A Simple Explanation of Consciousness and Time: Our Cherry-Jello Universe

 It's been a very long time since I developed any new concepts to add to A Simple Explanation, spending the past couple of years concentrating instead on the Gnostic Gospel. So my longtime readers may be very happy to see this new posting featuring the torus, consciousness, and Jello? 

Yesterday my brother and I were musing over the nature of time--what is it exactly? It isn't a thing, it is nowhere to be located. Is it therefore a force? This was my response. I have long thought of the universe in this fashion, but I've never written it down or even shared it with my brother until yesterday. He flipped out over it. Let's see what you think...

A Giant Bowl of Jello

Here is how I picture time, space, and consciousness —

• We live in a Jello universe--a gigantic, torus-shaped, bowl of gelatin, studded with an infinite number of cherries.

• The Jello is the matrix that holds everything that ever was or will be.

• The cherries are every thing that ever were or will be--all potential events, all potential objects. An infinite array of cherries already laid out as potential.

• Consciousness is each spark of life making its way through this vast ocean of Jello.

• Time can only be apprehended through consciousness; time is nowhere to be found if there is no observer.

• The cherries are the full panoply of choices we could make along the way.

• Our free will chooses to swim this way and that as it moves toward the next cherry of choice. This free will is swimming from the middle of the torus in the direction of the outside boundary of the giant torus. All of these cherries are being held within the shape of the torus—the doughy part of the donut.

• Every lifetime is the trace of the worm-like path our consciousness chooses as it travels through the universe of cherries.

• In a real sense, the entirety of all of our lives is already conceived in potential. It is our self-awareness and free will that plod along at the speed of matter as we live our lives out as a linearity of passing time.

My brother, the professor of Philosophy, notes that this way of looking at time and consciousness may have just solved one of the longstanding conundrums of philosophy.  That is, how can we reconcile the concept of an all-knowing God if we subjects have free will? The answer presented by this model is that the all-knowing God has pre-placed all possible choices before us, but it is our individual free will that plots the course through these choices. This combination of potential versus choice reflects our free will.

That's it.

I'm posting a second version of this article over at my Gnostic blog, which further describes this Jello universe in Gnostic terms. If you are curious, you can head over there now.

Of course, the Jello salad pictured above is not to scale. The gelatin donut would be infinitely large, and the cherries relatively small.

"Real Science" Questions Cosmology

Here's an interesting Popular Science reprint. Those of us who study vortices and toroidal space-time cosmology will especially appreciate Matei Apostolescu's illustrations, particularly the "smooth operator."

[for some reason, all of the images associated with this article have been removed from the internet. hmmm...  I'm inserting a fresh image to replace the ones removed.]

Wait a second: What came before the big bang?

Not everyone thinks the universe had a beginning.

By Rachel Feltman and Matthew R. Francis October 4, 2017

C

osmologists used to think the universe was totally timeless: no beginning, no end. That might sound mind-melting, but it’s easier on the scientific brain than figuring out what a set starting point would mean, let alone when it would be. So some physicists have cooked up alternative cosmological theories that make time’s role seem a little less important. The concepts are as trippy as those black-light posters you had in college. Wait a minute…

Flowers of the multiverse

The main reason some physicists obsess over the beginning of the universe is because so much evidence points to there being one. But what if our universe grooved within an ageless multiverse—like a patch of ground from which countless flowers bloom. In this model, each universe has a big bang and keeps its own time. In the most popular version, each universe might even have its own version of physics too. Infinite possibilities yield infinite results: Some say this theory explains life itself.

We’d have to be extremely lucky for a single big bang to create a universe with the perfect conditions for life as we know it, but if new universes are springing up all the time, it’s no wonder one of those cosmic neighborhoods turned out just like ours. The universes in this garden grow or wither according to their own rules, while the multiverse around them goes on without a beginning or an end. It’s an elegant blend of change and timelessness, a floral brew many cosmologists are still sipping.

The smooth operator

Some variations on the big bang go down a little smoother than the original. In the simplest version, the beginning of time is a sharp point, where everything we currently observe was mashed into a ball of energy smaller than an atom—then burst outward, duh. But what came before? Physicists such as Stephen Hawking tried to restore a kind of timelessness by getting rid of that starting point, imagining a universe with no clear “bang.” You can wind back the clock to the edges of those first moments of existence, but asking what came before would be like asking why you can keep walking north when you get to the North Pole. Time, as we define it, loses its meaning as the universe shrinks down.

It never quite narrows to a single point. But no one has proved physics works like that—yet.

Steady state

The big bang posits that the universe exploded into existence and is still booming outward. So to throw out the bang, you must explain why we can see galaxies shooting off into the distance. In 1948, astronomers Hermann Bondi, Thomas Gold, and Fred Hoyle got around the problem by imagining the universe as a constant display of dazzling fireworks, with new matter bursting into existence everywhere, at every moment. In the steady-state model, it looks like the cosmos is growing, but change is just an illusion, man.

The universe is literally spacing out, yeah, but it’s not because of some single original event. It’s because the universe is constantly creating new matter, and that new matter pushes the older stuff out into the beyond. But the discovery of microwave radiation left over from the big bang during the 1960s cooked this idea—the theory couldn’t explain away that afterglow.

The collision

Why does a big bang have to be a beginning? Paul Steinhardt and collaborators propose that there are bangs bangin’ all the time, as our universe rattles around in a fifth dimension (whoa) our puny minds cannot even perceive. All of space and time as we know it sits on a four-dimensional surface called a brane. Sometimes it collides with another universe’s brane, and the smash creates bursts of energy we know as the big bang—energy still detectable as cosmic background radiation. As the universes move farther and farther apart in the fifth dimension, our cosmos expands. The cycles of collision and separation go on forever in a psychedelic dance. Many cosmologists don’t think we’ll ever find proof of this fifth dimension, but the idea that the big bang isn’t the real beginning has no end in sight.

 This article was originally published in the September/October 2017 Mysteries of Time and Space issue ofPopular Science.

tags: 

• space 
 
• time 
 
• sept-oct 2017 
 
• science 
 
• physics