Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write off the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Showing posts with label Science and the Universe - QP. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Science and the Universe - QP. Show all posts

Monday, January 24, 2022

Update: Discover of Mysterious X Particles in the Very, Very Early Universe


Part of the Large Hadron Collider's Compact Muon Solenoid detector. (CERN)


Physicists Detect Mysterious X Particles in
'Primordial Soup' For The First Time

January 24, 2022


A mysterious particle thought to have existed briefly just after the Big Bang has now been detected for the first time in the 'primordial soup'.

Specifically, in a medium called the quark-gluon plasma, generated in the Large Hadron Collider by colliding lead ions. There, amid the trillions of particles produced by these collisions, physicists managed to tease out 100 of the exotic motes known as X particles.

"This is just the start of the story," says physicist Yen-Jie Lee of MIT, and a member of the international CMS Collaboration headquartered at CERN in Switzerland.

"We've shown we can find a signal. In the next few years we want to use the quark-gluon plasma to probe the X particle's internal structure, which could change our view of what kind of material the universe should produce."

Mere moments after the Big Bang, the very early Universe wasn't made of the same stuff we see floating around today. Instead, for a few millionths of a second, it was filled with plasma superheated to trillions of degrees, consisting of elementary particles called quarks and gluons. That's the quark-gluon plasma.

In less time than it takes to blink, the plasma cooled and the particles came together to form the protons and neutrons of which normal matter is constructed today. But in that very brief twitch of time, the particles in the quark-gluon plasma collided, stuck together, and came apart again in different configurations.

One of those configurations is a particle so mysterious, we don't even know how it's put together. This is the X particle, and it's only been seen very rarely and briefly in particle colliders – too briefly to be probed.

Theoretically, however, X particles could appear in the very small flashes of quark-gluon plasma that physicists have been creating in particle accelerators for some years now. And this might afford a better opportunity to understand them.

During the Large Hadron Collider's 2018 run, positively charged atoms of lead were slammed together at high speeds. Each of these roughly 13 billion collisions produced a shower of tens of thousands of particles. That's a dauntingly colossal amount of data to sift through.

"Theoretically speaking, there are so many quarks and gluons in the plasma that the production of X particles should be enhanced," Lee says. "But people thought it would be too difficult to search for them because there are so many other particles produced in this quark soup."

Although X particles are very short-lived, when they decay, they produce a shower of lower-mass particles. To streamline the data analysis process, the team developed an algorithm to recognize the patterns characteristic of X particle decay. Then they fed the 2018 LHC data into their software.

The algorithm identified a signal at a specific mass that indicated the presence of around 100 X particles in the data. This is an excellent start.

"It's almost unthinkable that we can tease out these 100 particles from this huge dataset," Lee said.

At this point, the data are insufficient to learn more about the X-particle's structure, but the discovery could bring us closer. Now that we know how to find the X-particle's signature, teasing it out in future data sets should be a lot easier. In turn, the more data we have available, the easier it will be to make sense of them.

Protons and neutrons are each made up of three quarks. Physicists believe that X particles may be made of four – either an exotic, tightly bound particle known as a tetraquark, or a new kind of loosely bound particle made from two mesons, each of which contain two quarks. If it's the former, because it's more tightly bound, it will decay more slowly than the latter.

"Currently our data is consistent with both because we don't have enough statistics yet. In the next few years we'll take much more data so we can separate these two scenarios," Lee says.

"That will broaden our view of the kinds of particles that were produced abundantly in the early Universe."

The research has been published in Physical Review Letters.


Monday, November 22, 2021

How a Process-Based Universe Works: Is It "Free to Create" or "Divinely Determined"?




How a Process-Based Universe Works:
Is It "Free to Create" or "Divinely Determined"?

by R.E. Slater

A Process-based Creation always strives for Life

A little while ago I had mentioned once again how a process-based creation always strives for life. Process thought makes this abundantly clear when speaking to the life-giving God as the First Order of Processes from whom all subtending cosmic processes proceed. A Creator-God who endowed His image into a static creation (creatio continua) - or, for those Platonists amongst us insisting on a creation which comes from nothing (creation ex nihilo) - a process-breathed event upon creation which propels life from life once it is so endowed.

Consequently when one comes to Darwinian evolution which states that life births life is simply retelling the Process Christian that evolution is following "the same rules of the game" as Whitehead proposed years later after Darwin in the early 20th century: Life from life to life again and again and again in innumerably marvelous ways.

We live in a Life-birthing Cosmos

Hence, I've provided yet another article "marveling" at how this "finely-tuned universe" can be so amazing.... That we live in a life-birthing cosmos which continually recreates itself to meet up to its divine image breathed into the very fabric of its process-becoming cosmic structure. Regardless the obstacle, regardless the difficulty, "life" by some quantum force, or energy, or biological response will find a way to regenerate itself.

Now to the mechanisms which are causing this physicists and biologists will someday learn more. But whenever I read of the universe "fine-tuning" itself I think of its internal cosmic structures which bring this into play. If the cosmos goes one direction, then another life-giving path will result. If it goes this way, then another way will result. And as amazing as it is to look at the fullness of the cosmos and wonder at its "finely-tuned" symmetry, it also tells to us the story that it is the way that it is because its is driven to be this way by the divine God's very Being having been placed into the depths of the cosmos' DNA.


Two things - God & Potential

GOD

One, we do not need classic theism's divine determinism dogmas of an all-controlling God who is giving moment-by-moment direction, whether large or small (a difference of degrees vs the action itself). The very fact that God placed His Image into creation (whether static or nothing) was enough to allow creation it's own freewill path.

This is the substance of process thought. That we live in a divine creation filled with the ability to birth life processes again and again which God neither needs to guide or direct but who, Himself, has given to the multiverse His very essence. Wherever life is becoming, God is there. Life's presence is where God's presence is found. In fact, it would be quite correct to say that God lies always in the leading edges of the future. Though God does not know the future, it is unnecessary for God to know it. God IS the future. Or better, God is the future's FUTURE!

Hence, creation is fully freewilled because it has been endowed by God's own freewill and thus moves and has it's being-ness in the very essence of God's Being-ness. And since God's Essence, or Being, is always in the PROCESS of Becoming, so will we see and experience the same in a processual-becoming of ourselves, the world, and the cosmos as a whole.

To say God inhabits His creation IMMANANTLY is to say that the Process God of all life-bestowing Essence "flows" with creation's energy flows striving towards a greater becoming than it held when originally set in motion by its God. And yet, this God is greater than the very substance and flow of His creation.

And so, a process theologian therefore teaches panentheism but not pantheism nor classic theism. A panentheistic world does not require a controlling, determining God dogma.  Nor does it need to identify God as the world but a God whose "flow" is captured within the world's very DNA. That this kind of God has released creation to be all that it can be against all the obstacles which it's own freewill can, and will, present to itself.


POTENTIAL

Secondly, I have always errored to the side of the weak anthropic principle over the strong. Over the years I have discussed WAP v SAP many times. Here are few references which may be followed up here and here and here and here. My apologies on this last link but somewhere in my earlier "indeterminancy" posts lies a more embedded discussion; if someone locates it please post in the comments below. Thx).

Two observations

Observation 1

Weak Anthropic Principle (WAP) - If the universe was not able to produce us, we wouldn't be here and we wouldn't know it existed.

Strong Anthropic Principle (SAP) - The universe exists the way it is for our benefit. Observers are the point of the universe. No us, no universe.

Summary - I prefer to think of them as the reasonable and the egotistical versions of the Anthropic principle. Basically the weak version is a common sense statement and the strong is baseless speculation. - Google Anon

Observation 2

...Those are the weak/strong versions of Tipler and company-- the more standard original distinction by Carter (I got most of this from Wiki) is simply that the Weak AP says that "given the fundamental parameters we observe, we have to live in a place and time that is conducive to life." Thus the WAP is only relevant to resolving "fine tuning" problems in regard to why we are here now, as opposed to somewhere else later. Given the cosmological principle that all places are more or less the same, the "fine tuning" that is resolved is purely temporal-- why we are here after 13.7 billion years and not 1 year or 1 decillion years.

The Strong AP goes on to look at the fundamental physical parameters themselves, and asserts that they also have to be fine tuned such that we (human being) could come along at some point in space and time. So it talks about why if you monkey even just a little with the dimensionless ratios of the universe, you seem to dramatically alter the resulting likelihood for generating life. [ <-- process theology does not take this line of thought; it states that regardless of how you tinker, the results will always produce cosmic "life" in other ways. So, not one way to life, but an infinite array or life-creating paths. - re slater]

The reason the SAP is more speculative is that it is not clear what you are comparing-- you can compare life as it might develop in different places and times, and might scientifically find evidence for such life, but life in other hypothetical universes would seem to be a nonscientific issue. So the SAP is not really considered testable science, it's more philosophy, whereas the WAP is on a more solid footing in regard to the general requirements of a scientific explanation.

Personally, I don't think the SAP gives us any understanding of why the parameters are what they are, beyond the obvious point that given the laws we have found, the parameters would have to be within certain ranges or we couldn't be here. That doesn't qualify as "understanding" in my book. The idea that this does not require "fine tuning" on the grounds that there can be many other universes with other parameters that are not fine tuned, but we had to show up here, seems a fruitless and untestable claim. For example, how would one attribute a "probability" to a "universe"? Should we allow the laws to be anything [more or less] in these hypothetical universes, or assert the laws have to be the same only with different parameters?


And with that let's go to today's scientific article and try to fit it's contents into our above Christian observations.

Peace,

R.E. Slater
November 22, 2021







* * * * * * *



Our Universe Is Finely Tuned For Life, And There's an Explanation For Why That Is So


MIKE MCRAE      22 NOVEMBER 2021

Physically speaking, our Universe seems uncannily perfect. It stands to reason that if it wasn't, life as we know it – and planets, atoms, everything else really – wouldn't exist.

Now, three physicists from the US, France, and Korea have put forward a new explanation for why life, the Universe, and everything in it has had such a prime opportunity to exist at all.

For some reason, the amount of energy – or more precisely, the mass it equates – and the Universe's accelerating expansion are so neatly balanced, there's been ample opportunity for a few interesting things to unfold over the past 13 billion years or so.

A few magnitudes either way, and the overwhelming gravity would have glued the expansion of spacetime together better than a mouthful of taffy... or been so weak, the rapidly expanding Universe would have left little of interest in its wake.   

Such an apparent near-perfect balance might be a consequence of something called fine-tuning, a process in physics where the features of a system necessarily match or cancel out with such precision. If it didn't, the system just wouldn't look the way it does.

For example, our Universe happens to be neutrally charged. For some reason,  there happens to be a near-identical number of protons to cancel out each electron's charge; add a few more electrons and it would be negative, forcing clumps of matter to push itself apart. 

On the other hand, it could be a consequence of what's referred to as 'naturalness'. The Moon's near-perfect occlusion of the Sun during a solar eclipse, for example, isn't ordained by hard laws of astronomy. The size of the Moon, the Sun, and our perspective of both don't need any further explanations to make sense.

Physicists generally don't like appealing to vague coincidences when they observe the Universe. If two features of a system seem incredibly well matched, there's a strong desire to dig through the rulebook for a deeper explanation.

For electrons and protons, the solution could come with explanations of why there's an imbalance of matter over antimatter.

In the case of the Universe's incredible reflection of energy and expansion, there's no shortage of clever and creative ideas to chew on. Most tend to fall into two categories, however.

One centers on something called the anthropic principle, which says only a universe capable of generating thinking brains like ours can ask philosophical questions such as 'why am I here?'

This might imply there are other universes, though. Maybe an infinite number, most either collapsing the moment they're born or exploding in puffs of endless boredom. Ours just happens to be one of the good ones! Although fun to think about, without any way of establishing the existence of multiverses it isn't a proposition that could bear scientific fruit.

As for the second category, there is the possibility that we're missing some crucial piece of the physics puzzle, such as new fields or symmetries that could fail under specific conditions.

The fact that the resting mass of the Higgs boson – the particle representing a field that gives many fundamental particles their mass – turned out to be unexpectedly light might suggest there's a gap in our understanding of forces and particles.

It itself is the result of another fine-tuning conundrum, being the result of strangely-exact cancellations of other physics. For example, there seems to be some sort of mysterious fine-tuning between the mass of a Higgs boson and the cosmological constant – the density of energy in the vacuum of space.

This latest suggestion mashes together the idea of unknown physics behind the Higgs boson's shockingly itty-bitty mass with a kind of quantum multiverse effect, one that this time could feasibly be tested.

Their model puts the Higgs particle at the center of the fine-tuning explanation. By coupling the boson with other particles in such a way that its low mass would effectively 'trigger' events in physics we observe, it provides a link between forces and mass.

From there, the authors show how weakly interacting variables in a field might affect different kinds of empty space, specifically patches of nothingness with varying degrees of expansion. This potentially demonstrates the link between Higgs bosons and the cosmological constant.

It's a multiverse in a way, given the triggers occurring in different patches of infinite expanding space could plausibly give rise to a seemingly well balanced Universe like ours.

Their math suggests these triggers would be limited to a few possibilities, and even has room for explanations of dark matter. Better still, it also predicts the existence of multiple Higgs particles of varying masses, all smaller than the one we've already observed. That gives the hypothesis something that can be tested, at least.

Until then, it'll remain one of many neat ideas that could one day explain the eerily well-matched tug-of-war that has permitted a complex cosmos to unfold. A place we've come to love as our Universe.

This research was published in Physical Review D.


Thursday, November 18, 2021

R.E. Slater - Process Panpsychism: "Is the Universe Conscious?"



Process Panpsychism
by R.E. Slater

We are deeply connected to the cosmos

So I'm not sure where Klee Irwin is going in his 6 part Emergence Theory Overview series below having not reviewed it in the detail it requires, but I would like to state for the record that at Relevancy22 we discuss Process Philosophy and Theology on a regular basis. You need look no farther than Alfred North Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism to discover that the cosmos in God is described by Process Thought as:

  • (cosmo)panrelational - highly relational,
  • (cosmo)panexperiential - from whole to parts and parts to whole the cosmos experiences itself through and through, and
  • (cosmo)panpsychic - referring to a cosmos which "feels" the entirety of its depth and "being".

1Process Thought states that the universe is alive in some sense even as we, ourselves, feel alive to the universe. This is why Whitehead saw the cosmos as a living "organism" that "feels it's existence," by which he was referring to i) all the quantum physical forces and energies and ii) all biologically "living" plants and creatures.

2 - Moreover, our feeling or identity of "aliveness" is NOT unique to ourselves as participants in God's creation but is a result of being deeply connected with the earth, universe, or cosmos (however you wish to term it).

Humanity is not unique to (or separate from) it's environment but is birthed from its environment and shares deeply in its cosmic structures.

That is, panpsychic concepts such as human consciousness is not unique to itself in the human species but is shared with the rest of the cosmos. Which is to say, because the cosmos has some kind of panpsychism within it, the human species does too, as do all things around us.

More simply, we are who we are because of the type of cosmic creation we have evolved from. Rather than looking at humanity as being distinctly unique from its environment we need to see ourselves as deeply connected to the world about us.


Process Resources

The process philosopher, Matt Segall, from CIIS, has lately taken up Whitehead cum John Cobb et al's earlier positions of panpsychism to flesh those viewpoints out a bit more within an extended process context. If you wish to contextualize this area a bit more simply go to the Index section in the topic list to the right and look under "Index - Process Thought with Matt Segall" or "Index to Process Philosophy and Theology" or even "Index - Process Theologian John Cobb."


Process Flow and Rhythm

In short, Process Thought is how one may describe the world and find the process flow and rhythm of life everywhere. From the physical and social sciences, to anthropology and evolution, to literature and economics, and integrally with the all other non-process based philosophies, cosmic process is everywhere.

As example, let's picture the proverbial elephant where blinded philosophers and psychologists are feeling the elephant's tail, trunk, ears, feet, body and making conjectures about the world at large. Essentially, they are seeing the bits and pieces of a process world through their own unique perspectives, which makes process philosophy and theology an integral theory circumscribing all other parts of the sciences, humanities, and so on.

I mention this because here in this post there are two posts which are describing the universe as conscious or as a holographic projection of some kind (Klee Irwin's Quantum Gravity theory). Not unlike other philosophers and scientists of their day they are describing what Whitehead has described in his theory of cosmology as a Process-based Cosmos. These are not new thoughts so much as part of very old discussions.


A Process World attested to in Many Forms

The area of Process Thought would also include religion itself, such as Christianity and Islam, but perhaps more poignantly rests within the Asian cultures of India, China, and the Orient re Buddhism etc. That is, process inhabits all of humanity, from its religious, social, industrial, and recreational life.

For instance, in the area of Christianity there are a number of Process theologians who are reworking process thought into how one thinks about God; how one might read the bible in a legendary and historical, phenomenological, and redactive way; how social justice, personal and church worship, and life constructs might be made more pronounced when speaking to the human religious identity through the multi-hued process perspectives of love, sharing, burden bearing, service, or wellbeing and caretake of the soul.
If process is real it should be found everywhere, and especially in the living out of one's life in a healthily connected way with this earth and all those around us. 

Process is Felt by Many

As a process-based Christian, where I personally wish to stop short epistemically is moving too far into the mystical ideas of New Ageism, Astrology, and the eastern cults which I'll generally describe as Eastern New Ageism. And though I've written past articles giving a nod towards the astral "feeling" of the universe I wish to stop short of using the astral beliefs, or, of entering into the mystical spaces, which may run tangentially in other highly subjectivized directions beyond where process theology might naturally go. More simply, I wish to acknowledge these areas without going too far down the yellow brick world of subjectivized mysticism.

Our identity is found meaningfully
connected to creation about us.

Conclusion

To summarize then, we live in a process creation where there will be those among us who may be more attuned to it than the common man or woman. Who say they "feel" the world in its process flow and energy as if they were human tuning forks grasping to reach into the infinite arrays of cosmic energy flows which touches them in some meaningful way to the "cosmic All", to God, to mankind, or to themselves. It is this very normal, inherently built-in feeling of connectedness to everyone and everything which bears within its organic structures this "beiningness" of presence and relationality which process philosophy and theology is presenting to the colder worlds of our denied irreligious experience.

Our identity is found meaningfully connected to "the creational whole" of life. It is how our God is, and it is that Image of God which we feel or sense all around us.

Process flow is what makes our universe special when we hike down a trail in a sun splashed woods, or ski down a snowy mountainside, canoe across a blue-green lake, hunt or fish or camp, or simply walk the concrete city streets feeling alive to the flow of life flowing everywhere around us.

We sense creation's flow. We feel it. It is how we might describe the process flow of life that hints to the poetry which lives within us as we breathe in-and-out those esoteric feelings of spiritual community every moment of our mortality.

Namaste,

R.E. Slater
November 18, 2021


* * * * * * *



Tetrahedrons representing the quasicrystalline spin network (QSN), the fundamental  sub-
structure of spacetime, according to emergence theory. | Credit: Quantum Gravity Institute


New hypothesis argues the universe simulates itself into existence


A physics paper proposes neither you
nor the world around you are real.

KEY TAKEAWAYS
  • A new hypothesis says the universe self-simulates itself in a "strange loop".
  • A paper from the Quantum Gravity Research institute proposes there is an underlying panconsciousness.
  • The work looks to unify insight from quantum mechanics with a non-materialistic perspective.

How real are you? What if everything you are, everything you know, all the people in your life as well as all the events were not physically there but just a very elaborate simulation? Philosopher Nick Bostrom famously considered this in his seminal paper “Are you living in a computer simulation?,” where he proposed that all of our existence may be just a product of very sophisticated computer simulations ran by advanced beings whose real nature we may never be able to know. Now a new theory has come along that takes it a step further – what if there are no advanced beings either and everything in “reality” is a self-simulation that generates itself from pure thought?

The physical universe is a “strange loop” says the new paper titled “The Self-Simulation Hypothesis Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics” from the team at the Quantum Gravity Research, a Los Angeles-based theoretical physics institute founded by the scientist and entrepreneur Klee Irwin. They take Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis, which maintains that all of reality is an extremely detailed computer program, and ask, rather than relying on advanced lifeforms to create the amazing technology necessary to compose everything within our world, isn’t it more efficient to propose that the universe itself is a “mental self-simulation”? They tie this idea to quantum mechanics, seeing the universe as one of many possible quantum gravity models.

One important aspect that differentiates this view relates to the fact that Bostrom’s original hypothesis is materialistic, seeing the universe as inherently physical. To Bostrom, we could simply be part of an ancestor simulation, engineered by posthumans. Even the process of evolution itself could just be a mechanism by which the future beings are testing countless processes, purposefully moving humans through levels of biological and technological growth. In this way they also generate the supposed information or history of our world. Ultimately, we wouldn’t know the difference.

But where does the physical reality that would generate the simulations comes from, wonder the researchers? Their hypothesis takes a non-materialistic approach, saying that everything is information expressed as thought. As such, the universe “self-actualizes” itself into existence, relying on underlying algorithms and a rule they call the principle of efficient language.”



What Is Reality? [Official Film]
Mar 4, 2017


Quantum Gravity Research
What if the very fabric of space and time isn't made of one-dimensional strings or energy as we think of it, but instead was simply a code or a language made from a geometric projection?

Quantum Gravity Research is a Los Angeles based team of mathematicians and physicists working on developing a theoretical framework for a first-principles unified quantum gravity theory they call emergence theory. Still in the early stage of development, emergence theory attempts to unify, through mathematical and scientific rigor, the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, and consciousness.

This film is presented in layperson terms and explains basics tenets of emergence theory, quantum mechanics and digital physics in ways that are meant to be communicative and fun. However, if you'd like to read any of the scientific and more technical papers, please visit our website.
What Is Reality? [Official Film]


Under this proposal, the entire simulation of everything in existence is just one “grand thought.” How would the simulation itself be originated? It was always there, say the researchers, explaining the concept of “timeless emergentism.” According to this idea, time isn’t there at all. Instead, the all-encompassing thought that is our reality offers a nested semblance of a hierarchical order, full of “sub-thoughts” that reach all the way down the rabbit hole towards the base mathematics and fundamental particles. This is also where the rule of efficient language comes in, suggesting that humans themselves are such “emergent sub-thoughts” and they experience and find meaning in the world through other sub-thoughts (called “code-steps or actions”) in the most economical fashion.

In correspondence with Big Think, physicist David Chester elaborated: “While many scientists presume materialism to be true, we believe that quantum mechanics may provide hints that our reality is a mental construct. Recent advances in quantum gravity, such as seeing spacetime emergent via a hologram, also is a hint that spacetime is not fundamental. This is also compatible with ancient Hermetic and Indian philosophy. In a sense, the mental construct of reality creates spacetime to efficiently understand itself by creating a network of subconscious entities that can interact and explore the totality of possibilities.”

The scientists link their hypothesis to panpsychism, which sees everything as thought or consciousness. The authors think that their “panpsychic self-simulation model” can even explain the origin of an overarching panconsciousness at the foundational level of the simulations, which “self-actualizes itself in a strange loop via self-simulation.” This panconsciousness also has free will and its various nested levels essentially have the ability to select what code to actualize, while making syntax choices. The goal of this consciousness? To generate meaning or information.

If all of this is hard to grasp, the authors offer another interesting idea that may link your everyday experience to these philosophical considerations. Think of your dreams as your own personal self-simulations, postulates the team. While they are rather primitive (by super-intelligent future AI standards), dreams tend to provide better resolution than current computer modeling and are a great example of the evolution of the human mind. As the scientists write, “What is most remarkable is the ultra-high-fidelity resolution of these mind-based simulations and the accuracy of the physics therein.” They point especially to lucid dreams, where the dreamer is aware of being in a dream, as instances of very accurate simulations created by your mind that may be impossible to distinguish from any other reality. To that end, now that you’re sitting here reading this article, how do you really know you’re not in a dream? The experience seems very high in resolution but so do some dreams. It’s not too much of a reach to imagine that an extremely powerful computer that we may be able to make in not-too-distant future could duplicate this level of detail.

The team also proposes that in the coming years we will be able to create designer consciousnesses for ourselves as advancements in gene editing could allow us to make our own mind-simulations much more powerful. We may also see minds emerging that do not require matter at all.

While some of these ideas are certainly controversial in the mainstream science circles, Klee and his team respond that We must critically think about consciousness and certain aspects of philosophy that are uncomfortable subjects to some scientists.”

Want to know more? You can read the full paper online in the journal Entropy.


Klee Irwin - Emergence Theory Overview - Part 1 of 6
Apr 6, 2020


Klee Irwin discusses the origin story of how Quantum Gravity Research was started and reviews the latest overview of how the self-simulation based physics of emergence theory is shaping up in its latest evolution at the top of 2020. https://quantumgravityresearch.org/