08.18.07
The eonic effect, gaia, and hypercomplex systems
Continuing the discussion on Gaia and the eonic effect, here, I am asked a set of questions, Re: [chaosmos] Gaia Hypothesis - Is the Earth smarter than us?, and a response:
Gaia, the eonic effect, and leapfrog evolution,
and the response concluded:
The question of a Bohmian extension/resolution of QM looks interesting, and this is the second time it has been suggested to me, but the question arises, are we asking for an explanation of reality, as a backdrop to something, the eonic effect. Or can we expect to actually carry out some kind of direct application to historical dynamics as seen in the eonic effect. The eonic effect creates its own kind of question about reality, and ends in considerable mystery. Standard causal explanation fails, and the design argument fails. Such a high degree of coherence where we had assumed randomness is unsettling. I have scored one small victory in showing a definite ’system’ at work, but what a system! And there is no evading it. My exposure of this phenomenon is based on nothing more than simple periodization, and for all the talk of dynamcis, makes no commitment on that score. In fact, I may have simply discovered a ticking clock built into a larger system I don’t understand, or properly observe. Tick, tick, tick, great theory!
My original suggestion about standard QM was, I fear, to the effect that such a nice hack as QM–let’s try that ourselves.
The QM framework is highly suggestive and in the fuzzy way that is said, Bohm vs standard QM would end up about the same. If one worked the other would soon follow. I am not sure. My original interest in QM was in the elegant contrast of levels, and the bare fact of those two levels, a wave equation and an observer.In general, the eonic effect shows two levels in its separate but unified treatment of individuals and systems, and another metaphor for the phenomenon can be seen from an example I give (among several) is that of a computer and a user. Old style computers were deterministic, i.e. programs proceed from start to finish, end of program.
Then GUI’s came along and we have a tandem system, a computer and a user. The duet of the two alternates, as the user does something, then the computer responds, and then the computer idles, as the user does something else. This idling of the computer in a GUI or in computer mouse code is a remarkable circumstance and qualifies as a causality/freedom duality, treatable in the categories of such critters. Computer mouse code, in its bare form, is quite interesting.The eonic effect shows a suggestive similarity to this situation, on a tremendous scale, and a bit more complicated. But we can see this ‘alternation and system idling’ in the eonic sequence. Historical evolution is a tandem process of two levels braided together.
And there is another metaphor, the term ‘eonic’, which suggests ‘eons’ actually comes from the electronic term ‘eonic’ (type ‘eonic’ in google and see what you get, digital sampling companies) which sometimes refers to digital samplers.
Again, and this never appears in the text because it is not rigorous thinking, but the eonic series resembles ‘digital sampling’ of a frequency curve. It’s uncanny.
If you look at each of my transitions, it looks like ’something is doing something’, but a closer look shows that that ’something’ is only ’sampling’ what it finds already there, and morphing that into something more coherent or larger scale.
Each of the spectacular outputs of the Axial Age, by and large, are transformations of something that was embryonically already there. They suddenly get amplified and start to transcend their local source and diffuse globally.
Anyway, all I can say is that most people would think something on this scale was some imputation of divinity, but close analysis shows the eerie silence of ’some kind of system’ at work, we know not what, a ’something of gaian proportions’. That’s very unsettling for a student of the Old Testament, say.
We may be encountering something that, so far, surpasses human intelligence. Yes, we see a ’system’ with a dynamic, but we must keep in mind that it does whole civilizations lock stock and barrel, from religion to art philosophy and the rest of it. So quite apart from anything else we need a kind of meta-philosophy/science to assess the history of philosophy, say, inside that system.
In general, science is a dependent process amplified in the eonic series, and therefore, strictly speaking just more output of the system. So science in its current form flunks the ‘meta’ test. I don’t see how we can actually analyze a system in which we are immersed and all our cultural concerns, by and large, are descendant output of the system itself.Meanwhile, it is important to hope we can ever discover the full data set. This pattern obviously starts in the Neolithic or before, but only after -3000 does it become truly visible. Maybe soon our data will be good enough to get an overall sense of it. Then, and only then, can theory begin.
What we have so far is a beautiful and obviously coherent fragment five thousand years in scope.
In a message dated 8/17/2007 12:45:15 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, x@yahoo.com writes:
Regarding QM it is interesting to consider it as a plausible tool, if one drifts away from the orthodox interpretation.
For instance, a nonlinear Schrödinger equation, in a Bohmian interpretation, would provide for a deterministic system (no collapse), in which each part would be (nonlinearly) informed by the dynamics of the whole and the dynamics of the whole would be informed by the dynamics of the parts, you’d have a nonlinear holomovement, which might work as a mathematical or at least as an explanatory device of the type of punctuated equilibria dynamics that you are trying to achieve.
I would very much like to continue “hearing” from you, on these matters, since you are proposing a very interesting perspective.
All the best,…