Shaking Hands with Our Future:
Do We Live in The Matrix?
Posted by: Remoteviewer on Saturday, July 01, 2006 - 10:16 AM
American Chronicle
Gary S. Bekkum
June 30, 2006
Does the future reach backwards to determine the past?
The reasonable answer is no, at least not in the material universe around us.
For conscious sentient intelligent beings, the answer isn't so simple. The CIA STAR GATE documents prove that the U.S. Government would like to know more about the day after tomorrow.
Now we may know why.
Many years ago I was thinking about the best way to explain weird metaphysical phenomenology and the psychology beneath our experience of the future, and concluded that a coherent explanation must involve a model of the physics of information. It also happened that around the same time period, a mini revolution was taking place in physics and information in the form of quantum information theory.
Traditional systems of applied metaphysics typically involve highly developed and complex landscapes of characters, forms, and emotions interacting under strictly controlled protocols. This is sometimes reduced in description to the word "ritual" with attendant meanings open to interpretation.
Information theorist Seth Lloyd, an MIT expert in quantum computing, in a recent discussion at www.edge.org , stated that, "Many of the systems we regard as processing information, particularly sophisticated ones, have a notion of correspondence of a message with something else ... I regard those as emergent features that we can only ascribe to objects like living things, or perhaps to life itself. Those emergent features are very important. However, it is possible for a system to register information without that information having some kind of semantic meaning."
Seth Lloyd has been exploring the ultimate limits of computation. Lloyd's explorations are extremely important for our understanding of the fundamental role of information and quantum mechanics in the operation of the universe, where everything that exists can be viewed as performing a computation, including atoms and their constituent particles. Such an approach fails to address the celebrated author Douglas Adams' famous "ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything."
Over the last several years the information revolution has been complemented by an increase in data about the construction of the universe. As a result there is now a general consensus that what was traditionally called the universe is only a member of an infinite set of all possible worlds collectively known as the multiverse. Recently physicist and string theorist Leonard Susskind added the word megaverse to refer to those worlds in the multiverse which are actualized.
Given this enormous set of worlds as fertile ground for the imagination of mankind, the metaphysical and the physical once again have embraced, at least briefly, and have perhaps made a temporary truce. The ground of being is no longer terra firma, it shifts and sways to the beatnik strains of the meta-mega-physicalist.
Dr. George Ryazanov is a Russian physicist with a strong interest in unifying a vision of physics and metaphysics in a grand synthesis he calls the syncretic science of the future. Ryazanov's ideas are rooted in the concept of the opposition of coincident objects, in particular the symmetry of two signs of time. Two signs of time refer to advanced information processing from the future, and retarded information processing from the past. Many years ago Ryazanov experienced a metaphysical visitation and was inspired to recreate an old idea originally attributed to the renowned physicist Richard Feynman, but with a twist.
In Ryazanov's version, two worlds, one reaching backwards in time from the future, and the other reaching forwards from the past, shake hands together and co-evolve the present moment. Welcome to your future self. The past is no longer fixed, but mutable.
For Seth Lloyd, the physical universe is the ultimate computer, performing at the limit of all possible computations.
In Lloyd's worldview, the quantum universe works like an enormously powerful computer. We live in a quantum universe, under absolute quantum rule. There is a small problem, one that Lloyd is still considering in the new light of his information revolution. Einstein's legacy, of space and time bending and curving, of black holes and wormholes cutting through vastly separated regions and times, has yet to fully yield to the quantum kingdom. There appears to be room, at the end of the universe, for a menu that derives ultimate meaning from the final thought of our future self.
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