To say that the universe is an interesting place is an understatement and almost not worth saying, but it must be said if only as a reminder that there are other things going on besides war, disease and inflation.
Like why after nearly seventy years has there not been a return trip to the moon? Too expensive? And why after 100 years, has there not been any real explanation of quantum physics and its associated technologies. Instead what we get are hour-long specials on how weird quantum physics is, spooky, weird, ooh as if it were not really accepted as science or just weird science that no one understands, like UFOs, that are neither weird or new.
Stalled Century, What was Lost?
Secrecy has always been a part of human society so we have no way of knowing how much more advanced civilization may have been if those running it had not opted for endless war and scarcity (sacrifice) instead of a collective search for truth.
We can go back as far as we want to try and pinpoint what was lost, sifting through hermetic and probably incomplete texts, one-sided historical accounts, inexplicable ruins, but to put a finer point on it, one need not go much farther back than the founding of the Royal Society in London in 1660. This could be said to be the start of the materialist revolution, of which we are still very much a part and if the recent congressional hearings on UAPs (UFOs) are any indication, we are nowhere closer to getting a straight answer out of NASA (Never A Straight Answer), the military or the military-industrial complex as to what sort of a universe we actually live in. Why are we waiting for the military and the military-industrial complex and not the government or the UFOs themselves? Because the military-industrial complex are the patent holders of the alternative energy devices purportedly used for the terrestrial UAPs.
Although the military has not admitted to operating such machines, they have admitted that the craft may be terrestrial, but attributed them instead to Chinese and Russian space programs rather than themselves or off world civilizations.
Human civilization has only recently been able to amass enough wealth and harness enough energy to experiment with advanced technologies such as those evidenced by the UFO. Previously (for millions of years) we had been locked into an evolutionary game of survival of the fittest and natural selection that had us watching our backs for predators and trying to find enough to eat and are only now starting to come out of the long, dark tunnel of history.
So what’s actually going on? Does anyone really know?
My guess is of course both, yes and no. Yes quantum teleportation, entanglement ‘spooky action a distance’ are very real, but no, this doesn’t do us any good because we either don’t understand them well enough to use them, or we do understand them, but this knowledge is vouchsafed for a select few. The rest of us living in what is essentially a parallel world of imposed ignorance as to what’s really going on and as long as we wait for the military or the CIA or the DIA or the CSIS to tell us, we will be waiting a very long time.
But just as there is a political and scientific spin on the subject, there is also a metaphysical and philosophical spin. Think materialism, physicalism, panpsychism, cosmopsychism, monism, idealism. So what looks like a spaceship to a materialist/ realist society would, from a panpsychist, idealist or monist perspective look like an intelligent machine, an ‘undifferentiated aspect of mind’ (Kastrup), or ‘the human oversoul’ (McKenna).
One an objective approach, the other a subjective approach. The subjective approach putting the observer in the role of quantum interrupter, wave-function breaker, the rock upon which the wave-function breaks. Interaction of any kind being a quantum effect (even on the macro scale) where the observer becomes as much a part of the interaction as the non-material wave function.
This is what gives the UFO experience its apparent solidity, the same way that measurement collapses a waveform (in crude terms) into position or momentum. As we have said before, (see: https://www.danielthompsontheauthor.com/post/consciousness-and-the-measurement-problem-part-1 and https://www.danielthompsontheauthor.com/post/the-measurement-problem-as-a-unit-of-measurement-not-a-problem-part-2) measurement, observation and physical interaction are the same thing, they are merely the exchange of information, just as matter = energy and energy = information i.e. matter is scaled up information. We require energy to extract information and by extracting information we in turn transfer energy. It is not possible to measure anything without extracting information or adding it since quantum mechanics is subjective and classical physics is objective.
Quantum Mechanics isn’t Spooky and Neither are UFOs
The subject cannot be dissolved into the objective (Nature-with-a-capital-N), otherwise what gives Nature (and the ‘objective world’) its very sense would be missing. In this way the subjective leads to the objective, not the other way around. Scientists and their experiments belong to the Life World (nature-with-a-little-n) and are subject to constitution by mind/ consciousness. The more information that is recovered from an experiment, the more detailed that experiment seems to be. So it isn’t that quantum mechanics is weird, it’s that we’re too big and what appear to be classical interactions are really scaled up quantum interactions. In fact, it might be said that all of our senses are quantum in nature (since all senses are measurements), and that all phenomena are merely virtual until a conscious agent of some kind, and of some size, makes them ‘real’.
This is another formulation of the hard problem where the physical world makes itself known to us through our senses causing an emotional, sensory reaction/ effect in the observer, but there is no explanation for how it does this, in other words how can a bunch of particulars; neurons, things in the world, produce an absolute; consciousness?
Phenomenology tries to explain this interaction as the boundary where surface meets essence, object meets subject, the plane of appearances which is also the threshold of micro and macro, because our senses are quantum i.e. a dog’s sense of smell is 100,000 times better than ours, but our own olfactory faculties are nothing to scoff at either see: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sensorium/201812/experiments-suggest-humans-can-directly-observe-the-quantum, while our vision has been shown to detect a single photon of light https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2016.20282.
But if the world, and things in the world, are merely abstractions meeting on the common surface of our reality (including ourselves), then we can say that they are all the same thing and the boundaries and borders between them are provisional. We erase the boundaries and now we can get all kinds of effects, including qualia because mind is intermingled with matter and what seemed like a solid object before can be an idea and disappear as quickly as it arrived (like a UFO). That is, it disappears as an abstraction (an ‘icon’, per Hoffman’s Conscious Realism) on the boundary surface, but not from the world.
Experience is to Measurement, what Observation is to Interaction
Mind prefigures all things. If one thing is prefigured by mind (ideas), then all things are prefigured by mind (ideas). This is the same as saying that an object requires a subject. The subject constitutes objects as having meaning for them. But a subject also requires an object, this could be as simple as a subject turning itself into an object; thought becoming form as in I am resulting in a split of a formerly unified ‘absolute’ whole. This doesn’t mean that two dualistically separate things result—like mind and matter–but a three-part trinity of subject, object and the shared boundary through which they interact (exchange information), so when we take away the boundary, we go back to one thing.
Boundaries usually aren’t taken away though, they are steadily added through interaction and the accumulation of information and with each new measurement/ experience/ interaction/ observation, more information is added to our world. This information in turn is used as energy to get more information etc. until mind as we know it becomes indistinguishable from universal Mind, or Mind-at-large. Experience always occurs within mind and each experience/interaction adds new information and what we get back depends on the type of experience we have. That is, if you have enough information to ask detailed enough question, you have enough information to answer it. Questions lead to answers which lead to more questions.
There is no upper limit to how much information a system can have as long as it does not exceed the amount of matter=energy present in that system, likewise there is no limit to how many particles can be entangled within the same finite amount of matter=energy. Therefore, it is conceivable that the entire universe could be thought of as an entangled consciousness system made up of smaller units of consciousness (us, animals) and even smaller conscious agents (atoms, molecules) all in communication through an informational network.
In terms of entanglement, this means that the observer is not really collapsing the wave function or influencing the system, the observer was already entangled with the system of which it and the experiment are a part. \Like we have said, there are no boundaries between things; the universe is an entangled system that evolves through the interactions and events that take place within it, including humans and their experiments. Experiments are events within that system, but it is the universe that is conducting those experiments, not the other way around. Time in such a system is just the speed of interactions and space is the distance that this information travels. No observer, no time, but since everything is an observer, everything happens at once, which also means; no time.
Theories are as Abundant as the Time it Takes to Make Them
Even though Einstein didn’t live long enough to fully realize the significance of these ideas, he has been quoted as saying that “the mind that opens to a new idea never returns to its original size”. To an organism concerned primarily with survival, the world appears constrained by the availability of food, safety, shelter and reproduction. Each bit of information is calculated in energy and for both the australopithecines and early homo, this energy is acquired through hunting. The time and energy spent hunting (and not being hunted itself) takes away from the time and energy spent in pursuing truth about the human condition, consciousness, cosmos and the meaning of life, but as intelligence grows constraints are steadily overcome suggesting the possibility that future constraints (call them the laws of physics) can be overcome as well.
However, by the time humanity as we know it had reached a point where it could afford to invest time and energy both into keeping itself safe and developing technology it had already adapted to a limited, finite view of the world based on fitness rather than truth. Humanity therefore suffers from a kind of post-traumatic stress handed down through each successive generation (some generations having it worse than others) to where we are now with fewer external threats (ones perpetrated by predators) and more internal ones (ones perpetrated by contradictions and inconsistencies in our worldview). This leads us to a unique stage in our evolution where we get to reflect consciously on it (evolution and consciousness) rather than simply being swept along.
What’s important now is not the same as what was important in the past. Or rather both are equally important, since we have not yet reached a utopia, but neither are we purely concerned with survival. We are able to think about the meaning of life and search for a theory of everything, one that may deliver us from the naive realism of appearances to the truth at the base of it all. This is what the UFO may be doing, as Terrence McKenna said by way of Jung, that it is eroding our faith in science by appearing as anything it wants to be.
Theories of Everything also have the potential to cause us to doubt ourselves where we are presented with so many seemingly coherent theories that we can’t seem to choose one and stick with it, or trust our own abilities to choose. In this situation we must go with what our experience is telling us, gauged by how close we are to either pole; the Naturalized pole of objectivism, scientism and materialism or the natural pole of one’s subjective experience which draws heavily upon intuition as a source of knowledge. Science ceases to be science when it no longer questions its own assumptions, or ignores challenges from its critics. This is politics not science and for a long time now, science and politics have been inextricably linked, perhaps as far back as the ‘discovery’ of fire itself.
In order to get a clear picture of the nature of reality and our place in it, via consciousness, it is necessary to return to the Place we started in order to know it for the first time. This return is like the completion of a cycle which has not yet had time to complete. We can detect its existence however by the clear demarcations between ages (stages) in one’s life; childhood, adolescence, adulthood, senescence, or innocence, criticism, disillusionment (or not), wisdom (or not), which are the same kinds of demarcations between phases in the alchemical Great Work (see nature as alchemy, i.e. Green Hermeticism https://www.danielthompsontheauthor.com/post/new-west-northwestern-new-wild-nw).
As we have said, there are pitfalls in the search for TOE. I don’t know if this is an adequate explanation of the phenomena (UFO or otherwise) and I expect it isn’t. It is just another leg, of the slow, steady meandering walk, although I do not believe it is a random one.
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