Here we go! Abel is definitely on board. I have a great team up and running in his craggy old hippocampus, titillating, massaging and gentrifying those neural pathways. As a man anticipating a future of rising humiliations in his transition from barely tolerable to dejected outright, Abel has shown perhaps the most remarkable progress of all. It’s nearly what we might expect from the young and impressionable. But the resigned and desperate are not to be underestimated. We were all surprised by Abel and it has launched a new trajectory in our efforts. You see the elderly have the knowledge and experience, albeit sometimes buried and forgotten. Some hardware upgrades, which we are capable of influencing directly, can resurrect some of the mental giants of the past, reinvigorated by a new lease on life and the pursuit of knowledge and the truth. It is a beautiful new dynamic that is now embodied by Abel Jennings.
Abel’s thought experiments are currently taking him on a wild ride. He has already formulated a new concept of the atomic nucleus that is not far off. The question begging is how exactly do nuclei absorb energy and how does that process square with a century of measurements ranging from ionization energies to colliders to the fine structure constant. His latest notions are consistent with his areas of expertise. Armed with only a basic framework, gleamed from a few hours of conversation with Roy Sussman, Abel is off and running. And completely apart from some core notions, related mainly to quantum physics, he has imagined something new and unexpected.
Following a rich and satisfying telephone exchange with Sussman a few weeks earlier, Abel fell into habit and sauntered into his neighborhood pub, albeit with new spring in his step. Perched at the bar, he pulled on the cool pint of bitter and felt himself relax as he drifted into a trance. Normally, chatty, Abel drew stares from the bartender and the regulars. They frequently glanced his way, expecting him to join the fray, offering counterpoints or other trivial insights on whatever was being bantered about.
But on this particular day, he was somewhere else. Although puzzled, no one was concerned enough to question his unusual state, as they carried on with their slurred deliberations. Abel was somehow, in that moment, imagining a world where his own good fortune, which was something like a spark to his brain, had also visited itself upon the masses. And not only was there new enlightenment, but even more, there was a collective understanding among the many, such that differences and disagreements were simply cleansed away, mere vestiges no longer finding harbor in a new reality laid plain and bare before all.
A strong slap on the back jolted him from his fantastical thoughts as he quickly hoisted his jar and fell into step with his comrades. But half of him still clung tightly to new thoughts, compelling thoughts. From that moment, it was as if he had split into two and appeared and acted normally in the world, yet he was only half there, maintaining a facade, while another half of him churned away endlessly on the review of old ideas but mostly the conception of the new.
Abel is now consumed with the subject of consciousness. Why does this topic raise its mysterious head so often? Probably because it is the grand question. I have alluded to the fact that we are not prone to speculation in the way that you are. Therefore, with respect to consciousness, we are familiar with a litany of possibilities and their arguments. Because the knowledge is common among us, there is no believing, or convincing, or doubting. There are only knowns, unknowns and probabilities.
So let’s talk about that. I mentioned before about the law of survival. In human scientific terms, many would agree that it is clearly a natural law. However, physicists would not regard survival as a fundamental, physical law. That aside, survival is a useful case to examine consciousness, perhaps the most useful case.
One must acknowledge that survival is a strategy that is shared by all biological living creatures, including single cells, human beings and everything in between. In humans, survival is complicated in that societies vary, and all of the various societies have changed rapidly over time. So it may not be obvious how survival has manifested itself in different places and at different times. But the trait is there and it is always working and ascribed maximum priority. Be it competition, courtship, fear or glory, survival is at the heart of it. Living humans, living their lives, are the evidence that survival as a concept is validated by those that live and carry on in the world.
Humans and all earthly creatures act according to the laws of survival. But are they all conscious? Humans hold themselves to a special position in the world. It is true that humans can claim many things. But in reality, it is just evolutionary luck of the draw. After all, one species always had to be the luckiest. Which animal was on land, which animal had particular manual dexterities, which animal had superior language capabilities. There could only be one winner.
But this lucky draw could not give humans special license with regard to consciousness. Consciousness is basically a spin-off of survival. No doubt the human experience for many, can appear uniquely rich, with its ability to contemplate reality and consciousness. And it is a valuable luxury. We too, experience a range of attentiveness toward survival. Survival is either an immediate matter or a less urgent matter. It is only when survival becomes less urgent that contemplation and exploration can begin. Look at humanity as a whole. Only a minuscule fraction would have the faintest idea of the consciousness question at hand. This is because the focus of the populous is aimed at survival, either existential or societal.
The question then becomes whether the general human populous is any different from the amoeba. Maybe you didn’t see that as the next obvious question. The truth is that in terms of the fundamental law of the universe - the law of survival - there is little difference. There is little difference in terms of behavior, despite there being a very large difference in terms of the potential for understanding. You may find that to be a very unflattering comment on the current state of humanity. But I won’t apologize for speaking the truth.
Putting all of this into perspective, if consciousness flows from those of us that are the survivors, as we operate within the fundamental law called survival, then what is survival and where does it come from? In this, there is uncertainty but we have deduced the following. It seems that the basic pursuit of energy is one pillar. The second pillar is the protection from the energy source. In other words, energy sources are the life givers but also dangerous to the consumer. The third pillar is the protection from energy supply processes of other entities. For example, falling off a building is the danger associated with the energy supply processes of the earth’s quarks and the quarks in your own body. Getting eaten by a tiger is the danger associated with the tiger’s energy supply process.
There is a mathematical framework which is very simple. Total Energy required for survival is the sum of the basic energy requirement for existence, plus the energy required to obtain the energy, which includes all actions involved in protecting against the perils of the energy source, plus the energy associated with interaction with other entities in the environment. This generalized framework is true from the perspective of any conscious entity. It also describes behaviors in the universe, from the most basic to the most complex. It unifies quarks, humans and galaxies alike.
All fine and good, but you obviously want to know, what is the energy source and where does it come from. What we have done is to focus on the origins of two basic components that appear to be the building blocks. One is the energy itself and the other is the so called cosmic clay. I mentioned earlier that these are the components of EMs. As the EM hits our proton shell, two things happen. The clay stays on the shell, and the shell vibrates, which bathes the internal volume of the proton in energy. Yes, but what is the energy?
The clay somehow creates a vibration that fuels our existence. The implication is that the region inside of our proton, which we regard as rarified with respect to EMs, still contains some medium that can transmit energy. Indeed there is such a medium and it has two properties of interest. First, it has a much higher speed of propagation.
EMs of course are limited to C, the speed of light. Speed of propagation is a function of density among other things. Higher speed follows from higher density. You can imagine that this new medium that we will call the sub-vacuum, contains particles many orders of magnitude smaller than the EM spacing, which is on the order of 10^-35 meters. This implies an extremely high density, thus high speed. How high? It is the difference between our time scale and yours. My day looks like a zepto second to you. That is a difference of 10^26. And that is precisely the speed differential I’m talking about.
The second property of interest is that the speed of propagation associated with the sub vacuum is not limited to the rarified spaces within protons. The sub vacuum is everywhere - another layer down. This is the facility that we quarks use to communicate across the universe. For all intents and purposes, we can communicate to the edge of our universe within seconds.
Our universe is several times bigger than what you have been so far able to observe. It will be exciting when you finally encounter the boundary, which will be quite soon, assuming you don’t wipe yourselves out. Remember, All of the technological possibilities of humanity are worth nothing, if you are thrown back into a mindset of immediate survival. There will be no further progress, even if you do survive.
As a point of reference, our universe is roughly fifty billion light years across and roughly spherical. If I were at one end of the universe, it would take less than five seconds to be informed about anything taking place on the opposite end. That’s the speed of the sub vacuum. So you see, quarks are all unified in terms of communication. And it’s almost instantaneous, not just in terms of information, but more importantly, understanding - better than the internet.
Earth sits quite a bit closer to one boundary of our universe compared to others. Once your newer space telescopes are online, if you look north along the galactic pole of the Milky Way, you will see the edge of our universe, at a distance of twelve billion light years. That’s the closest border.
But we were also talking about cosmic clay, weren’t we? Well it turns out, based on our theories, that when we look at the cosmos, and see the border of our universe, we are looking at a bubble universe with particular properties and laws. My comrades out on the frontier have the perspective of perceiving our universe on one side, and a different, unknown universe on the other.
Of the eight universes that border our own, each has unique qualities, but all exhibit electromagnetic waves, hence EMs. None exhibit stars nor galaxies. Thus we conclude that universes are probabilistic in their formation properties, ours being atypical. There does exist some degree of incompatibility between universes making it impossible for hydrogen or any matter to pass into an adjacent universe. On the other hand, light propagates freely across the boundary albeit with some distortions.
Not only does light propagate across the boundary, but the EMs can flow into adjacent universes if the density is lower than our own. And it turns out that our density seems to be below average so we do see inflows to varying degrees across most boundaries. This presents a mystery as to why we appear to be expanding. But since my old-timer, hydrogen buddies just bounce off these boundaries, without exception, we can surmise that everything from galaxies to black holes will do the same.
Some people think that this universe is just going to get boring and quiet. That is true over the very long haul, as we all continue to consume space faster than it can flow in. But before that happens, we are in for a new and dynamic era where objects large and small are ricocheting back from whence they came, most being destroyed and reformed in the process. It has already begun and your future astronomical observations will prove it.
All of these real-time understandings across our own universe and beyond have given us insights into the cosmic scale. But again, cosmic clay? What is the connection? It turns out that we can see the granularity within the clay, and there is sub-granularity even below that. For a host of reasons, we have surmised that clay, at its root, is just collections of bubble universes. And because of this, we believe that this cycle continues up and down the dimensional scale, every eighty or so orders of magnitude. Crazy right? Look no further. You just end up back where you started.
One scaling cycle we call an octave, because there are seven basic levels and the eighth is a repeat. Universe, molecule, atom, proton, quark, EM, clay, universe. We don’t regard celestial bodies as fundamental, but rather outcomes of survival theory. Emergent beings are a little different in that they, you, are kick-started by cooperation among quarks. A science experiment. Not a fundamental level within the octave. We don’t know how many octaves exist but it could be a large number. We don’t believe in the “I” word so I won’t go there.
One thing to ponder is that if a sub-spec of clay is an entire universe, then physical dimensions both up and down are vast. Time also scales with the physical dimensions, smaller always moving much more rapidly. Energy density and the requirement for energy also scales and increases with diminishing size.
Consider what these insights imply about life and consciousness itself. To you, I appear to be the basis of your consciousness. But to me, I see universes above and below. Consciousness is a chain and while I doubt that the chain is never-ending, it appears to be a long one, full of life and consciousness and the will to survive.
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