Shamanic travels and p-adic physics as physics of cognition and intentionality

Below an email sent this morning. I realized that I could add it to my blog as such (apart from correcting some typos, adding some clarifications, etc.) rather than wasting time to rewriting it and loosing some of the spontaneity of the response.

Dear X and Y,

I read the chapter of the forthcoming book by you and Z. This kind of book has social order. I am myself frustrated of not having seen any clear analysis written using language understandable by a layman and demonstrating the problems of materialistic view and showing that spiritual world view is by no means in conflict with basic tenets of science. The text happened also to resonate with what I have been working just now. I add some subtitles to the comments below to make clear the red thread.

1. World view induced depression

The observation that scientists are people suffering world view induced depression is to the point. As I told Luis, when I was younger my attempt to believe in the world view that I was taught made me literally sick. I have followed discussions in physics blogs and have found that the tone is pathologically negative: crackpot, idiot, imbecille, moron,...: these words are thrown again and again against the opponent. The language used is language of power and violence. I see also this a side effect of this world view induced depression and an attempt to overcome it by aggression. Kind of monoculture of consciousness, stucking to a theory/worldview without ability to detach from it, is in question.

2. Perennial philosophy and the new number concept

I liked very much about the representation of the basic ideas of perennial philosophy. I think that the basic challenge for theories of consciousness is to understand mathematically the division of reality to the sensory world which we can study by doing experiments and the spiritual world which we can approach by various spiritual practices.

Cognition and intentionality (I use "cognitive" somewhat loosely but I do not know any better word!) should have physical and space-time correlates if the notion of physics is properly extended. Even more: we should be able to show that the physics of spiritual world is visible in the physics of the material world. Just like directly invisible quarks are visible via the physics of hadrons.

Here I find strong resonance since TGD in its recent form involves generalization of number concept involving fusion of real numbers with various p-adic number fields, one for each prime p=2,3,5,7,... This fusion is along common rational numbers (very roughly): genuinely p-adic numbers are infinite as real numbers and are analogous to transcendental real numbers representing different manner to complete rational numbers to a continuum.

The point is that one can extend also the notion of spacetime, 8-dimensional space containing space-times as 4-surfaces and speak about p-adic space-time sheets as correlates for intentionality and, there are strong indications, also for cognition.

First point: What is remarkable that non-rational points of these space-time sheets are literally at infinity and only rational points belong to the physical universe. The interpretation is that our thoughts and intentions are literally cosmic or even a super-cosmic phenomenon: cognitive body somehow looks the material universe from outside. This fits very nicely with the idea of cosmic consciousness as consciousness in which sensory input is minimal and cosmic cognitive and intentional component dominates.

Second point: That cognitive space-time sheets have discrete rational projection to real imbedding space and intersect real space-time sheets at discrete set of rational points, conforms with the fact that all physical representations of thoughts are necessary discrete and based on rational numbers. Consider only numerical computation which is bound to satisfy this constraint although cognizing mathematician can perform exact calculations.

p-Adically infinitesimal means infinite in the real sense: that is very short p-adically means very long in real sense. Therefore the continuity and smoothness of local p-adic physics at infinity means that real space-time sheets having discrete set of rational intersection points with p-adic space-time sheets obey p-adic fractality meaning very special kind of long range correlations. Local randomness with long range spatial and temporal correlations can be seen as a direct physical correlate for the existence of cognition and intentionality.

Intentional behavior is indeed characterized by temporal long range correlations. Hence we can measure the immediate implications of something which as such is not measurable! Spiritual and non-local intuitive mind would reflect itself in the properties and behavior of the material world. Without it, the material world would indeed be just a random soup of particles as materialist try hardly to believe.

Even better: these predictions are very spesific. In particular, they lead to successful elementary particle mass calculations and to quantitative understanding of basic spatial and temporal scales in nuclear, atomic and molecular physics, biology, cosmology. This is something completely new.

A possible model for the realization of intentional action is as a quantum jump transforming p-adic space-time sheet to a real one. This is possible if real space-time sheet has vanishing conserved charges such as energy, momentum, electromagnetic charge,... In TGD framework this is possible since conserved inertial energy can be both negative and positive. In principle it would seem that we could really create our physical universe by this kind of intentional action so that Eastern view about reality as a purely mental construct would be correct. I have even proposed S-matrix describing this process and in principle predicting probabilities for different intentional actions.

A question, which just occurred to me, is how reversible the transition from intention to action is: it might be that transitions from action to intention (from matter to thought) is very rare since initial system must have vanishing net quantum numbers, in particular energy and this is extremely difficult to arrange. This could mean that our geometric future is mostly p-adic and past rather stably real: dreams would be the stuff that the reality is made of! If so the flow of experienced time would correspond to the front of the p-adic-to-real phase transition propagating towards geometric future as I have proposed. Of course, infinite number of these kind of wave fronts would be there and the direction of geometric future could be also non-standard.

3. Brahman=Atman and infinite primes

This idea is second element of Perennial Philosophy. Infinite primes, integers, and rationals represent a further extension of number concept besides the fusion of p-adic and real number fields. What is fascinating from the point of physics is that the construction of infinite primes is structurally equivalent with a repeated second quantization of super-symmetric arithmetic quantum field theory. Furthermore, just as 0-dimensional points represents number, 4-D space-time surfaces represent infinite primes, integers,...

This generalization leads also to a generalization of finite numbers: one can construct infinite number of ratios of infinite rationals which are equal to 1 as real numbers but p-adically finite for any prime p. Hence the number 1 and obviously all other numbers and also space-time points have infinitely rich number-theoretical anatomy not detectable by any physical measurement. Single point of space-time can represent in its structure the quantum state of entire material Universe! Brahman=Atman in the most literal and maximal sense that one can imagine!

4. Limits of quantum theory

My view concerning the capacity of standard quantum theory to solve the riddle of consciousness should be already clear. I think that wave mechanics is far too simplistic to allow to understand consciousness. Quantum measurement theory where quantum jump, a good candidate for moment of consciousness as elementary act of creation/re-creation is taken as a fact, is a set of mere phenomenological rules, and in conflict with Schrödinger equation.

My own proposal is simple basically: quantum states are actually entire time evolutions of Schrödinger equation and quantum jumps occur between these (or their generalizations) and thus outside the realm of space-time and given quantum state. Quantum jump means a re-creation of entire time evolution of the cosmology meaning in particular that both geometric past and future are re-created but in accordance with field equations. The experienced time identified as sequence of quantum jumps is something different from geometric time and these two coincide only in certain states of consciousness. Western mode of consciousness is this kind of mode but also in this case long term memories are actually communications with the geometric past: classically as in the case of declarative memories and by quantum entanglement making possible sharing of mental images as in the case of sensory memories.

Second point. Planck constant hbar is the symbol of quantum mechanics and taken usually to be absolute constant which can be put to hbar=1 by a suitable choice of units. Quantum classical correspondence in TGD however predicts that space-time sheets which can be arbitrarily large define quantum coherence regions. This is in conflict with standard quantum mechanics predicting that macroscopic quantum coherence regions should not exist. The resolution of problem is that Planck constant is actually dynamical and quantized: the larger the value of hbar the larger the Compton length so that for instance electron can be zoomed up to an arbitrarily large size and these zoomed up electrons can overlap and form Cooper pairs and superconductor.

The implications are rather dramatic: there is entire hierarchy of values of Planck constant and these correspond to dark matter phases which are macroscopically and even astrophysically quantum coherent. TGD can "predict" the value spectrum of Planck constant and this has led to a surprisingly precise model for living matter including band and resonance structure of EEG.

This gives justification also to the notion of magnetic body (actually onion like hierarchy of them) having astrophysical size in the case of brain. These magnetic bodies carry dark matter and act as intentional agents having biological bodies as sensory receptors and motor instruments. For instance, the time delays of consciousness found by Libet can be understood in this framework.

5. Microtubuli and what shamans do during their travels?

I believe that microtubuli are involved with the realization of long term memories and neural communications: for instance, it is very difficult to understand how high frequency sounds (higher than kHz) could be communicated by nerve pulse patterns since characteristic time scale is about ms. Microtubular conformational and em field patterns are ideal for this purpose. I however think that microtubuli represent only one important level in the hierarchy and that magnetic bodies carrying the dark matter are the star players in the real sector.

At the top of hierarchy wuold be p-adic space-time sheets, p-adic/spiritual bodies representing us as eternal cosmic beings in the real sense. The travels of shamans could result by the ability of shaman's p-adic/spiritual body to partially detach from biological body and direct attention to other parts of the infinite universe.

The direction of attention could mean that shaman as a master of intential action transforms part of his infinite p-adic body at some distant corner of the universe to a real zero energy space-time sheet which can then sensorily perceive the environment. Remote mental interactions would quite generally be based on this mechanism.

Best Regards,

Matti