The Moonshine Memoranda: THE "AUTHORIZED VERSION OF REALITY"

The following is the abstraction of a topic currently featured in V.H. Ironside, Behold! I Teach You Superman :

Considered, then, as a human story, the history of the Universe is the record of a major biological species which allowed its evolution to be guided by conscious reflection. And considering the remarkable progress science has made in the last hundred years, or the part physics has played in changing our perception of the nature of reality from being independent of man to being warped by the observer, nothing could be more opposed to the divinely predestined and more or less infallible laws of Laplace and Newton.
And yet, this is ‘Metaphysics’ in its most profound and mysterious sense. We may call it operational or mechanical as we chose, but the universe is not, indeed, an ex post facto study in the precise mathematical laws which led, step by step, to the creation of the world. There are other forces at work. Dogma is resolved and redundant. Stagnation has given way to a restless, creative ferment, and, with the lapse of direction, so has time. Solving mysteries of facts, science has surrendered to the greater mysteries of interpretation. Facts are lifeless and can be circumscribed, ideas belong to the living mind and can be read between the lines. Hence Spengler’s profound reflection that “The will-to-system is a will to kill something living, to ‘establish’, stabilize, stiffen it, to bind it in the train of logic. The intellect has conquered when it has completed the business of making rigid.”^{^[1]}

In fact, there is a great deal of plausibility in the suggestion that ‘modern elementary particles are no longer very Newtonian.’ Newtonian particles merely appear as stationary states in a moving concept of matter and fields – a source of stillness at the eye of the virtual storm. But elementary particles moving in virtual fields remain indistinct from it, because a community exists between space (or spacetime) and matter. Nor are the processes of the human mind irrelevant to the tough, rigorous examination of reality which used to be the hallmark of science - or independent of it. Indeed, there is a further constituent; I would suggest, a crucial compositional one, that has been overlooked: if mass equals energy, consciousness equals ‘free’ energy. Classical physics, with its extreme structural simplicity, postulated fundamental relationships between the properties of mass and energy for example, or their inertial and gravitational manifestations. Free energy seeks to elevate these into a conceptual principle working mysteriously at great distances and on a scale even of individual synchronicities. And this is a fact of which the enormous implications have never been acknowledged, let alone correctly interpreted.

Or does it seem possible to disentangle the process from the principle; to probe

beyond science into thought itself? To separate the energy of light from its frequency? To draw a distinction, in other words, between the warping of physical space and the warping of mental objectives which define physical space? For together these two provide the inside track, compelling for its cause and effect, but strangely lacking in analysis of the enormous repercussions for the relationship between lawfulness and due process, between fields of force and forces themselves. Inevitably, one has to remember that mass, measurement, energy and the passage of time itself must vary according to the observer who can impose particle or wave behaviour on light. And while it is entirely reasonable to say that “A true fundamental theory of the universe may exist, but could be just too hard for human brains to grasp”^{^[2]} (Lord Rees), its compositional symptoms nevertheless arise from mental processes, corroborating the direct effects of knowledge on our physical experience. Actually, one might go further, and argue that it would be an elementary error in all forms of scientific epistemology not to treat mind and matter as one continuous entity. In fact, it is the abiding oversight of human higher-order consciousness that it confuses cognition with synapses and different neurons in various parts of the brain, when an investigation into the nature of consciousness certainly

ought not to terminate in neuro-science. This is the heart of the matter. So far from being a mere instrument of perception in which all have acquiesced and which all take for granted, the cognitive function is not a method. It is not even the operating system. It is the very nature of our cosmic identity, the converting principle of a medium whose boundaries may be glimpsed intermittently as the effect of our own self-conscious comprehension. Left unsaid, but certainly part of the epistemologist’s comprehension, is the growing realization that the phenomenon under investigation is not the Universe which, at any rate, cannot be replicated without the brain, but but an ex post facto rationalization of reality’ – a product - authorized by physicists. You may not wish to contest the ‘authorized’ version, but even without fully appreciating the connection, you play your own transforming part in the process. Fact and faculties are part and parcel of a single conceptual transaction.