Apophenion

by Peter J Carroll

  Nevertheless in both magic and quantum physics you can modify what probably happened in the past, so long as it does not alter the present, and you can see that you have done this because the future then manifests in unexpected ways. Magical literature abounds with anecdotes which strongly suggest that some enchantments have their effect by modifying the past, and the Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser version of the Double Slit Experiment demonstrates this effect convincingly enough. In this experiment a subtle arrangement of devices allows you to choose whether or not to preserve an observation of which slit a particle probably went through, and such a choice then seems to actually modify whether it 'did' or not.

  I have called the 3-dimensional reversible time interpretation of quantum physics 'General Metadynamics'. Like most of the other interpretations it remains un-falsifiable at the time of writing, and thus to a certain extent it remains a matter of taste. However two related lines of speculation do lend support to the idea of 3-dimensional time.

  Firstly the structure of the suite of currently known particles of matter and energy does supply an unexpected source of possible confirmation.

  Appendix (i) deals more fully with the technical side of this argument, but in brief; three varieties of all fundamental matter particles have been found. The ordinary ones make up the overwhelming majority of the stuff of the universe, but two heavier versions of each exist. These heavier versions rarely appear in nature but we can make them, although they have short lifetimes. The number three seems to dominate particle properties. Strong nuclear charge occurs in 3 varieties, electroweak charge also manifests as a fraction or whole of three basic units. Appendix (i) shows how the extra degrees of freedom afforded by three dimensions of time allow particles to have spins which account for these phenomena. In particular the hypothesis explains why the two heavier and apparently superfluous extra versions of matter particles have to exist, and why charges manifest in threes. Of course the reversibility of time also leads to corresponding anti-charges and anti-particles, again in groups of three, which we can observe.

  Secondly, if the universe exists as a finite and unbounded structure in space and time then it probably has the geometry and topology of a vorticitating hypersphere which will mean three dimensions of time as well as three of space. Chapter 6 and its appendices attempt to clarify this heretical idea. Yet for now I'd like to examine the magical implications of the general metadynamics interpretation.

  * * *

  Part 3.

  General Metadynamics and magic

  A few months' examination of a library of magical books might well give the impression that the whole subject appears abominably complex and impossible to reduce to any sort of comprehensible structure. However if we ignore for a moment the mythos and symbolism and metaphysical paradigms adopted by various traditions of magic and concentrate instead upon the actual objectives sought, and techniques used, then it all begins to look a good deal simpler.

  The basic ideas of magic, which have remained with humanity since the dawn of thought, and which the earliest traditions of shamanism seem to have preserved, reduce to five core ideas: -

  1) Divination. The idea that certain practices can reveal information by non-ordinary means.

  2) Enchantment. The idea that certain practices may encourage desired events to occur by non-ordinary means.

  3) Evocation. The idea that by certain practices people can command 'spirits' to assist with divination or enchantment objectives.

  4) Invocation. The idea that by certain practices people can enter into some sort of identification with, or possession by, 'spirits' to achieve divination or enchantment objectives.

  5) Illumination. The idea that certain practices enable people to gain special knowledge and powers that ultimately seem to reduce to divination or enchantment.

  Thus divination and enchantment remain the basic measure of magic because we know enough about the mechanisms of evocation, invocation and illumination by now to understand that these practices act as psychological mechanisms to support attempts at divination and enchantment.

  Debate of course rages about the 'certain practices' that give the best results in each of these five activities. These 'certain practices' actually remain rather uncertain and somewhat ad hoc and rule of thumb at the time of writing. However the hypothesis of physiological 'Gnosis'16 and the hypothesis that 'Sleight of Mind'17 can unleash the subconscious, have helped to refine the practices towards something approaching a reliable toolbox.

  Divination and enchantment constitute the core of what some have called parapsychology. This word has perhaps less usefulness than it seems, because if its effects exist, then it implies something more general about the universe that goes beyond mere psychology to imply a whole Para-Physics which begins in the quantum domain and protrudes capriciously into macroscopic reality as magic.

  The General Metadynamics interpretation of quantum physics provides a paradigm that can model the divination and enchantment effects underlying what we call parapsychology if we add the concept of Decoherence.

  Decoherence explains why quantum effects do not dominate the macroscopic world. A photon lucky enough to fly from Sirius to your eye without hitting anything along the way can remain in entanglement with the electron that emitted it on Sirius a decade or so ago. This can happen mainly because few particles get in its way in the intervening space.

  On the other hand Schrödinger's hypothetical cat, whose fate depends on whether or not a quantum event triggers its death inside a sealed box, almost certainly exists at all times in either a dead or an alive state inside the box, irrespective of our observations or lack of observations. This happens because entanglements rapidly get out of phase as particles interact with other particles in their environment. The 'yes/no' wave state of the particle controlling the cat's fate cannot entangle coherently with the entire cat and put it into a state of 'life/death' superposition because as particles interact the coherency rapidly becomes lost amongst the jumble of atoms comprising the apparatus. Thus the cat killing mechanism as a whole remains either triggered or un-triggered, the superposition of the quantum state controlling the mechanism fails to entangle coherently with much of the mechanism. However at some randomly chosen time when the superposition does collapse, the mechanism does one thing or the other, although we cannot predict when it will do so.

  Superposed and entangled states exhibit great delicacy, they remain very prone to decohering into their environments by contact with surrounding particles and this has raised a serious barrier to the construction of quantum computers. A quantum computer can in principle explore a vast number of possible answers to a question simultaneously by using components that can apparently pass through many superposed alternative states at the same time, however the critical quantum parts of the components require very careful isolation from their environment to prevent decoherence.

  The brain functions as a rather chaotic analogue computer. A given input to the brain or even to a single of its component neurones, does not always elicit the same response or the same strength of response. Relatively long range connections between different parts of the brain tend to work rather erratically, and this leads to more unpredictable function. Much of the brain seems to function on threshold effects rather than simple digital on/off type effects. As a stimulus strengthens, the probability of a response increases, but its effect remains unpredictable at lower intensity. Sometimes butterfly type effects occur; a single idea can initiate a mental cataclysm. At the time of writing we have very little idea of how the brain stores memory, although we have a rough map of where it seems to store it. Curiously it seems to store memory in the same areas that it uses to imagine and anticipate the future.

  Magic works in Practice, but not yet in Theory.

  Well it may not work very reliably in practice but the balance of evidence from parapsychology does suggest that it does play a limited but real role in reality. Divination and enchantment do sometimes achieve statistically
impossible results.

  The theory however remains problematical. If we choose to abandon the antique hypotheses of spirits, transcendental agencies, and mysterious aethers, then only quantum ideas remain as possible models. In this case the brain must somehow allow some quantum effects to manifest at the macroscopic level.

  The brain must operate not only as a chaotic analogue computer, but to some extent as a Chaotic Analogue Quantum Computer as well.

  A Chaotic Analogue Quantum Computer might sound like a rather crazy specification for a brain but it accords rather well with our subjective experience of 'mind', the activity which the device performs.

  States of Voidness can arise from either mind stilling meditation or in milder form by absent minded distractions. In this condition the brain seems to relax parts of itself into states of Superposition pregnant with possibilities out of which inspiration can collapse. Sometimes divinatory phenomena manifest in these states.

  States of Gnosis can arise through the physiological experience of extreme excitation or extreme focus of the nervous system and this seems to correspond to Coherence, with extensive areas of the brain all exhibiting the same mind activity whilst the function of other areas becomes strongly inhibited.

  It seems that the brain may have the ability to somehow preserve superposed states so that they can remain Entangled with past and future brain states. Divination thus works because the diviners basically have access to some future state of their own brain when it knows the answer. Divination experiments in which the diviners themselves will never know whether they divined accurately or not, usually fail abysmally. The tendency for superpositions and entanglements to decay over time would then supply an additional reason for divinations to tend to work best for short time periods. The great majority of my premonitionary experience tends to occur just a few minutes before the event.

  Some magicians make a point of trying to visualise themselves at a future time when they will have found out the answer to a divination. They may also resolve to visualise sending back the information to their current divining self when they have it, to establish a closed loop in time.

  Entanglement of present brain states with past and future ones can also provide a model to explain enchantment. Enchanting into the future presents the simplest case.

  If by techniques such as Visualisation coupled with Gnosis the magician can establish a future brain state which perceives a desired event as having come about, then physical reality will have a tendency to decohere towards a situation in which it has.

  This strongly suggests that when enchanting for a future event, magicians should focus on establishing a future perception or 'memory' of it having occurred, rather than visualising a chain of events leading to its occurrence.

  Thus 'On my fortieth birthday I have magnificent property assets', makes a better statement or visualisation of intent for a spell than 'It is my will to become rich by the age of forty'. The former spell encourages the whole of entangled reality to work towards your desire, whilst the latter merely increases the chances that you might make the right choices.

  Retroactive enchantment appears to work by a similar mechanism. 'At twenty three I have a series of life changing experiences which equip me well for the future'. Such a spell might usefully undo many of the negative effects which seemed to stem from the experiences at the time, both on the psychological and physical levels. A retroactive enchantment cannot take place if it alters the measurable conditions of the immediate present and thus prevents itself occurring, so we can only measure its effects by the amount that it causes the future to deviate from its probable course.

  Quantum Entanglement underlies the idea of the magical link and antique theories of magic by contagion, yet it sets rather severe limits on what we can achieve with it because decoherence tends to weaken the effects of entanglement. Simultaneous physical presence with physical or line of sight contact seems to offer the best chance.

  Artefacts once connected to the target or visualised remembered images come in at second best, whilst photographic images qualify as a rather poor third choice, real time live images or telephone calls may offer better possibilities if you can establish them.

  General Metadynamics, the quantum-magical hypothesis of three-dimensional reversible time, has its own equation:-

  This represents a new member of a class of equations called 'Uncertainty Relationships' that follow on from Heisenberg's celebrated equation relating the uncertainty (and almost certainly the actual indeterminacy) of position and momentum.

  It means that the indeterminacy in the entropy S, times the indeterminacy in the time t, (in any of its 3 dimensions), has about the same magnitude as Planck's constant, h. (Note that we need to specify the absolute temperature, K, (at which we measure the entropy, to preserve dimensional equivalence, but this makes little practical difference).

  Thus any activity of the universe which constitutes a minimal entropy change can proceed for plenty of time. So a particle can 'feel out' multiple possible future trajectories so long as only one of them gets reinforced by reverse time feedback to become real, as the options it didn't actualise create only infinitesimal entropy.

  Thus we can think of time in three dimensions as working by a process of Apophusis, Apophasis, and Apoptosis. These Greek derived words have acquired various applications in biology, rhetoric, and biology respectively, but they illustrate the underlying mechanisms of reality:

  Apophusis - branching, reality makes a feint at every possible thing it could do.

  Apophasis - weirdness, what doesn't happen may still have an effect on what does.

  Apoptosis - dying off, a collapse of superposition and entanglement to yield a result.

  Curiously, at least on a subjective level, the mind feels that it works like this as it seeks decision, inspiration, or Apophenia. This suggests some sort of quantum-panpsychic principle at work in both the microcosm and the macrocosm.

  * * *

  Part 4.

  On The Nature of Time

  What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it, I do not know.

  - Saint Augustine.

  The present seems to exist for a fleeting instant only, the past seems to exist in memory only, and the future seems to exist in our expectation only.

  (Note that all the records cosmological, geological, literary and in the form of memory, exist in the fleeting now, and structure our beliefs about the probable past and the possible future).

  Does time exist? Can we ask what it 'is'? Do we perceive time or do we construct it as a working hypothesis?

  I have a device that shifts the entire universe lock, stock and barrel, every last particle, a million years into the future (or the past) every time I activate it, but nobody ever notices.

  Only a record of relative movement and change seems to give us a sense of time. Plainly time does not exist as something abstract and separate from movement and change. Time does not flow and it has no location.

  I submit that we have difficulties in forming a coherent picture of time because the past and the future consist of something radically different from the present.

  The universe consists of quanta that sometimes appear to behave as particles and sometimes appear to have behaved as waves. Note the careful wording here, we can never catch a quantum behaving as a wave, we can only catch it as a particle. After we have caught it we can say that it appears to have behaved as a wave to arrive in the position we caught it in. Similarly for the future we can only make a prediction about its wave behaviour and the range of possible particle states that might lead to.

  For large lumps of matter we can usually ignore the wave behaviour of the constituent quanta because the wave behaviours tend to cancel out and allow us to establish fairly reliable memories and expectations. Thus we can construct working hypotheses of cause and effect, and get away with the idea that the past and future have a similar reality to the present moment.

  But of
course they do not; we create that illusion by memory and expectation and with ideas about cause and effect.

  The present moment always manifests in the singular as a particle-like reality. The past and the future of any moment of the present have a wave-like reality.

  The past and the future consist of a vast array of waves forming a much 'larger' universe than the one we observe directly, it forms a multiverse of wavelike parallel universes out of which the observable singular particle-like universe of the present moment appears as an interference pattern. This occurs as a two way process, the particle-like present subtends the wave pattern into the past and future multiverse but the multiverse also subtends an interference pattern to create a fleeting particle reality.

  This can only happen because time has three dimensions, it has 'width' to accommodate all possible pasts and futures, not just the length in which to accommodate a single past and future.

  The whole idea of 'being' thus seems illusory and to merely arise from our rather sluggish perception which fails to notice the ubiquity of change.

  The whole idea of the past and the future thus also seems illusory because no particle-like reality exists there at all.

  We learn to conjure an illusory picture of reality for ourselves in which we, and other people, and various phenomena have 'being' and some sort of a 'real' past and future, from the perspective of the present. Without that illusion we would probably find existence intolerable.

  The above paradigm represents General Metadynamics taken to its logical conclusion.

  It provides a model of the physical principles underlying both quantum physics and magic.