Nox Vox -- A. A. Attanasio

Traveling Light

2011-08-11T10:41:00.000-07:00

No, those aren’t sperm. That’s a NASA graphic illustrating two photons traveling through the froth of spacetime. It’s a science fantasy.

Light doesn’t actually travel. The motion of light is a deep illusion for us. We exist in the phenomenal world of time. But light has no rest mass – and no time.

From the pov of a photon, neither time nor distance exist. Strange as it sounds, a photon arrives instantaneously at its destination.

Photons reaching Earth tonight from galaxies 10 billion light years away departed before our planet and sun had formed – and yet arrive instantly!

You can see in this video clip how photons behave very differently from particles of matter.

We are made of matter. We see light but only by destroying it. Photons absorbed by our retinas initiate a cascade of chemical reactions we call seeing.

The strange reality of light surrounds and touches us, but we never enter it. We exist exclusively in the unknown dream of our physical bodies.

The distance to which light moves away from us is the space of our human identity. We measure time and distance by the timeless action of light.

The act of seeing, which we so routinely take for granted, brings us into contact with a reality that transcends us. Right before our eyes is the luminous mystery of our being human.

At the instant of creation, in the first moment of the Big Bang, everything was light. Why did all this energy rush out into the cold and profound darkness of space?

Why did light cool to matter – and become us?

Wigner’s Friend is silent. No comments about the origin of the Big Bang. Whatever core elements in the psyche script our dreams has nothing to say here about our origin as light.

The distance to which WF moves away from us is the space of our human dream.

What Are We Seeing?

2011-08-03T14:29:00.000-07:00

This is a portrait of our universe based on observations of the microwave background radiation: the remnant heat of the Big Bang from almost 14 billion years ago.

The structures in this image—the rings, dots and spackling—are made up of galaxies and strings of galaxies! Scientists are not sure what they’re seeing, because those concentric rings may be a visual anomaly, an illusion. Until the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite completes a more sensitive probe of the deep sky, science must rely on fantasy.

There are two prevalent cosmological fantasies about our origin that might explain these bulls-eye rings of galaxies.

Roger Penrose and Vahe Gurzadyan speculate that the universe expands toward infinity—and after a very long time, beyond a googol of years (10 raised to the power of 100), all mass has decayed to energy. Because energy has no rest mass, there is no time anymore. And there’s no way to measure distance (because there are no longer any objects, not even atoms, for reference points). In this extreme state of indeterminacy, a new Big Bang spontaneously emerges. That’s because this vast nothingness has no disorder, as there’s nothing much there, and the second law of thermodynamics says that states of low disorder, low entropy, spontaneously move toward higher disorder and so eventually—boom!—another Big Bang.

The other hypothesis of our cosmic origins fantasizes many universes floating around like bubbles in a larger dimension. Occasionally, they bump into each other, and the concentric rings we see in the galactic sky are “bruises” where our universe collided with others. There seems to be evidence for four of these impacts.

Here is an animation of this cosmic bang-up. http://wwwphy.princeton.edu/~steinh/cycliccosmology.html

Watching it makes me dizzy, because there’s such a spectacular gap between this less-than-real animation and the bigger-than-real higher dimension it portrays.

In this split between what-we-know-is-fantasy and what really is, we meet Wigner’s Friend. WF is the observer within the human psyche who dreams us up.

I created this space to hang with WF out here on the internet, which is the mind of our time. There’s a lot going on in the mind of our time, and I wasn’t sure if WF is any part of this moment. So I was ready for silence. Instead, several visitors replied, and their collective comments comprise my fantasy of what WF has to say—

WF: Mayhaps stories are living things, and words their cells. Those cells live inside the people they enter, where they wait to meet other words and make other stories …

AA: That reminds me of Richard Dawkins' concept of “memes,” cultural ideas that replicate and evolve like genes…

WF: Yeah. And perhaps we are just the soil and weather that help them grow.

AA: Humanity, then, is the ‘soil’ for the ‘seeds’ of memes. Our brain generates consciousness as a medium for the ferment of fantasy—of stories

WF: "In the Beginning, there was the Word." And the Word is informative and entertaining. That is the way the Word hugs the World.

AA: That gives me a lot to think about, WF! So, if I understand, you’re saying that our preconscious narratives, the stories of our dreams, are what we try to embrace in the phenomenal world.

WF: Our science fantasies about the origin of the universe reveal less about what’s out there than what we cherish in our hearts.

AA: I notice that the two science fantasies about the origin of the universe both involve eternal cycles. We find this eternal return in many mythologies, probably because homo sapiens evolved in a world of celestial cycles.

WF: That’s why the myth of the solar hero endures: the struggle of light and dark. We can see that today in comic book fantasies, which are the biggest draw at the box office these days and reveal our species’ nascent, childlike acknowledgment that we are all super-heroes.

AA: Sure. In the 21st century, thanks to science, we know that reality is a mystery. Humans are made of fantasy. We can only imagine who we are. By relating directly to the narratives within us, to our dreams and fantasies, and imagining our most heroic ambitions we can profoundly influence how we relate to the phenomenal world around us.

WF: Every inner movement is a prayer that transforms the world.

AA: Very poetic.

WF: Sometimes. Other times, our fantasies are trite, like when authors “hack,” turning out lifeless Frankensteinian pieces to pay the bills. There’s something depraved about cobbling together such undead things.

AA: Depraved because the imagination is endlessly creative and only expediency keeps an artist from tapping into that vital source.

WF: Yes. We are dreaming all the time. That otherness is always rolling. We can feel dreams under the surface when we fall asleep slowly enough. And sometimes publishable stories have been born in dreams. But do we as conscious beings really have responsibilities to our dreams? Is there a handbook or memo for this? ;)

AA: I think that’s what this blog is trying to figure out. What does it mean to be friends with Wigner’s Friend?

Introducing Wigner's Friend

2011-07-16T17:47:00.000-07:00

Here is a stunning portrait of Wigner’s Friend!

Schrodinger’s Cat and Wigner’s Friend are outlandish science fantasies by two of the 20th century’s Nobel laureate quantum mechanics. They dazzled me as a kid with their cartoon-like simplicity and began my lifelong obsession with science fantasy.

Click on the image at left to view a hilarious and in-your-face YouTube video that lucidly describes Wigner’s Friend and its weird implications.

As an adult, I felt the ground shift under me when I finally grasped the deeper significance of these thought experiments: There is no scientific definition of an observation.

We know from the peerless wonder of the double-slit experiment that observation changes the quantum world—but what qualifies as an observation?

On larger scales, relativity theory shows how the velocity of the observer affects the interpretation of what is observed.

And more personally, our biology creates its own version of reality in our heads. Forty years ago, physiologist Benjamin Libet measured how the brain lights up with the intention to act just before we experience the volitional certainty that we’re doing exactly what we choose. Our actions are decided for us in uncanny and bewildering inner spaces.

Choice and identity float out of a neurological vanishing point, a weightless instant beyond our awareness. What does this mean?

Who are those voices we distantly hear as we drift to sleep? I say ‘who’ not ‘what,’ because these neurological entities plot the mythic fatedness of our dreams. The very fact that the sleeping brain uses us in dramas not of our making is a huge clue.

With dazzling poetic intelligence, the brain manipulates us into expressing all of the mind’s mysterious powers (of memory and imagination)—with no control.

This ‘night voice’ so many of us hear is Wigner’s Friend. I mean this in a poetic sense. And poetry—metaphoric thinking—has stupendous effectiveness in the virtual reality of the brain … where we all live and die.

An entity observes us and nightly installs us as characters into narratives and dramas—of whose design? Who is observing us from within the complexity of our organic being?

Science, for now, how has no idea. And so, science fantasizes, conducts thought experiments and proposes hypotheses about being human.

What we do know is that our being is a mystery. Humans are made of fantasy. We can only imagine who we are. And so, we move through the world in the disguise of our presence.

This blog is a conversation with the observer behind that disguise, with Wigner’s Friend. For me, that’s you. I, my sense of ‘me,’ exists in this distinctly human space as the unique pattern of these words. How you observe this pattern determines who I am.

Who am I?

How you see me is how you see your self, because I exist through these words as part of the virtual reality in the organic structure of your brain. How you respond to this blog originates at preconscious levels, within the unknowing that projects us into consciousness. And so, of course, silence is a meaningful response – though a text easy to misread!

I am intensely interested in what you have to say. Or, rather, what fantasy shapes and moves you.

That was the charge I gave myself when the notion for this blog emerged from the secret corridors of my brain: to express openly the candescent power trapped in the human place of the skull, to write from our heart in its cage, and then to observe whatever appears here at this website, where we meet in mystery.

“I even feel a certain honor to be associated with such a mystery."