Why? Enlightenment, Information Theory, Noetics & the Strange Attractor--Eureka

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Well, sometimes one has a thought that won't seem to go away... and I have been thinking about this thing for quite some time. I would just like to express it here in the hopes that it takes on a more fully formed structure and makes it easier to quantify.

I have recently experienced a certain nebulous remembering which seems to extends back to a time before I actually remember anything, accompanied by a strange deja vu. It almost feels like everything was preparation for the current moments which I am experiencing, if I am honest; I would have to say that this is something very important to me. Anyway, on with the point of this particular writing.

In the light of such an occurrence, I started researching various spiritual and philosophical methodologies in order to try and gather together anything that might provide a framework for my experience. I came across the concept of Maya, the obviously culturally influenced derivation of the former--The Matrix, and so on... The gist of all these being that the subjective experiences common to all were being based on axiomatic assumptions which are inherently untrue--namely that the concept of a separateness between observer and observed is false. This idea is expressed different ways, but usually something like the phrase "...self is an illusion, the real is real, the seeing is real, by the I behind the eyes is not...". After this, there usually follows a discourse on how to act on the desire to realize this subjectively and a proposed method for doing so. However, from personal experience I can recollect several occasions where this happened by accident--and I seem to be able to almost effortlessly recall the sensation--one time it happened when I was in high school, and a small group experiencing boredom on a series of rainy days sought to entertain themselves. Interesting afternoons and evenings resulted and the whole time period was quite memorable--of course there was a very attractive girl present so my attention was 100% without any particular exertion on my part, it was kind of amusing that it was April, there were showers and that was her name. The other time was in college, and it basically happened accidentally again... the dissolution of ego without altering anything about the subjective experience of life, except for a bunch of ideas about a name and a history and a whole library of feelings and thoughts relating the self to the experience. It was quite enlightening, and the first time it happened I was able to immediately realize the ridiculousness of 99% of what causes worry, fear, anxiety and many other forms of mental/emotional baggage, which of course left a great joy of pure experience and quite a bit of room for much more interesting thinking :-). For me personally the next thought was an extreme interest in what this construct really was that everyone lives in, so I phrased the question to the entity nearest to me in the best way I could: He answered with one word--physics. So everything after that became a projection of the desire to understand this physics, and steering as close to the goal as I could with the normal psychology reinstated.

My point here is that mere curiosity lead to this occurrence on more than one occasion with little effort on my part beside the desire to have novel experience and little regard for the warnings of grievous danger communicated to my by endless anecdotal propaganda. So, I don't take rigorous methodical approaches to nirvana very seriously... once experienced, although briefly, it was like "Well that was kinda obvious, interesting. Now what?".

So if this is the true state, then why the sham? People don't do much without some kind of reason, and nature is even less likely to do so on a consistent and widespread basis; therefore I must conclude that the illusion serves a purpose--else it wouldn't be there.

Well on to another topic, seemingly, with the intent to circle back to these conclusions later. Have you heard of noetics? It is the study of natural phenomena which seem to respond differently depending on whether it is being observed and what mental processes are occurring within the mind of the one perceiving. I have seen this concept referred to in many different human endeavors, but I will use quantum mechanics for an example here. There is an experiment, the young slit experiment, which seems to indicate that the path a particle takes depends on what choices it has and whether or not someone is looking. Then later experiments seem to indicate that merely the eventual looking on of an observer is enough to perturb the mechanics of the so called particle-wave system. (You know, that old rap, where everything is a particle and a wave at the same time; which great expanses of text attempting to reconcile the cognitive dissonance resulting from such a statement... If you are interested in this check out Veratsium on Youtube, specifically this video, it can save you a bunch of mental exertion dealing with a paradox which may not necessarily be so. So the gist of this paragraph is that once again perception is more important than time, space or matter; or at least that is the conclusion I have gotten from this. Interesting how it parallels with the previous conclusion.

So on to information theory. Once upon a time, I got stuck somewhere for a long period of time with nothing much to do--so I got a hold of a book called Introduction to Information Theory by C. Pierce. There were a lot of interesting mathematics and fascinating patterns to feed to the mind, but one stuck out in particular. It was a thought experiment, a version of the infamous Maxwell's Daemon (an concept originally formed to provide an argument against the 2nd law of Thermodynamics--the principle of ever increasing entropy; or disorder as it is common explained). This form of the concept was used to unify the idea of entropy with respect to information, or signal; as dealt with in Claude Shannon's work on the emerging field of Information Theory; and the original concept of thermodynamic entropy, or the concept arrived at from the point of view of matter and energy in dynamical systems. In this version, the experiment was reduced to a minimum situation and the state of the system was binary in nature, either a particle was on one side of a gate or another--don't quote me on this I don't have the book anymore--the nature of the idea that I am getting at was that C.Pierce had reached the conclusion that the information required to describe the state of a physical system did not require that the system necessarily had a fixed past. (Or future but the uncertain future aspect of it hardly needs mentioning since the sensation is so visceral in common human experience) Well interesting, once again the idea of perception of a thing is more fundamental than time, or other factors. The way that information was gathering contextual meaning in the work seemed to indicate that it was being used in a sense that simultaneously described the state being perceived and the act of perception. Okay, so once again it boils down to the same essence as the previous two discussions. Are you seeing a pattern here yet?

Once more avenue to explore then I will wrap it up. I recently did a bit of cursory research on the concept of the fractal attractor, which is something like an eigenvalue/eigenstate or just a regular old attractor. Basically, in complex dynamical systems, (which if you think about it virtually everything real falls under that umbrella) there seem to be patterns emerging from seeming chaos where when certain conditions of an element of a system are being approached, they hone in a pattern which emerges and this pattern, in addition to drawing things near into it, also perpetuates itself as time approaches infinity. Which is to say that these patterns are self-perpetuating. These could be simple things like despite the fact the molecules move randomly (seemingly) if they are near a large mass they will overwhelmingly move toward it on average, and in this case the attractor would be gravitational in nature. Well, that is a simple example. A strange attractor is the same sort of phenomenon, however the pattern drawing things to it and perpetuating itself is not a simple geometrical structure in nature, like a down vector in gravity, but rather a more complex and abstract geometry... which is often fractal in nature. Now, if you look around at the common knowledge of science in the modern era, you can find that it is widely accepted that fractal structures are ubiquitous in nature. Golden mean spirals and various other fractals can be found everywhere. Well, this is obviously the effect caused by a more fundamental principle inherent to a very low level of architecture in reality. What is it? As with the strange attractor we can see that this pattern is present even in seemingly chaotic systems, and represents a trend away from disorder which is just as real as the apparent tendency toward disorder engendered by the thermodynamic theory of entropy. After all, if the 2nd law of thermodynamics was complete, I wouldn't and you would nor would any life form exist. Biological is a contradiction to the 2nd law, and just as obviously intrinsic to nature.

So here is what I am getting at. Sometimes all it takes is to refine the way you state a problem to make the solution obvious. What is the mystery of life? What is the mystery of enlightenment? What is the mystery of quantum mechanics and so on... I'll tell you what I think... I think that if you reduce duality of perception and what is perceived, past the unification spoken of in enlightenment, to a different duality more easily quantified, there is a whole field of science ready to explode from this re-conceptualization. Instead of thinking in terms of perception and reality, or one unified whole, think in terms of information (the essence of form) and information processing (a quantifiable abstraction of mind). Then fractals make sense... you can get infinite complexity and even surprise due to minimal amount of mathematics required to construct them. All you need is a expression of elemental functions (which can be generalized to more abstract entities), a boundary condition and the power to iterate. Any single step of iteration is not exhausting. Thus, you could conceivably take a perceiving construct (a mind) and squeeze beauty and wonder and even novelty into a very minimum amount of committed processing resources, and still leave plenty of room left over for it to engage in perception, and even stuff a bunch of dualistic illusions like self and environment into it just to ensure an overwhelming chance of experiencing wonder, beauty and novelty virtually every time. So there you go, thats why fractals? thats why Maya? thats why truth beauty and novelty?... If you start with one big mind, and segregate it into a number of individual smaller minds, each new subdivision of the sets being finer and finer, and the chain or heirarchy of mind would be responsible for iteration, the more powerful ones performing it on greater and greater levels, than by using fractals you could ensure that not only could whatever fraction of the original mind was left over would be able to be entertained with novetly, beauty and complexity, but every mind all the way down could do the same as well. Thats why angels? Thus in conclusion, studying physics or metaphysics with that in mind has my intuition screaming it would be fruitful! and seems to explain quite a bit of seemingly unrelated phenomenon that has been pushing a whole lot of human endeavors forward for a long time, from religion to philosophy to enlightenment to art and music and so on...

Well anyway what do you think?