International Institute for Middle East and Balkan Studies (IFIMES[1]) from Ljubljana, Slovenia, regularly analyses developments in the Middle East, the Balkans and around the world. Prof. Dr. Anis H. Bajrektarevic is professor in international law and global political studies, based in Vienna, Austria. In his comprehensive analysis entitled "Digital Devolution"[2] he is writing about the influence of intelligence on modern society.
(Cyber colonialism of a newage technofeudalism)
Throughout the long and arduous course of human history, both progress and its horizontal transfer were an extremely slow, sporadic and tedious process. Only in the classical period of Alexander the Great and his magnificent Alexandrian library will the speed of transmission of our knowledge change; though modest, analogue, and backward—it still outpaced the snail's pace of our discovery cycle.
When our occasional revelations finally proved more frequent than the speed of our own infrequent transmissions, it marked the moment of our separation. Simply, our civilizations began to differ significantly from each other in technical-agrarian, military-political, ethno-religious, and ideological aspects, as well as in economic settings. Finally, the so-called the great discoveries are the event that transform wars and famines - from moderate and local - into global, pan-continental phenomena.
Rapid cycles of technological discoveries, patents and knowledge first took place on the Old Continent. This event with all its reorganizing effects reconfigured societies. Ultimately, it marked the birth of powerful European empires and their (liberal) schools, and the overall, lasting triumph of Western civilization. It radically mobilised Europe, weaponized science. (On the very subject of history of ‘weaponisation’ of Europe, I refer the curious reader on my text: Imperialism of Imagination, Geopolitics of Peter Pan.)
For centuries, we lived fear but dreamed hope - all in the name of the modern era: From the First World War to the Internet (from WWI to www.). Does this modernity of the digital/internet age, with all the instantly transmitted and publicized discoveries, lead us towards justice, harmony and the establishment of fair relations?
Is, and will our history ever be on holidays? So was our world ever more than an idea? Shall we briefly stop at Kant's word - the moral definition of the imagined future, or continue to look at the objective, geopolitical definition of our common tomorrow through the Hobbesian reality?
The agrarian era made the question of economic redistribution inevitable. The industrial age culminated in the issue of political participation. Artificial Intelligence - AI (quantum physics, nanorobotics and bioinformatics) brings a new, yet insufficiently anticipated challenge: human (physical and mental) powers may soon become obsolete. If and when that happens, the question of general human insignificance, that is, uselessness, follows.
Why is AI like no other technology before? Why our rethinking of spirituality is extremely important?
If you believe the above is nothing more than philosophical melodrama, anaemic alarmism, keep this in mind: Soon we will have to redefine what we considered life until now.
As of January 2020, intriguing scientific trials have been successfully concluded: The line between organic and inorganic, native and artificial (seemingly) has been erased forever. AI now includes everything: quantum physics (along with quantum computing), nanorobotics, bioinformatics, and organic tissue weaving. Synthesis of all commonly referred to as xenorobots (types of living robots) – biodegradable symbiotic nanorobots that solely rely on evolutionary (self-navigating) algorithms. The essential building blocks of biotronics are therefore there...
We are in a dangerous time of traps and delusions.
The trap, of course, is hidden in the naming: Intelligence (be it artificial) implies ancestry and development, general well-being. This is rather a tool offered by the prospect of digital captivity, the minority over the majority - the slenderness of knowledge over the sluggishness of ignorance, the naivety of the giver (of information) against the greed of the gatherer disguised in good intention.
It is a mistake to believe that our (social) actions are based on the analysis of facts. Historically, human actions (from collective war to individual marriage) have always been based on perception. So, it is about the perceived, not necessarily factual.
But, let's start in order.
Sometime in the pre-Christmas days of 2019, I wrote a short piece about artificial intelligence (AI) and our reckless glee at the indiscriminate application of this technology that could irreversibly change the fabric of society like never before in human history. Under the title "The future filled with empty choices - tomorrow (n)ever dies" the text appeared soon after in "New Europe" based (where else but) in Brussels, from where various media outlets carried it everywhere. The good old days before corona, and the two slaughterhouses (Eastern European and Middle Eastern) that we frivolously call wars ...
Particularly dark and accusatory, but – as it soon turned out – accurate, was the part about silence. It really deserves a full quote here:
“Aegean theater of Ancient Greece was a place of astonishing revelations and intellectual excellence – a remarkable density and proximity, not surpassed up to our age. All we know about science, philosophy, sports, arts, culture and entertainment, stars and earth has been postulated, explored and examined then and there.
Simply, it was a time and place of triumph of human consciousness, pure reasoning and sparkling thought. However, neither Euclid, Anaximander, Heraclites, Hippocrates (both of Chios, and of Cos), Socrates, Archimedes, Ptolemy, Democritus, Plato, Pythagoras, Diogenes, Aristotle, Empedocles, Conon, Eratosthenes nor any of dozens of other brilliant ancient Greek minds did ever refer by a word, by a single sentence to something which was their everyday life, something they saw literally on every corner along their entire lives.
It was an immoral, unjust, notoriously brutal and oppressive slavery system that powered the Antique state. (Slaves have not been even attributed as humans, but rather as the ‘phonic tools/tools able to speak’.) This myopia, this absence of critical reference on the obvious and omnipresent is a historic message – highly disturbing, self-telling and quite a warning for the present day.”
In his address in Paris on December 7, 2015 (on the occasion of the adoption of the successor to the famous Kyoto Protocol - the Paris document on the implementation of the UN Convention on Climate Change, COP21) - just one day after the great victory of the French extreme right - the UN Secretary General once again warned world leaders: "More than one billion people worldwide live without electricity. Nearly three billion people depend on suffocating, hazardous traditional fuels for cooking and heating. Likewise, access to modern, reliable, affordable clean energy is critical to eradicating extreme poverty and reducing inequality... The clock is ticking towards climate catastrophe.” Blandly ignoring internal French politics as well as hard evidence of climate change, all the international nihilists, professional optimists and other guardians of the status quo would call it 'environmental scandalism'... or political alarmism - it's the same.
After that came Marrakesh in 2016 (Marrakech Partnership for Global Climate Action launch), then Glasgow in 2021 (COP26), then CCC Dubai (COP28, Climate Change Conference 2023), but the rhetoric remained unchanged...
What is the real state of our planet?
***
Galileo famously said: “The universe is a grand book written in the language of mathematics“. However, what we now know is that to reveal this cosmic Esperanto wasn’t the most fascinating part.[3] This grand book of universe, we are reading and writing at the same time...
Back in the 1990s, there was a legendary debate between two eminent scientists; Carl Sagan, astrophysicist and Ernst Mayr, evolutionary biologist. The issue was the question of all questions – is there any intelligent life out there? Sagan – closer to mathematics, and the counting of starts and worlds attached to it – argued that out of all the innumerable planets like ours, life must flourish at many of them. Quite a few of them, he claimed, must have developed advanced forms of living beings. Mayr – on the other hand – argued the opposite. His pessimism was coming from his profession, not from his character that was as vivid and optimistic as Sagan’s: What biology is for the natural sciences, that is what a history is for human sciences – a spacetime-lined story of the past with a predicament, or sometimes an inevitable consequence, for our future. As prof. Noam Chomsky beautifully reminds us of this great episode, Ernst Mayr took our mother planet as an example to illustrate his claim.
All organisms share the same evolutionary mandate: to promulgate their own life. No wonder, as similar codes reside within all species – the intricate self-actualizing chemo-electrical tapestry, known as genes.[4] However, the so-called ultimate biological success of species could be measure by their number, configuration and durability. Hence, by all three parameters, prof. Mayr stressed, the most adaptive systems are those conducting fast (non-cognitive) mutations caused/triggered by any environmental stress (e.g. varieties of bacteria, creatures stuck in a fixed ecological niches, like beetles or some sea biotas), and surviving even larger crisis including the cataclysmic events. But, as we go up the scale of what we assume as intelligence, the systems become less adaptive and scarcer by number, configuration and durability. Arriving to the top (as we classified a tip of the intelligence pyramid), from low mammals to higher primates, apes and Homo sapiens, the species tend to image a rarifying picture – by all three biological success parameters.
By Mayr’s account, the average lifespan of upper-intelligence echelons is only around 100,000 years. Out of billions of spices that have inhabited (and quite some still inhabiting) our planet, we – along with other higher primates – are late arrival and temporal ‘accidents’. He attributes this to our intelligence, labeling it as a ‘lethal mutation’ – not a blessing but a curse. Mayr’s finding is intriguing: The higher the intelligence, the more likely to end up in self-destruction, past the transitioning on a curve of initial development. If so, that would mean that humans are unable to deploy their vast neuroplasticity, and that the mechanical solidarity of non-cognitive creatures gives far better results in preservation (even enhancement) of the environmental equilibrium.
Indeed, our environmental, financial and politico-economic policies and practices are creating the global stress for us and all other species. Each of our civilizational technological cycles intensified and expanded our overall conflict with life and the planet - thus, not a better adaptation but more violent antagonisation. (From the cell to Cosmos; from the smallest organised structure of life to the largest harmonised order of space-time, the system sustains itself on cooperation not on confrontation.)
Therefore, deep and structural, this must be a crisis of our cognitivity. It is so, since the antagonisation of nature cannot be development - just as technology (anthropotechnics) must not be the master of appropriation, but only the servant of creation.
Do we want to prove Mayr right with our global Jihad against a cognitive mind?
If the subatomic world emerges into the atomic one, the quantum scientist (or metaphysician) will call the physicist. If the atoms create more complex molecules, the physicist will turn to the chemist. If, on the other hand, such complex organic molecules evolve too complex for chemists, they will call in biologists. If such a biological system further consolidates, the matter is handed over to socio-political scientists or psychologists. And, finally, if this kind of biota becomes too complex, geopolitics is needed to connect (all) inorganic and organic systems into one coherent time-space narrative.[5] Do we really act this way?
From Copenhagen, Durban, Rio+20 to Paris COP 21 and on to Dubai at the end of 2023, our conclusion remains the same: we need principles and concerted action, since this is the only way to approach the difficult problems of this planet. We still haven't reached a consensus about the Bretton Woods institutions, Tobin's tax initiative, about the World Trade Organization and negotiations from the so-called The Doha Round, about limiting nuclear weapons, about migrants, the Slavic Guernica called Ukraine, the Middle East and the horrors of a 15-minute city called Gaza (whereby the bigger crime than that is our persistent silence about it) and the 'mantra' of regime change, about the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change), on the negotiations after those in Kyoto and Paris, on the so-called Covid-events that have significantly damaged our health, freedom and trust in science, about the so-called the great promise of AI, and finally, about the alarming state of our environment.
Issues are fundamental: Why has science converted into religion? Practiced economy is based on the over 200-years old liberal theory of Adam Smith and the over 300-years old philosophy of Hobbes and Locke– basically, frozen and rigidly canonized into a strict exegesis. Academic debate has been replaced by a blind obedience to old ‘scientific’ dogmas.[6]
Why has religion been transformed into confrontational political doctrine (holy scripts are misinterpreted and ideologically misused in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, the Americas and Africa)? Why have (secular or theological) ethics been turned from bio-centric comprehension into anthropocentric environmental egotism and ignorance (treating nature as property, rather than a coherent system that contextualizes our very life)? Why are – despite all our research studies, institutions and instruments – planetary inequalities and exclusions widening? Why has been our freedom reduced to a lame here-us-now choice to consume?
So, on a global level, we fundamentally disagree on the approach to the realities that our planet is facing, as well as on the ways of our attitude towards it. [In addition, we fundamentally disagree about the role of technology. When we talk about technology, it's not about the art of science, it's about the state of mind! It is not a linear progression in mastering the disciplines of natural sciences, but a cognitive puzzle in achieving critical insight.]
I am neither moralizing, idealizing nor agonizing. The world based on agreed principles and commonly willing actions is not a better place. It is the only way for the human race to survive.
We completely separated human development from economic, industrial from stock market, demographic growth from energy consumption. That's how we base all our business models on (the promise of) selling more and more goods to more and more people. As we do so, we sincerely hope for a new 'middle class boom' – with escalating purchasing power versus fast fashion in clothing, driving, telephoning, travel, warfare or medicine – that should sweep most of the Global South, as it peaks in the OECD countries.
If so, it means that we need three times more natural resources in 2050 than we consumed in 2010. Our huge ecological footprint is already exceeding our planetary limits of sustainability. While the Gini coefficient of that Oxfam study will tell us more about the ratio and proportion of guilt and sources of damage.
Clearly, our crisis is real, but neither sudden nor recent. Simply, our much-celebrated globalisation deprived from environmental concerns can only cage us into the ecological globalistan.[7]
In the modern scientific and philosophical (or astronomic, esoteric and theological) sense, the word cosmos should describe (a dependent origination of) everything (of the manifested, comprehensible and visible universe as well as the non-comprehensible potentiality and invisible universes/multiverse) that nature and/or God has created.[8] As everything that has been, is and will ever be conceived as a time–space, matter–energy and force (with all the properties and all their conceivable aggregate states/stages, elevations and degrees), particle – wave-function (consciousness-information), cosmos is nature and/or God itself. It is all that ever begins (from), lasts (with/in) and ends in (returns to) the quantum field.
Contemporary astrophysics claims that the known or comprehensible universe is expanding, still being powered by the quantum event generally referred to in literature as the big-bang (or perhaps the Higgs Boson particle recently reviled by CERN). Up to now, there is no general consensus of the scientific community on what is the property (nature) of the invisible, inter-stellar and inter-galactic space (dark matter). However, it is certain that the visible stellar universe is mainly composed of two elements only: helium and hydrogen. Thus, stars – this backbone of the universe – are predominantly (to 99%) made of these two elements. Tantalizingly enough, the colony of progressing biped primates, while evenly spreading over this planet, has developed a strong technological, civilizational and physiological culture of addiction to a completely other element: carbon.
We place ourselves in a centre of materialistic world – this, of what we perceive as a universe of dead (and linear) matter. Therefore, what we euphemistically call (anthropogenic) Climate Change is actually a brutal war against (living) nature. It is a covert armed conflict, since we are predominantly using the so-called monetizing-potent ‘technologies’, instead of firearms in our hands. (For this purpose hereby, the army units are replaced by the demolition-man of other name; ‘transnational corporations’.) This armed regime-change insurgency is waged against most of what is beautiful and unique on Earth – on the planet that gave us time and space enough to survive as species and to evolve as cognitive life. Thus, the known sustainability matrix of 3 maximums (of good, of species, and of time) becomes the minimum species, minimum time with a maximum harm.
Intentionally or not, it is a synchronized attack: We are steadily and passionately polluting our public sphere with the diverting banalities manufactured by the so-call social networks, reality shows, ‘celebrities’ and the like – trivializing the contents of our lives. At the same time, we are massively contaminating our biosphere (waters, lands, air and near outer space) with non-degradable and/or toxic, solid or aerosol, particles radiation and noise – irreversibly harming our habitat.[9]
We pollute the time as well, turning it into cross-generation warfare’s battlefield: Our dangerous patterns might seal off the fate for untold number of generations and sorts of species to come.[10] No wonder, our corrosive assertiveness has (time-space) parallels: acidifying of oceans and brutalization of our human interactions, as well as over-noising both of them, are just two sides of a same coin. What is the social sphere for society that is the biosphere for the very life on earth: the (space/time – content/form) frame we all live in.
Seems we pay our space (linear possessions) by our time (future). Therefore, our crisis cannot be environmental, as it was never a financial or security (war on terror) – our crisis must be a moral one. This is a cognitive deficit crisis, which we eagerly tend to spend in a limbo of denial!
In his famous speech of 1944, Max Planck spelled out something that philosophy, religion, astronomy and physics were indicating ever since the classic Greeks (or to be precise, since the ancient Vedic Sanskrit texts).[11] It laid down the foundation, not only of quantum physics[12] but also, of the so-called Unified Theory of Everything (TOE) as well as the (Coherent key to) Secrets of Creation. Moreover, it rejuvenated and reaffirmed many of the Buddhist Tantric perspectives, especially the metaphysical visions contained within the Yogacara,[13] as well as one of paticcasamuppada[14] – the so-called interdependent non-directional origination.
Hence, if one of the newest TOEs postulated by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow is correct – that the quantum universe, as a self-excited circuit, tends to create meaning and that the observers are part of the system – than the cosmos self-actualizes itself.[15] It concludes that, as the universe evolves, enabling organization to emerge, our consciousness creates the universe/multiverse.[16] If so, it leads to a self-actualization of us in cosmos too, as then the fundamental nature of reality should be a comprehensive and coherent self-perception.[17]
This TOE would then suppose our constant mastering of arts, which is not a ‘technology’ that preserves status quo, but is a technology that opens, liberates and expands. How can the carbon–addicted culture of fragile and insecure, but here-us-now assertive and corrosive bipeds, whose overall dynamics are largely determined by the binary (fight-flight, consume-abandon) actions of the reptilian complex consciously project an intelligent universe predominantly composed of helium and hydrogen in all its immensity?[18]
Nature does not change. Change (as a cosmic constant) is a nature itself. Still, even Heraclitus understood, this force is never eruptive or destructive (explosive, combusting and polarising), but eternally gradual and constructive (holistic, inclusive and implosive). A clear proof of this is that we, the 'masters of technology', predominantly use the so-called Explosive systems (based on internal combustion engines, and/or superheated jet/thrust) to meet our kinetic and thermal needs. Nature exclusively uses the so-called Implosive (self-sustaining, holistic) systems when he creates, and explosive only on rare occasions, when he destroys.
So, we don't know that much about nature and the cosmos. Look up the skies, that will be the exact way how entire universe works.[19]
We are drifting, dissolving and retreating on all levels and within each and every organic (marine and continental biota) or inorganic (soil, glaciers, water, polar caps, etc.) system. For the grave, burning (hydrocarbon) planetary problems, our human race needs an urgent and lasting consensus which presupposes bravery, virtue, vision and creativity. All this will not result from fear of coercion (social haircut, austerity, financial straitjacket), from a further militarization of our societies caused by the accelerated confrontations called ‘war against the invisible’ (germ or terror), but from the universally shared willingness to accord our common planetary cause. Cognitive mind can do it all.[20]
So, let's start a global war on terror - but this time - against the terror of the global ecological holocaust caused by the cognitive deficit crisis.
For the three most serious planetary challenges (technology, ecology, nuclear annihilation) we need an accurate, fair and timely multilateral approach. In this struggle for relevance, everyone has their stake, and their share of historical (generational) responsibility.
Back in 2011 (feeling the coming, but still not grasping the today's full amplitude and corrosiveness of digital colonialism, with devolved return to feudalism, imprisoning technologies), I coined the term McFB way of life. Then and there, in my book 'Is there Life After Fb', I also recorded this:
Contemplate the following situation: Your national security service sends a form to all its citizens' home addresses. There he asks them to start keeping a file about themselves, their family members and close friends, completely free of charge, but in detail and persistently, and all this in their own free time, to update this (written and audio-video) data, to classify, they archive, sort and send to the Service at least three times a week, for an indefinite number of years. This would most likely revolt the citizenry to the extent of current mass protests. In an atmosphere of total distrust, the country's government would have to resign with a deep, clear and multiple apology.
And now imagine an Orwellian world (of the future) in which such a form with the same request arrives in everyone's mailbox from a foreign private company. The local government feels this reluctantly and passively maintains it. But when it notices that the entire citizenry has accepted it en masse, and propagates it as a pleasant and useful entertainment (almost as a new standard of social behaviour), then the government also supports it more clearly, and in some places also (publicly) promotes it.[21]
Are the so-called AI promises obsolete (presence of artificial intelligence) - and therefore fears about it (because they are actually just algorithms and not intelligence, since intelligence must contain at least four components; linear, social, sensory and physical, and not only linear-computational, whatever strength and speed might be)?
Should (only) Big Brother be blamed in such an atmosphere? And who exactly is he? Will there ever be a greater 'Brother' than our own stupidity?
About author:
Anis H. Bajrektarevic is chairperson and professor in international law and global political studies, Vienna, Austria. He has authored eight books (for American and European publishers) and numerous articles on, mainly, geopolitics energy and technology. Professor is editor of the NY-based GHIR (Geopolitics, History and Intl. Relations) journal, and editorial board member of several similar specialized magazines on three continents. Earlier this year, his 9th book was issued in New York.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect IFIMES official position.
Ljubljana/Sarajevo/Vienna, 19 June 2024
[1] IFIMES – International Institute for Middle East and Balkan Studies, based in Ljubljana, Slovenia, has a special consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council ECOSOC/UN in New York since 2018, and it is the publisher of the international scientific journal "European Perspectives."
[2] This text is an excerpt from the author's introductory presentation at the conference of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina "Knowledge as a universal value - ethical and moral aspects" (held on May 8, 2024 in the main hall of ANUBiH).
[3] Same principles of physics rule all over the universe. Mathematics is needed to check up these laws – to explore, examine, prove and confirm them. (We sense physics but visualize it mathematically; e.g. we feel gravitation, but express it by mathematics.) Therefore, an advanced mathematics means elaborate understanding of nature around us and universe as such.
[4] Still, this recipe book for life – genes, are not performing in a strict chemical determinism. Self-actualization is a core of process. Even if applying a strict Darwinian stance, the evolution of species was not (solely) a selection through competition, but rather a well-calibrated interplay of both – cooperation and competition. Much like universe itself: (re-)creation and its maintenance.
[5] Original thought, but here and for this use significantly expanded, taken from Carl Sagan.
[6] Belief is confidence (promise of certainty), knowledge is evidence (probabilistic estimate of truth/insight into a coherent reality). Other word for religion is compliance; other word for science is doubt. Liberal, mesmerizing and attractive as it might be, “science is open-minded because it has no agenda”, as Mlodinow says. Enhancing good and avoiding evil is eternal inspiration for spirituality as well as the declared moral charge of any organized religion. Thus, it was maybe religion indeed that tranquilized, bonded and soul-deepened humanity in the course of centuries. Still, it was science and its approach to coherence of reality that steered up mankind towards a dwell of (applicable) knowledge previously unattainable by any other medium/means. Ergo, if pre-conscripted and canonized, that is never a science. It can only be a lame obedience.
[7] In order to maintain this kind of inversion (when this, what pretends to be, is actually not- since that is in fact diametrically opposite), it takes more than mere intellectual acrobatics, and our already proverbial ignorance: Orwellian control and Huxleyan deception. Namely, since the 20s of the last century, the engineers of social acceptance (manufactured consent) have been arguing about the most effective method (or combination of): total control - (repression of the external, omnipresent), or 'willing' self-trivialization (hedonistic floating without purpose and goal, including gender and any other fluidity). Hence, the overt coercion or covert extortion as the most effective tools for the steering of the social dynamics. Both of these schools got their own literary expressions: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and shortly after 1984 by George Orwell.
[8] Our cosmos is a finite but borderless ever-expanding (non-linear) multiverse. It can be tentatively illustrated as spherical, quite much as a surface of Earth that expands, plus 2-3 (non-areal) dimensions including the quantum one, too. Our universe/multiverse is relative in its contents (of histories and manifestations), and their constellations, but (to us) is absolute in its (space-time) omnipresence. Or, as Sagan beautifully concludes: ‘The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.’
[9] Obsessed with our own delusion of this cosmic disharmony, we must appear tragicomically standing poor, immature and alone against the omnipresent omnipotence of this opulent universe.
[10] In his highly intriguing but illuminating findings, Stephen Jay Gould reveals than in other mammalian species, the ‘murder’ rate is considerably higher than in human communities. If evidences of this historian of science and evolutionary biologist are accurate, that would mean that humans are genetically better off, but that are civilizationally wrong. No other but human species has ever represented a global threat on entire planetary life!!
[11] “All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force...We must assume behind this force existence of a consciousness and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.” Max Planck, Das Wesen der Materie (The Nature of Matter), Florence, 1944. At about the same time our joy for the ‘defensive modernization’ peaked with the mastering of the atomic bomb: the nuclear (weapon) age. Deeper implications and meanings of the quantum mechanics, nuclear physics, bioelectric medicine or neurocybernetics’ research of ganzfeld, for our understanding of and our engagement with the process of reality (and selfhood), were disregarded, marginalized and nearly forgotten. And Plank himself was considered as Quantum mystic.
[12] One of the fundamental laws of quantum physics says that an event in the subatomic world exists in all possible states until the act of observing or measuring it “freezes” that, or pins it down, to a single state. This process is technically known as the collapse of the wave function, where wave function means the state of all possibilities. Hence, the subatomic world can behave either as particles (precise things with a set location in space) or waves (diffuse and unbounded regions of influence which can flow through and interfere with other waves). Hence, of neither matter nor a place, quantum world is an event.
E.g. an electron is not a precise entity, but exists as a potential, a superposition, or sum, of all probabilities until we observe or measure it, at which point the electron freezes into a particular state. Once we are through looking or measuring, the electron dissolves back into the either of all possibilities. That means that reality must results from some elaborate interaction of consciousness with its environment. The confirmation comes from the past. Hebrews (the New Testament) 11:3 says: “What is seen was not made out of what is visible”. The XIII century Persia mystic Rumi looks like a pen-friend of Ludwig Boltzman. He seems as writing the letter to the father of astrophysics of the early XX century, when noting: “Look at these worlds spinning out of nothingness. That is within your power.”
[13] It’s absolutely astonishing that the ancient Sanskrit texts describe quantum vacuum and zero-point of the quantum field – by term sunya. This word should be interpreted as describing a cosmic seed of nothingness, which (hanging in a limbo of non-experience) is swollen by potentiality – an egg of infinite potentiality or shunyata on a brink to burst into a deep infinite-dimensional sea of manifestation/s. No wonder that the arithmetic sign for zero (that the rest of us took from Hindus) is actually an egg-shape, the same one called ‘origin’ in geometry to mark the center or beginning of a coordinate plane.
[14] Esoteric teachings of paticcasamuppada are considered a core of Buddhism. Applying the extensive philosophical interpretation to this teaching, it remarkably fits to the astrophysical theory of the so-called dependent (interpenetrating) origination. It also well supports basic laws of both quantum mechanics and evolutionary biology about a self-organizing system in an ever self-expanding, dynamic equilibrium which is rather dialectic than a directional.
[15] Sharing this anthropic viewpoint that the quantum wavefunction of the primordial meaningless universe stands on the very edge of time-space and meaning, and that the collapse of the wavefunction (an inception of cosmos) marks materialization of previously shapeless, non-experienced potentiality (that becomes possibility, an experienced classical event, by action of conscious-ness), Henry Stapp describes potentiality-consciousness as: ‘the two-way quantum psycho-physical bridge’. Conclusively, if we are to identify the meeting ground for the comprehensive and lasting reconciliation between science and religion, we must further investigate ‘Stapp’s bridge’. E.g. in mental(ly experienced) space, mind and matter move together as one.
[16] It would correspond to the Buddhist expression karma (usually misinterpreted in the West by reducing it to a lame moral conscript). The word karma has far more extensive meaning in Buddhism and should be understood as an (intractable) action which leaves an informational imprint in all deeper levels of realities which can be activated at some future point in time. Hence, this self-synthesizing universe paradigm of quantum physics fully corresponds with the Buddhist Yogacara assumption that all perceptions do leave traces which make future similar perceptions more probable/plausible – origins of the potentialities within the quantum realm. This is why mankind kept practicing a prayer..
[17] Vedas describes it as siddhis – psychic event (comes after profound meditative states) when the meditator experiences a feeling of omniscient knowing – a sense of seeing everywhere at once (a state of illuminating darkness, of superrich nothingness); or when the subject enters a state of unity with the single object being focused upon (sometimes followed by a psychokinetic effect: levitation or moving objects at a distance). In nearly every instance, the recipient eliminates the sensory bombardment of everyday and taps into a deep well of alert receptivity. Could it be that this art is like any other form of communication, but the noise of our everyday McFB life prevents us hearing it?
[18] Just one illustration that for our civilizational and/or developmental dead-ends, we do need cognitive mind to recognize it, not the ‘technology’ to ‘fix it’. For that sake, let us examine the so-called locomotoric engines (Otto’s ICE), which we use for transportation as well as for energy conversion/transfer. (We sow it first used by Chinese and Ottomans for guns and canons since they are in effect a one-cylinder internal combustion engines – ICE. Its military deployment we wanted to domesticate by using these destructive devices in a constructive way?!?) There is absolutely no need for any ICE’s fuels or combustion efficiency improvements. What is required is a new approach, new philosophy. And, it is to depart from the 150-years-in-use very harming explosive systems (unclosed circuits), and their replacement with a nature-coherent and nature-complimenting technology of implosive systems. Explosion sets chemo-electric, electro-magnetic and thermo-kinetic energy by the hydrocarbon’s combustion and the subsequent exhaustion of emission pressure, temperature and shock-waves to outside, while implosion just tackles available ionosphere’s energy charge (which is always a non-carbonic) into motion, or transmits it without losing or releasing any harmful substances. (No wonder that even today, the aborted development of e.g. anti-gravitational ship, flying disk, etc., we attribute to Aliens or classify as the UFOs.)
[19] (Anthropo-)biology is only the outer layer in our comprehensive scientific grasp. In its core, resides physics. And the backbone of physics is mathematics – this universal language of cosmos.
[20] Cognitive mind can do it all. Even, in the most literal sense… E.g. the human brain has an effective computing power of about ten to 100 petaflops (quadrillions of operations per second). The most powerful computes that we have today in the world are also rated at about ten to 100 petaflops. The only problem is that each such a device is the size of living room, cost some €200 million, and annually produces an electricity bill of some €3 million.
[21] Yet another ancient Hindu text elaborating on the nature of reality (which is not a relatively known Shrimad Bhagavad Gita, whose insights seems originating from beyond the comprehensible world), is a less know Ashtavakra Gita. This book is a recap of ancient-time dialogues between sage named Ashtavakra and his king Janaka. The world described in this manuscript is a creation of outer mind. Ordinary folk is trapped in the matrix-like reality due to their disregard to true knowledge. The most tantalizing chapter is a conversation between the King and sage about the need to free from the clutches of this illusory matrix. It falls rather close to how Morpheus saves Neo from the computer generated reality (the 1999 movie Matrix). By applying the sage’s prescribed methods, the King Janaka firstly grasps the illusory nature of the constructed world, and soon after wakes up to a true reality.
