 years into the ascending Dwapara Yuga. This means that the rise and fall of the mental virtue of sentient beings on this planet has occurred four times in the last 110,000 years, and we are 318 years into the fifth ascent.

Is there any empirical evidence supporting the existence of a high level of human development more than 10,000 years ago to be found on planet Earth? Yes, there is: In Southern Turkey, a mound called Gӧbekli Tepe (Round-belly Hill) has been excavated, and the oldest layer has been reliably dated to have been used from 10,800 to 11,600 years ago. It included 10-ton stone pillars decorated with stylized bas-relief sculptures of animals, distorted human arms and hands and cryptic symbols. There are other archeological sites with stone structures and carvings that very likely cannot be duplicated today, even with our modern technology. However, most of them are dated by archeologists as being built more recently than the stone pillars of Gӧbekli Tepe: The Egyptian Pyramids, 2,700 to 7,000 years ago, Stonehenge, about 5,000 years ago, Mayan ruins, 1,000 to 3,000 years ago, Puma Punku, Nasca Lines, etc., about 1,500 years ago.

At first glance, this evidence doesn’t seem to fit into Sri Yukteswar’s cycles of time. But this is because we have the erroneous idea that time is a uniform backdrop within which all events occur in a linear fashion. We are drawing the wrong conclusion because our ingrained idea about spacetime is false. It is based on the short-term appearance that time is linear and unidirectional, and that, along with space, time is everywhere uniform. But this completely ignores Einstein’s general relativity, and a key concept he expressed in his final addition to his work on relativity. He realized that space and time have no existence of their own. When we combine this understanding with Sri Yukteswar’s time cycles, things begin to make sense.

Even though  modern science is only a few hundred years old, we like to think that, if the mental virtue (scientific and spiritual understanding) of sentient beings was at an apex in 11,500 BC, then there should have been great cities with towering buildings, and wonderous machines all over the planet, yet there seems to be no evidence of that. Why? First, a lot may have been obliterated from the surface of the planet by erosion, plate-tectonic subduction, and other geologic processes, and even by human activity, in the 12,000 years of descent. Second, 12,000 ascending years of mental virtue and spiritual advancement may not result in anything even vaguely similar to what we have now, near the low point, things that we have developed within just a few hundred years. It is entirely possible that conscious beings may evolve mentally and spiritually in 12,000 years to the point where buildings, machines, and even physical bodies would be completely unnecessary.  - Imagine a planet returned to its natural pristine condition!

According to general relativity, the spacetime of a mass-energy system is defined by the periodicity of the rotation and revolution of objects within the system. Our hours, days and years are defined by the movements of the objects within our solar system, and what we call space, is defined by the mass-energy-consciousness field relationships between the objects of the system. Time within another solar system, thousands of light years away, may be passing at a very different rate relative to ours, because the rotations, revolutions and the masses of the objects in that system are different than in ours, and because of their motion relative to us.

The relationship of the rise and fall of civilizations to the most dominant periodic cycle of rotation in the physical system within which it exists, as stated by Sri Yukteswar, is reasonable because, as discovered in the development of TDVP, the stability and thus specific rotational dynamics of physical system is produced by the presence of gimmel in the atoms.

What about those sites with stone monuments, built with amazing engineering skill and precision, more than 1000, and less than 10,000 years ago, widespread around the world? Were they really built by the ancestors of the people now living there who were presumably less advanced than their descendants, who had nothing but primitive tools? Here are three possible answers to this question:

1.     Most of these sites were built at a time of mental virtue and spiritual understanding in the last descending age than where we are now in the new ascending age, so they may have had memories and/or records of higher knowledge from the last age of highest development that was lost as the world passed through the lowest point about 500 AD, when the Great Libraries in Alexandria, Caesarea and elsewhere were burned.

2.     Some of the sites may be far older than archeologists estimate, dating back to previous high points of development.

3.     They may have been built by extraterrestrials from more advanced civilizations within our galaxy, as temporary bases for various reasons.

It is conceivable that all three of these answers may be correct for some of the sites.

Conclusion: The current civilization is most likely NOT the most advanced development of conscious beings ever to exist on this planet.

SOME MAJOR MAINSTREAM IDEAS ARE FALSE

SOME MAINSTREAM IDEAS ARE SCIENCE FICTION, NOT SCIENCE

When I say some mainstream ideas are science fiction, by ‘science fiction’ I don’t mean a futuristic story created for entertainment, I mean something that is fictitious, i.e., actually false. A lot of things accepted and reported as science today are not real, and some things routinely rejected by mainstream science actually are true. If you don’t believe this could be the case, just look at the history of science. It is not uncommon for a hypothesis once accepted as fact because it was consistent with the mainstream view, to turn out to be untrue; and it is not uncommon for some things rejected because they were not consistent with the mainstream view, to be proved to be true. There are ample instances of both of both types of turnarounds, but I’ll mention only a couple of each that are of major significance.

For many years, most people, including some early scientists, believed the earth was flat. The idea that the earth could be something like a ball spinning in empty space was, to them, obvious nonsense. Then, when the earth was considered to be the center of the universe, the astronomer Claudius Ptolemy worked out a system of cycles and epicycles that appeared to adequately explain the erratic behavior of the known planets. Both of these scientific ideas proved to be false, because they were based on false assumptions.

The text from a physical geology course I took in the early 1960s identified the continental drift theory proposed by a meteorologist named Alfred Wegener in 1915, as pseudoscience, i.e., an idea that had been thoroughly discredited by geologists. But just a few years later, the same idea that mainstream geologists had called a ‘crack-pot’ theory, proved to be true, and was renamed plate tectonics. Even Einstein’s 1905 idea that the measurement of space and time in one inertial reference frame from another moving reference frame varies according to relative velocity was considered by most mainstream physicists to be “utter nonsense” until it was proved to be true by empirical data.

What’s the point? The point is that science is never complete. It moves forward on theories and testable hypotheses. and thus is never completely correct nor completely wrong. Science is always a work in progress. The problem is that when a mainstream scientist says something, the media presents it as if it is prima facie truth, even though it may be based on unproven concepts, and the public gets the impression that everything about science as we know it is solid fact. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many things believed by mainstream scientists right now will prove to be incorrect.

I will list just a few scientific theories in vogue today that are false. They are literally science fictions.

The Big-Bang Theory

The 13.8 billion-year finite age of the universe

The 4.5 billion-year age of the Earth

The current civilization is the most advanced ever to exist on this planet.

My reasons for declaring that these theories are in fact false, stem from the discovery that current conventional beliefs about the nature of matter, energy, space, and time are flawed. This is revealed by the application of the primary calculus, the Calculus of Distinctions, to mass, energy and spacetime at the quantum scale, and by empirical evidence from quantum mechanics. Dr. Vernon Neppe and I have written about this in detail in a number of publications, and I have posted a number of essays about it in this blog site, so I will only summarize some of the reasons here, and note that they are in agreement with the historical resolution of the EPR paradox by Bell’s inequality and meticulous experimental data that show that matter, energy, space, and time are not what we think they are.

All four of the mainstream ideas listed above are fatally flawed because they are based on the erroneous idea that space and time form a uniform, passive background within which everything happens. Once you realize, as Albert Einstein did, that space and time have no existence of their own, and that observation and measurement of space-time dimensions are not uniform throughout the universe, but vary depending on relative mass and motion, the four ideas above fall like a house of cards.

There is ample evidence that 1) the big bang never happened; 2) the universe has always existed and will always exist in some form; 3) the Earth is much older than 4.5 billion years; and 4) civilization as an expression of the mental virtue of consciousness, has far exceeded its current level many times in the past. This evidence is all around us in many forms, and has been presented in a number of publications by Neppe and Close. I will summarize some of the evidence in my next post.

IS THE BIG BANG A BIG BUST?

MORE PROBLEMS WITH THE BIG BANG THEORY

The big bang theory has been popular with the general public for more than half a century, but contrary to popular belief, the simplistic idea of a universe flying apart from a single explosion of an infinitely dense mathematical singularity (a dimensionless point) billions of years ago has never had unanimous support among physicists and cosmologists. The most obvious problem was that a straight-forward regression, or running backward in time in accordance with the general theory of relativity resulted in having stars that were older than the universe. This was side-stepped by Alan Guth’s rapid early inflation theory in 1981. There were other problems, and in 1989, I applied the Calculus of Distinctions to the red-shift constant-light-speed expanding-universe big bang and found that there were unresolved contradictions in the theory, indicating that the universe could not have originated in a singularity explosion. I also concluded that the universe has always existed in some form, and will always exist. I sent my findings to Stephen Hawking in 1989 and published them in 1990, but they were generally ignored by mainstream science. Professor Hawking responded that my ideas were interesting, but he didn’t have time to pursue them, and he had a problem with my assertion that time, like space, has to be three dimensional.

I am not the only one who had (has) problems with the big bang theory. The latest ripple comes from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO). See the Daily Galaxy site: http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2017/07/the-universe-is-governed-by-cycles-ligo-gravitational-waves-are-a-signal-from-the-birth-of-the-cosmo.html?utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheDailyGalaxyNewsFromPlanetEarthBeyond+%28The+Daily+Galaxy+--Great+Discoveries+Channel%3A+Sci%2C+Space%2C+Tech.%29&utm_medium=feed&utm_source=feedburner

From the article: “Correlated noise in the two LIGO gravitational-wave detectors may provide evidence that the universe is governed by conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC) which assumes that the universe consists of a succession of [big-bang] aeons, says Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford. Penrose proposes that the apparent noise is actually a real signal of gravitational waves generated by the decay of hypothetical dark-matter particles predicted by CCC. Penrose argues that a significant amount of this noise could be a signal of astrophysical or cosmological origin – and specifically CCC.

Last month, physicists at the Niels Bohr Institute, writes Hamish Johnston, editor of physicsworld.com, pointed out that some of the noise in the two LIGO detectors appears to be correlated – with a delay that corresponds to the time it takes for a gravitational wave to travel the more than 3000 km between the [recording] instruments [of the interferometer].

First proposed over a decade ago by Penrose, CCC assumes that each aeon begins with a big bang and proceeds into an unending future in which the universe expands at an accelerating rate. As this expansion becomes infinitely large, Penrose argues that it can be transformed back into the next big bang.”

This is a huge departure from the popular big bang theory and abandons the idea of an absolute beginning or end. After more than 27 years, Roger Penrose, co-author of the Penrose-Hawking Mathematical Singularity Theorems, appears to be agreeing with some of my 1989 findings.

Edward R. Close, July 31, 2017

THE SINGULARITY CONTRADICTION IN MAINSTREAM SCIENCE

SINGULARITY

Just what is a singularity? Merriam-Webster defines a singularity as follows:

1.      :  something that is singular, as

a :  a separate unit

b :  unusual or distinctive manner or behavior : a pecularity

2.     :  the quality or state of being singular

3.     :  a point at which the derivative of a given function of a complex variable does not exist but every neighborhood of which contains points for which the derivative does exist

4.     :  a point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time are infinitely distorted by gravitational forces…

We will be talking about singularities in the sense of definitions 3 and 4. Definition #3 defines a mathematical singularity in terms of algebraic functions and differential calculus. In non-technical terms, it simply means a dimensionless point. Definition #4 is the physics definition of a singularity, derived from Einstein’s general relativity, describing, e.g., the theoretical origin of the universe in the big-bang theory.

In his 2006 non-fiction book about artificial intelligence and the future of humanity, futurist Ray Kurzweil uses the term the Singularity, in the sense popularized by Vernor  Vinge in a 1993 essay "The Coming Technological Singularity”. Kurzweil introduces what he calls a law of accelerating returns, and predicts a rapid increase in technology, leading to a technological singularity that will transform humanity by enhancing our physical lives with genetic alterations, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence. Once the Singularity has been reached, Kurzweil says that machine intelligence will be more powerful than all human intelligence combined.

My short story about “Kurzweil’s Singularity” is fictional, of course, but it raises some serious questions. The current materialistic scientific paradigm is based on some assumptions that may or may not be true. One such assumption is that consciousness ‘emerges’ only when a certain level of complexity arises either from natural biological evolution or human technology. But what does emergence mean? Is consciousness a localized field of some sort? Is it some form of energy that we haven’t yet discovered? Is consciousness something from nothing, or is it created in some way, originating at the point when there is sufficient complexity of a specific type? If so, created from what? If fields of consciousness are created from energy, there may be ways to determine where that energy comes from. We can ask the following questions:

Is there less mass or energy associated with the structure of an organism when consciousness arises, or more? If there is less that would indicate that the organism’s consciousness is created, at least in part from some of the mass and/or energy of the organism. On the other hand, if there is no difference or there is more, that would indicate that consciousness is being created from mass and/or energy from the surrounding environment. The answer to these questions could be determined experimentally, if the moment of the awakening of conscious awareness can be determined. In the case of an AI machine like the one postulated in science fiction stories, this should be easy to do.

Consciousness, as we experience and observe it, seems to be associated to some extent with all sorts of organic life forms in different ways, depending on the ability of each specific life form to express it. An ant, e.g., exhibits consciousness differently than a bird or a bear, but all three are aware of their surroundings, and awareness is at least one indication of the presence of consciousness. There is also very convincing evidence that plants have some level of awareness. Does the obvious association of consciousness with life mean that organic life and consciousness are one and the same thing, or that life is a requirement for consciousness? Can, or does consciousness exist without life? Some quantum physicists have suggested that a form of consciousness may exist in elementary particles, because particles seem to ‘know’ what other particles are doing in situations like the double-slit and delayed-choice experiments. It seems that with the current scientific paradigm, we don’t know much about consciousness or its relationship to organic life, and yet life and consciousness are what most defines us as human beings.

Considering the theory favored by AI enthusiasts, that consciousness emerges from physical complexity, the most important question is: does physical complexity produce consciousness, like clouds produce rain; i.e., is the relationship between physical complexity and consciousness causal, or was consciousness there all along, just waiting for the right combination of electro-chemical-physical conditions through which it can become manifest? Using TRUE quantum unit analysis, we have shown that the latter is correct. Consciousness is primary.

The current scientific paradigm is based on the unproven metaphysical assumptions of materialism. Strangely enough, it has led to the conclusions that the universe originated in a mathematical singularity, and in the case of epiphenomenal consciousness, that consciousness originates from a singularity, in other words, reality is something from nothing, which is a strange position for materialists, since the basic assumption of materialism is that the material universe is the only objective reality. This logical contradiction that the physical universe originated from a non-physical source, i.e. nothingness, eliminates materialism as a viable basis for a scientific paradigm. TDVP replaces materialism by demonstrating that reality consists of three forms: mass, energy and consciousness, interacting in a 9- dimensional domain of space, time and consciousness. See posts on TRUE quantum units and TRUE analysis.