The Apophenion: A Chaos Magick Paradigm - Peter J. Carroll 2008
Metadynamics - Practical Magic
This chapter questions the assumptions of causality and of one dimensional unidirectional time. It examines both the apparent causality failure and the apparent operation of hyper-natural forms of causality implied by quantum physics.
It seeks an Apophenia in a model of three-dimensional time that can model both quantum physics and magic.
'It is my opinion that our present picture of physical reality, particularly in relation to the nature of time, is due for a shake up - even greater, perhaps, than that which has already been provided by present -day relativity and quantum mechanics.'
- Professor Sir Roger Penrose11
Part 1.
Quantum Weirdness
Quantum physics works beautifully in the sense that it allows us to build all sorts of amusing electronic devices and to model the behaviour of atoms and subatomic particles to a very high degree of precision. However nobody really understands it. The maths gives excellent results, but it contains things like imaginary numbers which have no obvious perceptual meaning in the human scale world. Bizarrely contra-intuitive events seem to underlie the behaviour of the stuff of the universe. Objects can seem to have had several different locations or mutually exclusive states at the same time. Moreover some of the behaviour of quantum entities seems completely random and to arise without prior cause.
Thus many interpretations of quantum physics abound. Some interpretations claim that no underlying reality exists;12 we have reached down to the simplest level of reality and we just have to accept the strangeness we find there on its own terms. Others seek to find some kind of hidden variable to restore some sort of causality to the apparent randomness of the quantum domain.
Herewith some examples of quantum behaviour to illustrate the weirdness that underlies our reality.
Because our whole language and thought structure revolves around the idea of cause and effect we have difficulty in accepting the idea of random events, and prefer to think in terms of uncertainty instead. We tend to assume that apparently random events must have underlying causes even if we cannot work them out. However nature provides a simple example of uncaused events in radioactive decay.
Radioactive isotopes, (atoms which spontaneously decay), all exhibit a characteristic half life. Plutonium238 has a half-life of 88 years, Tritium (Hydrogen3) has a 12-year half-life, and these half-lives limit the lifespan of nuclear warheads. Many of the Uranium isotopes have half lives of hundreds of millions of years which means that we can still dig the stuff up because some still remains from the formation of this planet's material in an exploding star core billions of years ago. Now a half life denotes the time it takes for one half of a sample to decay, So after 12 years, half of a sample of Tritium will have decayed, after 24 years only a quarter will remain, and after 36 years only an eighth will remain and so on.
Thus the process seems predictable enough, however it seems impossible to explain how this happens except by assuming that each individual Tritium atom has an exactly 50:50 chance of decaying in a 12 year period. The behaviour of the individual atoms would appear to have to remain random, within limits, to produce the half-life effect. Random behaviour means no causal connection to previous behaviour. Just because a dice comes up with five twice in a row does not make it more likely to come up a third time. If a Tritium atom failed to decay in a 12 year period it does not affect the likelihood of it decaying in the next 12 year period; that chance remains 50:50. Dice may not actually exhibit truly random behaviour unless you bounce them around a lot, they may merely exhibit unpredictable behaviour because we cannot calculate all the micro-factors determining how they fall. Nevertheless with the internal behaviour of atoms it seems inconceivable that some sort of internal micro-factors generate the observed behaviour. Quantum physics depends on the idea that nature does not have unlimited divisibility, at some point something comprises the smallest possible piece of reality. It won't have any internal structure or smaller components within, and at that point the chain of cause and effect must presumably come to a halt.
The Double Slit experiment provides a second example of the weirdness of quantum behaviour. This seminal experiment demonstrates the whole mystery. Many variants on the original experiment exist but they merely serve to confirm the mystery a little.
If you fire light quanta or electrons or even moderately large molecules like Buckyballs (consisting of 60 carbon atoms), at a screen with a small hole in it, then they pass through the hole and land on a target the other side as you would expect particle like projectiles to behave. If you use a screen with two holes in it then they land on the target in a particular pattern as if as if they had passed through the holes as waves instead, even though they land on the target as particles. The wave like aspect of their behaviour suggests that they do not have a definite location in space and time whilst in flight, but that they somehow smear themselves out over a range of spacetime locations. When they encounter a target they somehow collapse back into definite particles, but their wavelike flight mode allows them to do seemingly impossible things.
All objects have wavelike characteristics, but things as large as bullets have a wave function much smaller than the size of a bullet, so bullets tend to go through only one of two closely spaced holes in a steel plate. However tiny objects like light 'particles', electrons, and moderately large molecules, seem to have the ability to pass through both holes simultaneously because their wave functions have a similar size to their particle sizes.
We should not however suppose that the wave like characteristics of quantum entities limits the weirdness to tiny areas of space much smaller than human scale events. With the progress of time, the wave functions can become spatially huge. Instead of using a screen with two closely spaced slits in it, you can use a half-silvered mirror to give a beam of light a choice of directions in which to proceed. Light quanta can either go through it or reflect off it, and with this you can achieve quantum weirdness on any scale you like. It seems that with such a 'beam splitting' apparatus we can force individual light particles (for this is how they manifest at the detectors) to fly 'both' ways round a system of mirrors that we can position yards or even miles apart. The wave function can become enormous by human standards. At this point it becomes imperative to take care about 'when' we speak of. Before a particle sets off, it may appear to have a choice of trajectories, when it lands it may appear to have exercised both choices simultaneously, we cannot however investigate its apparently wavelike manifestation whilst it flies, for in doing so we force it to collapse back into particle mode.
That a half-silvered mirror can apparently split a single light particle into two waves says something utterly strange in itself. Light registers on detectors by getting absorbed by single atoms in the detectors, yet a half silvered mirror consists of little clumps of silver atoms that reflect light particles instead of absorbing them, and spaces between the clumps where they can pass through. So although individual atoms can absorb light particles they appear to have a fairly huge wave size compared to an atom whilst in flight because even a fairly coarse grained half silvered mirror that looks patchy under a hand lens will do the trick.
The presentation of electrons that you get in elementary chemistry and physics classes as tiny little electrically charged balls orbiting the nuclei of atoms or travelling down wires to supply electrical current gives a model of very limited explanatory power. For chemistry to work as we observe it, the electrons need to act as though they have a sort of smeared out existence all over the outside of the nucleus. They don't function as tiny little balls whilst in orbit, they act like diffuse spherical clouds englobing the nucleus, but in other situations they act as point particles of zero size.
At the quantum level particles seem to behave as if they can 'be' in several different states at once or 'be' in several different locations at once. However we can never observe them in such a condition, we can only make observations that strongly suggest that they had occupied such states prior to our measurements. Here we see the double slit mystery re-appearing. Single particles appear to have passed through two different states simultaneously. This phenomenon has the name of superposition and it dominates the way the universe works. Most of the particles of mass and energy that make up the
universe seem to spend most of their time in superposed states. Only when they interact with each other do they seem to fall out of their superposed condition and momentarily manifest in a definite particle like state. The collapse of the superposed wave state occurs randomly, but because most human sized events involve billions of particles, such behaviour creates a more or less perfect illusion of cause and effect, at least in the short term. Thus whilst the water molecules in the glass on my desk vibrate and jiggle around quite violently and keep dropping into and out of superposed states, the water as a whole keeps fairly still and its behaviour remains fairly predictable. Yet some individual molecules may occasionally escape the surface of the liquid and evaporate away.
Under certain circumstances the collapse of the wave function of particles occurs in a not entirely random way, this happens if the wave functions of two or more particles become entangled. Quantum entanglement seems to contradict all the normal assumptions that we acquire about causality, space, and time. Many variations of the basic entanglement experiments exist, but a generalised account of what happens goes like this: Allow two particles which have come into contact to travel off in different directions, then force one of them to collapse its superposed state and assume a definite particle like property. You can choose what property to measure but randomness ensures that the answer will come out as either yes or no for that property. Now in doing this you ensure that the other particle will give a no if you got a yes, and a yes if you got a no, and this seems to work across any amount of space and time you like. Thus not only do particles spend most of their lives in superposed states, but those superposed states remain entangled with those of the last thing they collided with. So if your eye caches sight of a distant star at night it establishes a quantum connection to an event billions of miles and perhaps thousands of years ago.
Conversely, and here it gets really bizarre, as you look out at that far star at night, light from you can in principle entangle you with an alien not yet born, thousands of years in the future, on a planet orbiting the faraway star.
With reality appearing to behave so differently at the quantum level than it appears to behave on the macroscopic level, many people have sought to interpret quantum physics in a way that makes some kind of sense in macroscopic terms. Often this has meant trying to add some kind of hidden variable to sneak causality back in, but none seems convincing. Macroscopic events do however differ from quantum scale events in one important respect; they exhibit a preference for increasing entropy. Processes involving huge numbers of particles do not usually exhibit time reversibility. Eggs break fairly easily but broken eggs never seem to unbreak, and a time-reversed film of an egg reassembling itself from broken pieces looks unrealistic.
On the quantum scale, events seem less limited by this apparent one way restriction in the direction of time, and the equations describing many quantum changes look fully reversible in their relativistic form, so nothing seems to prevent them happening in reverse.
So, in summary quantum physics presents us with two phenomena to reconcile with the rest of our understanding of the universe, namely superposition and entanglement. Both of these seem more comprehensible if we assume that what we observe as particles actually have a wave like behaviour that spreads out in both space and time into the past and future of the moment of observation. After all, superposition implies hyper-temporality, superimposed events happening at the same time, whilst entanglement implies hyper-locality, linked events happening at the same time in different places.
One particular interpretation of quantum physics, Cramer's Transactional Interpretation,14 explicitly describes the double slit experiment in terms of phenomena moving both forward and backward in time. In this model a forward wave goes through both slits and then makes the target emit a time-reversed wave, which travels back down one of the two paths at random, taken by the forward wave. The time-reversed wave meets the forward wave at every point of its trajectory and the two waves combine to make a particle. Thus in a sense, the particle reality arises out of an overlap between waves coming from the past and the future. This transactional scheme also makes some sense of the phenomena of superposition and entanglement. We can never observe superposition actually happening because any attempt to observe it forces it to collapse. Nevertheless it often seems that we observe behaviour that could only have arisen from a superposed state. Now if the past of a particle consists not of a discrete single state, but of two or more waves, then the moment of a particles interaction or measurement marks the point where these waves overlap and collapse to create a particle- like effect.
Similarly in entanglement we do not need to posit some incredible action at a distance that somehow finds its precise target across vast tracts of space and/or time. We just need time reversibility. When one of a pair of entangled particles falls out of superposition it sends a time reversed wave back down its trajectory back to the point where both particles had contact. This then modifies the starting conditions, which in turn ensures that the other particle in the entangled pair behaves appropriately.
Time reversibility thus solves the problem of how a single particle can 'know' that a screen has two slits, and how it can 'know' what it's entangled partner has done on the other side of the universe. However it does not explain the randomness or the apparent superposition of two states in the same 'place'.
For this I suspect that we need not merely reversible time but three-dimensional time as well, time which extends 'sideways' as well as just fore and aft. I propose that time may thus have the same dimensionality as space, three in each case. This may seem rather contra-intuitive on first analysis, after all a calendar shows a string of dates in a row but it never shows extra days stretching out sideways from any day, nor do we seem to experience such things. We do however generally accept that a number of possible tomorrows might follow today, although most people seem to assume that a singular yesterday led to today, despite that historians argue interminably about how and why we arrived at today. The assumption of a singular past will receive some re-examination in the following section.
Part 2.
Three-dimensional time
If time does have a three-dimensional solidity we would not see it directly. We cannot even see a fraction of any length into the past or future by normal means anyway, so a thickness in time would generally go unnoticed as well. However a universe with sideways time would have one defining characteristic in particular; it would appear to run on probability rather than on strictly causal deterministic principles, and this one does.
Time appears linear and one-dimensional because we define and measure time as the direction in which entropy increases, but entropy only appears on the macroscopic scale, where large numbers of particles participate in a process. Although various macroscopic processes lead to increasing entropy at different rates we have tended to adopt the revolution of heavenly bodies as our standard entropy-meters as they dissipate their energy only extremely slowly and at a fairly constant rate.
Probability lies at right angles to time as we measure it, in sideways time, and it acts as a sort of pseudo-space or parallel universe space, but we should not suppose that any of the 3 dimensions of time has a special status, anymore than any of the spatial dimensions has. Now all objects have a limited spatial displacement in three dimensions, two and one dimensional objects exist only as theoretical idealisations; a piece of paper must have some thickness to exist. Similarly all objects have a displacement in 3 dimensions of time as well. Their temporal 'thickness' at any instant equates to their wave property, and it has enough room to accommodate superposed states which have slightly different orthogonal time coordinates. Thus at any instant of the present not much temporal room exists for parallel universes because particles displace only tiny amounts of time. Most of the particles in my body will exist in superposed states at any instant, but that does not imply that overall I exist in many parallel universes in any meaningful way. My overall wave property at any instant does not much exceed that of the size of a single particle. Thus it serves to locate me fairly precisely in time and space on the macroscopic level, even though most of the particles inside me have multiple orthogonal time coordinates in the pseudo-space of parallel universes.
Noether's theorem asserts that all conservation laws reflect symmetries in nature in which something remains constant. Thus for example the claim that 'matter can never get created or destroyed' implies that the amount of it remains constant under time translation. This claim proved inaccurate, and Einstein replaced it with the celebrated mass-energy equivalence where the energy equals the mass times lightspeed squared. This new conservation law asserts that the total mass-energy remains constant in time although one can change into the other. Heat an object and it becomes heavier, but only infinitesimally so at kitchen temperatures.
Einstein also uncovered a non-obvious space-time equivalence. All objects always move at exactly the same rate in spacetime, despite appearances to the contrary. The faster something moves through space the slower it moves through time. Onboard time actually slows down for objects moving very fast, months of jet travel can take a few fractions of a second off an accurate clock and theoretically add them to the life span of those travelling with it.
We measure time only by movement in space, even if that movement consists merely of parts moving within a clock or within the human body. A deep symmetry exists between space and time, so why do we ascribe different dimensionalities to them?
Large pieces of matter each move only in one direction in space at a time on the macroscopic scale, thus we need only one dimension of time to describe their motion to a reasonable approximation. However if something did move in several directions in space at once then we could use a three-dimensional time frame to describe it.
Can anything actually do this?
Yes, the wave aspects of particles of matter do it all the time, but usually on such a small scale that we do not notice it, in the same way that we do not usually notice the mass-energy equivalence or time dilation at speed. However waves sometimes have very big effects which show up as quantum entanglement over many kilometres or in the capricious phenomena of magic.
When it comes to the past and the future, objects can have as much orthogonal time as the period of 'ordinary' time under consideration, this equates to the idea that events become progressively less predictable or determinate the further you look in time. So a particle has many possible futures and its wave like behaviour allows it to spread out and 'try' all of them to some extent, but it only gets feedback across time from one possible future at random. This then creates positive interference and allows the particle to manifest in some definite form in the future.
Despite that we assume the past to exist in singular form because we experience our own past singularly, both magic and quantum physics suggest otherwise.
From the standpoint of the present, the past and the future do not exist in definite form. The present consists of the moment of interaction between waves from the past and the future as they collapse randomly into particle mode. The past and future consist entirely of wave modes spread out in orthogonal time in a progressively more diffuse fashion the further you consider them from the present. Thus time travel into the past remains a silly idea because the past merely consists of wave like echoes of what might have been. Time travel into the future remains possible, but only if you isolate yourself from the effects of entropy by slowing down your onboard time by travelling at, or accelerating towards, something close to light speed.
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.
Yet I regard it as a dark illumination, an unpleasant insight into how the machinery of the universe may actually work, I find it at least as disturbing as the idea of the inevitability of personal death.
Yet as a Chaoist I must regard nothing as true, but regard some things as having greater or lesser degrees of utility.
Thus I will use it for magic as I find it the most convincing paradigm available, despite that I find it mystically unattractive. For the purposes of conducting my ordinary life I shall use other less austere paradigms.
Ouroboros,
An Alchemical symbol representing
a subtle blasphemy;
The finite and unbounded curvature
Of the eightfold universe,
Moreover, it lives…