My Big TOE: creating space

Creating space-time

Space-time is not a physical construct, but a construct of consciousness created by imposing a set of constraints upon a subset of the larger reality. It is a consciousness interface filter that defines the perception (physical experience) of PMR to participating sentient conscious entities. Interactions between individuated units (subsets) of consciousness are constrained by PMR space, PMR time, PMR mass, energy, and gravity. All beings (conscious entities) within a particular subset of AUM's consciousness (a portion of its organizational potential; a chunk of thought-space) are delivered, by the rule-set representing space-time and defining its properties (one of the PMRK), a consistent virtual experience.

To AUM, space-time is theoretically a profitable internal environment/process that reduces the entropy of its overall system by reducing the entropy of the subset governed by those rules. Our PMR creates a rule-set within the space-time structure, which defines the processes that make us and our space-time uniquely profitable to AUM. Together, "space-time and the PMR rule-set constitute an optimized design solution for a virtual reality simulator that serves as an interactive multiplayer consciousness-quality development trainer for units of individuated consciousness."

Space-time cells constitute an AUM construct--in other words, space-time cells are conceptual, residing in the space-time part of the mind of AUM. Space becomes the structural basis, where time is the dynamic basis for this conceptualization, which will lead to a simple isotropic experience-space (reality) which will lead to the possibility of ordered change (as space-time enables a uniform experience) and therefore evolutionary profitability (growth). "Space-time subsequently becomes the fundamental media for a uniquely dimensioned sub-reality or virtual reality within the larger consciousness system."

My Big TOE: AUO evolves into AUM

AUO mutates to form unique, specialized mental spaces consisting of their own memory and computation-space: separate dimensions, or separate realities. "There may be dimension within dimension, reality within reality, like a set of Russian Matryoshka dolls or perhaps the concentric layers of an onion."

Each subset is contained within, derived from, and dependent upon the superset.
[less constrained (more degrees of freedom)]<--->[more constrained (fewer degrees of freedom)]
NPMR --> NPMRN (a subset of NPMR) --> various physical/non-physical realities (mental spaces of NPMRN, including our own PMR universe) 

 "When AUO eventually grows up and evolves into an extremely complex and highly ordered set of specialized reality cells performing specialized functions, it becomes an entirely different type of entity," what will now be called Absolute Unbounded Manifold (AUM), but at its core "is the same basic AUO consciousness energy sporting a more evolved level of awareness, lower entropy, and greater functionality."


Campbell asserts we're living at the dawn of an evolutionary and cultural transition because for the first time we humans can consciously and deliberate accelerate our consciousness by tinkering with the (biochemistry of) our mechanisms of conscious perception through genetic engineering and psychotropic drugs, aided by technologies like artificial intelligence and computer networks. In other words, the primary driver of evolution will no longer be random mutation and natural selection, but self-directing human intellect. 

This process will move faster and faster, but it remains to be seen whether it will raise or lower entropy. The determining factors? The nature, quality, stability, and balance of the system.
Edit: or maybe it's like this:

My Big TOE: Orders of mental process

Orders of mental process
As awareness masters and refines its evolving mental capabilities, newer, more complex motivations arise as a result of and in conjunction with the first-order imperative to implement the Fundamental Process. Newer, more complex second order functions then begin influencing and driving the evolutionary process, expanding the potential number of protitable states.


First-order function: Imperative to implement the Fundamental Process.

Second-order function: The complexity and interactive properties of the mental processes evolved to implement the Fundamental Process eventually evolve second-order functions like intention, feedback, interaction, synthesis, and integration. For example, the human ability to think and process information at such high levels results in unparalleled mental synthesis, integration, and interactive feedback, which amount to second-order consciousness functionality. This higher mental function is borne of bright awareness coupled with complexity of choice.

Third-order function: Second-order processes lead to development of values (quality): enjoyment, aesthetics, ideals. These, then, are now capable of influencing the outcome of the Fundamental Process. Given awareness and choice, there is then quality and value. Human brightness, with complex sounds and symbols, leads to evolution of music, literature, arts, sciences, technology. There is now such thing as "creativity," "fun," "preference," "morality."

My Big TOE: The birth of time

Dimensionality
A dimension is a well-defined processing subset within The Big Computer. Within digital consciousness, the creation of various dimensions is the creation of separate memory and processing subsets (like partitioning in digital computers).

We experience our perception of reality as 3D time-ordered only because the rules of our universe require four coordinates to specify individual events relative to an individual's frame of reference (each of which is as fundamentally proper as any other) on a temporal axis. The space-time rule-set is only a local rule set and does not apply to the larger reality.

How is time invented?
To invent time, AUO "needs only to oscillate (repetitively change the state of) some individual or group of reality cells more or less regularly. The cells oscillate at a constant, regular rate to be more functional (hence more profitable). Once cycle equals two oscillation frequencies--a change of state and a change back.

1. The Fundamental Process enables AUO to change, or modify its absolute oneness
2. AUO finds it can lower its entropy by changing states
3. Time separates a "before" state from an "after" state and therefore enables more organization and complexity and less entropy
4. Awareness of change, before and after states, necessitates the idea of a personal time

Why is time invented?
The organizational potential of a system multiples if it is possible for operations and content to be arranged in a specific order and sequence because "cause" and "effect" explodes exponentially the number of potential possibilities.

Interactive content can now be indexed and sequenced: sequences propagate and carry content. Regularity enables complex interaction. Causal logic chains evolve. Time acts as a catalytic agent--it enhances AUO's ability to self-organize. In terms of consciousness, which is pressured by self-improvement, more aware and highly organized configurations (higher quality consciousness) are profitable.

Time facilitates communication
AUO has relatively independent parts and patterns (reality cells). More possibilities and evolutionary potential can be generated if those parts and patterns can communicate because patterns of content can be propagated, integrated, and regulated. Communication is facilitated by time: A cell changes state, and an "adjacent" cell can now change state as a response to that cell's having changed state. A sent message and reception (change) takes place in a period of time. If there is a meaning encoded in the state change (like alphabets or gestures or sounds), that is communication and data sharing.

What is the fastest a given message can be propagated? However fast a single reality cell can change state. That is one half cycle, or one quantum, of AUO-time. This fundamental quantum of time is thus the smallest unit of time our AUO clock can directly measure.

My Big TOE: Mathematics and logic as large-scale computational memory

Terms
Rules: Knowledge-based or experience-based patterns for the reliable definition, repetition, and interaction of other patterns.
Control & hierarchy: evolve out of the concepts of "rules," because with pattern formation must come rules defining how patterns will form, and with pattern interaction and relationship must come rules governing that interaction and relationship.
Quantum: A minimum, discrete group of reality cells that interact with each other, use and share information (patterns of data) and modify themselves
Reality cell: A singular, relative disturbance in a uniform state. The simplest form is a basic, binary unit.
Information: Patterns of data.

My Big TOE: evolutionary constraints

How do complexity, specialization, & organization arise?
- Simpler entities band together cooperatively to form more complex entities and systems that are more powerful and thus more profitable for all participants.
- Groups of entities in an interactive synergistic environment integrate, thus becoming one complex thing--a system that evolves as its parts evolve.
- When systems of systems evolve, complexity, diversity and specialization increase; entropy is decreased by evolving higher orders of organization.

Constraints determine degree and range of diversity
The fewer the constraints, the more diversity there will be. Since biological systems are constrained by survival and propagation, it will not produce a preponderance of weak or non-reproducing organisms. However, within the constraints of evolving survival strategies or modes of locomotion, there were very few constraints and so there are many types of each on planet earth, and variations within each type.

AUO is constrained by the energy/focus/memory required to keep itself changing/evolving
AUO is driven by the Fundamental Process to
1. Improve and develop the potential of its being
2. The quality of its consciousness
3. The level, breadth, and depth of its potential

We've established that AUO is not constrained by survival and propagation. But it may be constrained by the energy or focus required to keep track of all the "gedanken experiments" in process. "To maintain and profitably organize all the information required to support a complex interactive virtual reality would require a good memory--or perhaps a big computer. The existence of limiting factors would inevitably lead a self-modifying computational system (digital organism) to set priorities and develop rules that optimize resource utilization.

Minimal constraints for AUO means increasing complexity
So AUO puts its limited energy (ability to modify its own internal environment) to increasing complexity in relation to itself. This is what is most profitable for it: redefining and improving its overall capacity, quality, and awareness. Awareness leads to ability to modify internal states, leads to modification of internal states to decrease overall entropy.

AUO's motivation and evolutionary purpose flows to us conscious beings, because as above, so below.

**Some of this is similar to Terence McKenna's novelty theory; briefly, that systems tend to increase in complexity over time, that systems are motivated to decrease entropy, that existence consists of dimensions beyond the 3rd and 4th occupied by units of higher consciousness, that humans can move into these dimensions.**

My Big TOE: What motivates continuing evolution?

From reality cells to organization to specialization
We now have relative disturbances (what Campbell calls reality cells), we have uniform and non-uniform states represented by these cells, but we do not yet have structure, order, or specialization of function. Each new state represents new possibilities and opportunities for growth. As we have new states, we have growth of awareness, complexity, and useful control: profitability.

So what to do with the massive number of reality cells that have been created?
1. Organization: arranging the local deformations into patterns, patterns of patterns, and groups of patterns of patterns, limited by memory.
2. Continuation of evolution: diversification and specialization. The Fundamental Process creates pressures to evolve; diversification and specialization are individual strategies to respond to these pressures.

My Big TOE: Possibilities for new states of being

Ways of conceptualizing AUO
1. Primordial consciousness
2. An energy form that has the potential to evolve awareness
3. An (apparently) infinite potential to (use energy to) self-organize, i.e. potential to reduce average entropy through evolution.


How does AUO create new possibilities for states of being?
1. It first creates duality within itself by altering uniformity to create a local disturbance or distortion. The first "this" vs. "not this." A tiny ripple turns into waves, etc.
2. This duality means there exists "uniform" vs. "locally non-uniform" (a localized modification of the uniform state). This means AUO can create the disturbance, return to uniformity, intentionally reestablish the locally disturbed state, and return back to uniform, etc.
3. Once the duality is created, it can be evaluated for profitability, and then potential methods for achieving the new state can be discovered (e.g. single cells discover multi-celled configurations are more profitable. Later, it will find cell-specialization provides more efficient multi-celled organisms).
4. Continuing evolution requires more complexity in the methods of expression of differentiation of parts relative to each other. A simpler mode of state changing is unipolar sinusoidal waves (uniform/positive-disturbance/uniform, or uniform/hot/uniform) or bipolar sinusoidal waves (uniform/positive-disturbance/uniform/negative-disturbance, or uniform/hot/uniform/cold).
5. We've established that the Fundamental Process dictates that awareness, however dim, always creates ever more possibilities for itself to explore. Likewise, complexity, however simple, always generates greater possibilities for the evolving entity to explore. Two disturbances become three, four, hundreds, billions.

My Big TOE: Awareness and AUO

Evolving awareness
How are states of being evolved? Potential states of being are generated by direct choice, random events, and dumb luck. The entity explores all the potential states it can successfully populate. Therefore, awareness, a state of being, grows and evolves similarly to how physical bodies have grown and evolved: the entity interacts with internal environments (mutating) and external environments, discovers it can be aware of those environments, and chooses to be aware because it is profitable.

Developing and evolving awareness is a standard and natural happening among biological entities.

My BIG Toe: Learning & memory

The ability to store information and learn, the possession of a bright and more aware brain, the formation of genetic group memory, and enhanced sensory organs.

Individual Learning
What enables an entity to learn?
1. The ability to store information, the ability to remember. The larger the better.
2. High bandwidth input-output (I/O) (interaction between the processor & the external environment)
3. Short processor cycle times. Shorter the better.
4. Short memory input and access times (ability to input & retrieve data quickly). Shorter the better.

My Big TOE: Defining AUO and The Fundamental Process

I'm going to review here for my own edification some of the foundational pieces of Thomas Campbell's My Big TOE.

Two concepts form the foundation of it.

Absolute Unbounded Oneness
The first is mystical. "Mystical" means laying outside the bounds of what can be defined by our knowledge as science has discovered and clarified it. That which is mystical is either inaccessible to our minds, or is yet to be discovered by science. He (rightly, in my view) dismisses the idea that there is no beginning to existence as without basis in science, mystical in itself, and worst of all illogical. The alternative is that there is a beginning, but beginnings "belong to the next higher level of causality and are beyond the purview or scope of a subsystem's own causal logic" (vol.1, sec. 2, chap. 24).

The idea is this: that the "engine" or "source" of our reality (the physical universe and individual consciousness) is a "primordial consciousness," called here an Absolute Unbounded Oneness. The AUO uses the Fundamental Process to interact with itself toward new states of existence by changing its undifferentiated oneness.

The second idea is not mystical.

Wang Bi: Clarifying the Judgements

A translation of the I Ching by Wang Bi (226-249)--some insights from his "general remarks:"

1. Clarifying the Judgements
A Judgement "discusses the body or substance of a hexagram as a whole and clarifies what the controlling principle is from which it evolves."
Because "the many cannot govern the many," there is One that governs the many, as One "controls all activity in the world."
There is no such thing as absolute chaos--things follow their own principles, are united by a "fundamental regulator," are integrated by a "primordial generator." Because this is so, one can pick one line of a hexagram and "use it to clarify what is happening." This One enables us to understand situations even if variables are multitudinous--"if we keep to a single center point when viewing what is about to come to us, then things converging from the six directions lose their capacity to overwhelm us with their number." In other words, a "chief controlling principle" inheres in all things, and the I Ching offers Judgements as these principles.

wanting, etc.

All these Republicans calling for capped spending, it's humorous how naive they are about the American character of 2011. My Republican brother in law is a Fox News Republican, i.e. very little knowledge of political science, cultural understanding, economics; mere repeating of mantras. Incidentally he has little self-reflection, such that he doesn't apply the diagnoses he supports to his own life, he doesn't have consistency between what he advocates and what he lives, he's a hypocrite. Americans won't stop spending because we want too badly. We want, and the only way to satiate wants is to spend.
________
Speaking of wanting, 3 titles I'd like:
RL Wing's I Ching Workbook 978-0385128384
Wu Wei's The I Ching: 978-0943015071
Lao Tse's Tao de Ching: 1562790854
and
Frederick Franck's Drawing trilogy

I can get them all for a few bucks.

McKenna: The fifth dimension, information & entropy, science and possibility

A few days ago (6/12) in my print journal, I wrote

"The rules, that is what practicing drawing is for, to learn your rules so you're expressing yourself intelligibly, just as writers learn spelling, grammar and syntax and more advanced writers manipulate their words to convey stories hitherto untold, unfelt. that's why quality matters not (in the learning stages), one is learning the rules, and also learning the rules to self-expression: "I want to say this. How is it possible for me to express an emotion, a feeling about someone or something?" In learning the rules of self-expression, one improves his efficacy in the domain of expression, so that he can say what he feels, or it comes across, is transmitted, broadcast, sent, displayed, offered, proffered, given, understood, felt, expressed. Plopped down, we orient ourselves to the third dimension and to Earthly physics, then we learn the fourth dimension, the passage of time and Earthly time, days, minutes, seconds. Entrance into the fifth dimension may be expression, which has its own rules but is bound by human limitations." 

And then I heard this from Terence McKenna (from the Psychedelic Salon, podcast 32) yesterday:

"Language is in conquest of dimensional expression, or something is seeking to manifest itself in a domain of time & space, of higher and higher dimension." Early life forms, fixed slimes, are like points of being, who by breaking free and becoming motile, still without perception, are like lines, and when "light-sensitive photons" are trapped in their membranes, intend to move toward light, which is entrance not only into the third but also the fourth dimension because to move from here to there is a matter of executing will over time as well as space. Thence evolution is about efficacious means of movement in and through the third and fourth dimensional world, a "topological manifold with a temporal axis."
"But then, with the advent of spoken language--spoken language is about the recovery of memory at a later date; it's a data recall system. [He's drawing, intentionally, most likely, on ideas in Flatland: we beings of the fifth dimension should have access to the fourth, as the square did Lineland and the sphere did Flatland. This is accomplished by language, by which we can travel to the past (kinglists, histories) and into the future via strategizing, fantasizing.] When you get to writing, this time-binding function is now totally explicit...the purpose of these behaviors is to keep the past from slipping away.
"From the point of view that evolution is the conquest of dimensionality...you can see that the primate conquest of time by these time-binding technologies is the phenomenon we call human history." This is why we speak, write, invent alphabets and mathematical notation. Full conquest of the 4th dimension will require machine symbiosis and humans to become more than "semi-cannibalistic primates [into] machine-tenders of a global nervous system."

OK so that's one big idea. The next big idea is related to Terence's notion that not only is the universe a novelty-producing and conserving mechanism, but that novelty is occurring at quicker rates through time. What I'm interested in here is close relationships between the thoughts of 3 big thinkers of the late 20th century: Luciano Floridi, Terence McKenna, and Thomas Campbell, relating to the concept of entropy. Floridi addresses entropy as it relates to information, viz. that entropy applies to information as it does to the physical world, that without intentional conservation it will dissipate and cease to exist. Note here the parallel between this concept and Dawkins's meme notion. Floridi introduced the notion in relationship to his Information Ethics: it is our obligation to preserve and conserve information as long as it enriches what he calls the infosphere; it then becomes unethical to destroy information and to let valuable information be destroyed or go to destruction. Thomas Campbell's notion of entropy has wider implications related to the existence of love in the universe: as entropy takes life away, it is the human objective to extend life and this can be done by love. Bertrand Russell too has something about entropy in one of his radio broadcasts I just listened to, I'll have to find it and transcribe it here. This is the incipience of an essay on the evolution of the application of the concept of entropy in the late 20th century.

Here's what McKenna said about it in the same talk:

On Teilhard de Chardin's "nuosphere", "the atmosphere of electronic and radar and radio and telegraphic and television signals; that we would build a new atmosphere, as it were, a technosphere of information. And information is a very key concept in all of this. What I call "novelty," you could arguably call "information;" what I call "habit," you could arguably call "noise." And this is a vision of being where there is a struggle between these two antithetical forces--one, described by the second law of thermodynamics: entropy. The other described by novelty theory, and Ilya Prigogine's non-equilibrium thermodynamics, etc. etc. And they are, in every situation, locked in struggle. The amount of order and disorder in any situation is dictated by the unique configuration of the local struggle between these two forces, if you want to put it that way. But the good news is, it's not a Manichean thing--it doesn't go on forever, these two forces are not quite equally pitted. Over time, novelty wins. Order wins. Order triumphs over disorder, and builds higher states of order. So in a way, you could think of the whole process as what engineers call a "damped oscillation." That habit is this oscillation in a space of perfection, and that it is eventually damped by the surrounding telos toward concrescence [see Alfred North Whitehead's Process and Reality]."
...
"What really is happening is that a...leap forward [towards control of the world matter and energy] is being taken, and all under the aegis of this key concept of information. Information is more primary than time and space, more primary than light and electromagnetism. Information is the stuff of being--it's all you will ever know, it's all you can ever know. The rest are ghostly hypotheses to explain the behavior and the presence of information. It's almost as though it has a syntactical life of its own. It's almost as though it's a virtual lifeform of some sort, that is running on a primate platform [see Danny Hillis, The Connection Machine]...To this point, the human beings have been almost like the host of a parasite...a syntactical net...we were early parasitized by a kind of virtual life form that lives only in syntax, and is essentially timesharing and piggybacking our nervous system, but at some point we insisted around it, in somewhat the way a cell membrane trapped early bacteria and turned them into mitochondria, so now we can think with this linguistic symbiote that shares our brain space. However, [see George Dyson, Darwin Among the Machines]...when we talk to each other, when we make sense to each other, what we say can be perfectly made formulaic through symbolic logic...[which is in other words] capable of portraying human language and human logical process perfectly. The interesting thing is that this language, symbolic logic, is the language that machines speak with great fluency. This is the great bridge between us and the machines: that fundamentally we speak the same language. That "and" and "and" to a microprocessor mean the same thing. So there is no great barrier; it's all conceptual between us and machine intelligence. Machine intelligence is the most likely form of alien intelligence to arrive and complicate our social dialogue because in a sense it's already here, we're putting a great deal of effort into creating it, and its emergence depends to a great deal upon these same appetites for novelty that allowed us to squeeze ourselves out of the rules of molecular chemistry. Again, it's happening at these very high megahertz rates; machine evolution will not be like human evolution; what took us 50,000 years to achieve, it can achieve, through distributed processing, in minutes, hours. Hans Moravic says, of artificial intelligence, we may never know what hit us. It will simply come to be."

And another synchronicity, related to my latest venture back into calculus. I wrote recently

"Terence McKenna said math is pretty much the only truth he can see at this point, and my inspiration in picking up calculus comes from my desire to know more about the operations of the world. Understand the world's laws and you understand more about limitations generally. And life is quite simply God imposing limits on himself. We are of God, a substance of God with limitations: limits of knowledge, of knowledge of what is one or more dimensions outside our domain. It is our objective to figure this damn thing out, that's why we enjoy puzzles, it's a fractally smaller piece of the larger objective...If we figure out our laws, laws of science and math, we know how far to tread and we understand more about what we have to work with."

Note that's inspired by McKenna as well as Huston Smith and Thomas Campbell, who posited the idea that the largest domain of God is inaccessible to human understanding. Anyway, Terence said this in this same podcast I've been quoting from:

You see, in a way, what science is all about is, it will tell you what is possible. If you want to know if something is possible, you ask the expert in that science."

In other words, the limitations. To orient yourself intellectually in the third and fourth dimension, you learn the limitations, you ask science.

And finally, on the topic of discovering why things happen, McKenna again:

"But what science can't tell you, and what is what you usually really want to know, is, out of the class of the possible, what things will actually occur? And we have no theory for this, strangely enough...A fundamentalist Christian would say 'God's will. Out of the class of the possible, what comes to be is God's will.' Well, that would be one theory of what it is that winnows the actual from the possible. A scientist would say 'preexisting conditions.' In other words, somehow the circumstances into which any phenomenon is born skew it towards its ultimate developmental end-state. This is almost like the law of karma: by the circumstances in which you find yourself, you're carried forward to some conclusion that was inevitable based on that. Novelty theory is not predestination. It doesn't say that the future has happened. If you believe the future has happened you have all kinds of philosophical problems on your hands because for truth as a concept to have any meaning, you have to have error. If you think what you think because you can't think anything else, then what does the search for truth and meaning look like in a cosmos like that? It's meaningless. So there must be at least that much freedom: freedom to err in the mind."