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Unified Theories, Fantasy, and Cosmic Order
Published in the ANPA proceedings held August 2008 at Cambridge, UK
Robert Campbell
Abstract
Two fundamental options and their implications are distinguished in possible approaches to a Theory of Everything. Traditional approaches have led to a divorce between the practice and interpretation of science that permits multiple metaphysical constructions that cannot find direct confirmation in phenomenal experience. A non-linguistic System of delineating the structural dynamics of the cosmic order is introduced as an alternative. Since it embraces all possible structural varieties of experience, it results in a new methodology that can complement traditional approaches to physics as well as to the biological and social sciences. The One System subsumes an open ended series of discrete higher Systems nested within it. It is not a belief system. It is not a Theory of Everything. It is a universal methodology that facilitates direct intuitive insight into the creative process in any given context. In this respect, it must find direct confirmation in phenomenal experience in the public and private domains. A new quantum-relativity emerges naturally with profound implications in many areas.
Introduction to Theories of Everything
Every culture needs a theory of everything in order to meaningfully integrate experience. We need a perceived context to relate to, even if it is flawed. Everyone has one, even if they believe that life has no purpose apart from gratifying their own egocentric desires, however gross they may be. Animals probably function this way within their perceived territory of behavior, although higher mammals can display alturistic traits.
For humans, language has always played a large part in private and cultural theories of everything. Language has hypostatizing effects that can subsume layers of hidden meaning that are not readily apparent. One blindly believes in words that are essentially opaque, since they close the doors to intuitive wonder and questions about our existence here in this world. In this way, one can use language to justify almost any closed belief system. Every culture has a story of creation to explain away the great unknown that is beyond the reach of language.
Brief Background to Relativity
In Newton's world and before, beliefs were quite different from our modern western perspectives. Space and time were seen as a kind of infinite vessel in which events happened without need for a beginning or end. Despite the reticence of the church to fully embrace science, one could believe in both religion and science without apparent contradiction. Newton himself devoted more time to religious and occult pursuits than to physics. Then Michelson and Morley's famous experiment in the late nineteenth century showed that the speed of light is universally constant in all inertial frames of reference irrespective of their relative motion.
Einstein's special theory of relativity became the most widely accepted interpretation of the universal speed of light. He was able to derive the Lorentz transformations between inertial frames of reference by dispensing with the concept of the so-called luminiferous ether. The ether was believed to be the medium through which light travelled, however it eluded detection.
Then, Einstein came up with a novel explanation of gravity in his general theory. He claimed that space and time were not mutually distinct things, but a continuum that beame curved according to concentrations of gravitational mass. Suns and planets rested in a depression of spacetime, so that smaller bodies ran downhill toward them, so to speak. It was this curvature of the spacetime continuum that accounted for gravitational acceleration between gravitating bodies. Gravity and acceleration were equivalent he claimed, just as one feels heavier in an elevator accelerating against gravity and lighter in free fall. But an elevator has a draw works that physically exists. Gravity has no draw works.
Problems with Special Relativity
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the internal structure of the atom was still a mystery, so Einstein's special realtivity presented no significant barriers to belief for the physics community. It was established that bodies moving at high relative velocities approaching light speed become shortened in the direction of travel. They must become progressively more flattened as they get heavier. This is not consistent with the later development of atomic theory and quantum mechanics and the question has not been properly addressed.
Space and time are generally assumed to be continuous, but there are problems with this belief. If space and time are infinitely divisible, then Zeno's arrow never quite reaches the target. There is a logical contradiction in the concept of continuous space and time. And there are irrational holes in what is assumed to be continuous space, as the mathematician Richard Dedekind pointed out in his essay on Continuity and Irrational Numbers in 1858. (1)
There are other serious objects to the theory also. General relativity does not account for Mach's Principle. Why should the inertial motion of Foucault's pendulum or a gyrocompass be governed by the fixed stars many light years distant and not by their proximity to Earth? In a spacetime continuum, this implies action-at-a-distance which Einstein rejected. But somehow these issues get swept under the rug. The language of physics is not exempt from the need for a theory of everything and a few weaknesses here and there are not a real problem since they can always be deferred to future generations of physicists.
Problems with General Relativity
At the time Einstein published his general theory, the countless other galaxies like our own were not known, so it was reasonable for him to assume that our galaxy constituted a steady state universe. In order for the galaxy to avoid gravitational collapse, he had to adapt a cosmological constant into his equations that acted as a kind of anti-gravity. Then a dozen years later, in 1929, Edwin Hubble discovered distant galaxies with a large new telescope and observed their red shift. The same characteristic spectral lines of stars in our galaxy are apparent in distant galaxies, but they are shifted toward the red end of the spectrum. The wavelengths are longer just as the sound of a passing vehicle changes to a lower pitch as it moves away. The galaxies appeared to be moving away from us faster and faster the farther away they were. Extrapolating backwards in time, this led to the Big Bang Theory of creation. The spacetime continuum itself is believed to be expanding just as spots painted on a balloon will appear to move away from each other as the balloon is expanded.
The idea is that the spacetime continuum itself is expanding from a singular condition of infinite density now believed to be about 14 billion years ago. This is generally accepted dogma among cosmologists even though stars in our Milky Way globular clusters appear by some estimates to be older. (2)
But if the spacetime continuum has been expanding, why have atoms, that supposedly formed rather early in the expansion, not been expanding with it? Do they not occupy spacetime? Are they growing? Electrons, positrons, protons, neutrons, and neutrinos were supposed to have formed independently before they consolidated into atoms. So, how did the number of electrons wind up exactly equal to the number of protons to form neutral atoms of fixed dimensions in an electrically neutral, but expanding, spacetime universe? Are atoms shrinking?
Why have suns and galaxies not been expanding also? And if they have been, how is the relative expansion between galaxies to be meaningful? Where is the universal measuring rod? It is assumed that the spacetime continuum is distinct from matter, and yet there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that there is such an independent thing as a spacetime continuum. It is an unfounded belief implicit in the language of mathematics. The a posteriori concepts of space and time derived from arbitrary measurements in creation are raised to a priori status to explain creation. Is this extreme kind of bootstrapping really legitimate?
And there are irreconcilable differences between quantum mechanics and relativity, even though both are used in the Big Bang model. Einstein sought to expel action-at-a-distance (3) from physical theories, but the theory fails with Mach's Principle just as it does with quantum correlation. And the default interpretation of Quantum Mechanics reduces everything to the rules of chance, which Einstein hotly contested.
Einstein cast doubt on the continuum basis of his own theory late in life. In a letter to his friend Michele Besso the year before he died, he wrote: "I consider it quite possible that physics cannot be based on the field concept, that is, on continuous structures. Then nothing remains of my entire castle in the sky, including the theory of gravitation, but also nothing of the rest of modern physics." So, is the Big Bang just another story of creation based on a blind belief in langauge? Is it really any more credible than an aboriginal creation myth? The only option to a spacetime continuum is a discontinuous universe, as we shall see.
Language as Ontological Representation
Language is a representational tool. Words, signs, and symbols are used to represent things, qualities, feelings, and events in thought. At a primary level, the meaning inherent in language derives from our sense perceptions and our emotional, mental, and behavioral responses to them. In this sense, language is ontological since it concerns the very nature of our Being. Words have meaning conferred by the way Being is structured to function as an organized whole. This concerns the whole interdependent cosmic order. We have arisen from the Earth in response to a sun that plays a tiny part in one galaxy among billions. We are part of an interdependent whole that defines the nature of Being. Ontology as used here is the study of Being and its structural dynamics.
Language as Epistemological Representation
A history of experience can be encoded in language that is remembered and subject to recall. This constitutes knowledge of an indirect kind distinct from the direct knowing of sensory input. We know things from experience and can apply this past knowledge to respond to present sensory input in a way that anticipates a future result based on experience. We can span space and time and integrate history. The higher mammals have this capacity to tailor their behavior according to learned memories that conceptually relate to their behavioral space, even though they lack definitive language.
As with the higher mammals, we humans also accumulate knowledge in memory based upon how we interpret experience as it relates to our behavioral space. This interpretation becomes less dependent on territory and more dependent on our psychological behavioral space. This means that our interpretation of sensory input generally has a strong dependence on language from early childhood. We rationalize how things work and respond accordingly. Language in this sense is epistemological since it is implicitly involved in encoding accumulated knowledge related to how things work. Epistemology as used here is the study of knowledge and its justification.
Knowledge is Subordinate to Being and The Cosmic Order
The knowledge that we accumulate is thus colored by how we implicitly assume or explicitly theorize the cosmic order to work. We cannot avoid implicating the cosmic order when we assimilate experience in knowledge. We adopt a world view as a young child that develops throughout life. Regardless of how short sighted our world view may be, we cannot function meaningfully without one. Epistemology in this sense is subordinate to ontology since it has a strong linguistic component, and since the meaning implicit in language is also dependent on how the cosmic order works.
The Tree of Knowledge and The Tree of Life
In keeping with Genesis, a Christian might express this by saying that the tree of knowledge is subordinate to the tree of life in our Garden of Eden. It is the development of language, however, that has resulted in the bi-lateral polarization of brain function. It is a well established scientific fact that language expression is functionally delegated only to the left hemisphere of the new part of the brain in right handed people. (4) The complementary right hemisphere of the new brain (neo-cortex) focuses on intuitively integrating experience as a whole. Intuitive insight properly leads language, but this also tends to be socially conditioned according to the ethical standards of cultures and sub-cultures as enshrined in language.
The Serpent of Eden and Our Limbic System
Left brain language and right brain intuition are thus mutually relevant and seek a mutual balance that is emotionally satisfactory. Both hemispheres are fueled by emotional patterns from our primitive Limbic System associated with our reptilian and lower mammalian ancestors. It has been said that our new brain, to which we owe our intellectual capacity that can build atomic bombs and send rockets to the moon, is harnessed to the emotional capacity of a crocodile and a horse structured into our ancient Limbic System. (5) The new brain has no direct biological controls over the old brain. They are biologically constrained to live in the same house together on an equal footing. This accounts for our human social dilemma.
In an allegorical sense, the serpent of Eden corresponds to the reptilian part of our Limbic cortex. The reptilian cortex is primary to memory and to the animating patterns of life. It is associated with our emotional desire to eat from the tree of knowledge. We have a deeply rooted need to know our part and place in the whole scheme of things. We need a world view that is sufficiently comprehensive to satiate our emotional needs.
To the extent that this accurately reflects how the cosmic order works, we return to the tree of life. To this extent we can find a sustainable balance with the cosmic order by which we have evolved and thus transcend both our biological origin and death. This implicitly requires a sustainable balance with our natural heritage. This was a theme that permeated aboriginal spirit cultures, but it is sadly lacking in the modern world. We must relearn to reconcile Heaven and Earth in the modern idiom.
A Disparity Between Our Two Faces
We are thus faced with a strange situation. On the one hand, we must draw upon epistemological knowledge to rationalize in language how to behave. On the other hand, we must relate to an intuitive world view that integrates meaning as a whole. In some sense, the latter must transcend language and with it, all of creation, since it concerns the ontological basis of being.
The two hemispheres of the new brain are thus mutually polarized. The left hemisphere is concerned with short-term self-expression in response to changing events in space and time, while the right hemisphere is concerned with apprehending the self-transcending cosmic order that timelessly prescribes the universal structure of all change. This means that there is a Janus-faced dualism between self-transcending ontology and self-asserting epistemology at the heart of efforts to understand human behavior and how language integrates meaning. This includes the language of mathematical physics.
Janus and Arthur Koestler's Holon
Like the two faced Roman God Janus, we are looking in two directions at the same time. In one direction, we need to behave rationally in a social context. In the other direction, we seek to integrate our experience as a whole in accordance with a self-transcending order that constitutes our world view. The late social critic Arthur Koestler (6) adopted the name "holon," meaning "part-whole," for this Janus-faced characteristic of the human condition. The one face is self-assertive. The other face is self-transcending.
Koestler especially observed that it is usually our self-transcending face that gets us into trouble. We tend to identify with a self-transcending ideal of some kind that can often subvert our human conscience to the perceived needs of actualizing the ideal in practice. Our tragic human history attests to the atrocities that have been committed in the name of one ideal or another, including militant political and religious ideals, exclusive ethnic claims, rights movements of special interest groups, supremacy themes of various kinds, imperialism, collectivism, individualism, and so on. In general, the ideal involves social justification of deeply rooted desires that assume high priority status. Primal appetites seek a transcending basis in language as an ideal that is believed to be socially just.
Identification with the ideal tends to justify actions which would otherwise be unthinkable. Our resultant behavior often erodes our sense of humanity and contradicts the essence of the ideal. The otherwise positive teachings of major religions can easily be inverted into their
Knowing, Being, and Natural History
Returning to the Tree of Life
Universal Wholeness and Boundary Conditions of Phenomena
Phenomena as Active Interface Processes
Universal Wholeness and Two Options
The No Universal Center Option - Exclusive Objectivity
The Universal Center Option and a Rift in Wholeness
In the second option everything shares a common inside or center. This leads to a very different interpretation of how phenomenal experience is structured to function. If there is such a thing as universal wholeness it must admit of separate phenomena in experience. It must admit of both a subjective and an objective aspect to all experience. Every thing must have both an inside and an outside. And both the inside and outside must be universally shared. (See the diagram of System 1.)
Two Possible Orientations to System 2
The Subjective Orientation of System 2
The Two Orientations are System 2
Universals and Particulars
The particular center in System 2 is also monolithic since it designates only one particular kind of being. Objective phenomena in the natural world that share a common outside are not all the same. We see an unlimited variety of things although nothing in phenomenal experience is completely unique. Everything is one particular thing of a universal kind of which there are many.
The rift in universal wholeness thus also requires that particular things must correspond to hierarchically organized universals of particular kinds. There are universal archetypes of plants, invertebrates, and vertebrates, each with hierarchically subsumed archetypes such as class, order, family, genus and species.
Particular things quantitatively define their physical existence in relation to their universal qualities. For example we may say Rover is a dog. He is quantitatively defined as one member of an archetypal kind known as the dog species. A daisy is a flower. Bill is a human. The Earth is a planet. The sun is a star. That is the way we normally identify everything. (12)
In a Platonic sense this means that there are universal archetypal forms that transcend physical existence. In an Aristotelian sense these universals are confined within the particular manifestations of them. Both views are correct. Every particular thing is clothed in atoms and molecules that take a specific form consistent with a universal archetype. This is true even of things that we create. There are many makes and models of TV sets but they are all consistent with the archetypal plan of how all TV sets work. The archetypal plan is still something distinct from a particular TV set and yet the plan is clearly evident within it.
System 3 as an Elaboration of System 2 in Three Dimensions
Three Dimensions to Space in the Particulate Mode
System 3 and Electronic Charge
The Quantum Mode and the Void
Recall From the Master Sensorium - The Void
Atoms and Space-Time
A Family of Quantum Forces Required by Angular Motion
The Eternal Regeneration of Matter
Red Shift and Background Radiation
Distant Galaxies and Quasars
The Cosmic Order as a New Methodology
This interpretation of atoms and space-time is not another arbitrary metaphysical construction in language that is contrived independently of the empirical evidence after the fact. It is necessarily demanded by the structural dynamics of System 3 as it relates directly to the evidence. The System of representing the cosmic order is structurally required as a subsumed elaboration of System 1. The requirements are implicit in the nature of Universal Wholeness. If there is such a thing as universal wholeness it is a priori to the practice of science, not a posteriori. Humans do not invent it. The System is both ontologically and epistemologically consistent because it offers direct intuitive insight into the structural dynamics of the cosmic order and it can find direct confirmation in phenomenal experience in either the public or private domain or both.
Since it does not divorce the practice of physics from the interpretation of physics, it can provide specific direction to the physical sciences as well as to the biological sciences. The biological sciences are elaborated upon by Systems 4 and higher. Specific intuitive insight into the cosmic order as it relates to any circumstance can specifically lead research efforts with greater precision and breadth of application. It is a new methodology that can expand the horizons of science in more positive ways. It is a methodology that has universally consistent application. Otherwise we are forever left to the vagaries of any number of contrived metaphysical interpretations that are mutually exclusive, of limited value, and divorced from the practice of science.
The Rift in Wholeness and Proliferation of the Cosmic Order
The Rift in Wholeness and Universal Values
Evolution as an Expression of the System
Evolution as a Climb Back to System 2 and Knowledge of Being
A Brief Summary of Light as Matter in Reflux
A Fundamental Choice Between The Two Options
Notes and References
1. Dedekind, R., Essays on the Theory of Numbers, (Dover Publications, New York, 1963)
2. Chaboyer, Demarque, Kernan, Krauss, A Lower Limit on the Age of the Universe, Science, 271, 957,1996; Sidney van den Bergh, Ages of the Oldest Clusters and the age of the Universe, Science, 270, 1943, 1995; Bolte and Hogan, Nature, 376, 539, 1994.
3. "Action-at-a-distance" as used here in a general sense is not intended to mean that there are causal influences transmitted through a spacetime continuum faster than light. In a discontinuous universe there is no continuum.
4. See Sperry R. W., Hemisphere Deconnection and Unity in Conscious Awareness, Amer. Psychol., 1969.
5. See 6 below.
6. See Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine, (London, Pan Books 1979) He popularized the pioneering research of Dr. P. D. MacLean on the Limbic System and its role in emotion. The new brain to which we owe our intellectual capacity has no direct biological controls over our Limbic emotional brain. Also see MacLean P. D., Contrasting Functions of Limbic and Neocortical Systems of the Brain and their Relevance to Psychophysiological Aspects of Medicine, Amer. J. Med., 25, 611-626, 1958. Papez, J. W., A Proposed Mechanism of Emotion, Arch. Neurol. & Psychiat., 38, 725,1937.
7. There are several articles on the human nervous system on the website that demonstrate how the human nervous system is structured to function synapse by synapse.
8. These transient resonances can nevertheless exhibit patterns suggestive of the higher Systems. See Chapter 5, endnote 12, Campbell, R. C. , Science & Cosmic Order: A New Prospectus, MindReach Library, 1997
9. Otherwise we are forced back to an implicit belief that space and time are a priori things in themselves.
10. This is not intended to mean that Universal Wholeness can only manifest as an active Universal Center. It can manifest in a variety of ways to a particular being with either active or passive cosmic characteristics as it wills. Or it can not manifest at all. An unlimited repertoire is available to it via the higher systems employing the medium of the Void. The Void is the boundless quantum field that is timelessly generated by Systems 3 and higher. Since System 2 transcends and subsumes the higher systems these phenomena in the private domain are possible. This work comes directly from a highly unusual series of cosmic insights the first of which is described in a website article. But one should not just take my word for it. The System resonates with human intuition. Anyone can see for themselves.
11. One can deny this possibility if they wish, but the denial can only be a blind belief, not a personal realization in phenomenal experience.
12. Logical paradoxes may arise by not taking hierarchies into account. In Russell's well known paradox "The Contradiction" arises when classes are treated on a par with their members. Russell, B., The Principles of Mathematics, 2nd edition, London 1937.
13. See Chapter V, Science and Cosmic Order: A New Prospectus, ibid.
14. The quantum energy equivalent of a moving particle is represented by the complex conjugate of the wave function in the Schrödinger wave equation.
15. The Void is not synonymous with what is called the “vacuum” in traditional physics. The Void is a highly structured and integrated quantum energy field that mirrors physical creation and spans space and time. It integrates history. It is orthogonal to the integrated fabric of space-time.
16. There are general similarities to the Bohm interpretation and to some of his writing, such as Wholeness and the Implicate Order, (Routledge & Keegan Paul, London, 1980). The System might be said to be a specific exposition of the implicate order. My work began in the mid 1960's from original insights that came as a result of an intensive quest into organization structure as a result of political conflict when I was in a key management position during a company takeover. The insights explicitly demonstrated how the cosmic order works with respect to the physical and biological sciences.
17. The primary interval of time relates to the fact that the angular momentum of the electron in the first hydrogen orbit is zero. See Science and Cosmic Order: A New Prospectus, ibid.
18. See the website article "Gravity and Historic Coordinates" at www.cosmic-mindreach.com
19. Louis de Broglie describes his derivation emphasizing his guiding intuition of a "little clock in motion" in Wave Mechanics: The First Fifty Years, Butterworths, London, 1974. Comments on his derivation that relate it to System 3 are given in my website article "Atoms and Space-Time". There is more on this in Science and Cosmic Order: A New Prospectus, ibid. Quantum correlation is related as outlined in a website article.
20. Bart Bok published a summary, The Milky Way Galaxy, Scientific American, March 1981.
21. The infrared satellite IRAS discovered thousands of starburst galaxies with star formation rates up to hundreds of times greater than in more quiescent galaxies and sustained for tens of millions of years. Some starbursts are capable of reproducing their entire stellar population in less than a billion years if sustained. Our Milky Way galaxy is thought to experience starburst episodes every few hundred million years.
22. Chapter V, Science & Cosmic order: A New Prospectus, ibid.
23. Verschuur, G. L., High Galactic Lattitude Interstellar Neutral Hydrogen Structure and Associated (WMAP) High Frequency Continuum Emission, Astrophysical Journal, Dec. 10, 1997.
24. Flam, F., The Space Telescope Spies on Ancient Galaxy Menageries, reporting in Science, 266, 1806, 1994.
25. James Glanz, Galactic Building Blocks Found?, reporting in Science, 271, 756, 1996.
26. Reported in the January 1996 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.
27. Chapter 5, Science and Cosmic Order: A New Prospectus, ibid.
28. Chapter 5, Science and Cosmic Order: A New Prospectus, ibid.
29. The Panspermia Theory was first proposed by the 1903 Nobel Laureate Svante Arrhenius in his 1907 book Worlds in the Making. It was taken up by Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe in their book Evolution From Space, Dent & Sons, London, 1981. They showed that bacterial and yeast spores can survive the rigors of interstellar space indefinitely. They can be carried into the inner solar system by comets and are small enough to ride on the radiation pressure of starlight. If they enter the atmosphere at the right angle they can have a soft landing on planets like the Earth. The interstellar gene pool can be replenished by ejecta from comet impacts during the early life of planets and also by diffusion processes.
30. Campbell R., Downsizing Darwin, Mindreach Library, 1996.
31. For more on this see Campbell R., Fisherman’s Guide to the Cosmic Order, MindReach Library, 1999.
32. This is sketched in brief in the website articles Atoms and Space-Time; Gravity, Quantum Relativity & System 3, and The Cosmic Quantum Mind. The website articles on The System briefly outline the structural dynamics of the Cosmic Order up to System 4. The articles on the nervous system show how the Term transformations of System 4 correspond precisely to the structure and function of the human nervous system synapse by synapse.