Sep 16, 2010

Chapter 1 (continued...2)

Mutation at any level - or any system level - signifies the jumping of a force threshold by this omnipotent Mosc and is, thus, inevitable.

Purpose of evolution is freedom from all these forces at myriad of hierarchical system levels.

Increase in complexity-consciousness for any system is possible up to the level of the overcoming of the strong forces only, which for our present biospherical evolutionary system would be up to the level of us Homo sapiens only. Thenceforth, it will be the turn of the simplicity-consciousness of the expected supermen. An advance idea of this can be had from the fact that our highly evolved great men called masters and sages* already have rather simple consciousness - just like that of a child as they say.

Self-organization is necessary at and up to a point-time till force threshold under consideration for that particular system has been jumped over by the ‘I’** of that system, after which self-disorganization becomes necessary, of course, with self-organization simultaneously beginning to take place at the next force-threshold. In essence, it is the same phenomenon which to Freud seems life and death wish in man at the same time. Or which to geochemist A.G.Cairns-Smith seems simultaneous growth and dissolution in a crystal: ‘Even in a growing crystal the processes of growth and dissolution are both going on at the same time,’ writes he in his book Seven Clues to the Origin of Life. Thus, in an other popular jargon of the day, it is not order out of chaos as is generally understood, but rather, chaos sets in a system only when order has already begun to take place at the next force-threshold for that system - where the ‘I’ of the system has already lodged itself through a process similar to quantum jumping.

A human being's evolution or growth from birth onwards through childhood, youth, middle-age and old-age; a cell’s mutations from stem cell onwards through bone and marrow cell, blood and muscle cell, nerve cell and, let us say for the time being ‘super cell’ (a sort of a cancer cell but to be explained later on); a culture’s Ages such as that of our present culture’s beginning from the Dark Periods onwards through Middle Ages, the Age of Romanticism, the Age of Reason or Anxiety, and finally, the shortly expected, the Age of Intelligence or Intuition (in a way also its old age), all symbolize the overcoming of those four forces by the same Mosc force at their own respective levels.

So, in the ultimate analysis, there is no place for chance and natural selection at any level: at the level of the whole Universe, at the level of our universe, at the level of the species within, at the level of the cultures within those species, at the level of the individual man, of the cell, of the gene and so on down to the much acclaimed ‘grain of sand,’ for one need not wait for chance to grow, nor, for that matter, one has any real prerogative of selection even if it be qualified by the word natural.

The superficial role of chance and natural selection (wherever applicable), however, is explainable within these broad parameters and we shall do it at its proper place.

Purpose-wise, these ideas, in a way, incorporate the mystics’ notions of freedom, moksha, nirvana; philosophers’ ideas of ‘will to power,’ of ‘condemned to be free’ (i.e., ultimately power over forces, freedom from forces); psychologists’ notions of man’s longing for the ‘oceanic feeling,’ of his longing for the security of the womb (longing for ultimate Oneness, for Mosc); scientists’ ideas of acquiring knowledge (‘Knowledge is our destiny’ - J.Bronowski, in The Ascent of Man) which in an indirect way also amounts ultimately to the same endeavor - that of freedom, for, a thing known is a thing from which one has won his freedom.

Thus to play the boy of our first-page story, it is all Mosc, its entanglement into self-produced four basic forces in some topsy-turvy, virtual world, and then its efforts at disentanglement from those forces giving us in the process our actual world.

The other day I was browsing through Roget's Thesaurus of English Words And Phrases and was pleasantly surprised to find that one of the synonymous words of evolution is disentanglement -so in line with our above-explained intuition!

Obviously this Mosc theory of evolution I am going to present here, in no way differentiates between the living and the non-living so far as evolution is concerned, and so, it should go without saying that it does not take man to be at the center-stage of things. He is merely a ‘point’ - space-time moment - in the long evolution at the end of which, perhaps billions and billions of years hence, he wouldn’t exist, nor for that matter would the universe as we know it today. What would exist, instead, would be which everybody is free to name, i.e., God, Self, One, Oneness, Nothingness, Vacuum, Void, Great Emptiness, Absolute, Unknowable, Will, Thing-In-Itself, Consciousness-As-Such, Suchness, Sunyata, Supersymmetry, Superspace, seething cauldron of energy, home of so-called black holes and so on, and to which I have given the name of Mosc.

Then the process would re-start ab-initio. From Mosc it all began and to Mosc it will surely return, though to begin again and again...

Yesterday we were animals; a day before, plants; a couple of days before, minerals; prior to that, Mosc. Tomorrow we shall be supermen; a day after, almost unrecognizable but as superior to man as man is now superior to animals; and then, after a long time, first constantly decreasing corporally but increasing cerebrally, then even decreasing cerebrally and changing perhaps to lumps of pure light or intelligence, we shall merge indistinguishably again into Mosc***.

(Actually as the time available has no limit all the above must be happening even now, must be in a continuous cyclical state of happening. In such a scenario for which we would ultimately have to reconcile the steady state - that the Universe always is - and the superdense or big bang - that the Universe evolves from big bang to big crunch - theories of cosmology, the evolution of the Universe from Mosc to Mosc would be a continuous cyclical process and the 15 billion or so years age of our universe would only mean that it takes about this much time to come to our level from the very beginning. And as some far-off stars would turn out to be one of our end ‘species’ on the overall scale in the above scenario, they would have ages far more than mere our universe, besides, of course, playing ‘Parent’ to the birth of the next cycle of the Universe as I would explain somewhere later.)

This, then, sums up the first flush account of my ideas regarding the Universe’s journey from Oneness to Oneness, from Mosc to Mosc that arose out of the dialogue I mentioned at the beginning of this book.

Despite my professed iconoclasm, to claim that these are my very original ideas would only be to betray the height of ignorance. Though that is not to say that I have borrowed them from somebody else. My intuition, as I have worded it in the beginning of this book is purely my own and I had not come across any such ideas before that. Subsequently, however, when I became fairly conscious of them so to say, I began to find parallels to them in some of the Greek philosophers’ writings, as also in some of the Hindu religious texts. What is important in them, as also in many others in fact is, that there is One indescribable totality variously named, which then splits into Two, also variously named, beginning the game of life, of evolution, ultimately again merging into the One. The basic idea is the same here.

The One indescribable totality is our Mosc - or Matter of spiritual or supersymmetric or supersystemic category. On splitting it takes the form of Two: Movc or the Matter of virtual category and Mopc or Matter of actual or physical category. Which then again merge into One or Mosc after the consummation of the Universal game of life. The only addition may be taken to be the description of this game in terms of the forces or interactions, though that too probably because the ancients did not know about the forces.

During the course of this writing I hope to come across almost all the burning questions - may those belong to science, to philosophy or even to mysticism - confronting our global knowledgeable circles today, and help putting them in clearer perspective if not altogether finding answers for them. Some of them which pop out from almost every book dealing with the philosophy of science - and there would be no two opinions that this is the only worthwhile philosophy now-a-days - in my opinion are:

1. Is science coming to sort of an end? If yes, why?
2. Is our language failing us in explaining the things? If yes, why?

3. Are we undergoing some sort of cultural paradigm shift on the global scale? If yes, what sort of culture will it turn out to be?

4. Is our period in some way identical to the ancient Greeks following Aristotle? Are we heading once again towards the Golden/Dark Periods****? If yes, have we any choice?

5. Is mysticism a necessary constituent of our scheme of things?

6. What is the real import of the phenomenon of our being ‘spectator-actors,’ ‘observer-participators,’ ‘constructor–participators,’ in the scheme of things, which most of our cutting-edge scientists have been discovering of late?

7. Is quantum truth the final or some intermediary truth? Does or doesn't God play dice with the world? Does the dice go to the black holes by chance or by an inherent design in the ultimate scheme of things?

8. Are some far-off stars our end ‘species’ on the Universal scale? Does the Universe begin from some far-off star? If yes, how?

Mostly, specialists have written books, to be read by other specialists and the general reader. It is easy for them to handle both: specialist reader, obviously, and the general reader, by simply simplifying their arguments a little. It is a book written by one of the general reader so to say, and is supposed to be read both by them as well as by the specialists. It is but natural that while it may go easy with the general reader - may even entertain him - specialist reader may find it rather too easy, too obvious for their taste most of the time. Yet I would request the specialist reader also to go through it, for, even the falling of an apple had been too obvious for us till Newton showed wisdom enough to reflect over its meaning. Who knows the specialist reader too may find an invaluable iota of truth somewhere in it which may set him afresh on his chosen subject so as to ultimately enable him to break fresh ground in that. No doubt some portions in it he may find outrageously lax or outrightly ridiculous, but then, for that matter, with due apologies, one must remember that the sky of true knowledge is at the same height for those on the ground and on the Mt Everest of learning. I would conclude the chapter by a quotation from the book Theories of Everything by John D. Barrow:

We cannot tell how much of what at present we might be loath even to call science will need to be included in such an all-embracing picture of the world. Indeed, history teaches some interesting lessons in this respect. Today, physicists accept the atomistic viewpoint...as well supported by evidence. Yet, this theory of physics began amongst the early Greeks as a philosophical, or even mystical, religion without any supporting observational evidence whatsoever. Thousands of years would pass before we even had the means to gather this evidence....One suspects that there are ideas of a similar groundless status by today's standards that will in the future take their place within the accepted ‘scientific’ picture of reality.

Also read: My challenge to biocentric view of the universe from the chapter Goodbye Biology! http://self-designed-universe.blogspot.in/2012/09/goodbye-biology-challenge-to-biocentric.html


*On the species scale the weak interactions would give us the species of superman. But further within the species man only, because each interaction would go through its own further four basic interactions, these weak interactions give us to whom we call masters and sages. Obviously they have simple consciousness as compared to the ‘intellectual’ man.
**A relatively established ‘point’ along an ‘axis’ of a system - along our spinal cords in our case and also called chakras in Hindu Yogic philosophy – representing Mosc but otherwise showing in the rein of cumulatively which force out of the four basic forces a system presently is. ‘Moving’ from below ‘upwards’ along the ‘axis’ in quantum jumps it establishes itself at each force or interaction center before next quantum jump in due time.
For the specialist reader, this established point would denote my ‘I’ as what David Bohm calls a ‘self-referent process’ in the book A Ghost in the Atom; in contrast with my ‘quantum-mechanical’ ‘I’ so to say which would always move up and down depending upon with whom I am interacting at any given point of time, or even who is observing me. But naturally it would move only within the parameters set up by my above-mentioned relatively established ‘I’. Which is why even though I may be an old man, I will play the child with a child, a youth with a youth and so on, but left to myself – as a self-referent process- I would be and behave like an old man again.
***In this particularly inspired paragraph, which no doubt jumps through higher and higher spirals rather speedily and arbitrarily though obviously to accomplish the hugely difficult task of encompassing the whole of the Universe in a few lines, ‘pure light’ points towards some far off stars which I think would be the end species on the Universal scale as already explained, and ‘intelligence’ is just an effort to co-relate that highest evolutionary status to our human situation; for after all don’t we also look up to our highly evolved/intelligent men in any field as stars? Moreover, all the changes mentioned in it like increasing corporally and decreasing cerebrally and then even decreasing cerebrally etc have been visualized in terms of the increasing and decreasing importance of the forces Mosc entangles into or disentangles from as it moves ahead on its evolutionary journey spiral beyond spirals…Detailed discussion of this phenomenon would come in later chapters.
If some reader should find it difficult to imagine the whole of the Universe ultimately getting reduced to lumps of pure light or intelligence etc, I would like to remind that the whole phenomenal superstructure of the Universe came into being because of Mosc’s entanglement into forces, so it should be logical to assume that the reverse would happen as it gets disentangled from them.

**** In the immediate future we are entering the Golden Period/Satya Yuga, in comparatively longer period of 400 years or so we are entering the Dark Periods to be followed by new global cultural cycle as AD era cultural cycle followed BC era.

2 comments:

Neeta said...

Harb, I have been following your writings for sometime. This blog and it's four forces explanation has been invaluable in my understanding of creation. I had origninally set out to find meaning in what to me was a 'meaningless' life. This led me to the obvious -know thyself- path which I've been exploring for sometime along with an understanding of creation of which I'm a part. These things are never taught in school! No wonder we're so lost. I don't know if we would ever have a holistic education where all subjects could be explained from the creation point-of-view. Imagine learning Geography but not knowing the earth is a soul.

Anonymous said...

learned a lot