Thursday, March 21, 2013

Fielder's choice

I have a very tentative and preliminary comment about the theories linking zero point energy field (ZPF) to quantum physics (as in the works of Lynne McTaggart and Erwin Laszlo). It seems reductive to talk about "The Field" as being ultimate Oneness. In mathematics, the concept of infinity exists but there can be multiple infinities, different types of infinity. Similarly, "the Field" could simply mean a type of field rather than an ultimate Oneness in and of itself: a unified field, not the unified field. In all the theorizing by "New Age" writers and physicists, we have not gotten to the point where consciousness is ontologically linked to the physical world. Consciousness may be seen by McTaggart and others as an intentional agent that affects physical reality, but I do not think we have a "real" physical phenomenon at all until consciousness witnesses it. In this interactivity of subject, object, and epistemological process, creation unfolds out of itself which includes the containment field of the space-time matrix that hosts the "matter." The constituents of creation mechanics thus include the consciousness principle, but the oneness of consciousness itself cannot necessarily be postulated as a priori. Like the quantum particle, its existence is contingent on a complex acausal interaction that simultaneously brings physical reality into being, observes it, completely inhabits it, and finally becomes it. However, when I say "consciousness itself" I do not contradict the multiplicity of consciousnesses which recreate the universe in each of their separate dimensional existences. As in samkhya philosophy, the monads of consciousness, the purusas, are points of individual cosmic existence, each of them self-existent onenesses that do not cross-reference.
Ultimately a more advanced theory of time is needed to unravel the spectrum of Oneness Fields. McTaggart posits "everything in the future already exists at some bottom-rung level in the realm of pure potential, and that in seeing into the future, or the past, we are helping to shape it and bring it into being, just as we do with a quantum entity in the present with the act of observation" (Lynne McTaggart, The Field, p. 173). This viewpoint, as advanced as it may seem, privileges present time unnecessarily. In considering time's trajectory from past to future to be an advancement from more concrete (historical) to more abstract (uncertain and probabilistic), the present becomes simply a moving point along that line. I think we are dealing more with a staging platform which can accommodate all the known temporal states (past, present, and future manifesting something like solid, liquid, and gas) simultaneously through the lens of multiple consciousnesses, existing simultaneously in parallel universes, and ultimately resolving, if at all, in a multiverse that can support completely contradictory laws of nature. Recent research in cosmology may be pushing us in the direction of resolving quantum theory not as a unified field but as a vast warehouse of scrolled fields, each speaking its own language and each contained in its individual jug.