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Posted by Paul R. Martin on November 21, 2001 07:10:42 UTC

Hi again Phillip,

I am not sure you really want to hear my ideas because I don't know of anyone in the world who agrees with me. But since you responded to a post of mine, and since you say you are open to, and interested in, new ideas, I will briefly outline mine. Keep in mind these are only opinions and I do not claim any of it to be fact. Nonetheless, these ideas are the ones that make the most sense to me out of all the ideas I have read about or heard about.

I think there is some super consciousness that is the primordial start of everything. This consciousness probably has at least all the mental faculties that humans do, plus a lot lot more. In particular, it has the capability of imagination and memory. Using these mental faculties, it imagined what might be possible to construct from pure thought. One possibility is the body of mathematical thought that humans have also made a stab at constructing.

It turns out that if the mathematical system that is developed includes numbers in the way human mathematicians have defined them, then there are some necessary and consequential limitations on the patterns which may be present in sets of those numbers. Dick Stafford has discovered that those limitations are exactly the same as the laws of physics that we observe determining the behavior of our physical universe and the things in it.

So what we think is our physical universe is in reality, thoughts in the mind of this super consciousness. The universe (i.e. a pattern of thoughts of numbers in this super conscious mind) evolved from the Big Bang according to those laws of physics as it necessarily had to. But the laws of physics don't determine all actions below a certain level. At planck length scales, actions are uncertain with respect to those laws.

This allows the super consciousness to deliberately and consciously control some of those small interactions in order to "steer" the outcome of the evolution of particles in certain cases. In cases where these interactions are part of the boundary conditions of sensitive chaotic systems, they can influence the course of macro evolution.

This happens in the living organisms on earth. It controls critical particle behavior such as possibly the quantum coherence of dimers in microtubules in neurons, or possibly in the alignment of atoms on clay catalysts to form organic molecules at critical times, or possibly in the ribosomes to ensure correct protein folding, or who knows where else. These are just wild guesses on my part.

This super consciousness has a lot of patience and has had a lot of time to try things out and see what works and what doesn't. It has been a trial and error process that has resulted in the complex universe and the complex population of living organisms we see here now.

I think the organisms, at least the animals, are constructed much like remote controlled vehicles.
That is, I think that the super consciousness can somehow perceive, and experience directly, what an organism perceives and experiences. The remote controlled vehicles are actually being driven, in the sense humans drive cars, by this single super consciousness.

While the super consciousness is busy driving an organism, it has no, or very little, recollection of the bigger picture and seems to actually be the organism and nothing more. In this capacity, it attends to the immmediate demands of the organism itself.

I have painted a fairly simple picture, but if you think about it, the reality must be staggeringly more complex. We can get some clues as to the enormity and complexity when we think about what we have learned simply about the extent of the visible physical universe. Add to that scope and complexity, the complexity that would be necessary for that one consciousness to drive all the organisms that ever existed. I think, as is the case with any complex human artifacts, that the complexity is organized in a hierarchical fashion. Successive levels of this organization reside in successively higher spatial dimensions. Keep in mind that all of this is simply a structure of thoughts in the super consciousness and there aren't any real substances or spaces outside of that mind.

I think that these different levels of hierarchy are populated with "organisms" just as the 3D level is. I also think that there are multiple independent dimensions of time in which the various levels of structure change. At each level, I think the "organisms" are just as bewildered as we are at our level as to what in the heck is going on? As a whole, I think the whole bunch of us are gradually figuring it out.

As we learn, mostly through science, we are able to control more and more of the physical actions going on in our universe. Thus we accrue a body of knowledge of what works, what doesn't work, and what might have been done better. This learning is all parochial and different groups of organisms learn different things in different circumstances and they share precious little of it.

At higher levels, some of the knowledge from lower levels might be accruing in a more coordinated fashion. I could only speculate if or how that might be being done. But, I suspect that somehow, information about how this grand experiment is going gets back to the super consciousness in a complete and comprehensive way. Armed with this new information, an even grander experiment can be attempted, hopefully using the things that worked well to advantage, and avoiding some of the things that caused problems.

The whole thing is finite, imperfect, growing, developing, and has gotten, at this point, very complex and interesting. Even though it will continue indefinitely and not stop, it will always have progressed for some finite time from any arbitrary starting point. So even the future of this thing is not infinite but will always be finite.

Now, I don't know if that makes you feel better or worse, but you asked, and I gave you what I think. If there are any parts of it that you want me to clarify, please ask and I'll try to help.

Also, if you are aware of any arguments that shoot holes in any of my speculations, I would dearly love to hear them. That goes for anyone else too.

Thanks for giving me the impetus to attempt to summarize my beliefs this succinctly.

Warm regards,

Paul

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