ONYX

      

01X.MAINEVENT - An introduction of a sort:

IMPORTANT TO READERS OF THIS DRAFT: The pages  below are of an essay under construction. There are, as of 11/01/22 about 110 pages on this site of over 400 pages of text and 150 pages of notes. It is being edited hour by hour, day to day. It is very different from what was first posted. There are lapses, sudden changes and material pulled without warning, all to be polished as it progresses. 

This essay has color coding. The green designates areas that are in development, need basic work. The blue signifies ideas that came up as the original text was being written; they are new in that context. RED XXXX is where things were last left off as editing points. The coloring is not consistent. The page numbers relate roughly to the manuscript text to ease maneuvering between them. They may not be up to date due to editing after this page was posted.

The material covered in the essay includes, but not in this order:

1. Being quantum systems 

2. Lessons from Tai Chi 

3. A look at Newton's second law

4. Everett's many-worlds, reality 

5. Manifesting

6. Earth's brain

7. Body mind link

8. Left/right brain 

9. On being wrong

10. Solar energy limits

11. Short term memory

12. Feldenkrais

Page 1

There Are No Rules    

How did this start?

My friend Denis and I were busy solving the world's problems.

Come on ... 

Yes, it was a wise crack. Friends would ask how we could talk for so long on the phone and we’d say we were busy solving the world’s problems. There were laughs  and eye rolls but what was surprising was how often we heard, “Good for you!”. 

So how could you talk for so long? What did you talk about?

We were both curious and liked poking around. We went on about anything that came up and enjoyed letting the conversation go where it would. Whether here, weather there, politics, health, food, families, we covered the gamut. Crazy ideas came up and we’d wear them out. So they’re crazy, so what? We didn’t wonder about them, we just let them out to see where they might go. We entertained them and they entertained us. 

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Okay, we’ve started; will you tell the truth? 

Is this fiction, nonfiction? You’re me, a creation of convenience. When we worked together before our act^⁠1 was called “compelling”. It’s familiar and comfortable, so here we are. You’re interviewing me and you’re asking me my own questions. Is that fiction or non? Let’s leave it at being writing, prose, formless for the time being. Truth? We're human, we lie, we never, we’re cowardly, brave, courageous, avoiding, optimistic, pessimistic, sneaky, honest, you name it, we are – we be. Within, we're multiple. We will tend to repeat and maybe even contradict ourselves. Whether what we say here is true or not, no further comment... maybe. 

You’ve already written a lot of what’s ahead, always editing. Where do you get the nerve, energy or will to keep at it?

Probably from past experience. We’ve been a draftsman and renderer. We’ve painted paintings, made furniture, built buildings. We have a desire to make real, to make things that are worth looking at or to wonder about. We’ve been limited to what’s between our ears for subject matter. Over time, our mind did its best to filter out what didn’t inspire us. Ultimately, we’re only satisfying ourselves, doing it to see if we can. That doesn't take much nerve. Some of it has been shown to friends; they were very nice, they didn’t say a word. The only thing to do was start; we’d figure out what came next as we went along.

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We shrugged off solving the world’s problems as what it was, a joke, a wise crack. It kept coming back. One bright idea was to think that kind of thing had to happen one person at a time. We saw how naive that was when we saw photos of places usually called slums. Not just one, too many (Images) with local names like barrios, favelas, bidonvilles, aashwa’i, spread around the Earth’s the equator. Human multitudes, their density and their life and death hit us with a staggering awareness of all of us all over the Earth. It's not easy to avoid the world’s problems, they keep cropping up. Solving them? Hah! When we saw those photographs we were seeing a hint. It would take some time before we had any idea of how to think about it.

And time, what happened to time? Open fields, lazy days, free time, long views. Then bing bang, thousands of houses, too many people, traffic, commerce, fouled drinking water, politics, smog, change, homeless. Seventy years ago, that was just beginning and it all seemed to take forever but later it looked like it all happened over night. We were lazy, ignorant, unwilling to think about the mess we were making and its affect on the future. The future then is the past now. What’s required to deal with the mess of the present is confusing, colossal and contentious. Our future today promises a few years to really fix anything but little more.

Aside from the world’s problems; where did you try to go, what did you choose to think about?

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We continued to poke, writing and talking about anything promising that came to mind, personal stuff, old stories. We looked for backup to test our ideas. We'd notice something, bring it up and new stuff to talk about would emerge. There was no plan to this, it was just random conversation. Off the phone, thinking reading and talking with others about some of the stuff we talked about with Denis, we noticed something that became troubling. In almost everything we read or heard there was a sense that something was missing. 

We looked for a center. We couldn't find a center that held up. Different areas of thought seemed to have nothing in common. There wasn’t any sense that the different things people were talking about had any connection to anything else. Specialization was the rule and the different things people worked at and thought about seemed more and more separate. The only thing anyone could agree on was that it was all a big mess.

What was missing?

We didn’t know, but we kept searching. We thought about places to look. There had be something basic to everything, common to different areas of thought: science, economics, politics, physics, psychology, lunch, no matter what, something that was part of everything. We kept looking for what everything had in common. Finally, the only thing left was the atom. That felt pretty far out when it occurred to us. Everything’s supposed to be made up of atoms, right? Then things started to come

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together. All these different things were made of atoms and there was so many different things that difference itself came up as at least another common thing. Everything existed at the same time and it was all in the world at once. The differences were confusing. Attending to atoms, it was easy to imagine there might be something larger. It dawned on us that the differences might embody richness.

We started to wonder what a common ground among all the variety out there would look like. We did more specific reading. The idea of connection kept trying to come up. Years ago, an enlightening experience introduced us to a mystery that kept nagging at us. We read and studied and played with it. We ran into a lot of mathematics. We’re not gifted mathematically — to say the least — but there was something there to think about, a basic and new way to perceive the world.

We didn’t know what to look for. Then the title of a book, Something Deeply Hidden by the physicist Sean Carroll spoke to us. It described the nature of something that could be what we were looking for. Some of the book, the math, was obscure for us, beyond understandable; we didn’t pay much attention to it. The book was readable because Carroll used ordinary language to expand upon its theory and evidence. It was a simple description of a world, the thinking behind it, how it came together and the relationships that supported the idea. There was an undercurrent to the story that seemed to fit the world as we thought of it. We suspected it might help us find that connection we were looking for. It was new and hard to get at times. We were encouraged since he used words and phrases that were mostly the same as those we use everyday. We stuck with it. 

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We reread and we listened to Carroll speak. We talked with friends and we read and listened more. We listened to others like a lecture by another physicist, David Tong, on the basic supports of science’s perception of the world. There were other things that we read and absorbed; they began to assemble and expand the picture. The other stuff we noticed, read and listened to came from a world that seemed quite the opposite of the one to which the physicists were paying attention. Then we read a word used by the ultimate physicist, Albert Einstein, and the possibility of connection began to get sticky. The word was spukhafte, spooky.

The spooky stuff we’d read in the past could politely be called “speculative”. We began to think the physicist’s line of thought might explain the coincidence of  words like “particles” in both worlds. We knew of Gurdjieff^⁠2 and had been pointed toward Madame Blavatsky. When we read that Einstein was a reader of Blavatsky we felt a charge that told us to keep on with our wandering efforts. We'd stumbled upon Gérard de Nerval, a French poet, essayist and translator of the early 19^th century. We opened a book to a forgotten mark and came upon Oliver Lodge and his preoccupation with the metaphysical. Interesting and unusual possible combinations came up that kept us reading and writing.  

You’ve gone from physics to the supernatural in just a few pages. Where is this headed? 

Let’s pull back a bit and take care of some details. First, there’s little if any of the first person singular here. We’ve dropped “I” for “we”. We were inspired to do this by an

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insight from Fernando Pessoa, a Portuguese poet and writer who said, “Each one of us is two, and whenever two people meet, get close or join forces, it’s rare for those four to agree”. We’d also remembered the thought of Julian Jaynes. His work brought up our complex two chambered brain. There were others who saw our mind as divided into the conscious, the subconscious and unconscious. 

We already thought we were of two minds, maybe even more. So this has become an experiment: How would it read without “I”? The only first person singular “I” we decided to recognize would be our temporary, living, tangible, physical presence. 

Also note that as well as eliminating the first person singular this essay uses the word “being” as a verb whenever it’s applied to humans. We’ve done our best to stop using the phrase “human being” where “being” is a noun. It has its uses but we find it uncomfortable.

What about "one person at a time"?  

One person at a time? Can we experience that? Can we experience being "we", being two or even more at a time? Pessoa’s works say something about it that suggests who we are has no limits. If we’re counting the people who walk into a room, one person at a time sounds right. But if we add how they’re seen as persons by others, we have little chance of making an accurate count. If there's a crowd in that room and they all know the person walking in, that person coming through the door becomes the physical avatar for all those impressions and opinions flying around the room. Actually, the phrase “individual people” stops having any solid

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meaning except as tangible, visible animals; when we heard about prosopagnosia³ even visible became questionable^⁠. Pessoa engaged the basic human nature we habitually repress: our many minds. We don’t yet know how to resolve them. We’re almost conscious of them when we become confused. Being seriously unable to control our multiple minds has been diagnosed as schizophrenia. 

Essay wise, here’s another thing to expect: We repeat ourselves. We tried editing out the repetition but as we looked at it we realized that what seemed like it was the same thing came out of different impulses. Each repeat was a bit different. We legitimized the habit when we learned that nature was repetitive. We also remembered that as we read demanding material we had to go back quite often to pull a lengthy complex idea together, so the repetition could be useful, time saving.

Okay, you’ve begun something that looks quite ambitious and that leads to, “Who do you think you are to be doing this?” 

Who do we think we are? First, we readily accept that we’re two. We can expand on that, like being even more than two, “we” can also mean many. At first, using "we" was confusing. Are you just calling yourself "we" or are you including "us" as well? Perhaps the context of what we say will indicate which "we" we mean. What if who we are is something else? In any case it raises questions that might be enlightening to look at. We've been shocked, shaken, by other selves we didn't know we were.

You’re into this physics stuff; What convinced you it wasn’t just scientific mumbo-jumbo. How did it start?

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Ah, the Quantum Barn! Yes! Earlier we mentioned an enlightening experience that kept nagging at us. This is the story: It began at the meeting of a hobby club, on a super-humid mid-summer night. All the club members present were suffering from the heat. An innocent question came up and it’s answer didn’t add up. From the peanut gallery, we interrupted the club’s business report to suggest turning off the lights in the hope it might cool things off. The idea was summarily dismissed: “Fluorescent light doesn’t give off heat!”. When we took a break before show and tell, everyone went outside to chat and smoke. We all noticed and talked about how shivery cool it was. Going through the open doorway was like walking into another season. We noticed there was no breeze, just chilly darkness. We talked about it briefly and forgot about it. 

A few years later this member of the club built a barn^⁠4 to house a workshop. It was carefully designed to be an efficient space, to conserve energy and be a tool itself, a place for working on a variety of projects. The building’s walls and roof were made of thick foam panels. The floor and doors were heavily insulated and the building was oriented to take advantage of seasonal weather changes and minimize energy use. Fluorescent lights were installed to give maximum light with as few fixtures as possible.  

One night during the building’s first winter, we forgot to turn the lights off when we locked up and left. There was a heavy snow storm before dawn the next day. [Image of barn in snow]  We were reluctant to wade through the snow and left the lights on over the next few days. When we finally re-entered the barn we were surprised by

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how warm and cozy it was. Pondering how it felt, we looked up at the fluorescent lights and BINGO, we remembered the night of our sweaty club meeting. For the rest of that winter and for twenty winters since, the lights have been on 24/7. The barn turned out to be inexpensive and trouble free to heat and a warm, super comfortable place to work all winter.

The explanation?

We looked on the web for confirmation that fluorescent light emits heat. We were led to Richard Feynman’s talks^⁠5 and his explanation of how light’s photons behaved. As they’re emitted they collide with whatever gets in their way. The interaction of that collision shakes up the atoms of what ever they hit whether wood, dust, concrete or human. Feynman’s description of it was a “jiggling” interaction that generates the heat. We’ve labeled it “atomic friction”. 

The old idea that fluorescent light didn't give off heat was based on the assumption that any heat we felt from a light source was from the infrared spectrum and fluorescent lamps emitted very little of that. It turned out that fluorescent lamps gave off a form of heat we had not been aware of, visible as light but within, a barrage of photons that can quickly heat up anything with which they collide.

What else can this phenomenon affect? If it’s as basic as Feynman describes it, it has to have a wider effect than just your barn.

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Yes and the news is not all good. We’ll get to that.

O.K., so with this encounter with Dr. Feynman, we assume your thinking about atoms began to evolve. What next?

There was no focus yet, we were just curious, and wanted to know more about this kind of thought. If intelligent people carried mistaken ideas like not knowing that fluorescent light gave off heat, there had to be lots of other miscues to which we were susceptible. Feynman’s revelation inspired us to look for more about how the atoms and electrons behaved. 

A Sean Carroll conversation with Joe Rogan included a casual remark, a conclusion that turned out to be loaded. In answer to a basic physics question, how do we see a particle when we look at a wave, he declared that we interact as quantum (electronic) systems. The implication was that as such we were emitting electrons ourselves and interacting with the wave as we looked at it. 

We put this idea of being electronic systems together with videos of brain scans. They showed electric currents flowing through neurons and connections in our brains and at times giving off sparks. Carroll declares in a lecture at the Royal Institution that this is visual evidence that an idea is a real thing. Sparks being emitted from a brain as an active system of electrons being emitted encouraged us to dwell on the implications.

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You, we, are electronic systems?

Why not? As Feynman explained, the emitted photons from light interact with the atoms of the surfaces they hit. So the brain-spark’s emitted electrons and photons head somewhere. In one lecture, Feynman off-handedly refers to ESP and dismisses it. Since he expressed those ideas, how we see the world has changed. Carroll stating that our brains are active electronic systems expanded possibilities. 

If our brains are emitting electromagnetic waves it makes sense that those emissions could encounter and dance with electrons emitted by other’s brains. What could happen? How about, “The first word that comes to mind...” or “You read my mind!”? David Tong underlines his lecture^⁠1 on the building blocks of the universe with his exclamation that, “We are all connected!”. 

All this begins to comes together with the thinking of another physicist, Hugh Everett. He was, to quote Wikipedia, “... an American physicist who first proposed the many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum physics, ...”. He saw that everything was one world, from the furthest star to the dust on the floor. He  declared that this one world was in a constant state of change; in repeated instantly instant instants many-worlds were created. It meant that one world was the prime singularity yet it was in a constant state of flux. Regarding “who we are”, Everett’s idea says we’re recreated as often as are the many-worlds and there are many, multitudes, of each of us.

Something happened in quoting Everett above that we’ve tried to avoid. The quote uses the phrase “...quantum physics”. What Carroll said in his conversation with Rogan was not that we are electronic systems, but “...quantum systems...” We often

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chat with others about this essay and what it’s about. When the word “quantum” comes up, we sense an itch to tune out from many with whom we’re talking.

Physicists repeatedly refer to their frustration with mathematics and formulas having a similar effect of putting people off. Anything expressed in “quantum” terms was confusing at first. Dr. Feynman didn’t help with his declaration, "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics." Repeatedly encountering the use of the word and sleeping on it helped. As we read more on quantum theory and quantum mechanics, what kept coming to mind was that we already knew all that. We would read a physicist's statement and say to our selves, “of course...”. It became more comfortable hearing and using it. Even typing the word came easier. The problem is it’s strangeness; quanta, quantum, quantity, quantify, the words stand off and stand out. They're familiar but not like they suggest anything that would be fun to entertain. 

They’re words that aren’t at home in our vocabulary. They remind us of arithmetic and math. We've eventually become more comfortable with quantum, the word oursleves. It also helped us feel more at ease with Everett’s ideas of who and how many of us we are. That became more clear as we began to see that there really were many more versions of us than we'd thought.

You already knew all that?   

We knew it but we weren’t aware that we knew it. It's reflected in the many ways we already thought of the world. We haven’t had those ways described that way before.

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Thinking like this begins to bring those ways together so they make sense. As we read Something Deeply Hidden, while the mathematics was over our head, the quantum ideas actually made sense. Familiar terms were used in describing them. We sensed a subtext but it was ours, not Carroll’s. Many of the ideas he expressed echoed our everyday thought. It was not the description of a new, changed world but a new way of seeing the world as it had always been. 

We began to realize the world actually was one world. What was changing was our consciousness it. This will probably be said again: Two statements have held sway in this essay and become reference points as we think about how the quantum world relates to us as humans, being. The first was Carroll pointing out that we are quantum systems. The other was physicist David Tong’s, “We are all connected!”. The implication is that we’re not just quantum systems but that as such, we're connected quantum systems. 

Connected? How does one person’s thought connect to another’s in terms of us being quantum systems? What do we have in common that allows us to sense the connection?

We have language, we have words in common. We’re connected because we use words and we generally agree on what they mean. As quantum systems we’re making, within our heads, electronic connections. When that happens, words are brought up in our minds and when we say or write them down we connect as we hear and read. We’re used to describing that as having connected verbally. A metaphor for the relationship between electrons and words is that of the algorithm and the word that appears on the screen of our smart phone. We're onto an idea of how talk works. Will that begin to describe how thinking works?

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How thinking works?

How thinking works. Is it the interaction between talking and electronically connecting with someone else while we’re talking to ourselves within our own heads? We have a collection of words, readily accessible in our minds. They’re assembled in the many ways we’ve called ideas, beliefs, concepts, principles and especially opinions. When we hear or bring up a word or a collection of them we create a thought. That thought excites other thoughts stored in our brain and when they connect they occur to us and we think. All this happens electromagnetically, spark by spark.

Occur to us? That brings up being conscious. Big question.

There’s also something else waiting for us to become aware of and know more about: We’re emitting electrons and they interact with electrons emitted by others. This implies that it’s possible to communicate on another level, without words; it would be extra sensory. We've come to the conclusion we’ve been doing that all along but we haven’t trusted it as being real. We’ve relegated thought on that sort of possibility to what we’ve called illusion, the woo-woo, supernatural world.

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Can we get back to “Who do you think you are?”

It is a question loaded with possibilities. If being a quantum system suggests we’re created over and over every time we encounter others, our self image should change but we habitually see ourselves as singular. “We” is not just the multiples within ourselves, it includes a multitude of other versions of ourselves. We’re also how our friends, lovers, enemies and doubters see us, how others perceive us. It adds up to saying there are countless versions of us. Quantum thought says the mental images of others, their memories and opinions of us, are real. Using the word real in this context demands a look at what real really means; that’s hard to resist; we’ll get to that eventually, too. 

Slow down. Getting a grip on the idea of multiples of us is a bit much. 

To accept that we're not singular we have to get beyond what we consider obvious. In terms of who we are, so far we’ve really only talked about our brains/bodies and what’s inside. The basic thing that’s obvious is our physical presence. We call it tangible because it's touchable, it has a physical presence. Even that presents difficulties; have you ever seen yourself as others see you? No. 

There being multiples of us starts off with the fact that there’s an us we’ve never seen. We each have the quality of being one person with our particular tics and syndromes, our origins, ancestors, parents, DNA, complexion, our stories, our ride on the arrow of time. We’ve only seen images of us, reflections, selfies, our legs,

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hands, arms and toes; maybe our nose and our hair, a tooth when it's pulled. When we dwell on it we realize how naive narcissism is. 

To get a grip on that we have to get a bit closer to the other versions of who we are. Becoming familiar with them could change how we react to others, how we think, how we manage — how we get along in the world. It also has the potential to cause trouble — what happens to the concept of the ego? Is the ego the result of fear of losing the who we've already established? Narcissus sees his reflection in the water but when he looks away that “he” disappears. What happens to Freud? How about insult? Privacy? What happens to religion? We’re getting ahead of ourselves.

As Pessoa saw and pointed out, we are two. The fact of the dual chambered structure of our brain makes it easier to accept and explore. Some of us are aware of it but it’s hard to say we think about and use it regularly. One time when we can recognize it is when we’re presented with a choice and we declare, “We’re of two minds on that”. 

Carroll uses a smart phone as a metaphor that describes the not-knowing-what’s-going-on-inside. We use our phone with some ease but very few of us have no idea of the nitty-gritty that’s going on inside of it, how it works. Discovering that we’re quantum systems is a lot like being made aware of a feature on our cell phone we didn’t know it had. If we decide it can be useful, we have to figure out how to use it. What buttons do we have to push and what can we expect when we do? We test by pushing different buttons to see what happens. Ever had your button pushed? Our smart phone is set up to let us push random buttons with very little chance of

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causing permanent damage. With us, as we try on "we", if it doesn't work we can always go back to “I”. 

That could be hard. It could feel like, well...

Further down the road it could feel as though "I" had been an illusion. We started by conducting an experiment, trying a new way of describing ourselves. As we’ve declared, we won’t use “I” in this essay (maybe). We still use “I” in everyday conversation. Eventually, we might have to extend the experiment. We’d have to attempt getting used to saying “we” hearing and noting its affect on others and ourselves. We’ve tried and it ain’t easy, especially in ordinary conversation.

When I use “I” I feel as though there’s a good part of me that’s private. “Who do you think you are?” has the tone of someone else letting me know a limit is being exceeded, privacy being invaded. It sounds like being told to mind our own business. What happens to privacy?

When we have problems dealing with others the difficulty is often that we can’t help being confused. We’re interacting with a person we really have very little knowledge of and there are two or more of each of us. The tangible person they interact with is us but that “us” is their version, created in their mind and made more real for them as they get to know us. When they look at us or interact with us it's with a person they’ve created in their minds. Their version of us is real and to them, as real as it will ever get. 

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We try to have some control over other versions of us. There’s no way we can be confident those are versions we could agree with or are even what we’d like them to be. Any variations can be so extreme and so strongly felt that we can be accused of lying to ourselves. Time passes and other’s images of us firm up. We become the us they experience at any particular instantly instant instant. [Yes, we’ve said that before and it might be a very useful phrase, shortened to something like “Aye, yi, yai!”, acronym: “III”].

 What happens to all those old versions of us in other’s minds that are shunt aside as new ones are created?

The problem is that they’re not shunt aside. They grow firmer or at best are only modified. The “us” in others’ minds can be confirmed, changed and even embellished like when we become the subject of gossip. What’s most likely is that their version of us will become firmer, more resistant to change. We’re used to thinking of the version of us in the minds of others as their impression of us and what we think of them as our impression of them. Because our minds tend to be habit laden and we’re lazy or reluctant, we don’t like to modify impressions once we’ve come to rely on them. They become more resistant to change so added embellishments tend to reinforce the original. 

Someone else’s version of who we think of as ourself can be quite different than who we think we are. They’re blind to how we see ourselves. We’re blind to how others see themselves. If they object to how we see them it’s difficult to get our

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version of them to agree with theirs. What we gather as our idea of another person comes loaded with emotional baggage, rumors and the opinions of the crowds we share. That’s all connected in their mind just by being there. It’s another aspect of being a connected quantum system. 

The gap between how we see ourselves and how the rest of the world sees us makes us naive. Sometimes we’re so naive as to become egotists; each of us can only know so much yet we can invent like crazy. Perhaps the illusion we experience when we see our reflection inspires further illusion.

Where does Pessoa’s 2x4 comment come in? How does it relate to being a quantum system? 

Again, in this essay we've dispensed with the pronoun “I”; no first person. Really, we are not just two but more. Pessoa represents a sense of a quantum reality that’s existed throughout human history. Blavatsky, Gurdjieff, Nerval and their like were sensitive to something not generally known or understood. They thought these mysteries were important enough to think and write about them. Because it doesn’t make sense to anyone who needs evidence, their sort of thought has been relegated to superstition, the metaphysical, the woo-woo world. They represent a wealth of people who have had and shared similar sensibilities and thoughts. We think quantum thought supports the idea that they were on to something. Though they didn't have the science or the vocabulary, they realized that the world was quantum. 

This is getting pretty far out... How about Pessoa?

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Artists aren’t generally over concerned with “normal” other than to keep it at arm’s length. Pessoa accepted what others considered abnormal and went on living like it was just fine. He allowed himself to be as many as seventy different personalities (he called them heteronyms) and lived the lives of them within his own. Maybe they visited for tea and a chat now and then. Artists like Pessoa saw their sense of reality as worthwhile. They entertained, explored and recorded their experience with unseen, unknown interactions. Pessoa’s genius was to stay out of trouble while he created a collection of minds he could know and control to his delight. As he wrote he showed us how humans could be. He saw, played with, wrote down and made a record of controlled dreaming. 

That’s hard to relate to the idea of the world being quantum and how we can understand that.  

When Sean Carroll is interviewed on the subject of quantum thought, both he and his interviewers declare it's very hard. We’ve found it hard on some levels but it can be quite easy at the same time. The language used by Carroll the quantum physicist, is the same language, the same everyday vocabulary his readers and students use. He uses it at home, when he goes out to eat or go shopping. Most of the words are the same and their meanings are always similar. The differences lie in how the words are used when it comes to quantum thought.

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Can those differences be resolved?

It’s generally assumed that quantum theory tries to say the world has changed. But if the world’s quantum now, it has alway been quantum. What has changed is that science has given us a new way to see the world. The world is as it's always been but now it's possible to see things about it which we didn't know. What makes it hard is getting beyond the way we’ve seen the world up until now, what quantum thinkers like to call the classic view. They make a mistake when they distinguish between the classic and the quantum - they’re just aspects of the same thing. The classic was just the way we dealt with the world in our ignorance before we began to understand it was quantum.

We’ve been dealing with a quantum world all along and we’ve managed. What’s stood in the way of us knowing it’s a quantum world are words and we have to start with them. It won’t happen instantly. We have to exercise patience and remember that we’re new to this. We don’t usually think of thinking as a skill but it is. A skill can be learned and developed and we can get better at it. Thinking about the world being quantum we’ve made mistakes. But we’ve continued on, refusing to take difficulties as a signal that we should give up. We’ve kept on and our view of the world is changing. It’s been encouraging and making what life feels like different in an exciting and positive way. 

How do we look at the world as quantum?   

We have to start with what we already have. We’ve been  sensitive to and dealing with a quantum world for our entire history. We didn’t begin to know it was a

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quantum world until quite recently, only in the last hundred years or so. 

Among the different areas of quantum thought there are many views of quantum reality. We’ve accepted Everett’s view as it’s been described by Carroll and others. It says that there is one world made up of many worlds which are created over and over instantly. We already knew that. For example, we express our knowledge of it when we're discussing the strange behavior of an acquaintance and we say, “Oh, they live in another world...”. We just didn’t realize quantum physics had made that not just a figure of speech but a fact. That other world they live in is real, it exists and it’s their world. 

We’ll get back to that but let’s stick with who we are. We make up who we know as ourselves when we describe ourselves to ourselves. It’s been called, "calling up our self image". The details we perceive and use to make up who we are exist, but only for us. There’s little chance of answering the question “Who do you think you are?” to someone else’s satisfaction. Every one else decides who we are on their own. They control their image of who we are. We can try to change the way they see us but that’s all we can do, try. 

Why is it so difficult to change their view? 

When another’s image of us comes back as unpleasant we might dismiss it as their “opinion”. It’s true for them - it fits to their satisfaction. Werner Erhard popularized dismissing opinion as unimportant with his seminars like the Forum, “Go to the ocean, shout out your opinion! Watch what happens ...”. But that didn't foresee the

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possibility that science would present evidence that thoughts are real things. As such, thoughts, even as opinion, have power and connect. 

Seeing the power of opinion has become much easier as we’ve become immersed in social media. It’s permeated other media like TV news and even our conversations. Opinions expressed online can strike fear and frustration in the heart of dictators, tyrants, presidents, prime ministers and innocents. Trolling creates opinions without reference to truth or evidence. Looking at opinions when they relate to us as quantum systems prompts asking, “How do we deal with them?” We're not in deep enough to have any ideas about that yet. It seemed like a pertinent question and so we asked it. Then we realized asking it was an experiment in manifesting; let's see what comes up. 

Manifesting?

"Manifesting" is another word that opens the door to the woo-woo world. Manifesting has become a word that enjoys fad status; search for it on Oprah Daily and Deepak Chopra. We’ve begun an experiment and we’ll do our best to keep track of it. As quantum systems, we function in a constantly changing connected quantum world. We need words that echo the character of being quantum systems, of being emitters and receivers of electromagnetic energy. Old phrases take on new weight, like animal magnetism echoing an electromagnetic aura. It would probably  be explainable in terms of quantum mechanics, but let’s leave that aside for a while. It will come up again.

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And opinions? 

Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow divides the way human minds work into two systems which he numbers system 1 and system 2. System 1 he describes as intuitive, sloppy and habitual while system 2 is thoughtful and deliberate. When humans react, Kahneman sees them largely as system 1 thinkers first. System 2 engages reluctantly if at all. When we face the world we feel most secure, most comfortable when what we face agrees with what makes up our system 1. System 2 is seldom called upon to engage and think more deeply than our lazy habits are comfortable with. 

If our reaction requires calling up system 2, our equanimity is disrupted. If it's easy, we do what's necessary and refer to our mind's filing cabinet of easily ready knowledge. If what we're faced with requires thinking we don't like, we come close to falling back into the realm of system 1 where opinion lies waiting. System 1, not being particularly careful, puts together easy responses made up of anything from fact to bullshit, the stuff of opinion. Dealing with it by way of system 2 would be to analyze it item by item with reference to logic, facts and evidence. 

Kahneman’s division of human thinking says that system 2 the analytic, tends to be lazy. We found his claims questionable. It’s not lazy, it just doesn’t know that it’s wanted or needed. He presents examples with little tests that are tricky. As we read his book we said out loud on confronting these little tests that they “looked fishy” and III, our analytic mind jumped to attention and quickly realized a way of testing

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his tests was necessary. His “tests” were biased to confirm his Systems 1 and 2 thesis. The relationship between a question or challenge and how the bi-cameral brain functioned was missing; assuming laziness was lazy.

Are you flip-flopping between opinion and manifesting?

Yes. When a question like Kahneman's comes up that’s designed to look simple and easy to answer, it's raw meat for system 1. System 2 not diving into it isn’t because it’s lazy, it’s because usually it doesn’t know its needed. It has to be told. That telling is part of how personal manifesting works. We manifest within our own heads - we ask ourselves for answers and we provide them by hearing the request and calling on our memory.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things look hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.” When we're unable to hold two opposing ideas in mind and still function, if we can’t come up with solutions, emotion can take over — especially if we tend to be impatient. That leaves the door open for opinion. When we can’t resolve an argument, frustration, dismay, or anger can cause us to defend our opinion. 

Still, opinions can be true or false, handling our own cleanly depends on being willing to admit we’re wrong. Opinions can often inspire learning but can only leave the realm of opinion if and when real knowledge has been established and

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accepted. That doesn’t mean the influence of opinion disappears. We can appear even more opinionated when we back up our ideas with facts or “real knowledge”. Opinion is a hammer with two faced head.

Where are these ideas coming from?  

They’ve arisen as we’ve written, read, thought about and edited. We reread and when we stumbled over our words or how we we put them together we’d think about what was necessary to make it all read more clearly. Now and then there was something that couldn’t be handled simply. As we wrestled with it we realized we were wandering or hadn’t really thought thoroughly about what we’d said. We’d do some research on the web, read or ask — manifest — and more ideas would come.

There were/are other sources. When questions first came up we thought we’d have to locate a place from which to start thinking about them, a center. But we couldn’t find a center that was any help. Every time we thought we had a place to start, we’d find distractions lying in wait. The place we were looking for turns out to be multi-dimensional and overly inclusive. It held lots of views rather than any single point of reference. It was all too chaotic and frustrating.

What we used to think of as a mental center has been erased or replaced by the internet. As we use the internet we find more and more of our minds outside of our brain and body. It’s led to an increased awareness of a macro, micro, nano world. Centers have become temporary things. What we assume to be a stabile center can be slippery and moving subtly, too often in the wrong direction.

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The question of where do these ideas come from reminds us of an ongoing conversation with others about the difference between the analog and digital world. It’s brought up the observation that anyone born after about 1970 has not experienced a fully analog world. Unless there’s a digital calamity, it’s unlikely that anyone born since will experience anything approaching an analog world. There are places the internet doesn’t reach. Those places are still influenced by their existence in the one world the digital world being part of it. It’s also probable that those places will have digital access eventually.

Where do these ideas come from before the digital revolution? What’s the effect of your experience in the analog world. 

The main source for these ideas is accumulated experience over a life time. The experience taught us to be as open as we possibly could. We also paid attention to things others discounted as superstitious or because of acquired opinions. The fact that so many could entertain weird ideas made them attractive to us, not to be believed in, but to be assessed, over time. It also taught us to do our best to get beyond anything that promised to hold us back. We said that people born since the computer revolution have not known of or experienced a purely analog world. Someone in their eighties has lived a good part of their life, about fifty years, in an analog world. Many continue to do so largely because it’s become their habitual way of dealing with the world. Some have a perspective on the present that accommodates both. 

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A lot of experience can accumulate over the years. When all that collected stuff jiggles around it amplifies old ideas. It also can confront and create new ones. It’s can be both an aid or a hindrace to being open, not concerned with opinions or the disagreeable. We haven’t always been successful at it.  

And the internet?

Digital reality. It’s been sneaking up on us. We can’t escape it. We’ve become more deeply attached to it because it’s become an extension of our minds and brains. Even those who avoid the online world are still affected by it since it impinges on all of media and communications. It permeates every part of the world we normally experience it. Any doubt about the meaning of a word or one we were ignorant of can be fixed in a minute without resource to a printed paper dictionary. Our knowledge of almost anything can be expanded with a few clicks. It's really quantum reality that's coming.

The “media-free” retreat is an attempt to get a taste of the simpler, analog life. It’s probably a frustrating experience since its reason for being is the digital itself. We can’t escape our awareness of the media. There is a basic explanation and it’s quantum, it’s David Tong’s declaration that “We are all connected!”. It’s more than just on the electronic person to persons level. We’re digitally connected as well.

Is it even possible to understand being quantum systems? 

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It will just happen; it might be happening already. We suspect that quantum reality will probably overtake and change how we see the world without our being conscious of it. We've been getting along as quantum systems all along without any problems. As an unknown known becomes apparent we'll be mystified by what's going on for a while. The whole world itself isn't changing much at all. What's changing is our relationship to it and to each other. The change probably started with the digital revolution. Historically, we've been through these kinds of changes before. We've noted the BCE period of Athens and the Iliad. There was the Renaissance. There was the Industrial Revolution. What have we left out?

The age of Empire and the Sea, for one and lots of little times...

So we're in a state of dynamic world change. This time it's on a larger, Earthly scale we haven't seen before. 

Will we give little notice to the way we are quantumly or will we just continue playing along as we always have been?

The number of us concerned with this new view of the world is growing. The nature of being connected behind this will cause this growth to continue and perhaps accelerate. The best example of this happening already we call a meme, the online connection among us that spreads ideas throughout the population. That will expand beyond what the internet can contribute just due to the fact of quantum connection. So it could be said that we’ll become more deeply connected and not

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even realize it. Our prediction is that our current confusing chaotic view of the world will slowly become less so as language becomes more thoroughly adapted to our new situation. Our consciousness will be altered by our interaction with others. 

Can we have any control over it?

First we have to learn how. We haven’t found a handbook for it yet — maybe that’s what we’re writing. It’s possible to be intentional about figuring it out. Wittgenstein’s maxim says you can't learn how to play a game by reading the rules. The only way to learn how to play the game is by playing it. How do we play this new quantum game? Where are there rules? How do we learn what being a quantum system is like? Maybe all we have to do is try on that we’re quantum systems and then see what happens, stay tuned to what’s going on. 

We can assume we’re taking part in an early test by playing with words like “entanglement” as descriptive of personal relationships and testing. We can test manifesting as being evidence of electromagnetic interaction. We call looking for answers on the internet “searching”. We enter words in the search box that tell the system what we’re looking for. But what about answers to questions the internet can’t answer? They’re questions we often don’t even know how to ask but we still want or need an answer or resolution. Can we search for answers in the quantum field? A turn to manifesting might clear the way to those answers. 

Where is this going? 

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It’s headed toward human auras and the concept of quantum entanglement. It’s headed toward the Earth’s brain. It’s headed toward the cosmic. Einstein described quantum entanglement as spooky action at a distance. Electromagnetic entanglement is the quantum realization that electrons can become entangled with other electrons. We recently encountered an example of it nicely limited to how our computers interacted. We tried everything we could think of to solve what we suspected was a bug. In our search for a cure we came upon a situation that echoed the idea of electrons flying around and creating auras. 

The link we were having trouble with was through our computer’s bluetooth system. We found that bluetooth traffic can lead to traffic jams and systems can be distracted, go off on a tangent when it’s confused by a link-up request. When we moved other bluetooth connected objects to places that isolated their auras behind barriers or turned them off, everything stabilized. We sit in front of our computer, but we, ourselves, are only wirelessly conscious of the interaction taking place in our little patch. Our little struggle was an example of being wirelessly connected similar to a bluetooth system ourselves.   

We’re not physicists and like most of us we’re not capable of their level of thought so we’ll stick to surfing and leave the deep to science. We emit waves, electromagnetic waves. You don’t have to believe in quantum mechanics to know that. If our brain is scanned while we’re thinking, electromagnetic activity can be seen. We also receive electromagnetic waves. How that all works on a basic level is described by Dr. Feynman. But we don’t need math, experiments and laboratory

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testing to know the truth of it. We already have evidence shown by the words we use when we interact with others. Most times it works quite well.

Doesn’t that ask for a look at the distinction between our minds and our brains? 

We’re used to thinking of our minds and brains as one integrated thing. We use the two words mind and brain because they really are different. Two other words provide perspective. One is “thing”, an object, to describe our brain. It has a material, tangible physical presence. The other word, “think”, describes what our mind does with our brain or our brain does with our mind. The condition of thinking also has a material, physical presence as a state of atomic interaction, not easy to see but again, visible with the help of the brain scan. Our mind, when it has ideas, creates realities. Both the thing and the condition are made up of atoms interacting. When they work together they emit waves. 

Auras? 

The waves we emit travel within us and to the outside of us. They become entangled with the electrons of others. We use words to make that happen. The words we speak transmit the electronic activity in our brains so other’s senses can be activated and share the activity in our brain. 

Jaynes' claim about the origin of consciousness implies that there was a time when the electronic activity was sensed and transmitted directly. The problem was that they created what he called hallucinations. He noticed that until some time after the

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Iliad, there was no use of any word that could be translated as “mind”. This implies that there was a time when words did not represent ideas. He claimed that when they did, humans became conscious. When that happened we learned how to use words to represent what was happening in our mind/brains.

Something was lost in the process, the use, nature and facility of preconscious communication. In that pre-conscious mental state thought or reflection as we know it did not happen, words were limited in their meaning. The question is, was this state one of direct sensing of electronic emissions? That’s doubtful because words were already commonly used. Was there a pre-Iliad word for “why” as a question? Did questioning or curiosity exist?  

We think there was a reason this occurred and it coincided with the creation of democracy in Athens.

How does all that come together?

For the change Jaynes describes to have happened and be effective as quickly as it did, it had to affect a lot of people at the same time. The theory we’re familiar with as to the appearance of democracy at that time relates to trouble with the military engaged in the wars of the time. Direction in general was given by Zeus, via an inner voice assumed to be the ultimate decider. That was what Jaynes referred to as hallucination. It follows that the voice of leaders was assumed to be the transmission of the voice of Zeus. Someone got tired of Zeus and questioned why they should obey his directions to risk their life in warfare, especially when after the battle they were no better off than before. Democracy was a way of paying for the

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warrior’s service. As they rejected Zeus, they demanded to share the war’s winnings and have a say on how things were done. The critical phrase is “...have a say...”. It represents a shift from the gods as authorities to humans realizing the present and beginning to determine their future.

Again, how does all that come together?

We begin to bring the electronic nature of being connected quantum systems when we use descriptive words and phrases. We use words like charisma, charm, threat, animal magnetism, describe our buttons being pushed. We describe what we see, feel and smell. Projected by our emitters, our brain, body, voice and hands, it’s a beehive abuzz with electromagnetic activity. Think of these waves of wordly emitted electrons making up an aura that surrounds us.  

How far does this aura go? 

We don’t know but as has been suggested, we can “imagine”. It can be extended for thousands of miles by the use of words and just a letter, an email, a book we’ve written, the mention of us by a traveler. The word excites electronic emissions, waves. What tells us that one person we encounter is great while another is a creep? Further on we’ll describe a series of events that took place across an ocean and a continent with stops along the way that might be a hint to how far our auras extend. The answer might be a lot simpler than what mystifies physicists.

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And manifesting? 

We see manifesting as “bringing to hand”. We actuate powers of emission or reception with words as catalysts, ears and eyes as sensors. We also actuate powers we’re still not conscious of when we emit electrons that entangle or are already entangled. So far we’ve limited the description of those experiences to intuition, a sixth sense or “feelings”.

Why are we still not conscious of these powers?

Simply because we don't have any experience of them,  we haven't tried to be conscious of them. The only people who might have consciously experimented and possibly been conscious of them fall into a category called, "Nuts".

Thinking of words as triggers of electromagnetic emissions might seem odd but we have other ways of triggering them. We roll our eyes, we nod, stamp a foot, scowl. We can look at the closing or dilating of our eyes’ pupils. So far the home of our idea is where the spark created in our brain as a thought happens. That spark can be a prompt to smile or frown. How about what happens playing or watching a team sport? Or singing in a choir? Applause? We have many way of communicating quantumly  using sonic and visual triggers. More? Feynman: “Imagine!”.

And manifesting...?

The wave or waveform is already there; when we ask a question we're searching the wave form. The magic of manifesting is that when we concentrate and ask questions we elicit words which connect electronically with other words being used in the lattice of our electronic mental world. The poet Patrizia Cavalli said, “The sound of a word, which is not an empty sound, produces a wave that has its own duration...”^⁠1 Electrons entangle with others and answers pop up, like that quote. The

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process can get so complex that it’s hard to imagine following any direct path to an answering description. In the lab it’s as few electrons as possible. In the everyday world electrons entangle as III gigantic bundles of electrons that connect with the entanglement we are. We sense a complex bundle of words, sentences, questions and shouts. Our mind/brain magically sorts them out. In some cases it’s all resolved by our brains into what we’re calling a manifestation. 

Spukhafte? Spooky? Coincidental? We can analyze until our heads spin. Does it work? Think what you want. Trying it on repeatedly, testing, will prove it right or wrong to our satisfaction or disappointment. We realized we’d been doing it for years, everyday, we just didn’t realize what it was called, how or why it worked or even that it was working. 

Earlier, we sensed it was a possibility when in conversations it would come up as a question now and then. It was a vaguely sensed mystery or puzzle. The question would be dismissed and let slide away, unexplored, unanswered and forgotten. Our experience was that we’d ask for an answer to something that was bothering us and the answer would come from something we remembered, were reading, or it just “popped up out of nowhere”. We were so used to using it that we thought little of it, less than we thought of anything else until quantum came along. For us manifesting was a subconscious aspect of the world we dealt with everyday.

Can we learn to expand, better use or become more sensitive to this situation? Is it an ability?

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Our own experience of it working everyday certainly doesn’t mean it’s common knowledge. We didn’t know we were using manifesting until we heard of it as such. We reviewed older experiences that echoed the idea. Back then we saw as them as “coincidences” and left it at that. It was what it was.

The only conscious control over the process we have is to express our need or describe what we’re searching for and then be sensitive to where and how an answer might turn up. When it does and we get it, it can happen like the the light bulb above the head of an enlightened cartoon character. Perhaps at the root of that idea is the spark that occurs when an idea occurs^⁠1. 

Is the spark in the brain an “epiphany” or does it happen so frequently that it’s common, an unknown known?

Sometimes it happens instantly, but it can take minutes, hours, or weeks to see and to become aware that a manifesting had happened. 

Is there a limit that says asking for bad things won’t work?

Why would there be? There’s every indication that it works as well for scoundrels as it works for saints. What’s critical now is realizing that manifesting has taken place and allowing it to actually be useful. Scoundrels are probably master manifesters, ruthless and constantly asking the appropriate questions to efficiently get what they’re after. 

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What’s the most effective manifesting question?

“What do we do next?”. The second most effective is, “What shall we have for dinner?”

Okay, you admit you’re no expert but claim you’ve used it successfully “every day”. How about examples?

First a spark. Just after you requested an example we gave up for the night. As we left work we wondered when a predicted rain storm would arrive. Lying in bed, our eyes closed, dozing off, a brilliant blue spark appeared between our ears. We automatically began counting seconds as we’d been doing for years when ever we saw a flash of lightning. We knew that five seconds between the flash and the sound of thunder equaled a mile. That would tell us how far away a lightning strike was. We came fully awake as we began counting. 25 seconds later we heard the clap of thunder. The strike was about five miles away. The spark had qualities. It was about an inch and a half long, lozenge shaped, blue and appeared just in and above our right ear. How do you explain the spark? It had happened before. 

That’s interesting, a nice story, but it’s just another coincidence. What does it have to do with manifesting?

We began manifesting when we wondered about the oncoming storm. The answer

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was initiated by the spark. Shades drawn, eyes closed, blankets over our head, we didn't see the lightning flash. We "saw" that spark. We mentioned it because it was an electromagnetic event and that’s what we’re talking about. The rest of the story is just filling it out. There’s a word in your comment that gets in the way. “Coincidence” is only a descriptive of things happening at a particular time. To give it more meaning than that is to use the word to avoid thinking more deeply about an occurrence. Seeing that type of occurrence as common and repetitive, we wonder about it. If we’re going to develop a new awareness of being quantum systems we need to re-examine the meaning and use of some words. Some need to be discarded, re-defined or replaced.  

We got onto manifesting because it related to our curiosity about electromagnetic brain emissions. Noticing a spark in our head as we wonder about an oncoming storm is quite unusual. It's nothing we'd call a common occurrence or a coincidence. Put it together with the habit of counting the lightning thunder gap and we’ve encountered a series of connections. The event was an experience that was illustrative in terms of what we were thinking of and writing about as we retired for the night. 

What’s really unusual about the whole story is that it relates directly and involves thinking and typing about the subject in its moment. We’re not that imaginative that

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we are making it up, this is not a fiction. We bring up the lightning story to reinforce the concept that sparks can be examples of brains processing received or transmitted emissions and that they’re perceptible. There are no laws or rules that say the flash of lightning always has the same form and is only seen with our eyes. Watching a video of a brain spark we see glowing activity in the neurons surrounding and leading to the spark — it’s like a great bunch of electrons converging on one spot, creating a traffic jamb and exploding.  

There’s quite a dependence on the anecdotal here...

Yes, another word that needs attention. Unfortunately the anecdotal is too often given short shrift. Anecdotes accumulate and hang out in the part of our mind that attends to intuition. The anecdotal can gain weight and force when it keeps happening over and over consistently. When that happens the questionable occurrence can become the equivalent of the scientist's explorable anomaly. It prompts “why?” questions and begs to be taken more seriously. The anecdote can also be a metaphor.

O.K., is there more to say about manifesting? How does it happen in the everyday world? How about interaction with others? 

We first noticed that manifesting was happening when we were looking for something we’d misplaced. On asking ourselves aloud where it was, almost always, reliably, we found ourselves going directly to the missing thing and getting on with

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the work. We already had the answer we were looking for in our memory but we had to let one part of our brain know what the other was looking for. We'd put something down and something else ends up on top of it. When we look we don’t see it but when we ask where it is, our memory recalls where we left it. We find ourselves going directly to that place and uncovering the missing object.

We noticed that our bodies started moving toward the object before we were conscious of realizing where it was. That opened the door to how our brain and body are integrated. This will come up again as we look at tai chi and seeing in slow  motion.

We’re not alone having that finding experience. More than once we asked an innocent question in an everyday situation and realized that it was an occasion of manifesting. While working with another person we noticed that they were stalled and were looking for something. Intending to help, we asked them what they were looking for. Almost every time they’d say, “Oh, there it is” as they headed for it. There’s a part of the brain, usually in the left hemisphere, that remembers stuff like where we last left something and it’s also where words are heard. It might not have a clue that something had been lost. That part of the brain has to be invited to take part in the search. Memory likes to hide out and not get involved until it realizes it’s needed. When we asked what our co-worker was looking for we triggered the phenomenon in their minds giving them access to information they already had, tucked away in their own heads. 

As we’ve aged we notice that we share a common experience with others of our ilk. We will head into the pantry to get a jar of something, we arrive and forget why we were there. Before we were aware of manifesting, we’d review what we were doing

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before and sometimes go back to where we began physically and start over. We thought of it as the loss of short term memory due to aging. But if we ask out loud, “What are we doing here?”, III, problem solved.

With manifesting, what we’re often searching for is not just a misplaced object. What’s hidden can be an idea or information. It can be the "why?" of something like an emotional eruption. It helps to remember that within, we are two and we’re capable of actually having a conversation between each of ourselves. We see it as communication across the corpus callosum separating the two chambers of our brains^⁠1. We also suspect that the amygdala is involved but that will come up later.

So manifesting can take place within ourselves. Not being generally aware of it suggests that as humans our evolution might not be fully developed. Our systems could certainly be buggy with room for improvement. Jayne's work wondered about that and saw a change that could be considered evolutionary. Are we in a beta state? The bad news is that we could be devolving, becoming more stupid; there are many who are convinced that's a certainty.

You mentioned entanglement as relative to this process of manifesting. What kind of space/time limits might affect it?

We said we’ve had lots of experiences that could be called examples of manifesting. We’ve used it for most of our life without realizing what it was. We sense that we’ve used it subconsciously many times every day. Since becoming aware of ourselves

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as quantum systems we often engage in the process intentionally as part of the game.

In particular there was one instance that was outstanding at the time and involved the expression of a desire over the width of the U.S. It involved different people and encompassed separate locations on both coasts. It involved information from a source in France. 

In the late 1960s we were part of a group we called ONYX^⁠2. Our interest was in exploring radical architectural ideas. There were other groups across the U.S., England and Europe engaged in similar explorations^⁠3. As ONYX, we’d accumulated designs, models, sketches and broadsheets describing our ideas. Some of it had been exhibited and published but there was nothing that tied it all together. Discussing organizing its history, we thought a monograph could do the job. We needed someone interested enough to write about us. 

How to find someone like that? We described our dream writer to another person on the West Coast. We said we needed to talk to an architecture PhD candidate from a major university — we even named a school just for the hell of it — about writing a monograph.  There were connections, existing in words only, not anything of a “hard-wired” or even a chit-chat nature. A month or two later we received a request from a PhD candidate in architecture — from the particular university we named — to interview us about our group. She was interested in us as a possible subject for a monograph! We met^⁠4, talked and eventually realized that our hopes and attitudes didn’t fit well with her interests and what a “monograph” would entail.

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It's worth examining the details of how it happened to decide whether it wasn’t just coincidental. What amazed us was how our specific description of the who and what we were looking for corresponded to the person who showed up. The item that linked us to our interviewer was an online reference to some of our work in the collection of a museum in France^⁠5. Because of all these details, dismissing it as  coincidence was inadequate. 

Not long after the experience some of our work was included in a large traveling museum exhibit. It was a review of groups doing the same sort of work we had been doing. The gist of our interview with the PhD degree candidate along with her comments was included in the exhibit’s catalog^⁠6. If there’s really such a thing as electromagnetic entanglement and distance is not a problem, this occurrence fits. 

Another nice story, but again, it falls into the category of the anecdotal.

Sure, but then isn’t everything, after all, anecdotal? Kuhn, talking about advances in science mentions how repeated work can expose an anomaly. What’s first noticed is set aside as not crucial to what’s being investigated. Yet it crops up repeatedly and begins to demand attention. Repeated is the key word here. An unusual occurrence falls into the category of the anecdotal or it happens occasionally. When it happens repeatedly, regularly over time, a pattern begins to emerge. The repeated happening moves away from being just anecdotal. When what might have been thought of as a standard is unexpectedly violated we have an anomaly. Quite often these anomalies can have the character of seeming anecdotal, removed from the possibility of

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measurement and/or verification. We’re seeing these unexplained events as anomalies arising as we experiment in the lab called life. We’ve practiced being observant over many years and we’ve done our best to enhance our memory and our ability to use it.

We wouldn’t have a word like “coincidence” if it didn’t happen a lot to a lot of us and often. What we’re doing here is attempting to integrate what we see as a new awareness with our everyday thought. In a way, we’re looking at the process of noticing an anomaly and investigating it. We’re starting with stuff that’s admittedly anecdotal, risking being wrong and attempting to qualify repeated occurrences as legitimate evidence.

One of the advantages of being older is being able to observe over years. When we’re younger that’s not a major part of our equation. If we’re prone to a wandering mind and don’t develop habits of observation fed with curiosity, we miss things. When we indulge the habit of noticing change over time, we notice patterns and irregular occurrences. We become able to see order in chaos.   

We call social studies “social science” but ultimately the discipline relies on anecdotal evidence, repeated anecdotal evidence. A good part of the evidence we present is based on observations over time. It’s been noticed because it exhibits consistent repetition except on rare occasions. The scientist’s confirmation of fact depends on the consistent repeatability of their experiments. The scientist’s discoveries often depend on hidden anomalies  sneaking in. 

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In the everyday world we notice the similarity of repeated events and we’re lead to making conclusions. Those repeated events can be too easily labeled as anecdotal until methods of measurement are brought to bear, all of which can slow things down. At times that delay can approach being fatal. The validity of evidence, whether scientific or not is always, even if it’s been labeled ‘Law”, is up for questioning. It’s difficult to assess new thought, especially if it promises to get in the way of investment and the prospect of loss.  

What sort of method of measurement would work in this case?

The only one we think comes close to the math of the physicist is statistics. The weight of the count resists attacks on the ideas. 

Can we go back to how do we experience electromagnetic emissions as humans, being quantum systems?  

We already know that in the lab we can be wired and our brains scanned to detect electromagnetic activity. The monitors of that activity can be connected to video. We can watch and see the emissions occur, like a cystoscopy of our brain, with the monitor following the flow. 

But how can we detect these emissions in everyday life, outside of the lab?

We already do that. We detect brain emissions but we do so in a cloud of habits that make it difficult for us to realize we’re doing it. Detecting these emissions has been

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happening all along but our detection was subconscious. Being conscious of just the reality of emissions is only just emerging. There’s been no felt need to detect brain emissions because we’ve been familiar with them and responding to them forever. What we’ve been doing has become so habitual, so familiar that we assume it’s natural. It is natural but we don’t have or aren’t familiar with the vocabulary that would allow us to think more deeply about it. In the hurry-up of our lives we slide into “It is what it is”. Sharpened awareness of being connected inspires searching for ways of being aware emission detectors.

There’s phenomena that are and have always been considered “spukhafte”, woo-woo, or at least highly questionable, like extra sensory perception, ESP. There are different levels of mental development throughout humanity. There are different levels of information retention and the use of it, AKA intelligence. There are different aspects of intelligence in humans being. There are conditions, syndromes affecting different brain/minds. It’s entirely possible that some of us have the ability to perceive emissions but find it difficult to bring that possibility together with our use of words as interpreters of sensed electromagnetic emissions. Our top candidate for the role of sensing electromagnetic emissions is what we call intuition. 

Intuition implies the ability to connect complex interbrain electronic activity very quickly if not instantly. The depth of the question is more than we're comfortable with. However, it’s a question very much worth exploring. The impulses we experience everyday but reject because they seem far fetched can be the source of

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evidence of our evolving consciousness. We’re claiming that this is worth exploring on the basis of having a new idea of the mind, that of a quantum — electromagnetic — system.  

One of the methods we’re using personally is engaging in a particular challenge to trust our intuition. We started the engagement with the process fifty years ago when we began to do the New York Times crossword puzzle everyday. In recent years our focus shifted to how our mind behaves in the solution process. We also began to consider the mind of the puzzle creators reflected in the character of their puzzle. We began to consciously rely on our intuition when a choice of a word was required. We began to focus on testing our intuition, paying attention to words that just popped up and trying them. We were amazed at how successful that was in coming up with the right word. 

For some years it was simply the challenge of filling in the squares with the right letters. At first we used the dictionary, then the web; we researched. When we began to do the puzzle on the bus to work, we didn’t have access to those sources. We found that we still came up with the solution without that help and so stopped using them altogether. Our technique became to just take our time and resist any urge to hurry. A new kind of puzzle was introduced recently that allowed a clearer test of relying on intuition. Our success with it often surprises us. Have we been using intuition all along to detect connection, emissions?  

You say this hasn’t been the situation with just yourself and it's has been going on forever?

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Yes. The discussion that revolves around the quantum idea has a history that goes back to the 19^th century. But that’s the discussion based on the scientific awareness of waves, rays, emissions and other characteristics of the invisible world, the history of the idea. It’s not the history of the quantum phenomenon itself. What’s been discovered tells us the world has been quantum all along. 

Human history relative to the world being quantum is unexplored. We’ve only looked at the history of the humans who made the effort to realize it. It makes sense to start by assembling what we know of how humans have coped with a world of which they were not completely aware. They were as aware as was possible. That might even help get some idea how we can be better emission emitter/detectors. We already have the mthodsof science. What science has exposed so far will probably inspire more general efforts.

You’re proposing that we think about what we we’ve done to deal with these emissions in the past even though we weren’t aware of them. How would we have done that?

We’ve been detecting brain emissions for millennia. Though we weren’t aware we were doing it, we’ve become well practiced. The familiar way it happens is called conversation, talking not only with others but to ourselves as well. The chat itself is a matter of minds meeting. What emerges is realizing that conversation is our prime way of creating and perceiving electromagnetic emissions. A thought creates

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electronic interactions which create emissions. The words we speak decode the emissions. Awareness of sparks being emitted and electrons entangling has been among the deeply hidden. We haven’t paid real attention to sparks flying until we saw them in brain scans. Yet we didn’t hesitate to describe the situation when we used expressions like, “Sparks were flying!”

Somehow that implies that there’s a limit to what we can keep private.

Yes, it does. An example of that is the type of human we sense is a creep. All the other labels are a manifestation of reading another’s mind. Angel, asshole, idiot, bigot, charming, magnetic, you name him or her. Privacy is a condition of our own minds that depends on how we appear to others. That appearance has been secretly electromagnetic. Our main control of it is through our behavior. We use devices like manners, taste, style, dress, to build a front that helps maintain our privacy. “Maintain” meaning not just keeping up but paying attention to, changing and adjusting as required, mowing the lawn.  

If we’re quantum electromagnetic systems and function as such, our senses are an integral part of the system. They’re linked electronically as well, certainly not separate. What our eyes, ears and taste buds tell us we no longer hear as inner voices, the voices of the gods, at least since times BCE. What we call ideas now, back then were probably assumed to be voices of the gods. We still acknowledge our ideas with words to ourselves. We begin each encounter with another person assuming they possess a normally functioning brain/mind.

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Now and then we anticipate words before they’re spoken. That can be caused by just being aware of habits of speech. We assume it’s just the way humans are and how we/they interact. Quantum anticipation happens fast and can take in more than just hearing the words. It can take in phrases, concepts, all so sudden that our response is a quiet “Wow!”. When it happens successfully we say it’s our intuition at work. The emerging realization is that we do have other ways to look at it, make the process more clear and even come to understand it. 

Certain physicists like to claim that a new world has been discovered, a new reality. They say that everyone who doesn’t know about this new reality is living in the past, living an illusion. That gets it all backwards. Everyone else has experienced the world as quantum all along. They had already learned how to live and be effective quantumly in the quantum world. Those physicists are just arriving at the proof of its existence. What everyone else missed and most of us still miss was consciously knowing the world was quantum.

When LaPlace came up with his “vast intelligence” AKA his “Demon”^⁠7, he gave us a larger way of thinking about probability. A lot of quantum thought has focused on knowing the future, being aware of probabilities. Our awareness of everyday probabilities shows up when we anticipate. We create expectations and when they’re met, we carry on. When they’re not met we might experience neural traffic jambs causing the sparks to fly. In conversations where we search for and find a word, we often declare, “The first word that comes to mind ...” or our counterpart says, “Exactly what I was thinking ...”. Then there’s, “I had a feeling ...”. All these nods, “looks” and habitually used phrases signal what we’ll probably say. Our habit

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has been to attribute it to what we’ve called feelings, a sixth sense or intuition. Yet we still don’t know of any rules that say electromagnetic interaction cannot be part of the conversation. Now we can also look at intuition with a deeper sense of what it may be. The sixth sense could well be a sense of our brain's emissions.

And entanglement?

We’ve become entangled with entanglement. Even the Kardashians experience entanglement. How about Einstein calling entanglement spooky? There’s lots about quantum thought that inspires imagining superpositions, superstition, and even changing waves to particles by just looking at them. The phrase, “...by just looking at them” has invited the attention of the physicist's curiosity. “Looking” can be shorthand for “being concerned with”, “paying attention to”, “thinking about” or measuring. We can look at something, ponder and reflect. When we do we fire up brain activity and sparks fly. The electrons we emit entangle with others in the waveform. 

The physicist likes to simplify, reduce things to a state that eases finding a mathematical analysis. It’s only in the lab that electrons are alone, unaccompanied or traveling in small groups. In the larger world they occur in bundles, encounter and become entangled in aye, yi, yai!, immense swarms of electrons upon electrons.  

Entanglement’s everyday meaning has been to describe what can happen with fishing line, spaghetti, kite string and now human relationships. In quantum 

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mechanics it means that electrons can be tied to each other regardless of time or distance. Physicists realized they’d uncovered something hard to grasp but the words they used to think about, explain and discuss it are the same words we all use. Using physics and mathematics to firm up understanding the world is hard and confusing work. For the rest of us getting it means leaving that stuff aside. We ask, “O.K., that’s the way things are, now how does the world look knowing that?”. 

The crucial question is “How does it affect me?”.

We started looking for answers to that by looking at ourselves. Going from how we’re used to understanding ourselves to understanding being quantum systems has been a clumsy shift. The same words used everyday versus the physics classroom get stirred up when we try to see ourselves as quantum systems. If we accept being quantum systems we still need words to clarify and grasp just what we can accept. The words and phrases we use reinforce the idea that we already know intuitively that we live and behave as quantum systems.    

Since the words tend to be the same, meanings don’t wander that far from those we already know. So let’s take, “You read my mind”. It says that as quantum systems we were already at least subconsciously aware that our minds were interacting. Along side the words we say, our brain/minds are emitting and receiving electromagnetic waves. Electrons are emitted and become entangled. Usually, when we say things like, “You read my mind” we’re satisfied with it as a coincidence and

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we go no further. If we do go further, toward quantum thought, we’ve taken a step toward understanding.

You’re wrestling definitions and phrases to fit your theory.

Maybe. Why not? The definitions and phrases were already there. Before, we didn’t realize they might have had a deeper meaning unless we were likely to look for a subtext. Again, though we’re beginning to more fully realize the world is quantum, it doesn’t mean the world being quantum is something new, it’s always been quantum. What’s new is our becoming conscious of it. That’s why we say we already knew these things about a quantum world. What we didn’t know was that underlying what that meant was the math and science, evidence tested and hard to refute.    

Hard to refute?

If you look at Hugh Everett’s idea that there’s one world made up of many it sounds nice and simple. It is simple if you go no further. It allows for everything, bringing it all together. As the idea is applied it becomes more clear. It can also become harder to get. Eventually everything fits so well that it becomes more and more difficult to imagine alternatives. The concept becomes more and more obvious. What’s hard is getting rid of or just keeping at bay all the baggage we bring to encountering and just entertaining the idea. 

That baggage is how we have been using words until we’re confronted with with a

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phrase like “many-worlds”. Everett declares them to be “real”. Our habit is to think of real as tangible, touchable, tastable, testable so how could that be? Where can I see these many worlds? Everett's many worlds are the different ways the world can be conceived of, looked at, seen. The easiest way into it is realizing that each of us lives in our own world. Where would privacy be without believing that to be true? There’s also the idea that the world is constantly changing. Constant change creates Everett’s uncountable new worlds.  

The object is to redefine the classic world quantumly. Once we accept quantum thought as valid, we can proceed and even risk being wrong and making mistakes along the way. But there’s a hitch, if we accept that the world has always been quantum, classic thought is quantum thought by default. It just has a hard time making the jump over to being perceived as quantum. Its vocabulary is inadequate to the task and translation is required. 

We’ve heard an unexpected description of the world as seen by a person — we’ll call him Chub — with no knowledge or interest as far as we know in quantum thought. Chub’s world as he saw it was one world and that one world was made up of many-worlds. As he went on describing his vision the details got closer and closer to Everett’s quantum one world. 

When asked where he got this idea of the world he declared that he thought of it this way for as long as he could remember. As we talked more about his perception it diverged a bit from Everett’s but in a way that Everett’s idea could include. Chub related the multiplicity of worlds to the multiplicity of humanity - that the many

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worlds were directly related to the many humans and each particular many-world’s particularities was particular to particular humans. 

Chub’s version of the many-worlds occurring in humans, being, agrees with Everett's idea but falls short by limiting the other worlds to other humans. We see it as not yet grasping the many-worlds that exist as the result of the one world’s state of being in a constant state of change, flux or flow. 

We’ve encountered being a quantum system as an emerging concept of the state of being human. It’s in the process of becoming and changes with each stimulus, each word. Until the experience of this essay, for us the potential many-worlds had been hidden, undetected, unseen, unimaginable. They’ve begun to appear as we’ve allowed ourselves to conceive of being caught up in the electromagnetic field. Mystery persists because even though the quantum nature of humans was always there, our awareness of it as such is still evolving.

What then, is the nature of that field that allows another world to be perceived and be called real?

So we have to deal with the word “field”. The idea of one world made up of many-worlds has an effect. It changes the nature of a lot of words. Field has to be seen as meaning one field made up of many-fields. When your question is posed with “...the nature of that field...”, the word “that” implies a particular field. Each of us is a field as well. We experience our field as we face  everyday life. The word resonates with “aura”. It's the simultaneous experience of all of our senses at any one time. But 

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that's us, ours. Perceiving other worlds is to acknowledge the presence of other's fields. We wander in our bubble of particles amongst others and their bubbles. The world is a bubble bath, a mist of aurae. 

Our experience of being tends to be stable until other versions of us emerge as we become conscious of ourselves in the minds of others. It can happen when we receive feedback in an argument. It can happen when in an everyday encounter someone else says something that delights or upsets us. It happens when what we expect of someone else doesn’t hold up. 

What had been stable starts to wiggle and shift about. The frustration we can encounter when we’re dealing with others can open us up to a new sense of how we interact with others. For example, at one extreme we return to what we dismissed about another person as “living in another world”. If their different way of thinking affects us and can’t be easily dismissed we might find ourselves trying to figure out how to resolve differences. After all, we’re all part of one world.

And giving in to emotion?

Emotions can erupt when we don’t know what to do next. What happens can be as mysterious as looking at a wave and seeing particles. Giving in might be a function of more than our will. It might be initiated by more of our consciousness than what exists in our brain. 

More than what exists in our brain?

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Our brain cells are not limited to living and functioning solely between our ears. We promised to discuss that but we’re still not ready. It's about our bodies being able to act intentionally without our conscious input.

The field is the whole story but we focus on the details that irk or delight us. The accumulation of words that accompany a situation can start to add up. We start to compose a personal history. Over time, focusing on the the details conjures patterns. Though we might not be aware of the pattern, it supports our assumptions about what we see, feel, smell or taste. It can inspire a sense of control that leads to expectations. When they’re met and the experience is unexpected, emotions can be triggered. We don’t say, “Oh, that doesn't fit our pattern”, we just see how everything fits and relates. We call the reaction we feel, "satisfaction".

The basic structure of our patterns is time. They're organized by the cycles of our life and the world. Some cycles are based on the repetition inherent to habits. We can become aware of the habitual thinking of ourselves and others. Becoming aware of someone’s habits over time can anticipate and excuse their behavior. When things start heading in a familiar direction we can be a step ahead.

Again, we’ll gossip (“gossip”, AKA character analysis) with a friend about a mutual acquaintance and their strange behavior comes up. Yup, we use the expression, “They live in another world” to attempt to place them relative to ourselves, in one of Chub’s other worlds. We’ve used the phrase as a metaphor and left it at that. To quantum physics it’s a declaration echoing Everett. It’s a reminder that our strangely

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acting friend is a quantum system too. Their 2x4 system is both free of yet connected to us gossipers. 

Their strange behavior happens in a different world, their world. Each of the many of us gossiping exist in our own worlds. As we gossip, we create another world. These worlds are just very few among many many-worlds. We like the image of the parts of everything being carried along in the one world flow, one world, one complex, constantly changing world in time’s flow. So many of the many-worlds become aspects, facets, of the one world and as such can be called up and seen as part of the field. [Image or ref.: Metaphor in video: 22 year old hurdler Sydney McLaughlin on flow at the track and field world championships as an exhibit of self isolation in dealing with a field. Mclaughlin is narrowing the field to the effort before her, setting aside her conscious particpation to be no more than a witness, another member of the audience.]

How is your strange friend both connected and independent?

We connect with them when we take notice of them. Their behavior conveys their strangeness which sets them apart. Their behavior tells us of their independence. Their behavior affects us consciously and subconsciously. Just the fact that we’ve relegated them to another world is connection. They remain independent unless we engage those emanations with words and trigger a more active connection of minds, a conversation. What’s going on in another’s mind in conversation is like being in a superposition.

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A lot of things about quantum thought are lurking like Schrödinger’s cat. How do these relate? 

It was hard for us to get the idea of the superposition. Then something about it prompted a laugh. We didn’t know what we were laughing at or why we were laughing. It was a like laughing at a joke before we even heard it. The state of the cat in the box is unknown and can only be revealed by opening the box. Eventually we got it, we saw the cat and superposition as a prank, Schrödinger’s jibe at the physicist’s seriousness and obfuscation. The radioactive switch and poison gas? Red herrings. It’s a metaphor for the human condition. Schrödinger might never have thought of it that way but where would historical fiction be if there weren’t many-worlds to imagine and reflect upon. 

The superposition is a metaphor for our relationship with the future. It’s a preoccupation with probability. We can’t know what the future holds until it happens. Spectator sports would not be all that interesting if the game couldn’t put everyone into a superposition until they know how it ends. We’re not alone in the experience, it’s celebrated with marching bands, cheer leaders, full stadiums and eager T-shirt sellers. It’s a full compliment of quantum systems interacting.

If we’ve managed to get along well in a quantum world so far why pay attention to it now? What’s the advantage of looking at it more carefully?

Quantum thought isn’t limited to what’s going on with our minds and personal

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interests. It has few limits: the theoretical physicists are as concerned with the universe as they are with their blackboard protons. 

Our existence, not just as a species, but even as residents of this planet is experiencing a propitious moment. There are two basic extreme possibilities for the future of Earth: destruction wrought from outer space or from the Earth itself. Quantum thought involves a deeper look at reality. How about our many-realities within one reality? 

Not yet!

Okay. In the interest of analysis, the physicist focuses on the minimal, to “Keep it simple”. They describe interactions of a few electrons at a time whereas the world is made up of, III, uncountable entanglements. A 150lb. human body/system is estimated to be made of 7x10²⁷ atoms. 

Any concept of humans being quantum systems, as we’re discussing here, wants to expand. Life as a quantum system active in our personal existence or as part of the whole quantum system entails more than an electron drawn on a blackboard. We’re in the midst of a process preparing us to have an effect though very minor, upon the universe itself. We’re super tiny and what we’ve been doing, on the scale of the universe, has not taken measurable time. We’ve begun to reach into, interact with and have an effect on the universe and to get to this state has only taken millennia.

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How do we approach the matter of translating words used within the same language, but see their meaning change and expand so much while they still retain their basic meaning? 

That's leading to another thing for the pages ahead. A lot feels to be missing. The business of reading on quantum thought and getting it still needs work. We’re approaching it as though it’s a game. Wittgenstein observed that you couldn't learn how to play a game by reading the rules. In order to learn to play the game you had to play it. His point is a bit tricky because you can’t even have a game without its having an achievable object and that’s the game’s first rule. The object of basketball is to pass the ball through your opponent’s hoop. So the first thing is to try to throw the ball up and get it through the hoop and if you do the next rule gives you points. Can being a quantum system be understood by playing it like a game? We can try on being a quantum system and look at how it affects us. 

How can being a quantum system relate to putting the ball through the hoop? 

We have to know what the first rule of being a quantum system is. We’ve made a stab at it by choosing the idea that as quantum systems, we’re all connected. The first move we’ve made in this essay is eliminating the use of the first person. This is a game wherein the game and the rules evolve together, just as the rules of basketball evolved as the game was first played. 

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We propose that the first quantum game rule has to recognize that we’re inherently multiple and that we’re connected with the world and with others. Our first attempt to speak out loud to another person as “we” — eliminating the use of the first person — was uncomfortable. We couldn't keep it up. Our game ball is the word “we”. How do we get rid of, set aside, minimize or redefine the “I”? Do we actually have to get rid of it? “I” separates, “We” connects. Choosing to call ourselves “we” is easy to type. It’s radical and uncomfortable when we try to make the change face to face with someone else, identifying ourselves as “we”. Perhaps that discomfort is a sign of powerful sensibilities lying below our surface. 

Powerful sensibilities? How can sensibilities be powerful?

Powerful in the sense of being firm, monolithic, hard to change. If a sensibility by that description can be changed, the change implied should be powerful in itself.

The discomfort might be like the first attempt at learning a skill. Too often when we’re trying to learn how to do something new, we make a mess of it. That can prompt us to assume too quickly that we don’t have the aptitude for that skill and that persevering would be hopeless. That reaction can also be in support of inherent laziness. When we keep trying, slowly but surely, we get better at it. If not perfect we can become competent and make having a new skill useful. Most promising would be a hybrid approach. We could continue to use “I” but sneak in "We" when we sense opportunity. 

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Perhaps it’s just adjusting the use of the two persons. Referring to content to decipher “we” sounds complicated. 

Distinguishing between “we” meaning ourselves and also meaning ourselves plus the person(s) we’re addressing is confusing. Getting which “we” we mean by being aware of context has a quantum aspect to it. It could rely on intuition. With practice we could find our intuition being sharpened as a reader of quantum emissions. We include more of the world and the flow when context is included. The world is the ultimate context and by paying attention to context we connect. The conversational “we” might be better understood if the experiment is conducted with willing people bent on learning and analysis, willing to collaborate and test. The checkout line at the grocery might be a bit more difficult. 

The alternative use of “one” in place of “I” can also be uncomfortable. “One” has acquired an objectionable aspect because it also implies separation. It almost rejects the possibility of connection by including “one” as quantitative. It’s use has been considered snobbish. It’s more neutral when we limit it to relating it to a tangible, living, physical being. Trying on just the “we” is an adventure. Bicameral brain activity and other versions of ourselves in the minds of others become factors. 

You started to go on about reality... 

Yes, reality, the word has to be reconsidered and refit into the quantum world. Links

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on the web relating to quantum thought bring up physicists shouting about how our non-physicist’s sense of reality is all screwed up and that we live in an illusion. There’s nothing new about that, Buddhists have been telling us that for ages. The physicists might not realize they're complaining about their own problem. They haven’t realized yet that the world has been quantum all along. Their new knowledge isn't fully evolved. Only their perception of the quantum phenomenon has changed.

We present a theorem: We postulate that there is only one reality. In the realm of one world made up of many-worlds, only one reality is possible and it’s made up of many-realities. It’s complex and rich. We send superscopes like JWST into space to try and get a better view of it — but it’s still just one reality. If there's one world, there's one reality. Attachment to our personal reality has confused us for too long. 

When we begin to see reality as our connection with the bigness it becomes possible to have a clearer, less confusing discussion of what “is”. Some of us try to set that question aside with the slippery expression, “It is what it is”. There are multiples of us in our own minds. There are multiple versions of us that exist in the minds of others. Our personal reality differs from the reality of us others perceive. We attempt to bring these realities together using words. Which reminds us of Wittgenstein’s idea that the words we choose and use depend on our faith that they mean the same to others.   

When it comes to reality, the idea of illusion has to be dealt with. Illusion is no more than an aspect of reality. It helps to realize that illusion itself is real and then figuring

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how it features in the idea of one reality. We see illusion as a condition that diverts us from perceiving an aspect of the real we call truth. 

Really?

Take an op-art image. It’s as real as the surface on which it’s painted yet the effect doesn’t fade away, it actually has energy that isn’t diluted or lost. It persists in fooling our eye, a condition we’re unable to overcome. Which invites a reply to our newly aware physicist telling us that our lives have been an illusion, “Sure, but the illusion we’ve been living under or in is just a condition of reality. You haven’t realized that illusion is just another way of perceiving reality. It doesn’t change reality itself, only how we perceive it.” Thinking illusion is the opposite of reality tells us subtly that we’re not fully evolved and that we may never be, perfection is out of reach. It’s also fundamental to how we perceive what we’re used to calling reality.

How about the doubter or atheist’s objection to religion? 

Our working definition of “I believe” is “I’ve left being”. To leave being can be an attempt to step aside and not face aspects of reality that make us uncomfortable. It enables us to be lazy and manage to live with our ignorance, fear or uncertainty. “I believe” is like saying “I have a theory”. Too often it morphs into “I’m convinced”; it would help to get over that. It mitigates and softens a repost or evidence that we

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could be wrong. The problem is that it’s not quite theory. A theory is already conditional by it’s accepted definition and defined as such. Belief can morph into the illusion of knowledge. It can affect and be supported by emotion. We find it difficult to imagine overcoming belief when it becomes embedded. Regarding atheism, it helps to realize that the atheist is a believer too. 

We give the physical world primacy and credit it as a source of truth. The metaphysical is the world “out there” and it too enjoys being real. We might be coming to a new way of seeing-the-world that erases something we hold dear or at least shifts its base.

People have sacrificed their lives and killed innumerable others for what they’ve believed.

Which illustrates the strength of illusion’s reality. It’s also another demonstration of our power to create illusionistic reality. We can not escape reality, even temporarily. We can atttempt to do so by fooling ourselves, creating illusion. It’s art’s secret. We might eventually evaporate as we live, die and are forgotten but in our “right now” we’re still part of reality’s flow, its history, even if most of it has never been written.

So where are we? We’ve begun to see reality for what it is. Where are we?

Well, at least we haven’t been pulled aside by the virtual yet. We’re here. The operative reference point is relative. The little realities are still real. Though they’re

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dwarfed by the big thing, they’re no less real. What’s important for us is where they stand and how they capture our attention. On the level we’ve been concerned with, figuring out how to get a grip on being quantum systems, it might help to look at the emissions we give off and receive. 

When a chat turns into an argument, increasing loudness, overlapping, interfering and interrupting voices indicate change taking place. Their relative intensity might be recordable and measurable. Measured, it might look like the sine curve so popular in quantum analysis. This also implies that the curve can take on a variety of shapes reflecting the complexity of the Pessoan 2x4 idea. Intensity would show up in the amplitudes of the wave forms of an interaction. Content would add up along the length, measured by the frequency of the curve and the area enclosed by it. Lots of noise making a big bump in the curve, a black swan, might be the indication of real drama. [Image???]

Relating quantity to quality is helped by having extremes or bases to measure against. When it comes to quality, good and bad are the first extremes we tend to bring up. Measuring (math) prefers plus or minus, positive or negative and left or right, x, y, and z. Which reminds us of people we encounter repeatedly, neighbors, correspondents, family, and their attitudes. We expect to hear a complaint or two from some consistently. Others will have their observation of how they like the weather while a few manage to draw on our curiosity and inspire us to ask how they’re doing. It’s tempting to try to relate the positives and negatives we perceive to the plus or minus charges of emissions. When we think about it we’re confronted 

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with another characteristic of electrons: they spin left or right. So many possibilities! [Image: notebook along axis of curve diagram]

When it comes to judgment, what’s good or bad, spins up or down, left or right we have the sine curve to which we can apply labels and see what happens. An exercise we can imagine but probably not pursue ourselves is to analyse a narrative, and see how it fits the ups and downs of a sine curve. We avoid the math to focus on the “what-about-us” picture. We could be wrong but our confidence in the Everettian idea limits the risk to minimal. Where it might be wrong at any point would probably involve the application of the growing theory to details.

You’ve proposed a link between electromagnetic emissions and words. Does that make sense?

A spark detected in a brain scan can be a reaction to an idea. Carroll describes a brain scan that shows a spark in his brain as an idea is prompted. He declares it evidence that an idea is a real thing. How else than with words would an idea be elicited?. O.K., there are ways, he could be presented with an image. It all comes down to our ways of sensing. What's new is realizing that we’ve already been sensing not just words or images, but electronic activity since before we began to experience consciousness. 

Our being conscious is hard to separate from our use of words. We’re assuming we’re hard wired within. We're linked by emissions within the space we share with others. That adds up to being integrated systems when we use words to think and

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share ideas. We use them to make sense of, interpret and organize the world we face. We rely on their use to express our ideas. The words we use are links, tools, code, catalysts; they bring up or respond to emitted electrons. They're manifestations of emissions. 

When our mental system doesn’t work the way we expect, the word we come up against is "disorder". ADD AKA ADHD, Aspergers, Autism, Bipolar and all the rest of the list of mental aberrations that have been considered mental disorders. When we learned that we, ourselves, exhibited the symptoms of ADD, we did not see or feel a disorder. We embraced it.

You embraced it?

Enthusiastically! As we learned about it and how it was seen by others there was repeated conjecture that Leonardo Da Vinci “suffered from the syndrome”. Our attitude became if Leonardo had it, we wanted it; for us it was a gift. We labeled it Attention Diversion Delight. The next few pages as we reread and edit seemed like they might be an example of what it’s like to think under the influence of a “disorder”. Things jump around, jiggle on the edge of confusion but it all comes together with thought and patience. Tim Goldstein said, “If I was with a pack of hunters working our way through the jungle I would want someone with ADHD on point as they are looking everywhere.”. 

Here’s an aside, relating to the structure of words themselves. Take the two words, “word” and “work”. Relating their similarity deepens the meaning of each. That in turn, adds depth to thought about where, when, how, and even why did that similarity come about? 

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You’re saying there’s something meaningful in their spelling?

It says we have to work to come up with the words and we have to review our use of the words to see if they work. We forget the work or lack of work we did learning to speak. We remember our struggles in school and the work of bringing words together with spelling, meaning and grammar. For some, it was unpleasant work and memories, for others, fun. What we’re doing here is trying to make even their  spelling meaningful.

When we ask how that similarity came about we have to go back to where words came from and the work of making new words over time, making language. We want to get beyond taking our spoken language for granted. 

If the world was always quantum, how did our reaction to it affect the creation and use of words? How did electromagnetic interaction between brains influence us when sounds were made and then those sounds became words? Did pre-language humans communicate silently? Visually? Did the smile versus the frown serve as the first means of communicating? The first expression of thinking differently?

This relates to the ideas of Julian Jaynes^⁠1. Did the world being quantum have anything to do with his idea? He proposed that consciousness was learned rather than inherent. It was the result of an evolutionary event. His idea was that being conscious didn’t really affect the human mind until about the time the Iliad was

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being told. The idea of quantum science that we are all connected fits nicely with his theory of auditory hallucinations. 

Hallucinations? 

Hallucinations could be a manifestation of quantum system connections. This gives hallucination and it’s accepted meaning a new aspect. It even impinges on “schizophrenia”. Jaynes idea was that the hearing of voices was the dominant mental state until people of the time of the Iliad and the Odyssey learned to be conscious. 

His idea suggests that metaphorical language was crucial to the development of consciousness. Jaynes saw the bicameral mind functioning as two independent entities communicating across the corpus callosum. Jaynes would say that through the use of language as metaphor, consciousness was born. We see this as the growing use of metaphor enabling the two halves of the brain to become one functional mind. What was happening before consciousness was that one chamber was communicating with the other as though it was a voice heard. That voice was obeyed as an everyday acceptance which provided motivation, intention and directed action. Sometimes it was believed to be the voice of God - Zeus. The use of metaphor established relationships that wore away the separated bicameral nature of the mind and the conscious mind was born. The two halves of the brain began to function as one. 

We theorize that that process is still evolving and it may be said that the human mind might never be fully matured. If it’s true that the minds of humans are at different stages of their evolution, it gives further credence to Jayne’s idea. We’re

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only just becoming aware of our brain/minds as quantum systems. Other aspects have yet to be explored in depth like the brain’s relationship with the body. That might expand into deeper knowledge of the amygdala's behavior.

There’s another historical aspect of what preoccupied Jaynes. That time in Greek history, specifically Athenian history, was when the idea of democracy first appeared. We’ll save that for later but looking at the two ideas sharing the same time is evocative.

The examples we’ve presented are metaphors that illustrate being conscious of living in a quantum world. They suggest ways we share our sub-consciousness of the quantum human situation. As Jayne’s idea holds up it also has something to say about humans being conscious of the quantum world without being aware of it as such. Relating Jaynes’ idea of an awakened consciousness to connectedness suggests many possibilities regarding superstition and metaphysics. In the past these areas of thought have required belief as we’ve defined it, “leaving being”. Evidence supported by tangible, material reality was missing. Now, we have evidence with which to work on these words and their reality stemming from quantum mechanics and the theory it rides with.

The discussion was about words.

Jaynes jumped in. Let's get back to the words we use being links, tools and catalysts that bring up or respond to emitted electrons. We mentioned the intensity and width of emissions and said we control that. We control how we use words with the intensity and tone of our voice. Intensity: whispering, normal voice, shouting. We develop styles to give color to what we say. Amongst other ways, we control the reach of our messages using posts on social media, participating in online group

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encounters, phone calls or with published articles, papers, books and of course, electromagnetic emissions and words.

What about entanglement and distance; what if space/time-wise they’re so far away they’re dead? 

[Image: assumed word marks from Lascaux] 

We have access to humanity's earliest words in terms of what we know from the past, like hieroglyphics. So, how does time-wise measure up? We have libraries and the recent multitude of information that appears to be assembling itself digitally. Do they do their job from the dead? How about a look at the letters of Vincent van Gogh? 

What does that have to do with what we’re discussing here?

You asked about entanglement, distance and being dead. It impinged on the question of life after death and the realm of the supernatural. Though we’re giving in to a whim, we know that we experience the dead at least through memory and emotionally when we grieve. There are tennis players who talk to their rackets and balls and it’s easy to see them as nuts. Yet we have no qualms, in fact sympathize and find it easy to empathize with someone who lays flowers at the scene of an unfortunate death. What do those flowers symbolize, what do they say and to whom?

Can a quantum connection be ended? If we have a connection with someone, does it end when they die? Can we end connections willingly? How does memory affect

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the connection? We can try to end a connection but how successful are we? What happens to the connection when a friend — or enemy — dies? 

The first thing that would be missing if someone close to us died would be their aura. That sounds pretty woo-woo but when someone dies their electrons will stop being emitted. While they were alive theirs entangled with ours. What we have left when they’re gone are remnants, stored in our brain(s) as memories. Those entanglements will continue to entangle, become mixed, outnumbered and perhaps, weaken. Eventually we’ll tend to “get over” our grief.

But there's a possibility. The dead person was connected to others: relatives, friends, loved ones, enemies. They existed quantumly in the minds of those others. Those others, still alive, carry electronic remnants, AKA memories. Those remnants will hold potential connection that could be experienced by the survivors. It might not come up again here but it's tempting to pursue. Ghosts, anyone?

When we look at the experience of a loved one dying, first we’re hit by the catastrophe, the end of a tangible life. With the shock of that, memories are aroused. What are those memories made of? We keep them in our brain’s hippocampus. We see our brains as bee hives of electronic activity and we know the brain is equipped with the ability to store and record that activity for later access. When we get older and are lucky enough to retain a functioning mind we’re surprised at how much information our memory has held and how far back it s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-s. 

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We're drawn to knowing more about nostalgia. We looked at the etymology of the word and were surprised that it originally meant homesickness. Nostalgia is the natural conversational hobby of the old. How does it relate as “homesickness” to the octogenarian’s recollection of “the good old days”? It excites the image of an ellipse, the movement of going around, completing a circle. 

Circle? Ellipse? Where does the idea that we're going to wander for a few pages come from?

Circle? Ellipse? They’re the same thing, just seen at different angles. As this exercise has progressed there have been many small but accumulating hints at something persistent. It lies in the relationship between the sine curve, the regression to the mean and it’s subsets like black swans. It’s lies in the persistence of cycles. They generate mental images that cry out for rendering. 

Consistent cycles over time serve to support memory (and be another indication of their power). When someone close dies there's the cycle measured by their birthday that triggers memories. A new cycle is begun as the memory of their death recurs cyclicly and we’re reminded of them again. Their death is a black swan.

What about the display of flowers?

The flowers are symbolic. Humanity’s great mystery is what happens after we die. The person placing the flowers says “I was affected by this death”. Their subtext of 

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that is, “Death is fearsome”. To many of us the question is the basic source of fear. The first source of fear for a person who died has been erased. They now know — if that’s possible — what comes next. As survivors, we still do not know and continue to harbor our fear, it remains alive and active. We are at a loss for words so we look for other ways of expressing our fundamental ignorance. What’s next for us remains unknown and we turn to symbols in lieu of all the words we can’t say and sense will be inadequate. 

Our own demise is still the source of our curiosity. It’s what we want to know but we're reluctant to pay the price of the knowledge. Our intuition tells us the desire to know and our fear of knowing is a source of consciousness.

As we expanded our awareness of quantum thought, it became evident that what was originally missing from what we read or heard was a lack of connection. We engaged with quantum thought and began paying attention to basic basics. Going to the heart of our existence practically, we have only two things to think about: everything and nothing. Both exist. Nothing, itself, might only exist as an idea. The best we can do is to describe “nothing” as another variant of reality. One variant is

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that it's something that stays out of our way. It’s most obvious characteristic is that it’s what’s between everything, empty space. We’ve come to know that’s not quite true. There’s something there even though we can’t see it. When it’s sweet or foul our senses tell us something more is there. The word for it is real and whether it’s illusion or not we won’t know or might never know... until. Our best perceptions tell us the universe holds a lot of nothing, is  maybe mostly nothing.

The result of all this quantum stuff is we have a new thing on which to pile our imagined situation. It’s nearer to being, less in need of belief, as we learn to manipulate it and take more sophisticated advantage of it. It promises to take conscious part in our evolution. 

The other thing to think about, everything, relies for its existence on us and our sensing its presence. When we go the next step after everything and nothing, we realize there’s more but we don’t understand so we pay attention to our senses. They tell us there’s more and we begin to assemble the world based on how we experience it. What we’re describing is like the encounter with the world of a newborn; it’s all senses. We learn words. We learn them by hearing them and associating them with what our emerging senses tell us. Our own first words are sounds, attempts to say something about our new state of being - we’re hungry, we feel pain, we laugh and giggle when we’re entertained... and we are mystified. 

A situation Einstein objected to was the entanglement of electrons. For him the idea that electrons could entangle instantly without regard to how far apart they were was a major problem. Could his problem have been they were already entangled before

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they were looked at? Could electrons entangling be a condition of observing them? The process of looking^⁠1 deserves thought just on the words used to resolve questions like uncertainty.  

The questions of looking go right to the depth of our being and hit perception pretty hard. When we look out into the night sky, bare eyed or with telescopic aid, we interpret what we see in a very particular way. What we've learned and assume is that what we’re seeing is something from the deepest past, lightyears away. However, we don’t talk about it being like that. We describe what we’re seeing as though it’s happening right now. We’re totally unaware of any delay in what we apprehend. We notice that space allows us to see the past, to go back multi millennia instantly. The question then is what are we seeing? Even with telescopes? Are black holes places where galaxies used to be?

Maybe it’s what we’re not seeing. What’s not there is how we relate to sharing being in one world. There’s knowledge missing, information, an undeveloped sense of everything. One word for it is ignorance. We use it as a pejorative, but ignorance itself is not bad; it's just a lack of information. Actually, it helps to remind us that we’re all capable of missing something. Realizing and admitting that we’re ignorant is useful in coming to understand. When we become aware that quantum concepts underlie a thought it makes it easier to see how the thought fits a “new reality". 

Quantum concepts?

Yes, quantum concepts. Like those that arise from being aware of the scale of the world from the atomic to the cosmic. They don’t need specific reference to quantum

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thought. They only need to be sensed intuitively. We don't have a pervading curiosity about a quantum world and that's to be expected. Our argument is that up until now, it’s always been that way. It’s when questions like “Why are we here?” come up that our curiosity might be piqued. Then we want to know more. We hope we will at least come closer to answering those questions. The gap between physics and philosophy lies at the heart of this effort to understand. Physicists argue, question and discuss with words in ways that suffer from a breadth of meaning. Philosophers use words that exclude, protect their expertise and bore us. 

Everett took care of world. Then comes reality. Our definition of reality works: There is only one reality dispersed as many-realities, an aspect of one world/many-worlds. The concept that everything is real opens up the possibility of a firmer grasp of the idea of quantum reality. 

What stands in its way that would keep us from grasping it?

The quantum world exists, but much of it is hidden from us. It looks like nothing, just ideas, so we see it as dismissible, something we can get along without. Our quantum perceptions are real, but for most of us they’re not only undeveloped, they’re unknown. They show up as words and phrases that refer directly to quantum concepts we cope with but of which we’re not even aware. The examples we’ve presented — like “You read my mind”, or “They live in another world” — are simple and widely used. They’re examples of being subconsciously aware of our minds being quantum systems. That awareness can vary as the uses of a smart phone will

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vary from someone who doesn’t know or care what “app” means to the user who’s phone has become part of their brain/mind they can’t put down. 

Awareness. That word’s used a lot here...

Being aware is being ready to observe and analyze, preferably before jumping in, putting system 2 in charge and keeping the reactionary system 1 out of the way. There’s no word we have that describes being aware of a quantum world like “woke” means being aware in a racial, political or cultural sense. Kahneman tries the word “Econ” to name someone who starts with system 2. 

If something said doesn’t allow for the world of many-worlds and many-realities it isn’t likely to be picked up in conversation without a reference to quanta. For example, quantum awareness is largely missing in the discussion of global problems — and everything else for that matter. Technologically, accepting a source of warming such as the quantum behavior of light is next to nonexistent. Just describing it invites objections that are well established in the minds of many if not most people who’ve bothered to think at all. Then there's the fact that we're all connected.

What seems to be our natural reaction to any new idea is to refer to what’s wrong with it. An open mind is very rare. Going along with a new idea if only to test it presents a forbidding challenge for most of us. The reason could be quite simple: being averse to work, averse to words. Thinking is hard work.

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What about awareness on a larger scale, like awareness of the Earth?

It would be great if global warming was approached with quantum thought lurking in the background. Awareness and analysis of other sources of warming like light, air conditioning, home heating, etc., get little attention in the way of proposals or serious thought. Even when it comes to cars, thinking is limited to cars themselves and electric powered cars at that. There’s little thought of how to reduce the heat the cars and their accessories give off themselves. To too large an extent we are prisoners of our own habits. New ways of building are established but we’re locked into old ways. Small buildings can be built to be super insulated and go up quickly promising long term economies. The use of these techniques are resisted in favor of old ways of building.    

How do you get beyond, break these habits?

When we begin to think about humanity’s big problems we begin to realize it’s biggest problem is humanity. We have deeply entrenched ways of thinking. We're collectively unwilling to entertain other ways of thinking. Even a word like “collective”, has a symbolic, politcal ring that sets up barriers to engaging. When words become symbolic meaning narrows and they fail to serve clear thinking.   

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Okay, on a larger scale, how do the habits lie?

Large scale, government solutions are often the products of rushing to gain advantage in election cycles. Holey roads get patched just before elections. Paying attention the media out of fear of it generating bad publicity gets in the way. The system has to be overcome or adjusted to to accomplish anything. Big ideas are clumsy and difficult to make work. They have to work but often can’t satisfy the  extremes of political division. Societal, political and economic reactions add up and delay already poor planning. 

Government plans are designed to control rather than engage. As sweeping changes are attempted, conflicts arise that delay progress and increase expense. Paying more attention to the smaller scale of critical factors can illuminate simpler ways of reaching larger goals. Incremental, easier steps can be less disruptive and in the spirit of slower is faster, can happen more quickly. Small scale flexible attacks allow room for necessary adjustment that large scale, sweeping projects tend to preclude. Smaller is bigger. 

Slower is faster? Smaller is bigger? O.K., go ahead...

When problems are approached at a large scale their inherent direction is toward getting smaller, their failures are greater. If it works, smaller tends to grow and it's less expensive to learn how well it works. The problems with smaller efforts show up quickly and are easier to overcome.

A good example of how small can beget bigger is Amazon. It started out as a book seller and grew into a behemoth. As a book seller it was loved. As it grew it became

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a monster that became an environmental threat with vast warehouses, increased truck traffic and delivery services. 

Here’s an example of a small scale way to lessen the pain Europe can experience due to Russian gas being cut off because of the Ukraine war: Blacken the bottoms of every cooking pot possible throughout Europe. It will reduce the amount of gas and the time used to cook any dish by nearly half if not more. It works because black absorbs heat while traditional silverish pot bottom reflects heat and requires more energy to do the cooking. We have experienced the use of the black bottomed cooking utensils and noticed how much less flame and time is required to cook the same dish on our old pans. This would be a one person at a time effort that would be encouraged by the self interest of any restauranteur, cook or  homekeeper.    

 Another simple trick or hack is to avoid dark colors, like black for the roofs of trucks and automobiles. We reversed the principle of the black bottomed fry pan. On buying a new vehicle seventeen years ago we immediately had its roof painted the lightest silver we could find. In all that time the A.C. has not been necessary to enjoy a cool, comfortable ride in the hottest weather. Once we found the ideal combination of open windows we forgot the car had air conditioning. Our mileage got better as a result of not having to power the A.C. We’ve done the same thing with other vehicles. We’ve seen and felt the benefit across our mini-fleet. 

Didn't we dispense with one person at a time already? 

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The behavior of individuals can change bit by bit in ways that add up without the pain of large scale blunder and sacrifice. Recycling programs were begun during the early 1970s in a good part of the U.S., and have stayed alive. The programs were added to already functioning trash collection programs by simply providing a recycling container and support for expanded collection services. There was little if any pressure or force, no threatened infractions, misdemeanors or felonies. Where things fell apart was on the scale of those who screwed up handling the stuff to be recycled and recycling it. Most of that problem was not knowing what to do with the collected materials.

How can individuals make moves to lower the heat with less business, institutional or governmental involvement?

It could start with individuals getting together to share ways to lower the heat. The easiest way to do that would be to adopt individual climate control as a hobby. Local libraries could be points for interested groups. 

Hobby groups?   

There’s a new feature of warfare that’s proving extremely effective in the Ukraine war. They’re called drones. About 2008 hobbyists around the world became interested in what are now called drones. They grew out of the radio controlled aircraft hobby as control systems became more and more sophisticated. Many approaches and techniques were developed which resulted in the aircraft that came

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to be known as the “Quadcopter”, a squarish structure with an electric motor at each corner. A control system was developed that allowed ease of controlling such that they could be learned to fly with relative ease. Technical universities like M.I.T. carried the development further and eventually they were adopted by the military for surveillance. Other variations on radio controlled aircraft developed by the hobby revolutionized the wartime use of aircraft. 

The important message here is that these groups of enthusiasts are a great model for working on problems that attract people with less in the way of restrictive habitual ways of approaching new ideas. 

So one person at a time does work when those singles can be connected.

Of course the internet has made the hobby group much more effective as a collaborative endeavor. Our experience with one person at a time started years ago. It was very personal, largely focused on our way of living frugally. Less money spent became our measure of successes. It became apparent that ideas that others considered too radical to even consider didn’t trouble us at all. Some find our ideas interesting. Taking them seriously wasn’t going to happen, we were just considered benignly crazy. [Image of nut(s), drawing] What’s slowly emerging is a growing interest in getting by on less. It’s not a good prospect for the tycoon.

What were or have you been doing as one off?

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We haven’t owned a TV for many years. We’ve watched one only when we couldn’t avoid it. We don’t have the time for it. We have a dishwasher but stopped using it. Our water and electric bills went down — a lot — our dishes are a lot cleaner. We built a workshop, our quantum barn, designed purposely to be efficient without air conditioning or the usual ways of providing heat. We found ways to avoid air conditioning in both our home and car. An advantage of these decisions has been that it’s kept our budget under control and we have more to spend on other things. The unexpected part was not missing anything we eliminated. We’ve also been relieved of the attention those supposed signs of better living required when they needed cleaning, broke down, wore out too soon or didn’t perform. There’s another unexpected benefit arising out of plain old frugality: The cost of living goes down and relieves pressure on wealth.

Wealth?  

Which brings up the question, “Why are millionaires such cheap skates?” — not the about multi’ or billionaires, only those with enough. The simple answer is that they live on a fixed income. Many live on dividends, the returns from their investments. They go to great trouble to avoid drawing on their investments and diminishing them but also to resist paying high capital gains taxes.

Wealth is an issue that deserves more attention. Real wealth is time. In popular parlance, wealth is associated with lots of money. But true wealth is having lots of time and being able to use that time freely. 

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In a conversation we mentioned that we were about to purchase a new computer. Our friend's reply was that they wished they could afford such a pricey unit (it wasn't really that much more than what they thought they could afford). When we pointed out that over time it would cost much less because we would be able to count on it being reliable and not requiring expensive help to keep it going or learning how to use new mostly useless features. We could not afford to not buy the better product.

Your description of the quantum barn is about the effect of light, its atoms and photons in a small space; where does it go from there? How does it relate to a larger scale?

Our thoughts about light and heat on a larger, Earthly scale arose from watching the weather online for many years. We got into the habit of paying attention to the radar images from the N.O.A.A. when they were first available on the internet. Our day to day outdoor work was always affected by weather. We also worried about our place on Long Island which could be flooded in storms like nor’easters or hurricanes. 

There's been a fairly steady weather pattern with few variations for more than twenty years. Most storms developed in the Mid or southwest and came across the country at a regular rate. They could be expected to arrive in late evening or just after dark. More recently we’ve had summers of intense drought, so severe that forest trees were losing leaves in August and water use had to be restricted. Storms were coming at their usual rate — promising rain — but as they approached Eastern New

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Jersey and Manhattan, they’d split. A smaller segment would head South over the ocean as the bulk of the storm headed North, into and across Southern New England. The City and Long Island received no appreciable rain for months. The weather we expected became expotential. We began to wonder about light and heat reflected from the solar farms being planted on any available open land.

As fire devastates different areas of the world it invites the question, what would happen if lights were turned off? Would ocean humidity that kept the coast’s climate moist for many years return? The Everlast/Santana song lyric “All you children, put your lights on” needs a corrective follow up: “All you cities, towns and counties, put your lights out, cut your traffic and turn off your air conditioning, too.”

Night-time images of the Earth from satellites over the years show a steady increase in the light emitted from areas of higher population. The images have an eerie similarity to a glowing, growing fire like the way fire light is emitted from a lava flow or even just a subdued fire in a fire place [image]. It would be interesting to see video of month by month images of the Earth taken at night from outer space showing the increase in man-made light over the years. Next would be a study on how increased light related to the increase in fires.

But that light is from the Earth, going out to space ...

Yes, except when it hits clouds, it warms them and causes the evaporation of water vapor within those clouds. During periods of drought, weather reports would note that rain fell but did not reach the Earth. In this instance, we’re concerned with reflected light, during the daylight hours.

So you’re saying increased indirect light adds to global warming? 

Yes and the news is not good. We began to realize it as a number of experiences came together. They became an addition to our earlier observations about light and the weather as storms approached New York City. The story is some what circuitous. It ends up in a place lots of people won’t like. We’ll take a bit to get to the nitty-gritty.

We lived for a good part of the summer during the nineties in Montauk, a small community at the eastern end of Long Island. One morning after breakfast we walked back to where we were parked along the street edging the beach. In front of our truck was a van with all kinds of paraphernalia attached to and sticking out of it. There were two guys looking at readouts, clambering from one gizmo to another. We asked what it was all about. The were from the EPA and very forthcoming. They told us they were there to monitor atmospheric pollution.

The day was sunny, bright, and hot — not a cloud in the sky. Pollution? Why? They went on to explain that Montauk, when the wind came out of the Southwest, was one of the most polluted places in the country. The pollution came from the industry manufacturing chemical products in the Wilmington, Delaware area. The fumes from the processes were carried to Eastern Long Island by the Southwestern wind. 

We objected noting that it was a beautiful, clear day. One of the technicians pointed up toward the sound of a jet flying over, “See that that jet?” It was not visible. He

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pointed out that there was a haze at altitude that hid the jet and that haze was the pollution from the Southwest. He added that the haze acted as a lens, increasing the effective heat of the sunlight.

As a result of our teen-aged hobby, flying model airplanes, we had acquired a habit of looking up — a lot. What else comes out of the southwest? Energy. Solar energy. One of the things we learned flying model airplanes was that energy was essential to our sport. We flew freeflight models. Our planes were adjusted to climb to three or four hundred feet and then make a transition to a gliding circle. The aim on a good day was to “catch a thermal”. The rising bubble of air would carry our planes aloft until a preset dethermalizer disrupted the plane’s aerodynamics and brought it down safely. Freeflighters liked to fly over dark surfaces like recently plowed land or large parking lots. Those models were small and lightweight. Thermals also keep full scale gliders aloft to soar and prolong their flight. They've taken full scale gliders bearing two pilots to an altitude of more than 75,000 feet. (image) 

We learned more about thermals and rising hot air when we began living beside a river estuary. We’re on its Northeast side with a view to the Southwest. We always thought the best thermal producing sites should be dark in color so they would accumulate and then re-emit the sun’s warmth to send up a thermal. Water was not considered a good surface over which to fly.

However, we met a colony of gulls flying over the estuary and they disagreed. When the wind was out of the southwest, they would gather and circle as the sunlight hit the waves/wavelets on the water’s surface. The light was reflected up, heated the air

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and created thermals over the water. As the gulls soared and circled hundreds of feet into the air, they noisily expressed their delight. What other sources of solar heat were coming out of the Southwest?

Riverhead on Long Island is one of the last places where compared to the rest of the island, there is an abundance of open space. It’s the last commercially productive agricultural area on the island. Recently, many farms have been converted to solar farms. This is where we began to realize limits are being exceeded. Solar panels are oriented to the southwest. The typical solar panel is a combination of the model flyer’s and gull’s ideal. They are dark within to aid absorbing the sun’s energy. They are covered with reflective glass. Solar panels both emit absorbed energy and reflect light.

But solar panels are claimed to have an anti-reflective coating and that deters the re-emission of heat. 

That might be true but only to an extent. The propaganda is that they reflect fifty percent of the solar heat they receive. When we say limits are being exceeded we’re saying that we’ve reached a point where solar energy appears to have a negative effect on the local climate. We suspect that if most solar panel experts were asked if fluorescent lights could give off heat they’d laugh, say, "No!" and consider it a silly question. But they, like most of us, are ignorant of the quantum behavior of light. How much light is reflected back is not mentioned and that light heats anything it encounters, like rain clouds.

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We began this discussion talking about the effect of light on weather coming across the U.S. from the West. An assessment of the effect of solar farms in Riverhead has to add solar panels that have been proliferating on governmental, commercial and residential roof tops all over the area. Up for approval is a proposed industrial development facility with nearly 400,000 square feet of solar panels on its roof tops.

Less than seven miles to the southwest in Upton at the Brookhaven National Laboratories is the Long Island Solar Farm, the largest photovoltaic array in the eastern U.S. There is so much solar power being generated in the area that battery farms are being proposed to store excess solar energy. Battery farms cover a lot of area and have reflective roofs to keep them cool. (¿How does the area of the Upton solar array compare to the total area of solar arrays in Riverhead?)

And the bottom line?

There is a price to pay for collecting all this energy and that’s living in a desert. As we look out of our window in mid August we see trees going dormant. There is an increased danger of fire with grass and weeds drying up beyond dormancy. The fires that have been devastating areas all over the globe are a distinct possibility on Eastern Long Island and we don’t have the water to fight them. We suspect that the island’s water table has been low for years; we know it is in our area.

Our theme here has been the southwest. Take a quick mental trip to the southwest of the United States. Sunlight on the ocean, prevailing winds from the west southwest, result: desert climate. 

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You’ve left out something...

We left out the lesson we learned about light itself. Richard Feynman showed us that light creates heat and explained how it does it. Generally, when we talk about the effect of sunlight we assume the talk is about the infra-red spectrum. But even the light on cloudy days is heat generating. Any one who’s climbed into an un-shaded car on a chilly, cloudy day has smiled at the snug feeling of a light-warmed car. That same light hits the arrays of reflective surfaces and is sent back up to dry out rain clouds. As we type this we’re glancing out the window and also keeping tabs on the NOAA radar. We see cloud formations in both views coming from the north and evaporating as they begin to pass over Upton and the “City of Calverton” on Eastern Long Island.

When we widen our scope and look at a front on the radar making it’s way across the eastern states we see an early morning cluster of rain and thunder storms. As the day progresses the cluster thins out in its southern reaches. The complex comes across the developed country from Virginia to Delaware and continues to diminish. The rain is cut off well before it reaches Long Island as it comes up from the southwest.

And how about LED light?

We’re adding more light as we change from incandescent light to LED light. LED uses about seventy-five percent less energy for the same amount of light. It emits more lumens per watt. Lumens are the measure of light and the heat generating

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photons in it. Being cheaper, it encourages the use of more light; we never seem to get enough light. It's not all that simple since the generation of energy needed to produce light also adds its heat. The balance between light and heat needs more critical attention as global temperatures continue to rise.

Earlier, you mentioned thermal energy rising from dark surfaces like recently plowed land and parking lots...

It’s the parking lots that add another source of heat to the atmosphere. With new shopping centers opening frequently, more and more thermal energy providers add to the problem. The only example of an attempted balance is the policy of county governments to cover their parking lots with... solar panels.

There are those who reject the idea of global warming. There is no value in pursuing that rejection in the face of our obviously changing climate. There are those who reject the idea that humanity causes the increase in global temperature. Ultimately, their objections do not matter except that they slow things down. We are faced with a situation that may or may not be caused by humanity. It provides an opportunity in either case to learn if we have the power to reverse or at least lessen a phenomenon that exists on the cosmic scale. It’s a test.   

When it comes to solving the world’s problems, that wise crack has survived.

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At least we’ve laid out the Earth/world’s two basic problems. There’s us and the global catastrophe the Earth is awaiting, the inevitable encounter with an object from outer space large enough to end civilization as we know it. Awareness of that possibility becomes sharper when we examine the history of our life itself over the life of the Earth as we know it. There are arguments that say past eras were ended due to collisions with giant asteroids. There’s also conjecture that the arrival of devastating meteors has tended to be cyclic. We know that collisions with the Earth have happened before and we know that they are real and see evidence of the cosmic collisions that are responsible for the smiling face of Mr. Moon. 

Breaking down humanity’s response abilities is not a pleasant task. Start with "There’s too many of us". Just breaking that down is depressing. There’s the strain on resources created by too many humans. Then there’s what those resources are used for and the effects of that use, like creating heat, carbon dioxide and lots of junk. The new question is: “Where to begin?”. The answer that first comes to hand/mind is, don’t worry about it, just get seriously started.

And the cosmic?

 We have an opportunity on a very tiny scale to alter the rhythm of the universe. The music of past civilizations has been a dirge. Can we change that into the music of celebration? 

In either case so far, at the source of the world’s problems as we know them, the Earth’s problems, is us, humanity.

Yes. There’s a need for an idea, a model, that brings it all together. 

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What do you mean by bring it all together? Model? 

We need a thought experiment, an idea that brings together the concept of the Earth as a part of the universe and human beings populating it. Years ago we wondered if the Earth could be considered a living organism. James Lovelock is credited with the Gaia theory of the Earth being a living organism. We didn’t pay much attention to all that but it probably registered. During the early seventies we hung out with a scifi aficionado and illustrator, Mike Hinge. At one point in our conversations we entertained the idea of the Earth being a living organism. We wondered if the planet could have a mind, a brain. 

That idea is a good base for a model on which to frame thinking about the Earth’s problems. What would the Earth’s brain look like? Where would it be? We realized that the only thing that resembled consciousness on the Earth was its complement of humans. The next step: brain cells: humans, being.

There’s a major problem lying in wait for this idea. Humans are a complex mixture. They encompasses an enormous range of possibility.

Good, that implies lots of paths to explore. First we have to firm up a grip on what we’re talking about. That we encompass every human possibility is extreme, an idea that asks for openness. Being willing to entertain the idea without prejudice is

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essential. A model for that is the the brain of a newborn. It has that potential to encompass every possibility. But that’s one brain and potential mind. 

Humans being the brain cells of the Earth prompts lots of questions. They always seems to come back to the basic question, why are we here? 

We’re not all that enthusiastic about answering the “why are we here” question. Let’s start with why is anything here? If we look around at the environment we’ve created, city, town, home, we see stuff. Some of it is here because it’s useful. Some because it’s decorative. Are we here just to take care of our stuff? Admittedly, when we entertain being the brain cells of the planet it relates. What do we bring to the stuff of a brainless Earth? First, consider the Earth. It’s a ball of mostly molten iron with a crust that supports what we’ve been calling life. We may become more aware of what that means as we explore our being connected electromagnetic systems. 

Connection might be a good place to start. A connection being something that two things have in common, there’s no doubt that we, humanity and the Earth are already connected. On the primal level, both humanity and the Earth face threats to their being. The Earth is threatened by its position in its larger world, the milky way, the constellation of which it’s (we’re) an element. The most difficult aspect of this threat to put in order is its randomness. There are things flying around, colliding with

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other things that make the Earth’s existence hazardous, dangerous, perilous. A benefit of having a brain, a mind, would be that it could be aware of probable threats from elsewhere in its world. It could think about whether there was anything it could do in its self defense. 

That’s the Earth. How about us? 

First, if the Earth goes, we go too. As a brain, what do we have to offer? We’re a mess — we’re tempted to say the prospect for the Earth having a brain is not so great. It would be starting out with a brain in a state of disorder. The newly conscious brain would be faced with it devouring itself and doing its best to see its home and itself burn up. 

So we have a planet with two obvious problems, asteroids and us. Any ideas of the planet benefitting from having a mind/brain get complicated pretty fast. Is there any use in comparing the earth and us? 

Any comparison strengthens the reason for looking at humanity as the Earth’s brain. Let’s assume the Earth can think on its own, no humans involved. How would it look at its problems and make the best of the situation? In terms of outer space and its randomness, how could it sense, know or anticipate what might happen. The Earth, without humans, is blind. The brain we propose sees. We have already been poking around in the immediate area of the cosmos. We’re into space travel, going to the moon and exploring Mars. This proposed brain has already been setting up aids to improve our vision of the cosmos. [Image JWST] We’ve even developed means of controlling powerful energies that might be useful. 

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That all makes sense, easy enough to expand upon. Good luck with the other problem. 

Yes. We’re a big problem. There’s too many of us. We fight with each other. We kill each other — that at least, the very least, begins to addresses the problem of too many of us. Even though we have ideas, we tend toward greed. Being self centered, we lack concern, we’re slow to learn and fatalistic. Slow to learn! We can take decades just to learn a few basics. As the Earth’s mind we are not fully evolved and we are stricken with disorder(s). We are an Earthly cancer.

Is there any indication of where some hope might lie?

This is going to sound strange but one possibility could lie in the consideration of money.

Money?

Remember the Watergate Affair? The idea that led to its unfolding was, “Follow the money”? It occurred to us that there was an area of human endeavor that was enormously expensive to the point that we wonder why we don’t hear how expensive it really is. What does the exploration of outer space and all the technology it has engendered cost? It’s actually an aspect of Earth’s problems that’s easy to get to.

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The reason for the loose money is the promise of what other planets hold in the way of resources. We doubt there will be humans walking on Mars in a hurry but we’re already well on the way toward exploiting it and perhaps other orbs for their ore or as places to pollute instead of our planet. Why no accounting? It might be because it’s other people's money, OPM. It’s imaginable that we could mine and manufacture robotically on the moon or Mars and relieve some of the pressure on what the Earth has left. Firing a rocket off into space and returning it to Earth for reuse is already happening. We wonder when an interplanetary rocket will be able to take up working robots and return to Earth with gathered info, resources, or even product.   

As we assemble this model of humanity being the Earth’s brain we hear an echo from previous theories in our essay. We’ve seen looking at the world being quantum as becoming aware of an unknown known. Is thinking about the Earth having a brain exposing another unknown known? If we decide that we are the Earth’s brain, we’re faced with the conclusion that if so, it means that we always have been. We just didn’t know it. It’s predictable that we will react to the idea as we are accustomed to react, with argument, silence or acceptance. The question is how to get humanity to take responsibility and start paying attention to its bumbling and get serious. And notice how the word “we” takes on more baggage: we’ve added a planet to the crowd. 

But money, there’s been a change in consciousness that is so extreme but so new, that the idea is fraught with fragility. It’s the consciousness of two people,

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MacKenzie Scott and Yvon Chouinard. Is there a way of developing an enthusiasm for spending similar to that focused on outer space toward getting humanity to wake up? There’s a metaphor for arousing needed enthusiasm in the story of democracy in Athens.

We’re sitting down — go ahead...  

Julian Jaynes had a theory that there was a major happening relative to human consciousness about the 6th century BCE. He described it in his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. That was also the time when the Athenian democracy came into being. The Athenian democracy came about as a way to make it worthwhile for Athenians to cooperate, engage as fighters and support the wars Athens was engaged in at the time. You might say the Athenian warriors threatened to go on strike. Democracy made engagement worthwhile since as democratic participants they had a say and could share in the benefits the winning of battles promised. 

And the new awareness Jaynes describes? Does that relate?     

Jaynes says that about then human mind(s) were freed from following the directions of “voices” heard within and began becoming aware of the power of their own minds. The time was critical for the world of Athens. We’re in a critical time for the Earth itself. How do we raise the consciousness of enough people to successfully address the Earth’s problems? We see a parallel with Jaynes’ theory concerning humans becoming conscious then and our situation today. It’s the change in human consciousness taking place as we expand the preceding Newtonian awareness to engage being quantum systems.

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Thinking about democracy now (2022) and more than two millenia ago rings a bell. Then it was the stress of democracy’s birth, now its validity and strength has come into question as though its at the end of the process.  

We take that as a sign. It means there’s already a concern that opens the door to new possibilities. There are indications on the edge of the political that say things about democracy and expands the conversation. At its core are random individuals acting individually as effective voices.

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How does all this relate to humans being the essential elements of an Earth brain? 

We bring up Jayne’s idea that a radical change of human consciousness was possible. We connect how the culture Jaynes focused on was also creating the Athenian democracy. There was something about those ideas that related to our time’s seemingly disorderly human interaction. We’re experiencing radical change in human consciousness and a reassessment of democracy.

We’re talking about a relationship with something that took place about 2,600 years ago. What are the elements that might connect?

They’re a change of consciousness and change in the nature of human agreement. The change of consciousness deals with being newly aware of being connected. The change in human agreement is centered on politics. We’ve been discussing becoming conscious of connected humanity. We’ve avoided any talk of politics. Now, facing it, we have to exert our will to overcome our distaste and confusion. The differences seem so extreme as to be impossible to overcome. 

What we see first is the “yellow vest”. The next thing we see is that we’re separated politically as right and left even though we share similar if not identical goals. The separation is the problem. The Yellow Vests represent unaffiliated political connection. They dispense with party politics. The movement is based on a shared attitude. The expression we hear from the politically dissatisfied of both right and left is one of disgust. It’s shared by conservative and liberal, redcoat and blue jacketed revolutionary: “They’re all terrible”.

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We’d guess few of us engage in a regular conversation with someone carrying radically opposed political loyalties. When a conversation with someone like that takes place over time, shared complaints come together. Almost all differences can be attributed to party politics.     

A common feature of the yellow vest protests is their use of time. The reasons for their protest can range from local to national, vary all over the spectrum, but they all protest at the same time. There’s also actions like the truck occupation of Ottawa. They exercise their power by disrupting business as usual. Though many pundits see the political situation as signalling the end of democracy, it might be that what we’re seeing is democracy growing up. 

There’s another situation that echoes the time of ancient Athens occurring in the Ukraine. Wars disrupt deeply, but often with only a salutary effect on consciousness. It was the conduct of war running into difficulty in Athens that’s been credited with inspiring the creation of its democracy.

The war in the Ukraine initially inspires a vision of the complexity of life on Earth. The war’s effect on consciousness covers more than its locale, it’s become an internet meme. News of WWII was delayed and had nothing like the coverage Putin’s folly has engendered. This war could inspire the sort of enthusiastic following and fandom sports enjoys. At this writing it’s still young; soccer, football, rugby, cricket, baseball, tennis, war. The step from the Colosseum to Ukraine is another history to write. What will be interesting is what happens to faux-democracy in Russia. 

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You had something in mind when you mentioned that the solution to the Earth’s humanity problem might have something to do with money. Sorry to nag...

The money. A frustrating thing about money is its tendency to inspire the desire for more. The thing we had in mind was the difference between the promise of return for an investment in the exploration of outer space and the lack of any promise of return for investment in humanity. The idea that money invested in people is money wasted laughs logic in the face. If more people have more money more people are able to buy. Capitalism is supposed to be about selling whether it’s services or things. Capitalists like to waste money. They start by advertising their wares, an outrageous waste of money, where the returns are measured in tiny percentages. The big sellers that last the longest hardly advertise at all, their success was and usually always was by word of mouth, direct connection. There are lots of reasons investing in people results in positive returns.

You’re reluctant to discuss the money. Let’s let it slide. There are always the bigger questions, like the Earth’s brain.

The big question: Why are we here? We can use our imagination to look at that sort of question. For us at first it wasn’t even a question. We explored religion a bit but it didn’t appeal to our practical bent. We were aware of science fiction but not of it relating to “why”. The arts captivate us. Difficult questions have so far only been thought about with probes — attempts — essays. Raising the question again, if the

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Earth is a living organism, does it, like other living organisms, have a brain? That required looking at what “brain” means on the scale of something like the Earth. 

We decided to explore our model of the Earth’s brain being comprised of us. At first that was too abstract a concept to organize. When we encountered being connected quantum system, ideas started to come together. If it does a have a brain and its us, it’s hard to resist the idea that it’s in a state of evolving. We haven’t come across much other thought on the possibility but admittedly, we haven’t looked very hard either. 

The chaos of this idea became thinkable when we resorted to organizing our thoughts in terms of fractals. That made it easier to look at humanity in its variety. We began to see reasons and relationships, a possible framework or structure on which to hang questions that might make things more clear. 

How do fractals help understanding that?

[Image - out the window fractal, trees and shrubs]

Fractals are a way of seeing, giving organization to chaos. We were looking for patterns like a map that delineated where humans are on Earth in terms of say intensity of population. We began looking for ideas that might support the idea of the Earth having a brain. It occurred to us that there had to be many people concerned with the mysteries generated by questions like why are we here. 

Most of the Earthly places where that question had currency were centers of religions. How many religions there were on Earth was even arguable but the

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religions that exist have Earthly characteristics. The relationship between religions has undergone constant change as humanity’s time on Earth evolved. 

A question that arises from religion and geography is how does a particular place affect the nature of the locality’s dominant religion? One theory is that religion is a way of dealing with being ignorant of why we are here. The first thing we would be conscious of would be our environment, the first thing we would see.

When we become aware, when we first experience consciousness, the first state we usually experience is curiosity. The evidence for that is the fact that it’s repeated over and over with each new human birth and the ensuing childhood. Yes, there are anomalous births and childhoods. They should be given attention as sources in asking the questions of consciousness.       

Fractals can work as an organizing structure. They work well when the structure is allowed to be flexible and open when it comes to images. For instance in terms of religions on Earth, if each religion is related to a geographical location a possible Earthly structure begins to form. We have the the globe with religions having centers giving them form and color. Mecca, Jerusalem, Utah, India, Ethiopia, Nepal, Tibet, the list goes on and becomes more and more detailed, richer. The Earth is covered with what appears to be a chaotic dispersion of religious thought. Seeing it all as one fractal dispersed over the Earth’s surface begins to open views of relationships that have not enjoyed much exploration except as the facts of their locations. Then we bring in the idea of humanity being the Earth’s brain. A new way of approaching the question of religion and the ideas at its heart opens up.

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We sense a similarity to politics and political parties. Political parties are assembled around dogmas as are many religions. Let’s look at religions in terms of for instance, the climate in which they were conceived and grew. Religions morph into systems that define how life should be lived. This is probably a remnant of having heard the voices of the gods before we gained consciousness. We begin to see basic differences that establish attitudes toward how life should be lived that become part of the religion’s dogma. Yes, there could be other factors than climate. 

That’s out of a fractal sense. What about a quantum sense?

The oneness question comes up again. Is there really only one religion, made up of many-religions? Before we’re drawn too deeply into the Earthly nature of religions we’ll try to stick to exploring the Earth-brain model. Beside the human impulse to wonder why we’re here there’s plenty to explore in our little model situation. 

The variety of religions is dwarfed by the variety of humanity itself. We have different languages, racial characteristics, technologies, even different differences. Differences within religions complicate and enrich them. Do we stick to looking at the stuff we share? Can we stay with basics and inch ourselves away from our atoms to look at how we mix? 

A place to start is with the Earth itself. What is it about the Earth that puts demands upon its brain? How is the Earth similar to and yet different from thinking humanity?

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It’s a fraught relationship. A boat sinks, humans die. A forest is depleted, part of the Earth dies. There’s the possibility that those who sent the boat out rued their decision. Brainless, the Earth is ruthless. The dead forest is a problem but what concerns the Earth is not only local, it’s cosmic. Humans are not fully aware of that unless other humans tell them an asteroid threatens. 

As far as the Earth is concerned, humans are a new, very recent phenomenon. The Earth as a thinking organism is in an extreme state of childhood. We are not even a bug bite to the Earth and except for us, the Earth is not even conscious of the possibility of having a brain. That's not news yet, it’s just words on this page and maybe a few others are thinking along similar lines.

The word “ruthless” points up the difference between humans and the Earth. What it implies is humans are able to make a choice. The choice is to rue or to dispense with rueing. The Earth as earth cannot make a choice unless it has a brain; as earth it can only be ruthless. It is what it is and that’s as far as it goes. It obeys basic its physics and chemistry. It can be acted upon. It  cannot act, it can only react. There can be an Earthly choice if humans are considered an integral, connected part of the Earth. being of a planet eliminates any idea of it having regrets. Regrets are the aptitude of a mind. A popular dismissal during decade two of the twenty-first century has been, “It is what it is”. But as humans, it isn’t, it’s more, much more. We realize “it" when we’re in the middle of an electrical storm. Flash, bing, bang, bing, bang, we quickly become aware of the immediacy and maybe, the scope of Earthly danger.

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If we’re the brain cells of the planet, are we able to bring thought to be a characteristic of the planet? 

That depends on how willing we are to be the brain cells — the mind — of the Earth. The Earth doesn’t have time for will, it is in a constant state of potential, probable contention. It cannot act, it can only be acted upon. 

How does that come back to humanity’s being capable of ruthlessness?

Think about ants. Moralists support resistance to being ruthless. But if we walk into our kitchen and see a counter covered with ants we become III ruthless as we begin the battle. We engage in prevention and the use of chemical warfare. How does that relate? It relates on scale. Have we already mentioned the image of humanity from far above looking like ants? (Image, required) Add a few thoughts about the invasion of the Ukraine by Russia. It can be seen as a ruthless effort at population reduction without regard to borders. The war reduces the population of both countries, the general population of Ukraine and the male youth of Russia.

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The question of connection comes up again. 

Yes. When David Tong waved his arms to include everyone in his audience he was saying that we were all connected. But what we’ve been struggling with here is that the connection is something that wants to be more. The image of the tennis player talking to his racquet and balls keeps popping up; it won’t go away, it’s trying to tell

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us something. Are we connected to inanimate objects? We’re certainly connected to medications that keep us alive. They’re inanimate. We wash dishes with a sponge that at first is stiff and unyielding, then softens up and ends up a useless bunch of fragments. It goes through what can be seen as a life. So the conversation the tennis player has with his equipment is an acknowledgement of connectedness.

That’s pretty silly.

So what? Maybe it has a deeper effect that what seems to be happening on the surface. The player’s connection isn’t just with the equipment, it’s with his opponent, the court and the flow of the game. Acknowledging it can be a way of getting into the flow, out of his conscious mind, a way of getting his amygdala to maximize what his body has learned and knows and keep his emotions at bay. There are other tennis players who do not have the ability to control emotions and instead of cooperating with their racquets, if their equipment doesn’t work, they destroy it.

Is the Earth in a constant state of contention?

Start with us. If we mean us as an integral part of Earth, we’re not only its brain but its potential for cancer. Cancer is “a disease caused by the uncontrolled multiplication and dispersion of abnormal cells in a part of the body”. Replace “abnormal cells” with a variety of the human population and we begin to see humans being a critical problem for the Earth. We do our best to use up the Earth for our physical and often very personal benefit. We’ve become quite accomplished at it for the very short time we’ve been here. If we’re the Earth’s brain cells, we’re also its cancer and its cannibals.

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“Very short time we’ve been here”?

Our time of life of the Earth is so short it’s can only be measured in our human time. On the Earth’s clock it’s not even a short lived infection, not even a sniffle. Until we came along what happened on the surface of the Earth was in a relative state of balance. Humans are preoccupied with human survival. We start with ourselves, individuals, the “I”s and “Me”s that add up to humanity. We’re animals with a collection of genes predicting our possible behavior which in turn is limited by what we can become subject to, choice or chance. As the Earth’s brain cells, we’re here to save the Earth if it needs saving and if we’re not collectively insane. Collectively, we’re the brain of the Earth. We hold that our Earthly intelligence is maturing in spite of evidence presented by the media. We hold many opposing ideas in our minds at the same time. Some of us call it a mess. While in some sectors we seem to be going backwards, there are still signs we’re making some progress.

Like?

A highly evolved segment of our collective intelligence has been focused on one thing: the universe. Our major effort over our entire human life span has been to engage with the universe. Our most intense and cooperative collective effort’s main

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focus has been on getting into outer space and being able to have an effect upon it. From an Earthly point of view anything else is of lesser importance than what we’ve been evolving to do. Any thing that excites us to think of ourselves as “big” is dwarfed by a clear view of the night sky. Up to our too well illuminated present, our life on Earth has been a learning process. History tells us how far afield we’ve had to go to keep moving as this theory of the Earth directs us. 

That’s pretty far out. According to your idea, if we’re Earth’s brain cells, who or what’s directing who?

No one, no thing is directing anyone or anything. This is just a model, but think about that. We’re the Earth’s brain cells yet we still behave in the same way as our own little brain’s cells direct us. The big picture is a complicated, confusing mess. There are some clues in the thought of the people who’s most intense focus is the universe. The astronomers and physicists have a preoccupation: probability. Why this preoccupation with the future? Why not be satisfied with just knowing more about how the whole thing works, the “it is what it is” attitude? Why such a concern with what might happen? We propose an unspoken awareness of our cosmic superposition when it comes to imagining unexpected arrivals from outer space. Like a big rock. Then, lurking in the background, the aliens.

 Rocks? Aliens? What’s next? 

How about egos? We’re naive. We think of ourselves first. But underneath those 

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thoughts, nagging away, is our connectedness. We’re part of the Earth, functional parts of one quantum system. We start out by doing the investigating ourselves, we send one of us into space, then a couple of us to walk on the moon. We hop around on the moon and it becomes easy to imagine walking on another planet like Mars. 

Thinking on it we begin to realize human animals are not very well equipped for long space travel. The mental stress of a six month trip to Mars requires stretching our abilities quite a bit. It would certainly be an ideal environment for the study of boredom. As we become attentive to possibilities for space travel we’ll have to explore the edges of technology from the speed of space travel to ways of suspending life for months with an induced coma. Maybe even a chain of spacetels to stop at along the way. Stand-ins are necessary: We know robots can do quite a good job of getting to know places like Mars and sending back useful information.

 Something has changed — something has been realized — can it be handled? 

Yes, things are clearing up. We’ve been trying to organize it, figure out how to handle it but we’ve had a realization. We accepted the Everettian concept of one world, many-worlds. The next step was realizing one reality, many-realities. (Postulated on Page 63) As our mind absorbed that, doors opened. The next realization is that there really is only one history, an assemblage of many-histories. Having the practice of thinking in terms of one-world and one-reality, one-history was easy to entertain.

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Accepting this one-history, we became aware of a need to see limits. One-history implied that limits had to extend as far as we could imagine. In the past we have the time before the big bang. In the future the limits are the ends of our lives as living beings. Looking at what we can grasp within that span we decided to pay attention to the flow of the Earth’s history. Everything we know about human kind on that scale, is one piece with the Earth’s history. This is the structure for the idea of the Earth having a brain/mind made up of all the brain/minds of humans, being. The heart of this idea is why are we here? What good are we, of what use are we? How do we sift the answer to that out of the complexity we face when we ask it? Maybe there is no answer, it really is just what is. But that’s no fun.

How about imagining what it would be like to think from the point of view of the Earth itself? What, if it was conscious, would be the focus of the Earth’s concerns? The most primitive reaction of Earth’s brain cells (AKA “us”) is to fight or flee, our reaction to danger, to be or not to be. It helps to realize that all this at one point or another might hinge on chance, on luck. We’re in a superposition. If we think of the Earth sensing danger, it makes sense that it would relate to what it feared. On the Cosmic scale, the Earth cannot escape, it can’t step aside. The Earth is locked into the universe as far as what we, its mind/brain can conceive. And since our own prime concern is danger and fight or flee, if we are the Earth’s conscious it stands to reason that it’s concerns are ours. 

Since it can’t flee, the Earth’s mind/brain has to work on the ability to fight cosmic threats. What’s left out is the Earth being threatened by its own brain. That it’s

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diseased or suffering a disorder is hard to deny and that’s us. Will we, its brain, in spite of our possible ability to defend the Earth, destroy the whole project with nuclear war? Russia’s war in the Ukraine threatens to morph into such a catastrophe. We’ve said that the Earth could suffer from cancer. Accepting that humans make up the Earth’s brain, there’s no doubt it is experiencing abnormal cell growth. The strained interactions created as cells spread to various parts of its terrain have caused what could be described as dis-ease. 

So setting us aside, what?

We’re onto the idea of an asteroid. If we leave possibilities of cancer aside, the focus of productive human minds has been the universe. Major collective efforts of humans have been aimed at developing the actual means to be affective on the cosmic level. We began by dreaming with science fiction then making rockets. Though it’s unlikely any humans will directly experience a walk on Mars, we’ve already put our representatives on that planet. Our next visitor to Mars may be accompanied by a robotic pet. It will be a working breed.

So how do we deal with a rocky invader from outer space?

We already have disintegrated a small asteroid a safe distance away. There are other possibilities. An asteroid could also be diverted onto a path that no longer endangered us. It could be done with much less energy than what it took to destroy that first little asteroid.

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That sounds like quite an undertaking. What kind of force would have to be delivered to an alien body to be effective? 

Very much less than would generally be expected. If a propellant is attached to the alien body and fired off with an accelerating charge the impetus applied to the the alien body would accelerate the alien body in the direction of the charge’s push and it would continue to accelerate into space.

There’s quite an implication there. It says that an asteroid could be aimed and directed.

Yes. This interpretation of the laws of motion is loaded from the quantum to the celestial. How do stars, quarks, electrons, photons, behave when looked at in terms of the mechanics of this law? Expand this idea a bit and a big rock could be accelerated toward another threat to intercept it. Interstellar rock fights are conceivable.

You’re calling it a law? How so?

The main reference we have to compare, to analyse this idea, are the laws of Newton. Realizing this we see a major relationship that’s left out of the discussions of Newton’s laws of motion. The factors force, acceleration and mass are there but there’s nothing there that accounts for this phenomenon.

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Phenomenon?

When a mass is accelerated it continues to accelerate until acted upon by an opposing force.

Where did this come from?

It began so long ago that it’s hard to remember. We probably first noticed it flying model airplanes. Soon after that it caught our attention as we caddied and played golf and as we learned to bowl. It came to a focus when we learned Tai Chi. We saw things that fit this question that seemed to hover behind different occurrences. We had conversations about but the idea was abandoned as a question we couldn’t answer.

What was it? There had to be something similar about these questions that brought them together.

It was about the physical application of force. It was  mostly things noticed as we indulged in sports. The earliest we noticed it was flying model airplanes. We flew highly powered freeflight planes. They were sent up three or four hundred feet under power for a few seconds, the power would be cut by a timer and the plane would make a transition to a gliding circle. The idea of the competition was to keep the plane up for a given amount of time for each of a number of flights. We’d heave our planes straight up and they would howl up to gliding height when the motor shut

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down. But there were flyers who would softly let their planes go and every flight their planes, very similar to ours, would always out climb ours. When we launched the same way our plane would climb higher but we couldn’t resist the heave and though we often won, we were more probably more lucky than consistent.

Then it was golf. When we caddied, a good day was two rounds of two bags. That’s paying attention to the rounds of four golfers a day. We’d caddy both Saturday and Sunday and occasionally another day during the week. We saw a lot of golfers through eighteen holes and we saw quite a variety. When we took advantage of caddy’s Monday, we tried to use what we learned watching as we carried and handed out clubs. We saw that among the better golfers there were two types. One were the fast swingers who tried to hit the ball as hard as they could. They were often erratic. The others were hard to take seriously because they seemed so casual - they swung softly and easily. There weren’t as many of them but overall, but they were the better golfers and they usually out drove the heavy hitters and used a “weaker” iron for their second shots. 

And bowling?

That was funny. Every once in a while at the alley, down the line would be a club of older women bowling. We’d watch now and then and we were always amazed. Some of the more rickety gals would make it slowly to the foul line, launch the ball and it would seem to pick up speed as it went down the alley and hit the pins as hard as a ball bowled by a dynamo.

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Later on we started playing golf again. We were super attentive on improving. We read all kinds of stuff to try and improve every aspect of our game. Recently we found nearly eighty pages of stuff we wrote on the experience. The major thing we discovered was that if we wanted distance on our shots we had to be sure the club head was accelerating when it met the ball. Professional golfers don’t have much to say about hitting the ball relating to acceleration though they acknowledge the importance of “timing”. The most vivid and confusing thing a pro said about the swing was the great Bobby Jones, “No one ever swung a golf club too slow”. Richard Feyman was the Bobby Jones of physics.

The other thing a great pro didn’t say came from Jack Nicklaus being dismayed after a shot toward the end of a major tournament. His ball was at a distance from the pin that required an in between club chip shot. He chose a club, hit the ball easily and it soared across the green and suddenly changed the color of the game. When asked about it he attributed the overhit to adrenalin rising in the excitement of end of the tourney. Acceleration had not occurred to him.

Okay, that’s sports, this had been bothering you for some time... 

Yes. There’s an image, another video, of a demonstration and a policeman pushing a man who falls backwards. The push appears to be actually quite gentle and contact is made only at the end of the gesture. The look of surprise on the cop’s face says something about what happened. 

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The falling of a rather large man reminded us of a Tai Chi lesson. Our teacher, Jeffery, picked a couple to demonstrate. Man: large, heavy, muscular and his wife: small and frail. She was directed to push her husband as hard as she could to try to move him. No dice; he didn’t budge. Then she was told to put her hand gently on him and push easily. He went flying, at least twelve or fifteen feet, almost falling over. Jeffery had all of us try it and it was amazing. There were “on the street” tales, examples of the same phenomenon.

So we’re here now and all these examples have added up to something...

It’s added up to something we found and still find staggering. Over the years we’ve tried to figure out what was going on. We read Newton’s laws of motion countless times trying lots of ways of looking at F=MA. We drew diagrams and finally reduced the elements of what troubled us to the fewest we could imagine in the spirit of Carroll’s spherical cow. We proposed a variation on Newton’s laws of motion: When an object is accelerated it continues to accelerate until acted upon by an outside force. 

What does this mean?

It means that we’ve been wasting a lot of effort to move things. Until we’ve started to explore space free of the effect of gravity, it hasn’t meant too much. Being conscious of friction as it occurs helps to see what’s happening. 

It means that the asteroid that was destroyed recently could have been moved with 

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a fraction of the energy it took to destroy it. All that would have been necessary would be to attach an accelerating device to the asteroid and get it started in the desired direction. Without earthly deterrents it promises to work quite well in the friction empty outer space.