For me, the purpose of the Hermit/Forest-Dweller lifestyle is to simplify and to look beyond the cares of this life.
Let me paraphrase Huston Smith in his remarkable compendium “The World’s Religions” (second edition, 1991), p. 53 from the chapter on Hinduism:
“Why are we born to work and struggle, each with a portion of happiness and sorrow, only to die too soon? The generations swell like waves. Each, in its time, breaks on the shore and subsides into the boundless Fellowship of [the Great Stream]. To find meaning in the mystery of existence is life’s final and fascinating challenge.”
As a teenager in the early 1960's I gravitated to these deep mysteries. This was before the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation was discovered, and before quarks and gluons were known to exist or were even theorized. I went on to become a scientist, worked for NASA for 25 years, and always kept tuned in to these big-picture developments. Modern Cosmology and Particle Physics came of age as I watched. Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity remained at loggerheads and their sometimes-inscrutable revelations and inconsistencies always fascinated me. Nobody (and this is a direct quote from prominent physicist Richard Feynman) understands Quantum Mechanics.
I find this inscrutability utterly enthralling. Nothing else in life seems to get my 'juices flowing' as fully. Among the paradoxical thought experiments that highlight the strangeness of quantum theory is the famous Schrödinger’s Cat scenario, in which a cat is sealed in a box with a vial of deadly poison gas, which is released when a purely random, quantum event (radioactive decay) happens—say, when a Uranium atom spits out an alpha particle on the way to becoming Lead. Quantum Mechanics tells us that until we open the box and observe the poor kitty, it exists in a state of ‘superposition’, both alive and dead at the same time.
My analysis of that thought experiment is the main subject of the video, discussed as I walk along a stream at my hermitage: the Cloister at Three Creeks.
The video verbalizes many of the ideas I have come to accept, including the idea that this ‘superposition’ state, which is achieved when consciousness is rejected, is a far better representation of reality, and is, for me, the ‘ideal’ state—my Nirvana.
From that serene, outside-the-box state-of-mind, I was able to distill ideas I had been pursuing all my life, make 'sense' of the big picture of reality to my satisfaction, and find a way to express these ideas in words. In 2021, at the age of 73, I created a written document that I considered ready to share as my ‘Epitaph’ should I be called to ‘break on the shore and subside’. On 12 January 2022, I decided that, in order to make the written document more easily updatable, I'd publish it on this blog. Since then, updates have been frequent and significant.
The result is philosophical in nature. It hearkens back to the time when all science and practical philosophy were unified under the umbrella called 'Natural Philosophy.' It relies heavily on our current state of understanding (and lack thereof) of Cosmology and Quantum Physics. It makes liberal cross-discipline connections with Life Sciences and Organic Chemistry, touches on Psychology, History, and Technology; and then it extends into speculation (or Mythopoeia—i.e., fictional far-future 'world building' that was applied to my magnum-opus novel Eden's Womb) before winding up in the realm of Spirituality.
So, without further discussion, here it is:
INTRODUCTION
What
do I most value about myself?
In
one word, I would call myself a Pathfinder.
My greatest joy is noticing a fact or connection
that had not been noticed before—
‘seeing’ something in a new way.
I love sharing that joy with others …
… but …
… well, that’s why I write things down.
The ‘paper’ is a surrogate listener that
accepts.
Unconditionally.
But the sad truth is that the written word
is 'dead on arrival'.
Being static and immutable, it quickly grows
obsolete.
Only the spoken word of the living has
value.
It is the ‘last word’. It is in the moment;
and the best of it supersedes any
individual.
This is the ‘truth’ that becomes the
central current of The Great Stream.
Yet somehow, the “last words” of an
individual
seem to acquire special meaning, or
attention.
It is the tradition of the epitaph.
This is mine—meant to please no one but
me.
It hardly fits on a tombstone, does it?
But here it is, without apology—about 8500 words:
cold as a gravestone.
MY OVERRIDING PURPOSE
IN LIFE
My life’s quest has been to know the
ultimate—
to understand the ‘big picture’ of our
reality,
and therein to find ‘Peace of Mind’.
I never understood how one can find
comfort
in a place s/he does not understand?
Yet I know the answer: They call it
“resting on faith.”
“Nobody can fully understand the mind of
God,” they say. “Why waste your time
trying?”
Why?
Because I am a restless soul, not yet called by God (though I am always
listening) to come ‘home,’ to lay down my burdens
and surrender to faith.
Quite the contrary, I feel called to
discover and reveal a deeper and more universal interpretation of ‘home.’
(The Great Stream)
The quest has been long and usually
solitary.
(The only thing I’m really good at is
being alone.)
And, to my great joy,
I believe I have found that Peace.
It comes to me from the most restless of places—a place
that makes most people’s minds reel and
swoon.
It is the empty Vacuum, which Quantum
Physics tells us is anything but empty.
It is a ‘place’ without any notion of ‘place,’
where space and time and our rock-solid
Earth, and everything we recognize as reality somehow emerged out of nothing.
It is the unfathomable Chaos—
the inscrutable home of Paradox with a capital “P”.
In the physical realm, Paradox describes the Vacuum,
and teaches us that “nothing” exists in superposition with “everything.”
The two are inseparable, and in constant
flux—a dynamic balance.
The Philosophical Paradox
(from which all
thought emerges [in each developing individual’s mind])
teaches us that balance itself is
dynamic.
Peace
of Mind comes as a Superposition
of
Balance and Imbalance.
The notion of Balance
steps forth to be measured on its scales
amidst life’s inevitable buffeting.
That Imbalance (Philosophical Chaos)
is laid down upon the other pan,
and their weights are deemed to be
equal.
In practical terms, Balance is a thing
that we must actively manage, moment-to-moment; Peace of Mind is a journey of
experience—learning to find comfortable pathways through the Chaos as it
forever throws up new and unexpected challenges.
The notion of Dynamic Balance means that
even our way of measuring our experiences can change.
The scale we use is a personal choice.
As I choose to view things, reality itself
has no firm foundation. Rather, it
consists of an ever-shifting flow, brimming with memory and purpose,
with experience and constant learning.
It is a raging torrent where faith is a life-raft for those who choose it.
But like the written word,
any life-raft (any unquestioning faith)
decays in value as The Great Stream
moves on.
For me, understanding (constant learning
and adjustment) is a better way.
So, I keep moving. I seek out the paths
that avoid stagnant bogs and backwaters.
I aim to stay close beside The Great
Stream
(the core currents of enduring
existence—
i.e., the way of the Venerable Ones)
and I walk on.
“Walking
is good for the soul.”
My intended
legacy:
Sharing the news
of
THE GREAT STREAM
The way I tell the story begins with
three words:
“Truth
is Paradox”
a subtitle brings the word count to seven:
“All Meaning is Emergent”
but really only one of these words holds primacy:
Paradox
—unassailable in its power—
is the greatest thing.
This requires emphasis.
Most people think of God as the greatest
thing—
the thing that supersedes all other
things
and controls all reality.
My belief is that
Paradox is the essential god—
God stripped of all His comforting
personal and anthropomorphic attributes.
Paradox is primal because it has no context and needs no context.
By its very definition, you cannot
define it.
It embodies and ‘explains’ the
chicken-and-egg nature of the origin of all things—it is the one and only true
‘Uncaused Cause.’
And, therefore, it is the only possible
‘Ultimate.’
At the same time Paradox is utterly simple,
indifferent, and ephemeral.
It is ‘nothing.’
(The vacuum)
—the fundamental state of the first and
last things—
the enigmatic, frothing, unrestricted Chaos
in which all of reality is embedded,
the philosophical superposition
of ‘Necessary’ and
‘Contingent.’
Now this is what I believe in six times more
words, less one (the sacred number Seventeen):
“Out
of Chaos a current stirred;
and
over time a Great Stream gathered,
embodying
Meaning and Purpose.”
… and then further, in six times more
words, less one (101 words):
“The Great Stream 101”
“The
Great Stream is the font of Creation—
an
endless torrent of Universes.
Universes
beget matter;
And
matter swirls within them.
Matter
begat life;
And
the flow of the Great Stream sustains it,
its
Meaning made personal for you and me.
Life’s
Great Stream seeks the strongest course
following
the instructions in The Book
(Our
DNA, symbiotic biota, facultative processes, our physical environment and its
enigmatic laws).
We
humans oft neglect the Way of the Great Stream.
Preferring our own thoughts,
we
eschew The Book’s accumulated Wisdom,
which
guides the Venerable Ones (the enduring species); and this is to our peril.”
The Great Stream
Hypothesis
This is a scientific hypothesis
describing how our observed Reality formed
and how it functions.
It is meant to be testable,
with the understanding that any chosen
test
affects the outcome.
* * *
Thus, the beginning:
The
unassailable primacy of Paradox
The foundation of the
“Great Stream Hypothesis”
is this Seventeen-word conjecture:
“Reality is a flow that emerged from directionless Paradox:
the inseparable superposition
of contradiction and infinite regress.”
Within physical reality, the Paradox is
the empty vacuum that rages with infinite activity
—The Chaos—
a timeless yet ever-shifting virtual sea with no dimensions, no guiding rules.
The Theory of Quantum Mechanics is where the concept of superposition comes into our lexicon.
It describes
precisely what it finds to have happened ‘first’
in order for the specific ‘something’ that houses our reality
(including those laws of Quantum Mechanics themselves)
to have emerged out of the virtual ‘nothing’ of The Chaos
(i.e., the ‘Uncaused Cause’ that some
call ‘God’)
It is actually the most common event in
the universe.
Out of the void/the Chaos/the Vacuum, myriad ‘things’ are constantly on the ‘verge’ of being.
Physicists call them virtual particles, yet they produce real, measurable physical effects.
The process is random—without cause.
The process is mandatory. “Something” and “Nothing” co-exist in
superposition.
Both are “Necessary.” Each is “Contingent” on the other.
And although this virtual process itself is mandatory,
(ubiquitous, thus seeming to be “Necessary”)
any and all particular manifestations
(all actualized realities)
have no necessity.
The ‘somethings’ appear in dynamic
balance, often in pairs that normally annihilate each other within a fraction
of a second (less than the Planck time, i.e., so quickly that they cannot be observed).
But if one of the pair happens to interact with something else that is emerging from the void,
then the annihilation can be disrupted, and three anomalous objects might result—the combined (entangled) entity and the two partners that did not interact.
More generally, if a virtual entity can emerge
that can causally separate from its partner (i.e., manifest the emergence of cause itself) before the two annihilate, then the
result could endure.
Either way, the result is “The Beginning.”
—the first step in the Great Stream hypothesis—
the moment of creation, when the currents of the Great Stream first stirred.
In Seventeen words:
Without
cause, an interaction of virtual entities from the vacuum
can spontaneously produce
an enduring observable object.
THE
FIRST ENDURING PARTICLE
What
is that first enduring object? I don’t
think there is any one absolute answer, any more than we can speculate what
life’s ‘Most Recent Common Ancestor’ was like (let alone what the original
oldest ancestor—the very first life form—looked like).
One particularly fruitful idea that naturally falls from the concept of the “Big Bang” is that the first enduring object was what's called a ‘Higgs Field’—cosmic inflation itself—also known as a ‘False Vacuum field’ and possibly the equivalent of, or akin to ‘Dark Energy.’ It is best described very simply as an ‘oasis’ of zero entropy within the roiling Chaos (which effectively has infinite entropy).
(It’s actually very poetic—a strange and wonderfully paradoxical reversal of the intuitive picture:
The universe begins as an insistent silence amid infinite noise. It is a serene emptiness within a bustling city, yet it makes the loudest sound of all.)
In more general terms, picture the emergence (out of the frothing virtual Vacuum) of a virtual pair of special things (point particles, from the ‘perspective’ of the vacuum), where one actualizes like a swelling Balloon and its opposite, a ‘Squeezing’ in on itself—a suction.
These would be particles of nascent Space-Time itself.
Let’s run with this idea and speculate that the ‘Balloon’ side of the pair is a quantum of some sort of primordial matter-gravity with some primitive form of the laws of General Relativity being manifest. Its basic attribute is that it has intrinsic ‘positive pressure’ such that it is capable of expanding, as experienced from its internal perspective. Unfortunately, this thing will be short-lived, if it happens to have familiar attributes (in the laws applicable to our universe, matter always comes with a field of gravity--the combined energy of the two sums to zero). Gravity will immediately cause the thing to collapse in on itself. Bye-bye. Back into the Chaos. End of story.
NOT end of story.
The other particle, the anti-balloon, the Squeezing, sucking particle, is something like the ‘False Vacuum Field’ or ‘Dark Energy’. It has negative pressure. Intuitively, that would seem like a recipe for a quick demise back to the virtual nothingness also, but if it gets some sort of 'Kick' that pushes it out of the virtual shadow-realm of the Vacuum and allows it to endure, then, according to Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (the precursor laws of which had to emerge in this ‘good-enough-to-endure-for-a-little-while’ initial object), the gravitational effect of negative pressure is repulsive, and by reconfiguring Einstein’s Field Equations into what is called the ‘Ricci Tensor,’ which helps to interpret the difficult math in physical terms, it can be shown that negative pressure has three times as much repulsive effect as the positive density of this object. The result is an exponential expansion--something akin to our cherished ‘Big Bang!’
(Again, the fascinating paradoxical poetry of the physics enthralls me:
The universe begins its explosive development with a squeeze)
A quantum of Dark Energy’s intrinsic ‘gravitational repulsion’ is both its cause and its effect (a superposition) as with all virtual particles. Note well that I used the word Quantum here. The original Squeezer was just Space-Time, a precursor to the classical/continuous Space-Time of General Relativity; and all efforts to quantize Space-Time in order to find a cohesive connection with Quantum Mechanics have come up short. If this quantum enduring particle is the signature of universe creation, detectable here within our universe, then learning to probe it would tell us much. New developments are beginning to point to the likelihood that Dark Energy is decreasing with time. (The link is to my outside-the-box discussion of the findings and is a good supplement to this discussion here. Here, I'm going to take that ball and 'run like hell!' Stay tuned!) Extrapolating a time-decreasing Dark Energy influence backwards to the early universe could explain, or help explain, the early intense expansion that is called ‘Inflation’ that produces so many of the observed and otherwise inexplicable characteristics of today's universe.
The logical consequence of this thought experiment is compelling. The fact of an enduring particle—the existence of reality as we know it, at its fundamental level—is only possible by the emergence of a physically ‘self-Squeezing’ attribute or property, paradoxically enabling a nascent bit of ‘room’ and ‘time’ for a further interaction to happen—for some other virtual thing to emerge within it out of the vacuum—something that causally separates the virtual Self-Squeezer from its virtual partner, the gravitationally-collapsing Balloon, and initiates that first enduring particle with properties that can lead to the vastness of our observed reality.
So
… a single enduring particle came into being and expanded within its own reference frame. It is the courageous one that took a stand in
the Becoming poem (featured at the end of the Firestorm tab at pjwetzel.com).
This may be happening all the time everywhere in the virtual Vacuum ‘foam’. What makes it ‘memorable’ (literally capable of being perceived/modeled by a mind) is when the ‘DNA’ of this particle (its specific laws and specific values of constants) matches the ‘just-right-for-us’ goldilocks zone.
The Great Stream Hypothesis offers the speculation that, although the original selection of parameters and laws for that initial enduring particle happened purely by random chance (because the Vacuum is endlessly creating initial particle pairs by this process). our universe is a preferred solution (fine-tuned) because it takes advantage of some form of self-replication and the equivalent of Darwinian Natural Selection. (See the next section and beyond.) That initial seed could have been very different from the universe we observe. That first single cell has grown into a vast ‘Tumor in the Belly of the Chaos!’ As I’ve said elsewhere, the indifferent Chaos cares not if such a Tumor forms and expands in its belly. From the ‘perspective’ of the virtual Vacuum, all of that actualization remains nothing but an infinitesimal speck.
The take-away realization/speculation of the above thought-model is that that as-yet-unidentified, mysterious entity called Dark Energy could be the signature, within the Vacuum, of the ‘Creation’—the superposition of its cause and its effect. (Recall the unassailable primacy of Paradox.) Perhaps each fundamental particle that has endured in our universe began with an entanglement with a Quantum of Dark Energy. (This may be a way of extending Quantum Mechanics to incorporate Objective-Collapse Theory—the proposal I discuss in that Dark Energy post that is a useful supplement to this narrative.)
Reiterating the seminal words above:
Without
cause, an interaction of virtual entities from the vacuum
can
spontaneously produce
an
enduring observable object.
This generic process should be
observable
by studying the vacuum.
Deep under the earth, perhaps,
scientists might search for spontaneous generation of some particle
and its tell-tale pair of
non-interacting partners.
This would be, at least, proof of
concept.
Theoretically, there is no problem.
The currently accepted laws of physics,
allow our Universe to form from nothing.
But what comes next?
How did this germ of a universe develop into the
mature, adult reality in which we exist?
Was it a single step--our universe evolving from the initial germ in a single amazingly fine-tuned process?
That defies common sense.
The Heart and Soul of the Great Stream Hypothesis is the speculation that the fine-tuned laws and state parameters we observe came about through Universe Self-Replication and Evolution.
Just as complex human beings evolved from single-celled precursors, so did Cosmology undergo gradual transformations before yielding our observed final complex universe.
The discussion from here will take two separate paths:
The first is the meta-hypothesis:
The
universe we see is a result of an evolutionary process
involving quantum mutations and natural selection.
The second will attempt a step-by-step example, not meant to be unique, but simply an exploration of some of the steps that the process probably went through. As with the evolution from single cells to humans, this path will begin with the specific (speculative) self-Squeezing Dark Energy Germ presented above and explore how that might fit into the evolution hypothesis—a succession of ever-more-complex and refined universes co-evolving with life itself.
First, the meta-hypothesis:
Can universes evolve?
The first essential key is self-replication.
It appears that our currently accepted laws of physics allow for the possibility that our universe could produce offspring universes.
In fact, foreseeable technological
advances
could enable humans to produce
‘a universe in a test tube.’
Physicists who have studied universe
replication
include Roger Penrose, Lee Smolin, and
Alan Guth.
Now to the particulars.
How did that original ‘enduring object’ transform/evolve to become a fully-formed complex universe capable of supporting life?
Based on theoretical Quantum Physics, it
is not likely that there is one unique answer to this question. If many different original enduring objects
and subsequent pathways (channels and currents in the Great Stream) are
possible, then perhaps it does not serve much purpose to propose a particular
sequence of cosmic events.
This parallels the course of evolution
of life from the (assumed) original simple self-replicating molecule or
molecules that probably began the Great Stream of life on Earth. Different paths can lead to the same
result. We see that today as ‘Convergent
Evolution’—cases where two or more different species converge on the same
solution to a problem, and mimic one another, even though the paths of their
evolution have been completely independent of one another.
We do not know the evolutionary steps that life took here on Earth and probably will never be able to definitively enumerate them, because not only can different species find the same path, but along the way life endured an endless battering from the Chaos—random disruptions, some catastrophic—natural events that changed the course of evolution. The Chicxulub Bolide impact that contributed to or led to the extinction of the mega-fauna dinosaurs is just a recent example. Earlier mass extinctions were more severe. Such natural catastrophes are both set-backs (like landslides that come down off the slopes and fill a valley, blocking the flow and damming-up the Great Stream) and major opportunities for new flow (like when the dam is breached and a gush of current cuts a brand-new channel).
So … with many paths to the same
observed reality we see today, it is probably pointless to propose a specific
sequence of events that may have led to it.
But Truth is Paradox. It evokes a couple of nice Zen-like koans (riddles):
That which is pointless
is
the source of understanding.
and/or
To achieve focus, one must begin with a blur.
And so, undaunted, we forge ahead.
Here is a proposed Seventeen-step sketch describing the course of the Great Stream from that primal ‘enduring object,’ via star formation, through the appearance of the primal self-replicating molecule that begat all life, to the fully formed complex universe we see, populated with myriad fully formed complex living things … and beyond—far beyond. Details are necessarily vague or left out, because, as said, no single pathway is likely to be strongly preferred. We only know the final result.
1. We begin with that enigmatic thing called ‘nothing’—the Vacuum—which we know about because we see its effects everywhere we look. The Great Stream Hypothesis begins from the point of view that our reality is a subset of that Vacuum. Formally, the Vacuum cannot be said to exist. It is a virtual entity with the simplest construction—no restrictions, no attributes, devoid of information itself. Calling it a source of possibility gives it too much ‘substance.’ Whimsically, taking cues from science fiction, it could be imagined as the gateway to/from another dimension—The 0th dimension! We assume that both time and three-dimensional space are emergent properties, NOT fundamental.
2. Emergence of time’s arrow and the actualization of space with the appearance of that particle pair, the Balloon and the Squeezer and with the Squeezer interacting with something else from the Vacuum that makes it that first 'Enduring Particle'—transforms it from a virtual non-entity to the first Real Thing in our reference frame. For this exercise, I am considering the Squeezer to be the precursor to Space-Time, and the resulting Enduring Particle as the precursor of the physics represented by Einstein's General Relativity. Therefore, I'm going to postulate that the 'something else' was the precursor to the mass/energy-gravity couplet. which together always sum to zero, as they must. I'm calling this particle ‘Stuff’. My best candidate for ‘Stuff’ is something like light (the first photon, which is its own anti-particle) but actually just the precursor to electromagnetism in general. As discussed in the preliminaries above, the Squeezer endows the Enduring Particle with negative pressure, under which gravity is negative. That repulsive actualization held open a physical space of very low or zero entropy, and by its very name—by its actualization in the virtual Vacuum—it set time’s arrow in motion, because the Vacuum naturally began a decay process, increasing entropy. To counteract this, a particular Higgs-type field (a special field whose energy is not zero when the field value is zero and is zero at some offset field value) either had to be inherent to the original ‘Stuff’ particle or had to actualize from the vacuum and interact with the Enduring Particle in order to cause an expansion (a self-replication of low-entropy space) that out-paced the vacuum's inexorable erosion. In the analogy to the emergence of life on earth, this bubble of low-entropy space can be considered our Cell Membrane—the thing that keeps the Chaos of the outside world away and allows the processes that sustain our existence to continue to go about their business. Early participation of additional dimensions could be part of the evolution of this cell but would have phased out (compacted) while the size of the universe was still tiny. Three dimensions have special advantages for fashioning a coherent reality. Only one other dimensional system is stable to universe expansion—seven-dimensional space—and that’s just more complicated by far, so Occam's Razor probably strongly favors three dimensions. The resultant form that time necessarily took (the pace of its flow) could not assume just any value. It had to be compatible with the form (the governing laws) that space had assumed. I presume that is how the speed of light came to be established. Our field of negative pressure/gravitationally repulsive vacuum had to expand faster than the speed of information (of what would become light).
3. Now . . . given that the vacuum was intrinsically given this gift of time to batter the new enduring object, it could inject all manner of virtual Garbage into this nascent space. Critical among the things that had to emerge early in the process, is something that was the precursor to Quantum Mechanics. I am going to identify this contribution as one of the most iconic destructive virtual forces in the Vacuum. It could be called ‘Erosion,’ but that is the cup-half-empty term for it and also implies that it only works around the ‘edges’ of our Enduring Particle. I have given it the name ‘Throb.’ Throb interacts with any entity, but in the first instance, it interacted with the Enduring Particle as a whole, and effectively resulting in its division into parts, which would be the precursors to self-replication. Think of Throb as a wave packet. It imposes a statistical probability (an inherent fuzziness) to the properties of the entity it ‘infects.’ It is its own virtual anti-particle (think of the 180-degree out-of-phase counterpart). It can have any ‘Amplitude,’ but its interaction selects a particular amplitude (precursor to collapse of the Quantum Field). It also can have any wavelength, which effectively defines how widely the distribution of its effect operates (how fuzzy the entity it interacts with becomes.) Again, in the first instance, Throb imposes a variability on the Squeezer and the Stuff that the Squeezer is acting on, resulting in patches of faster and slower expansion (greater and lesser negative pressure). Over time, in the expanding early universe, the patches with greater expansion rates naturally dominated and grew like bubbles amid the zones of lesser expansion. Where did our universe emerge amid this chaos of variable expansion rates? All that can be said, I think, is that there's more than a simple phase change from one vacuum state to another involved. Rather, Throb imposes a full range of variability, and any effective phase changes would be secondary, and may not even be necessary. All that can be said with certainty is what we see—we came to be in a zone that was expanding faster than the selected speed of information exchange that emerged as our physical laws got tuned—so we're blind to the vast landscape beyond. I speculate that there is some other form of information exchange or ‘Memory,’ by which our universe does, somehow, interact with this landscape (with what's beyond our observable borders). I have chosen to call this landscape ‘Flat World’ (see later in this discussion). This is the realm in which different universes can interact, therefore enabling what could be a very robust form of Natural Selection. But we're way ahead of ourselves here. Meanwhile, back in our local bubble, or its precursor, the expanding space continued to be prone to being seeded with more Throb and with all of the vast array of Garbage that was compatible with the emergent laws of our bubble. The vast majority of this Garbage was just that. It would be destructive or useless, but I'm presuming that some thing or things that emerged (actualized) into this exponentially expanding germ granted it new capabilities; thus began the trial-and-error experiment with dimensions, laws, and constants that would lead to what we recognize as matter (see the next two steps). The zero-entropy silent garden that was the original Squeezer had come alive with a buzz.
4. Laws of math and physics, a recipe for the particle zoo, and prescriptions for cosmology all had to be selected from the virtual Garbage, then adjusted by trial and error within the various Germ-Baby universe bubbles. In the original Primal Font (which is the equivalent of eternal inflation as described by that specific theory), this information (the ‘DNA’ of the resulting universe) could have been relatively simple and minimal—just enough to allow the possibility that the resulting universe could self-replicate, possibly via the Throb mechanism of variable expansion rates discussed in the previous paragraph, or just by the physical processes that we already know about. From what we know of our particular universe, these physical processes seem to require prodigiously high temperature and density—a packet of mass equivalent of about an ounce of matter packed into a space far smaller than a proton. Within a fraction of a second an ultra-hot ‘exploding ball’ of what's called a False Vacuum field came seething into reality out of the initial seed, but very likely also being ‘contaminated’ by many other entities from the Chaos during that process of ‘inflation'—entities perhaps absorbed at need as a growing organism takes on food. There are several existing theories describing how a universe can spontaneously replicate. See my Firestorm in the Wilderness post for an extended discussion, including how Universes could interact in a hyper-environment that allows robust Natural Selection. There's also more about this in the later points below. The eternal inflation theory, producing independent bubble-universes and the Everett Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics are NOT among these useful self-replication theories, because they seem to have no mechanism for Natural Selection.
5. Matter develops, and its complexity evolves to suit life. Note that in that Primal Font of Universes, the resulting individual universes could have had very different properties from the Universe we know. Any and all possible values of the physical constants, and any and all functioning sets of physical laws are permitted. To get to where we find ourselves, our bubble was somehow gifted with (acquired) normal matter through what's called Baryon Asymmetry. Here's a proposal: The Squeezer interacting with Stuff produced non-interacting matter that was either the precursor to, or the actualization of the mysterious stuff we call Dark Matter, which science knows exists, but hasn't been able to identify (so there's your identification!). In this Germ-Baby universe, Stuff and Throb were the first Bosons or Boson precursors (the agents that transmit force). We know that in our universe the Vacuum provides particle pairs (called Fermions, such as an electron and a positron) given nothing but a photon (which is a Boson) to start with. So somewhere back in that distant past evolution, came the ‘Fermiator,’ which is the link between Dark Matter and our familiar Baryonic matter that interacts with radiation (with light, photons). Probably the Fermiator had to actualize Stuff into the three parts of the system that we observe—a photon, a positron, and an electron, so it can't be a simple virtual particle pair, but a more complicated Three-Body virtual entity. (Have physicists considered any other three-body virtual interactions? If not, why not, other than the fact that they would be heinously complicated.) This proposal says that very early in the evolution of some Germ Baby universe, one single virtual Fermiator came through from the Vacuum and interacted with that universe as a whole, such that one of its three parts, which happened to be the electron, interacted with the universe, and the other two entities (the positron and the photon) vanished back into the Vacuum. Thus, this Germ Baby universe was infused with a single electron's quantum field. Here is the source of all Baryon Asymmetry—the answer to the vexing question of why the Big Bang did not create exactly equal quantities of electrons and positrons, which would then have annihilated each other long ago, leaving no matter at all in the universe. Great. Now we have Electron-World—a universe with electrons and light. We still need the Hadrons—the heavy things that produce Protons and Neutrons so that we can have atoms. We need a ‘Hadronizer,’ which would be a virtual entity that produces Quark-Gluon pairs, or some such. Now we're still not finished manufacturing the bizarre universe that we live in. We need the Weak Force that plays nicely with photons and electrons but plays tricks on the Hadrons and their Strong Force, such as letting Neutrons decay into Protons and electrons. Only then do we get the recipe for Star Formation and the generation of all the chemical elements known to be needed for life. To summarize this broad sketch: Matter is no simple matter. It had to pass through a vast array of steps of organization (first developing that 'Sacred Number' of seventeen fundamental particles and no less than four different interactions among them) then probably tweaking space-time itself to permit stable (but not too stable) stars and galaxies to form (organizing the seventeen fundamental particles into nearly 100 different naturally occurring chemical elements). Almost none of these steps are fully understood. Physics simply measures the properties of all these particles and 'renormalizes' the theory to fit them. Here is the Primal Font of the family of universes within our channel of the Great Stream. It yields the moment in each universe that we look back at and call the “BIG BANG.” The resulting entity had to evolve toward a whole lot of complexity and have a lifetime long enough to produce stars and heavy elements. As said, there's a whole lot of fine tuning packed in there, and the peculiarities of the particle zoo and the way that Quantum Field Theory got developed in an effort to describe it, strongly suggest that the process was an unguided hodge-podge cobbled together by trial-and-error. An analogy to all the 'Junk DNA' in our own genome seems appropriate. It is at this point in the ‘history’ of our universe that its evolution begins to be explainable by our particular (known/accepted) laws of physics.
6.
Emergence
of Life. Probably initially an
‘irrelevant tumor’ in the belly of an apparently ‘indifferent’ ancestor universe. This organization process mirrors the development of stable matter discussed in the previous step. The process again seems to be strongly aided by the acquisition of Cell Membranes within which chemical experimentation can take place without so much buffeting from the general Chaos. As with the early steps in universe development as sketched above, the steps required to go from pre-biotic molecules to today's life are a hugely daunting gauntlet, almost none of which is understood by science. Plenty about the abiotic origin of life has
been said elsewhere.
7. Panspermia (which I assume, and believe, is both inevitable and essential to the Great Stream Hypothesis), and the first spontaneous transmission of life from parent to child universe. These things are obviously highly speculative. What's called Proto-Panspermia is pretty well established. The pre-biotic building blocks for life have been found to be abundant in meteorites and asteroids like Bennu, from which we have retrieved and studied samples. Panspermia would be a much rarer event, but how could it not be possible? And what is possible will happen if you wait long enough. The space-travelling organisms would most probably be simple single-cell deep-rock organisms that are hurtled into space during a meteor impact, survive as dormant DNA deep inside the resulting meteor, crash onto another planet, and ‘take root’ there. Beyond Panspermia in our own universe, is the far more speculative idea of DNA inheritance from parent universe to child during universe self-replication. The idea here is that with enough of that DNA drifting about a universe, I assume that eventually some of it would get caught in a quantum-tunnelling event that generates a child universe. In one theory, explicitly, there is a small remnant of the original true vacuum (stable zero-point energy) that separates from the parent universe with the sudden explosive emergence of the germ of false vacuum and its subsequent tunneling and then closure of the ‘umbilical’ wormhole. The child universe should thus be seeded with the physical constants and laws of the parent, but with quantum mutations, since this initial seed is far smaller, even, than a single proton. Could a small packet of actual material—a ‘time capsule’ or ‘message in a bottle’, such as DNA get transferred? This would require radical new technology and probably the discovery of new fundamental laws, or perhaps the emergence of some new property out of the hidden virtual ‘library’ available in the Vacuum. I introduced one possible example of the latter earlier, a field I call ‘Throb’, which would modulate the amplitude and size of Quantum Fluctuations in our present world. It would be during a manifestation of extreme ‘Throb’ (far out on the tail of the statistical distribution) when Inflation or something like it would be most likely to begin and end. Throb, perhaps in concert with another element from the Chaos might also act to clip off a local ‘bubble’ of reality such that a macroscopic object could pass through the umbilical between parent and child before it is cut. The process would be analogous to a mother passing a virus, or gut flora, or other ‘biotic passengers’ to her unborn child. The Great Stream Hypothesis suggests this possibility, that the deep origin of life on Earth came from elsewhere in the universe, and that this life itself ultimately came from a previous universe. I believe that within the lifetime of those alive today, we will find enough evidence of life on other worlds and/or in drifting asteroids/comets/meteors to at least make Panspermia here in our own universe more than an assumption.
8. Living organisms (probably simple but genetically advanced deep-rock single-cell organisms, which I give the name ‘Twees’) begin to evolve in ways that enhance the ability of a universe to reproduce. Twees might ‘learn’ to control ‘Throb.’ (And in a far distant future universe, so would ‘Wizards’.) Once DNA is being transferred from parent universe to child, we can effectively begin to think of a universe as a living thing. The process of natural selection then begins to include not only adjusting the physical parameters and laws of the reproduction of universes, but also, the well-known process of biological evolution. More on the ‘environment’ in which universes ‘reside’ and interact later.
9. The Clam-shell seed-pod hypothesis. Eeyock. (This and the Twees are a reference to my Sci-fi novel, Eden’s Womb, which explores a specific example of these future enhancements to the Great Stream Hypothesis.) Through trial and error (natural selection), Twees ‘learn’ that higher forms of life, multi-cell beings with some form of what we call ‘consciousness’, can be useful in enhancing universe reproduction. Twees become symbiotic with a species of clam-like creatures dwelling deep in a Europa-like ice world, selecting for very hard, durable, air-tight (water-tight) shells, eventually even evolving an internal ‘particle accelerator’ for enhancing the quantum-tunneling process that generates child universes. Twees then become passengers in these air-tight ‘seedpods.’ The clam-beings can, of course, evolve intelligence to any degree imaginable and could therefore develop technology that further enhances and controls the process of creating a ‘universe in a clam shell (test tube)’. (In the novel, a highly intelligent clam named Eeyock has a deep and enduring role in the plot). The Twees do not require living ‘clams’ to survive the transmission into the new child universe. But their air-tight shells become inter-universe spaceships carrying Twees that then seed the new child universe…
10. With life in charge of the evolution of universes, physical parameters begin to be adjusted to favor life. What I call the ‘Olbers Effect’ could be one very useful form of adjustment. Nearly two centuries ago, Heinrich Olbers noted the seeming paradox that if the universe were static (not expanding) the sky would be as hot as the average star’s surface because light from stars at all distances, out to infinity, would be arriving at Earth. Unless the universe was somehow limited in scope, an infinite number of stars would be shining in the sky. The discovery of the expansion of the universe by Hubble removed that apparent paradox; and the later discovery of the cosmic background radiation led to the modern theory of the Big Bang origin of the universe. But what if life, interacting with the evolution of its succession of universes, were able to adjust the rate of expansion of the universe such that abundant stars and planets formed during the era when the temperature of the cosmic background radiation was within the ‘goldilocks’ range of zero to 100°C? The entire universe would be habitable! Life could abound in unimaginable quantity compared to what we experience in our present universe, probably none of it intelligent, since there is no need for great complexity. This is the ‘warm sky’ branch of the Great Stream Hypothesis, and it is not a feature of our universe. Ours has followed a different path:
11. Intelligent life and the cold sky ‘channel’ of the Great Stream. In contrast to the warm sky scenario, in which life would be so abundant that the universe would appear to be one gargantuan tropical garden, we find that our own universe, which is presently expanding way too fast, and is headed for a very quick dissipation or ‘heat death’, must find a different method of enhancing universe reproduction. There are, of course, infinite possible scenarios for how such a universe could attempt to compete with the warm-sky universes. The Great Stream Hypothesis, however, seeks to be relevant to our species, Homo sapiens. Our existence is proof that technological enhancements to physical processes can be a very useful survival tools. However, intelligent beings are prone to making hasty decisions that are to their short-term advantage, but most often lead to their quick demise (I believe). We’ll spare the lectures and prophecies and instead move forward to the stage where the Twees arrive on Earth, via the Great Stream of panspermia from another galaxy.
12.
The
Twees find intelligent beings useful and become symbiotic with them. Through trial and error, their deep, slow
DNA-language-based guidance steers humans (and intelligent clams like Eeyock in
another cold-sky channel) toward peaceable and sustainable lifestyles while directing
them toward the necessary technology to create safe lifeboat ‘seed pods’
stocked with plenty of Twees, and launching them, via quantum-tunneling, into a
child universe ‘in a laboratory’. As
with the clam-shell beings, the Twees find no necessity for the humans to
survive the transcendence to the new universe, but neither do they preclude it
if the technology allows. So …
13.
*** SPOILER ALERT for the Eden’s Womb
Novel—do not read the rest of this list if you intend to read the novel - skip down to 'Beyond the Great Stream' *** The first accidental transmission of
intelligent beings (alive!) from parent universe to child. ‘Adam and Eve’ – the actual real FIRST humans. Myth becomes fact. Twees begin to adjust
their host intelligent beings in order to improve their chances of ‘live transcendence’.
14.
Intelligent
beings and Twees become fully symbiotic.
Transcendence of intelligent consciousness to new ‘designer universes’
becomes routine. The level of technology
is such that humans are capable of creating observable (simulated) child
universes in order to more quickly and effectively fine-tune the ‘DNA’ of their
real child universes. See item 17.
15.
Universes
become fully engaged living things, guided by the mind of the individual or group
of scientists that created a child universe and transcended into it within their
‘pod’. (This, by the way, might be the answer
to the Fermi Paradox [Where are all the other intelligent beings? They left!], and our path to ‘eternal life’—our
consciousness is embedded in the ‘hologram’ of the universe we created.) Universes thus begin to find ways to interact
with one another, initially only via the one-way transfer of information from
parent to child universe but eventually learning more subtle and sophisticated
ways to directly interact with sibling universes, with ancestor universes, and ultimately with any other universe, perhaps through wormholes, perhaps by tapping into the ‘one vacuum’ in unknown
ways. What comes naturally next? Sex between universes! Of course, we’re now into highly
speculative realms of science fiction or pure mythopoeia.
16.
Flat
World. A virtual (yet arguably physical)
specific example of a putative hyper-realm where the community of conscious universes
begin to gather as they learn to interact with one another in ever more complex
ways. At the center of Flat World is the
original Font of sterile ‘germ baby’ universes (covered in item 3. of this
list), ever gushing out an endless stream of them. The source appears like a blazing sun, with
each simple universe somehow like a photon and each living one like a single
cell organism. Without justification, I
envision the inner portion of this radiating effusion of universes to take the
form of a flat, rotating disc, like a galaxy.
17. The likely predominance of simulated universes in Flat World. In the seventh (and currently the final) book of the Eden's Womb series, entitled The Navel of Time, we are introduced to the ‘Watchers’—a highly evolved and sophisticated Twee-based life form whose primary role in their world is simulating their deep origins and studying (watching) the results. Simulated realities are where future intelligent beings come to play their virtual reality games. But the Watchers' simulations are not games at all, but scientific and experimental. Research. Among the myriad experiments are those that are attempting to reproduce that first transcendence of intelligent life—Adam and Eve, the literal first man and woman, truly alone in their newly born child universe, given the command to be fruitful and multiply. Some of the simplest of the Origin Stories from our ancient traditions become literal fact.
Beyond The Great
Stream
Beyond
the realm of the basic Great Stream Hypothesis is the reminder that the Font that
begat our particular universe remains just one more unremarkable object within
the indifferent Chaos.
Indeed,
it can be imagined that our putative Flat World—gathering place of uncountable
universes—is not even a basic object in the Chaos at all, but a derivative fragment
of the original ‘enduring object’.
Imagine
that you are a conscious universe-entity standing on Flat World, looking up at
the ‘sky,’ and seeing other points of light—other Flat Worlds.
What
if these other ‘stars’ are part of a great hyper-cosmos? What if our particular Flat World is merely a
single ‘atom’ within a majestic ‘hyper-universe’ with its own set of physical
laws?
This
possibility illustrates that our universe may be so far removed from any
fundamental original ‘source’ as a single ‘enduring object’ that it is truly
hopeless to speculate as to how it came into being.
Hopeless?
Who said: “Where
there is life there is hope”?
It
is in our DNA to have hope. And it is within
our DNA that we may someday recognize the interconnectedness of all this vast,
mind-boggling landscape of possibility.
So,
we now further extend the thought experiment.
What
if that hyper-universe of ‘zillions’ of Flat Worlds is but one molecule within a
single cell in a vast intelligent living being, who dwells on a planet in a
solar system within a galaxy in some mega-hyper-uber-universe, which is itself only
a speck …
…
You get the idea … Infinite regress.
Or,
alternatively, perhaps reality is cyclical.
What if that speck is a mote of dust floating in the air in the room
where you sit reading this?
Paradox within Paradox
—the Gateway to the streaming wonder of
existence.
In summary, the ‘Great Stream’ formed
from the Ultimate but it is not the Ultimate;
it is the small part of the Ultimate
that we can hope to grasp.
That is a paraphrase from an ancient
text.
Chapter 1 of the Tao Te Ching reads:
“The
Tao that can be told
is
not the ultimate Tao.
The
name that can be named
is
not the ultimate Name.
The
unnamable is the eternally true.
Naming
is the origin of particular things.”
One could do worse than to look to that
ancient
faith tradition called Taoism
to explain the Great Stream.
For one thing,
the name of the ‘Ultimate’ is the name
of the faith.
(Compare with faiths named for an
individual
[Christianity, Buddhism, Zoroastrian]
Or a population [Hindu, Judaism]
Or attributes of its followers
[Islam, Sikh, Jain, Shinto].)
I prefer what is simplest.
There is only the Tao.
Nothing gets in its way.
Here is the rest of Chapter 1:
“Free
from desire, you touch the mystery;
Caught
in desire you see only the manifestations.
Yet
mystery and manifestations
arise
from the same source.
It
is called Paradox.
Paradox
within Paradox:
the
gateway to ultimate truth.”
Spiritual Influence
TAO TE CHING
道德經
… being the exploration of the ‘Dao’
– the ‘Ultimate,’
that of which there is no greater – and
the way of attaining its limitless power.
Let us postulate a fictitious deity
that presides over our Reality
We will call her Dalle (yes, she is female),
from the French root meaning ‘channel’
—the central current
of the ever-changing Great Stream.
Dalle is the personalization of the
‘Dao’
(and a ‘corruption’ of that ineffable
name).
In the fictional world of the novel Eden’sWomb,
Dalle plays a minor role as a River
Goddess,
however, in our reality, She takes the
role of Strongmother, the embodiment of our real, physical universe.
Dalle’s holy book is our genome—our
DNA—so it is inherently personal to each individual.
Although I once created a Facebook Page
called the Communion of Dalle,
it was merely a thought experiment.
I do not proselytize.
All the trappings of my personal faith
in Dalle are strictly
“A Religion of One.”
Paraphrasing Chapter 6 of the Tao Te
Ching:
“Dalle
never dies.
She
is called mystical Strongmother.
Her
doorway is the root of Heaven and Earth.
Gossamer,
as if barely existing,
She
is found within:
Always
in use, never spent.”
The
Great Stream begins
with the origin of our universe—
an insistent flow amid directionless Chaos.
It continues via an
evolutionary
succession from that ancient germ,
as
I believe.
Our
universe is always in motion.
A
hundred years ago it was proven
that
it could not stand still
and
exist as we know it.
Great
currents of matter swirl within it,
and
within those emerged our planet
and
its Great Stream of Life,
ever
changing, ever dynamic.
And
this is how, in practical terms,
I
equate “The Great Stream”
to
the message of our DNA
—the
flow of evolution—
where
the fast flowing central current
is
the Way of the most successful species/communities.
Those
Venerable Ones,
as
I call them,
have
come closest to what we all seek:
‘Everlasting
Life, Peace and Security’
[I 'invented' the Twees as the idealization of the most Venerable
of Venerable ones—
able to hop from universe to universe—
Transcendent, virtually eternal.]
And
so, my desire is to tap into
the Venerable Ones' ancient state of being.
It is built into all of us. The goal is to learn to recognize its
manifestations in every-day experience, not trying to search for it,
or to work toward it, but to let it appear.
It
most naturally comes not by shutting oneself away from Nature, trying to
control the restless body, and meditating*, but rather by celebrating the
body’s restless instincts, immersing oneself deep in Nature, ever on the move
and alert, experiencing the world in the way that our distant ancestors and
ancestor species have done for billions of years,
via
the deep message of our personal DNA.
For
me, this state of mind most often comes into bloom during long walks, alone,
deep in the woods…
Walking the Way of The Great Stream:
The Pilgrimage
that finds (and creates) its own destination
Walk
with Nature. Walk alone.
Quiet
your footsteps,
still
your breathing.
Walk
as if you are stalking prey.
Because
you are.
Open
the senses.
Not
just five. There are hundreds of senses.
Thousands.
Revelation
itself is a sense. As are awe and
wonder.
Joy. Peace.
Strength.
Look
to sense them all.
Release
the mind.
Consciousness
kills this quest.
It
locks us into a tiny cocoon called ‘now’
in the shell of a body called ‘me’
Reach beyond.
Sense the myriad currents around you—the vast and ever-changing flow.
See the Galaxies dance their intricate ballet.
Feel the trees breathe in the wind.
Hear the waves breaking over the shifting sand.
Now your path has become Nature's Path:
As your being merges
with
The
Great Stream.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Meditation
looks for the stillness within.
Perhaps this discipline is the same as the hunter's prey-stalking discipline.
The goal is to connect with pure
consciousness, transcending the self.
Perhaps this is the same as connecting with the deep genetic memory of the Venerable Ones.
Reaching the destination at last, you flow into that oneness—
Stream
into the glorious light.
I suspect that it is the same place—The Great Stream.
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