BJ's SOLSL: my friend Jan, with some Cosmology

This one is a gift for you from my good friend Jan Lee.  I met Jan Lee one day in a coffee shop (THE coffeehouse), where she was reading a most interesting looking book on an aspect of novel writing.    I chirped up as I do tend to, and asked if it was any good cos I had that book at home and haven’t started reading it yet.  (Observe my small child way of making friends that has not changed at all despite me being in my 40s.)  She didn’t seem to think I was weird for speaking to her (as people can do, sadly), and we got talking.  First about novel writing (she’s writing a brilliantly interesting sounding novel), then about allsorts of other things.  Then we met up for coffee again.  And then again.  And then regularly.  And then we saw each other’s houses.  It was lovely; things can be relatively simple even as a grown up. 

I think it was helped by the fact she’s so curious and chatty and clever; she just does not mind talking to me and thinking of answers to my often daft questions.  Every now and again we butt heads about something, but it’s usually a result of differing styles; I end up learning and having thoughts even from our disagreements.  I wish you all a as friend stimulating and funny and warm.

One of the things we talk about a lot, is cosmology.  Its part of what she’ll be exploring in her novel, aspects of it.  It’s such a huge subject – and there’s so much to say and think and ponder on it…so I asked her to write a tiny quick teaser bit, to get you all as interested in this vast subject as she is.  If you’re all good, I’ll ask her to write a follow up bit, where some of the ideas get explained a bit more – as this article is but the start of your exploring of this subject…It will send you off to the library, to Google, with a crunched up concentrated face, to find more, more, more…

***

Musings on the nature of reality

I had a lot of trouble deciding what to write about here.  My first thought was the Big Bang theory, and how similar it is to the story of Genesis (reader reads religious nut), and how that might be an expression of the borders of our ability to understand the universe.  As in, maybe we just don't have the equipment, because we're built for the natural, three-dimensional world throwing lions at us.

Then I thought about parallel universes, all the unexplained experiences people have (reader catches a whiff of joss sticks), or interconnecting dimensions, etc.  But I'm woefully ignorant in this area. 

So, then I thought I'd look along philosophical lines... existentialism and nihilism (reader visualises fat, angry angels, hopping.) 

But I've got to start somewhere, and the thing that most recently piqued my interest was this:

http://www.collective-evolution.com/2013/08/08/the-study-of-fundamental-consciousness-enters-the-mainstream/

And what makes me take it more seriously than I otherwise might, is this quote from Max Planck:

"I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness."

- Max Planck (Founder of Quantum Physics, Nobel Prize Laureate), As quoted in The Observer (25 January 1931)

I don't even pretend to understand it, but it got me thinking, ooh, about lots of things.  Like how only a fraction of the universe is made of the kind of matter that we understand...

http://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-is-dark-energy/

...so, naturally, we can only view things in terms of our understanding of the 5% that we currently have at our disposal, otherwise we step outside the established scientific boundaries and might find someone passing us the Prozac.  Taking comfort from Max Planck's words, though, I'll press on.

It got me thinking about consciousness and how it surges through our brains in three-dimensional energy waves.  For some reason, I imagine this as a superbly choreographed Mexican wave running right through a stadium (instead of just around the edges), with layer upon layer of tiny people standing on each other's shoulders.  It also made me wonder how we have come to view the near-death experience as a by-product of the oxygen-starved brain, rather than as our experience of the reality of the point of death.  Which got me thinking about probabilities.  Which is the more likely?  That near-death experiences are a kind of sugar-rush, or that our consciousness experiences leaving our body?  We can see the same pattern repeated in every brain, and we can talk to the survivors and ask them what they saw and heard while the brain was emitting that pattern.  But then we have to leap one way or the other, and where does the weight of evidence lie?  I know two people who have died (and survived, obviously), and they both had a full-on awareness of the process.  One of them was a Man Of Science, who didn't believe in anything he couldn't hit with a stick, but he took his experience to be an absolute reality.  Their journeys, though very different in some ways, were fairly typical of the bulk of reports.  It changed their entire outlook on life.  So, having the physical process of death described in terms of the pattern in makes in the brain doesn't help much.  Douglas Adams springs to mind, because wherever you might sit on the meaning-of-life question, knowing that the answer is 42 doesn't really cut it. 

http://www.greatplay.net/uselessia/articles/theanswer.html

“At the end of Life, the Universe and Everything, the third book in the series, Arthur encounters a man named Prak, who through a significant overdose of a remarkably effective truth serum has gained the knowledge of all truth. Prak confirms that 42 is indeed the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything, but reveals that it is impossible for both the ultimate answer and the ultimate question to be known about the same universe. He states that if such a thing should come to pass, the universe would disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarrely inexplicable. He then speculates that this may have already happened.”

- Encyclopedia Uselessia

The probability thing got me thinking about the multiverse, and whether we can ever point to the moment that a parallel universe branches off, given that it happens at every instant, given that it happening is what the world looks like just going about its business.  I imagine the multiverse as a  disc galaxy - fat in the middle, where all the highest probability outcomes come to fruition, tapering off to the more improbable around the edges.  It doesn't look anything like that, of course, because my imagination is really quite limited and the multiverse must be (in our terms) effectively infinite.  It might be that human imagination and consciousness evolve as new things are discovered or created, but we aren't there yet.  Which brings us right back to how the Big Bang theory came to have so many elements of the Genesis story – and how our current Big Sleep theory looks just like nature giving us one last dream before we go. 

The parallel universe thing reminds me of all the other dimensions that, theoretically, populate the universe (if the concept is still current after the decline of string-theory).  How it could be possible that they do not interact with us at all, ever?  Except for one that might have something to do with gravity, maybe.

Then there's the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, not to be confused with the Observer effect (although Heisenberg himself is reputed to have confused the two on occasion).  It seems to say that in order for the wave-function to collapse into reality, our consciousness must interact, fundamentally,  on the quantum level.  Is that right, or did I end up confusing the two?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_(physics)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle

Anyway, as always, there are more questions than answers.  I think I'll just skip the bit on existentialism and nihilism.

By Jan Lee, August 2013