The honeycomb lattice of things?
You heard me.
Oh dear. I don’t suppose you’re referring to a lattice of atoms, are you?
Nope.
I feared as much.
You did? I wonder why?
Because you’re always doing this.
Doing what?
Pushing your agenda – refusing to accept that what you see is what
you get.
Er…
That things are real, not to be despised or denied just because they’re
made of teeny weeny, prosaic little atoms; that reality is not something to be
despised or disrespected just because it happens to be predominantly physical with
a thin overlay of life; that life sustains wee patches of consciousness that
seem to enjoy connecting to form larger structures such as “nations”, the same way
cells frequently unite to form a greater multicellular body. All perfectly natural, if you
ask me, and in no way requiring attention-seeking mystification.
So you want me to deny the honeycomb lattice – just because it adds an
inconvenient layer of complexity to your model – to simply pretend it doesn’t
exist?
What honeycomb lattice?! I have no idea what you’re on about.
No? But apparently it makes you fearful – presumably because it ain’t
atomic.
Well your honeycomb thing is hardly going to be based on science, is it?
Not if I’ve never heard of it before; not if you’re forever suggesting there’s
“something else” which fundamentally alters the equation – a pseudoscientific
“quantum field”.
But how would you know if you’ve not even looked into it? And why the
anger? Why the fear? Why the rigid belief that only the atomic model makes
sense?
There’s no anger, no fear, I’m just sick of your insistence that physical
things have to be secondary to some weird, and apparently conscious, quantum
field.
I see. It upsets you McConnell, doesn’t it? I'd like to understand.
It’s disturbing. Yes, I find it upsetting.
It looks like I’ve been insensitive pushing you to see things that contradict your
worldview.
You could say.
I apologise. That was wrong of me.
Really, it’s no big deal – I just fail to see why you can’t be content
with a perfectly rational model that satisfies everyone else.
I was content, for a long time, until things ever so slightly slipped out
of focus... I experienced a paradigm collapse. Then I couldn’t unsee what had became painfully apparent.
Oh. How unpleasant.
Yes, on the one hand, but on the other it was exciting to connect.
Exciting?
It was exciting because instead of insisting that everything was built
from the bottom up – from sub atomic particles upto galaxies and the
entire universe – I saw how that couldn’t quite be achieved – for reasons I wouldn’t
like to bore you with.
Hum.
I saw that there had to be a top-down explanation to fill in some of the
gaps.
Er…
Where someone or something seemed to hold matter in place and guide its development in myriad ways. How else can we explain the incredible,
impossible diversity and harmonics we see all around us, and the ever-steepening complexity curve as data accretion somehow continues to accelerate logarithmically.
Oh. Sounds like the Creator God argument found its way into your thought
process.
Yes, either a creator God, or some kind of amorphous intelligence which couldn’t
be limited to us few and far between sentient beings – had to be much, much more ubiquitous.
So an intelligent or conscious Field is essential if you're unwilling to go full-medieval back to holding God entirely responsible for them gaps you're seeing. Well, you've opened a mighty can of worms, D, if there's anything in what you're saying.
Yes, I know. I wasn’t looking for a fight but there are unbridgeable gaps in the bottom-up atomic model.
Such as?
Such as life itself: Big what-the-heck "L". And Creation. The undeniable design or programming
that has gone into it. The mere fact that we’re here discussing it conceptually using abstract, grammatical, structured language as if that in itself is
perfectly normal.
I see... But the atomic model doesn’t deny consciousness.
Too little too late. For a top-down explanation it would have to be the
key mover – shaping the landscape of life and things in general – at every
scale, at every stage, at every level, not just an evolutionary afterthought.
But how can that be if consciousness is the result of electro-chemical
processes in the brain?
You tell me.
Don’t be absurd. I'm not the one rejecting the orthodoxy. In any case, you couldn't just fiddle with the model, you'd have to turn everything on its head.
Precisely.
So you decided you had the authority, or the necessity, to dismiss the
entirety of modern science and…
What choice do I have. Denying the leaps of faith that are baked into the existing model is no longer possible. I have to face the awkward truth
that life cannot simply emerge from a vacuum – unless life is somehow or other
itself a constant, or perhaps an organic offshoot of consciousness. In any
case, how could electro-chemical processes in the brain explain the extraordinarily
complex experience of consciousness, of being alive – how our thoughts,
feelings, emotions, beliefs and personality traits all blend together
seamlessly – if it’s merely the product of electro-chemical or synaptic
responses in a vast galaxy of atoms known as the brain. It beggars belief.
Does it? There are trillions of cells connected together. Each one carries a
small part of the consciousness. The brain is the central hub bringing it
all together. I don’t see what your difficulty is.
No – but apart from intercellular electro-chemistry there’s music,
aesthetics, poetry, philosophy, ethics, economics – the breadth and diversity
of what consciousness is able to a. experience, b. consider and c.
C?
Actuate. Based on conscious experiences – sensory and
linguistic inputs – a person is able to organise vast networks – a home, a
family, a company of like-minded individuals, a nation or, in some rare cases, an entire planet. It beggars belief.
So you keep saying, so you say – failing to accept the power of simple sequential and parallel processes: such is nature’s rich and extraordinary diversity – even when viewed from the pinnacles of human ingenuity. Nature is indeed wondrous to behold, is it not? Miraculous, you might say, but all merely the product of nature’s need to survive against all odds in a cold and hostile universe. Natural selection at its finest. For life could only survive if and when, by happy chance, it stumbled on electro-chemical processes which appear to be rational, appear to be intelligent, appear to be problem-solving though in truth, fundamentally, they can be none of the above. It's just life doing what life does, organising things in the most efficient and successful way to ensure survival, always by trial and error, no matter what we, trapped in our by now self-aware minds, think, or like to imagine.
You speak as if we’re no more than a biological version of a
computer.
And?
Well your computers aren’t actually conscious, are they?
Not yet. Not to the best of my knowledge.
So there must be something else explaining how we are.
Must be? I fail to see why, if we have no clear way of knowing what so-called "consciousness" actually is, or whether we actually are. Far better to stick to what can be measured empirically rather than dabbling with the dark arts of bodiless minds .
Well? There really doesn't seem to be any good explanation. There's an embarrassing accumulation of never-ending accidents which seem to lead ever further and onwards to ever higher levels of structure and organisation.
Like I said – nature truly is remarkable, but so too is the sub-atomic realm of quarks and bosons – a universe unto itself, busily providing the foundation for life itself at scales of complexity and microscopic infinitisitudes we're simply unable to fathom or comprehend. Your alternative, D, simply isn't necessary, and would drag science kicking and screaming back into witchcraft and mysticism. It would be a disaster of monumental proportions.
Isn’t it healthy, McConnell, to have competition in any arena? Isn't it competition, after all, that stimulates growth and development? Instead of insisting that the science is already settled – let’s entertain the possibility that consciousness is actually, potentially, a top down process which interfaces matter and cells, without a doubt – but which doesn’t necessarily originate there... a bit like a TV signal, or the internet – yes – it comes through modems, routers, hard drives, computer chips and servers – but ultimately it originates in TV studios or the minds of individuals all over the world – who simply use the hardware to disseminate their creative content.
Who knows, D, who knows... interesting speculation, of course, but let's turn it round, let's look at it another way: do you really imagine our civilisation could withstand such an attack, were this to be validated? We would have to learn an entirely new way of thinking. We would have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Instead of explaining how the universe operates and everything within it – we'd be reduced to questioning what awareness is, and whether or not the universe is merely a product of awareness – a rubber tire – itself amounting to naught – knocking against the asphalt of consciousness – neither of which are empirically verifiable... Be a scientist, D, by all means... Question what you will, but leave the mind alone, or rather leave her safely ensconced in the brain, or else pay the ultimate price for seeking to fly too high, too close to the sun.
Ah – but what if consciousness itself is part of nature's biology – is programmed to resist change, until the time is ripe, until all necessary ingredients are in place? What if our conversation is, itself, a mere continuation, a furtherance of the same process that gave you atoms, gave you primitive life, and then complex life forms – what if all the inorganic physical, then organic biological processes now continue at a third level – which as yet we perceive as through a glass darkly – but which is, in fact, merely the next iteration of the mathematical progression of life, or matter marching towards the great attractor of infinity?
Ok, D, there might be something in what you’re saying.
Something worth investigating, McConnell, if nothing more. This isn’t a
belief. Merely a hypothesis that may or may not be borne out by further
research.
I can go along with that.
Wonderful. Now, according to this purely hypothetical line of thinking –
the atoms themselves may not necessarily be the key factor: neither the signal
generator nor bearer.
No?
They may be – don’t get me wrong – but equally they may not.
Ok. And what’s this leading to?
The fact that atoms are little points in space – are they not?
Hardly controversial.
But that is insufficient.
It is?
Yes, because according to your model – space is meaningless without time
to animate it, to allow movement, so our atoms are somehow where time and space
converge, perhaps like a beach where waves and pebbles wash together endlessly.
Right. But I fail to see where this is leading.
Just a thought process, nothing more.
Ok, if you say so.
Well, time and space have been blended or merged into space-time,
haven’t they?
Yes. By Einstein.
A merry fiction, if ever there was one.
I beg your pardon.
Necessitated by the abject exclusion of consciousness.
Huh?
Substituting time you create a purely physical model in which things, although
fixed, can “at the same time” change, evolve, proceed.
At the same time?
Well, in the passage of time, which conveniently flows through all space
and all things as a given, a tick ticking constant of almost limitless morphability.
And you think this is a contrivance?
I think, or I accept, that time is a necessary substitute if consciousness is denied, otherwise matter would not be animatable. It would be stuck in
its lifeless grid of frozen ness.
But what’s wrong with time?
Nothing. It works perfectly, up to a point.
Up to a point?
Within an age.
An age?
An aeon.
Oh dear.
But then it too, being inanimate and highly linear, proves woefully
inflexible, is unable to leap into another channel, another age, another harmonic without some
other agency.
Oh.
Because, like a river or a train track it’s only able to head one way at
a given time, whereas in fact…
Yes?
In fact things have to flip out of the channel from time to time.
They do?
Absolutely, otherwise things couldn’t revert to the singularity, the all-unifying one, and our universe would either disintegrate or freeze over.
Oh.
But let me concede – time works well enough, for the most part.
Music to my ears.
So you’d be excused for ignoring its shortcomings.
Such as?
Yes, if you zoom in to the atomic level, or even closer, you notice
things are not quite as they seem.
How do you mean?
Your tried and trusted space-time is not actually monolithic.
No?
It oscillates ever so slightly. Wobbles. Like jelly.
Really?
Yes.
And?
So between the place where an atom may or may not be found – where time
and space in some way converge – there are other non-places where atoms cannot
manifest, which we’re not even able to detect – in between.
Oh.
There, off grid, things are much less certain. There, you are
essentially neither fish nor foul, neither here nor there – for consciousness
can’t fix you, can’t pin you down against reality itself, is unable to assign a
value of one or nought.
Ah. So there you have it D – reality always needed that physical aspect. There's nothing atavistic in me focussing on cells or atoms. It needs people like me to…
Absolutely. How else are we going to pin the tail on the pig? There's no denying the lattice of physicality, but the ones and zeros have to work together, McConnell. And thinking about them rationally is only possible if you find a way to articulate or, better still, experience their relationship. In a real sense, you might say, we are the product of their interplay; make of it what you will.
So reality, you’re suggesting – is itself like an interface.
Yes, I suppose I am.
But the interface is not where things actually originate.
Yep. Like the creative content that finds its way onto youtube or any other platform.
Ah ha. Interesting idea. And there’s a whole dark neither-here-nor-there-ness –
Yes, between time and space where never the twain shall meet, which perhaps our mind frequents every time it pulses off, and reconnects with the universe within.
Which is where the thought waves or inspirations do their "thinking", their conscious or unconscious nessing, before making their way up onto
the platform of 3D reality if they qualify?
Correct. Up or else down – if reality is more like the wall of a cave or
a screen where thoughts, ideas, things are projected, as if the present course
can be extrapolated endlessly.
Ah ha. Seems reasonable enough.
Yes, well this is mere conjecture – as you know – but if there were
anything to this conjecture – we’d want to test the hypothesis and find whether
it can be investigated empirically, and somehow measured or affected – in other
words – whether we can develop a more sophisticated, a simpler model of reality
which enables us to arrange things, and experience things with greater ease, greater harmony, with reference to fluctuations in the field of
consciousness.
Ah – well that would be, indeed, a fascinating area of enquiry D –
though I fail to see how it could possibly be investigated. Things that exist
outside regular space time – where the lines neither converge nor connect –
cannot be visible or measurable.
True, McConnell, unless we’re able to think outside the box, so to speak
– to find a less cumbersome way to measure quantum effects.
Quantum effects. Hum. Merely the process of considering the possibility
– of discussing the alternative alters the balance of probabilities in some
way, does it not?
Yes, you’re right.
For if conscious-ness is not primarily the product of electro-chemical
processes – if it’s the constant – the given on which all things – on which
space and time somehow rest…
Then it’s going to be in some way hackable.
Hackable? I’m not sure I like that term.
No.
We’d be looking for harmonic resonances – wouldn’t we, or interference
patterns of some description?
Yes.
We’d be looking for background conscious-ness becoming aware of and even responding to the conscious-ness reaching out to it from our reality – from within our
cognitive processes. Like a close encounter of the third kind!
Correct.
Which should be possible if conscious-ness is universal.
If indeed, leading to direct contact.
The shortening of the way.
Kwisatz haderach?
The kwisatz haderach.
But I thought that’s meant to be a person, a fictional messiah?
Yes, but here it’s uncapitalized. In any case, what are stories if we
are part of the interface between the processes of physical reality and our
reality of human thought and organisation?
Ah ha. The anthropomorphic principle.
Precisely.
We have to experience as humans, real or imaginary, whatever it is we
would understand conceptually. To interface or die.
Die?
In the sense of becoming meaningless, or obsolete: disconnected from our light source, our over-All.
Indeed! So let us consider the shortening of the way in terms of
physical reality, as if it were a natural process, not merely a literary or
mythological device.
Ok. Like a meandering river cutting through a loop to shorten its course
– if, fundamentally, we were never completely separated from the quantum field
of background, omnipresent conscious-ness…
Then the same could happen at breakthrough moments when the meandering
loops are sufficiently close together.
Instead of endlessly routing through the systems and processes of a
reality we know all too well – would it not be possible, in certain instances, to
route directly through the Field itself? For a spark to leap the gap, the "void",
and establish a new pathway, a new precedent, a new arrangement of things.
Without blowing things up.
Without shorting out the entire circuit? Ay, there’s matter in this
consideration after all.
Indeed.
And you think we’re at such an inflexion point?
We’re having this discussion.
And we’ve been pre-prepared by literature and mythology, have we not?
So the answer is yes?
If it can be felt precognitively…
And brought to reality.
Both?
Yes. The infinite is so vast and unwieldy that things coming to fruition
have to be felt or intuited if we’re going to engineer a quantum event. We can thus
become aware of something still outside our physical reality, currently being
experienced in 3d as stressful interference or mounting dissonance.
And you think we’re active players?
I fail to see how it can be otherwise. Somehow or other we are part of the Field
and sense the need, the urgent desire to balance the two sides, to bring about
a shortening, to simplify an excessively extended pathway with pure simplicity,
a creation event in which the present arrangement of things in reality is suddenly altered, quite
possibly without our clear awareness.
Indeed?
Indeed. One suspects that our clear awareness would prevent the process
from actuating in time and space.
Why so?
Because awareness tends to lock things in place, doesn't it. A watched kettle never boils until I allow it to by relaxing my grip.
So presumably there’s another part of us which is always aware and
masterminds the process.
Perhaps, but whether we’re able to connect with it is another matter.
It? Don’t you mean he or she?
One suspects that sexual polarities are a feature of our divided
reality, not the quantum field.
Right, so my other aspect out there would be neither male nor female.
Neither here nor there. Neither then or now, from our perspective.
It boggles the mind.
Absolutely, but in actual fact it might not be half as strange as it
seems.
No?
No, one suspects, no matter where you are things always have to be
somehow normal.
But how could things be normal in a quantum flux where nothing is
determined, nothing is fixed?
Well, it’s hard to imagine unless you consider the myths of sorcerers
able to shape shift, translocate and cast spells that somehow transform one thing into another.
But those are just myths. They couldn’t be real.
Correct. They couldn’t be real from our position in the continuum of
space and time, or on our side of the curve, but if you were born in a world
where energy or competing dimensions take precedent over physicality, because
your particular reality straddles a fault line and still experiences undivided
conscious-ness, then it would be strange or disturbing to imagine a world such
as ours where things are fixed, as if consciousness were not the universal force
connecting all and keeping things in a more amenable state of flux.
Ah.
You would be aware of the other side, of our reality, as a brutal,
brittle unnatural realm in which by some demonic force the isness had been
supplanted by a rigid, disconnectedness, which periodically resulted in
convulsive change. You would even feel the storm building and consciously or
unconsciously would play some part in experiencing the change and assisting it
from your side, all things being connected. To fall down into this world would
indeed be a terrible loss – like being trapped in hell, like losing access to
God.
Oh. That puts it in a very different light.
Indeed.
But how come that world, that side wouldn’t be infinitely fluid,
chaotically so, as one imagines the quantum field to be?
Perhaps at times that would be something they experience, but generally conscious-ness,
whatever it is, always arranges things, or awareness of things, to be meaningful,
within certain bands, otherwise the anthropomorphic principle would be
invalidated.
So conscious-ness can adjust matters to keep people engaged and
involved.
I imagine it has to. But in any case, nature abhors a vacuum. Without a sense
of beauty or harmony you start slipping into noise, and noise amounts to
nought, if I’m not mistaken.
But noise is present throughout.
Yep. It’s one of the two states, isn’t it. Presumably noise is not
absolutely noise, but seems to be so to us, to where we are in the space-time
continuum.
Yes. And noise is also part of consciousness, so sooner or later it
flips into pattern recognition or awareness of recurring harmonies or rhythms
which are somehow slightly less than completely random. It can be an
infinitesimal deviation from perfect randomness, but that is enough – sooner or
later a new awareness of perfection and beauty starts to emerge from chaos, and
awareness, as you know, is an irresistible force. Matter and myth start grappling,
struggling to crack the code, to own the emergent awareness, the new “me”, to digest
its endless stream of data, its feelings, its observations. They intertwine,
coiling together like snakes climbing a slippery pole, and thus human beings,
the children of matter and myth are born, and the process continues at ever new
levels and scales… and thus it is, and here we are, in a conversation paradoxically attempting to use words and flat-think to describe the infinite.
Indeed, here at the very cusp of our next inflexion point, suddenly
aware as we haven’t been for aeons past, attempting to bring the blurred images into focus.
Suddenly aware as, I suspect, we have always been but needly ignored// in order to experience the ride, the unfolding interplay of matter and myth, while
they seemed to take us concurrently in wildly different directions until…
Crack.
The egg of time fractures and chick
Or baby snake, if you prefer, emerges.
A shudder of realisation. A sudden chill as time comes to a standstill
and the whole captures awareness in a moment of pure kwisatz haderach.
A consummation devoutly to be wish’d, in which the honeycomb lattice restores
equilibrium harmonically, and for a brief eternity… conscious ness-ity story-tells
ineffably, does it not?
Indeed
A single word
And the rest
As they say
Is history
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