Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Brain/Mind/Collapsing Waves-R

Brain/Mind/Collapsing Waves-R
Where is my mind? Organs (heart, stomach), seat of consciousness (pineal gland), parts of or all of the brain, brain and central nervous system (CNS), embodied or disembodied in an aura—too may options. Too many philosophers. Not enough science. Too much religion—not enough spirit. Too black and white—no color, no emotion, too much emotion. So—everything is relative. Mind and the hologram. Memory is a hologram. . . really, REALLY loose.
A part of me craves order, a part disorder, a part chaos. Something about life and death. Where am I going with all of this?
Let’s change the subtext. I dismiss causality. Causality is a useful construct—no more. Causality produces pollution—we really ought to consider cleaning up our act before we destroy the only platform our life-form currently inhabits.
Life is not conscious, but some life forms appear to be more conscious than others. Until the Turing solution has been attained by a non-organic machine—read computer—we seem to be talking to ourselves. What if we can sense others at a distance, something described by Einstein when countering Bohr’s quantum theory of entanglement, calling it “spooky.” The Old One does not throw dice he believed. But quantum mechanics uses mathematical models that perfectly describe “spooky action at a distance.” Entanglement, the physical principle of spookiness, actually resolves one of psychologist C.G. Jung’s hypotheses, that of synchronicity.
Synchronicity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity) was born out of Jung’s interaction with a major player in the early gestation of quantum theory, the progenitor of the exclusion principle, Wolfgang Pauli (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_exclusion_principle). Pauli was analyzed by C.G. Jung. His dreams are a fundamental element in part of Jung’s Collected Works, “Psychology and Alchemy” as well as “The Analysis of Dreams.” Their commonality lay in the quizzical equivalence of quantum physics and depth psychology and gestated Jung’s & Pauli’s principle of synchronicity.
Jung analyzes Pauli’s dream of the cosmological clock in a metaphorical/symbolic rather than in acausal manner. This an appropriate response to the unconscious of causal quantum theorist Wolfgang Pauli to take. Jung develops an acausal theory of personality—psychological type—using the acausal principle of synchronicity that might be considered a direct extension of quantum theory to describe the intuitive function.
To sum up the theory of psychological type (http://www.xs4all.nl/~lange01/L-R/pdfs/uk-b-jungsynchronicity.pdf) (Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 6: Psychological Types), there are two logical and judgmental orientations to reality—Thinking and Feeling, two acausal perceptual psychological orientations to reality that are not judgmental—Sensation and Intuition, along with external-extraverted or internal-introverted attitudes. Much research, measurement, and hypothesis testing examines scientific principles of psychological type. My doctoral dissertation (Intuition and Creativity, Moss, 1991) supports covariation of Intuition and creativity. Using the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI), the Singer-Loomis Inventory of Personality (SLIP), and a test of creativity by Davis (Multidimensional Analysis of a Personality-Based Test of Creative Potential, Gary A. Davis, Michael J. Subkoviak, Journal of Educational Measurement, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Spring, 1975), pp. 37-43), on a large population, my research extends Jung’s theory—if you are intuitive you tend to be creative, and vice versa.
Taking it a step further, synchronicity describes phenomena revealed in the pre-psychological theory of astrology in Jung’s clearly significant study. Astrology—being utilized by intuitive people to ascribe personality variables and potential action to alignment of celestial objects—supports synchronicity. To define it, Jung states synchronicity is not causal, not deterministic—sound familiar? Quantum mechanics is not causal. It is not deterministic. If synchronicity is defined as “an acausal meaningful event,” it lifts pure chance to a level including meaning. Jung and Pauli—synchronicity and the exclusion principle—both emerge from principles of physics and are mathematically verifiable.
Let me take this reasoning a step farther. Spacetime is the universe our body and our brains occupy. Our individuality can be explained by the individual frame occupied by each brain. Your spacetime and mine coexist but are relative to one another. We communicate through the mind.
Mind and matter, mind and logic, mind and acausal meaningful “coincidence:” is mind a quantum apperception of a brain situated in spacetime? Following the hypothetical-deductive model, the null hypotheses would be:
mind does not function according to quantum states.
Mind does not collapse probability waves as described clearly by Feynman.
Brain is not an organ specifically organized to collapse probability waves, inducing mind.
We are not all connected by entanglement.
We cannot apperceive non-local events across superluminous and extreme distances as they occur.
We cannot apperceive events before they occur.
Time does not strictly follow the arrow of time as apperceived by the mind in the form of dreams, visions, psychotic states, paranoid delusions, schizophrenic experience of living dead, communication through teeth of messages from people on Mars, or seers and prophets cannot see into the future.
If the null hypotheses can be proved, none of the above hypotheses stand. It seems to me that it is time to take this project on.
To put it directly, I posit the following revolutionary principle: brain collapses waves inducing mind. Further, if the brain didn’t exist, the mind would have had to invent it.
I am building: there can be a substantive theory of quantum mind. What would it mean as a theory of psychology? Can a theory of quantum psychology make sense in practice? Could it make predictions? Could these predictions be verified? THAT is when things get interesting.

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

“Black Hole/White Hole” and Continuous Creation
You know what a black hole is if you’re aware of physics in the 20th/21st c. Think heavy; so heavy light bends because space-time distorts. At the intense power of gravity induced by a black hole, light gets sucked in--as does any matter--and even though photons continue to go in a straight line, the space-time continuum becomes more like a big, sucking sound that deforms the line so photons go around in a circle and can’t get out. No light=>blackness.
For some time physicists Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose considered the option of what happens in the very center of the tearing vortex of a super massive black hole (BH). After some development, they developed the concept of the suspension of the laws of the universe as we know it—in the formation of a “singularity.” In July, 2004, the $5 bet Hawking and Kip Thorne of Caltech made w/ another prominent physicist, John Preskill, also of Caltech, had to be conceded when Hawking changed his position about Hawking radiation and the inability of a black hole to emit information, thus reinstating the laws of physics, even in what he once described as a singularity. Black holes are modeled after string theory, and a black hole has become a “giant tangle of strings (New Scientist, 14 July, 2004).” In fact, the Hawking radiation emitted by this “fuzzball” does contain information about the insides of a black hole (New Scientist print edition, 13 March, 2004).
What does this mean? Einstein’s precious insights do not require abandonment in the infinity of a singularity. Consider the BH without a singularity. Matter/photons become stripped of their structure and thus entropy is increased, unlike like what must have occurred in the big bang. The miracle of extremely higher entropy makes possible the viability of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. So black holes increase entropy.
But nothing escapes, so through Hawking radiation some energy is released, increasing entropy in the surround of the BH. However, something else is going on and it is not subtle. Mammoth charged particles spit out the poles of the rapidly revolving BH which smash into earth’s atmosphere—they have been traced to super massive black holes that drive the heart of our galaxy, as well as companion galaxies in Andromeda. Called gamma “rays,” only a large multiple of the gravitational fields wielded by millions of stars devoured by black holes in the center of a galaxy could generate such highly charged particles. Further, great jets of energy escape from the poles of galactic centers’ very cold black holes. Why can such energy of such high entropy charge space around them? And what is the effect of this output from what has been described as the most supremely efficient machine in the universe? Star formation. Energy so huge creates stars. High entropy reproduces new stars by the release of high entropic energy from a BH. What do I mean-high entropy?
The 2nd law of thermodynamics states that organization of matter can be described mathematically. The higher the organization the higher the entropy. Life is disordered compared with the simplicity found when all matter becomes similar to all other matter. So when a highly organized, but from the standpoint of entropy chaotic, object falls into a BH, it gains entropy as not only its composition disorganizes when the molecules separate in the intense tidal forces which rip them apart, the molecules then lose their electrons as they ionize, the nucleus of the atom rips apart, breaking into subatomic particles—quarks, mesons, bosons, muons, antiparticles—down to quantum interactive subatomic particles of increasingly intense energy as they approach the planck length at the center of the BH. Entropy increases. (See link for more complete explanation of entropy: http://www.entropylaw.com/) But do they get out?
Forgive me for being speculative, but here’s where the amateur physicist in me begins to stretch out. You may break out into a sweat as I destroy mathematical verity as we know it. But I’m having fun. In fact, how I arrived at these concepts was artistically driven.
Last year (2006—2007) I composed “Black Hole,” a musical realization of what I thought happens when someone falls into a BH. An 8-movement piece, I start out with a ¾ waltz—think Richard Strauss in the approach to the Space station in “2001, A Space Odyssey.” In the 2nd movement we engage in 6/8 to double it up, then multiply meter in the Indian tabla tradition to a fast 4/4 as we accelerate in movement III into a free piece in movement IV within the event horizon beyond which nothing escapes—not even photons. Crazy energy liberated by the disintegration of matter increases the degree of involvement in multi-dimensional phenomena described by string theory. I surmise the following: stripped-down subatomic particles near what would be the singularity accelerate to the 11th dimension—the 11 dimensions are posited by a branch of superstring theory called M theory. My creative leap states in the hypothetical-deductive language (which aims to disprove what is posited and if it cannot be statistically disproved—the hypothesis stands—because the null hypothesis failed) the following null hypotheses:
I. there is no a white hole in the place a singularity once was said to occupy;
II. there is not enough energy to raise subatomic particles obeying laws of quantum physics to increase multidimensionality to the 11th dimension;
III. the laws governing spacetime are not relativized in the 11th dimension;
IV. in the 11th dimension spacetime does not disappear;
V. 11th dimensional strings are not bound by gravity: a) gravitons, b) loop quantum gravity;
VI. Strings occupying 11 dimensions are not transparent to gravity;
VII. Strings are not expelled at FTL superluminous speeds (i.e., FTL: faster than light) along polar lines of force of the spinning BH;
VIII. energy does not collapse quantum particles at increasing distances from the event horizon;
IX. matter is not converted from energy according to the laws of physics as promulgated by Einstein as quantum particles condense at the highest vibrational energies of superstrings;
X. Spacetime is not reversed;
XI. Low entropic strings do not reenter the galactic quadrant.
Musically, this solves a problem I had--it was depressing to fall into a BH and get torn apart without a creative process restoring this energy to the universe. So I developed a theory—the 11 hypotheses above—and came up with a hopeful synthesis. In the final movement—after quantum foam—the themes are played backwards—IIIIII—and layered one on top of the other in an Ivesian counterpositional deconstruction ending in a final declarative chord. Instead of death and disintegration there is death and rebirth—on a cosmological scale. I call this continuous creation.
Naturally, not being a mathematician or a physicist, data cannot be processed by myself to disprove any or all of the above null hypotheses, but as a composer I’ve achieve my purpose—I hope you like “Black Hole.”
“Black Hole” is performed by Louisa Strous Boiman (violin), Ralph Denzer (trumpet, keyboard), Dan Scholnick (tabla), and myself, Michael Moss (tenor and soprano saxophones, Bb clarinet, bass clarinet, khean (from Thailand)—the group PRO VISO. It is to be available soon on 4th Stream Records.

Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Free Life Communication: Web 2.0

I’m naming my blog after the ‘70s NYC (New York City) musicians’ cooperative I became president of because the spirit of creative collaboration and the lowering of entropy through the creative use of minimal resources liberated/freed the maximum amount of positive energy. Through the music we communicated a message that you needed positive energy to create a new healing message so as to heal old wounds and make people whole. My objective with this blog is to throw out ideas and to invite comment that is positive and constructive to initiate debate over thoughts and reflections on a wide range of topics. We will communicate and liberate energy that will delimit life. Thus Free, Life, Communication: FLC, the coop, was founded by NYC musicians wanting to play “the music,” not to make money, but to explore new compositional and expressive concepts. It evolved as an organization, then suffered a decline; in its the time the loft jazz movement expanded until loft jazz in NYC produced several loft jazz festivals. Many “unknown” artists found a platform to explore areas that were non-commercial, and known artists were able to expand their concepts. I was able to produce a number of records as a part of a larger “indie” movement on my own record label—4th Stream Records, and founded my own publishing company—ERG Publishing Company. Now I want to reproduce the feeling of involvement but this time through the larger medium of public participation made possible by the net. So, if anything stimulates reflection and creative process overtakes mundane productivity as a result of anything I write—join the movement! And comment!