The following is the abstraction of a topic currently featured in V.H. Ironside, Behold! I Teach You Superman.
“Behold,
a river that floweth back unto its source in many windings!”
Nietzsche
We cannot get around the riddle of
creation, no matter what. Identify the supreme reality with the supreme
objective, however, and all else follows naturally. The strongest clue, and
perhaps part of the answer, lies in the fact that after the Singularity the
future becomes a consequence of the past. A minute change in the initial
conditions can make a very substantial difference to subsequent results,
admittedly, but the future will still be the product of an initial number of
mutually dependent variables.
pliable analogy). Rather than
listing the various ecliptic possibilities, such as annual, partial, total,
solar, lunar etc., let me say that the interception of a luminous body by the
interposition of another body between itself and the eye of the observer, is
what constitutes an eclipse. Without the observer, there would be no acknowledgment. As in the case of a total eclipse, such
as that of the Sun for instance, it would be seen along a narrow band called
the band of totality. Outside this band the screening of the Sun by the Moon
when seen from the Earth is only partial. But either way, it has to be so
aligned in order to qualify as an eclipse.
Now,
all these effects can be calculated in detail. Extrapolations, in other words,
can be directed backwards to determine previous eclipses. Conversely,
predictions can be made with a view to future eclipses. This may seem obvious,
even self-evident. The point, however, is that although the notion of a
trajectory implies clear knowledge of its progression, the eclipse only comes
into existence at the moment that we observe it, i.e., when the alignment is
complete. The act of observation, in other words, has not only created the eclipse but its complete and entire past.
It
may seem ludicrous to claim that the eclipse actually antedates the causal
conditions it appears to initiate. But my own view, from this perspective, is
that unless lodged firmly in the sense data of intelligent observation, any
such alignment is devoid of meaning. That it hinges on one’s ability to
reverse-engineer its past as one would the backward movement of a clock. For it
is at this point alone that we are able to determine what the initial
conditions of our evolving universe might actually have looked like. And this
becomes obvious when one imagines the Eclipse as a causal description of our
knowledge, so that if our knowledge is modified in any way, the past too is
bound to retro-activate and assimilate.
In obvious
ways, and allowing for the great differences in scale and structure, this
metaphor parallels the past performance of a subatomic particle which is not defined until a measurement has been made.
Because of the inherent uncertainty of all the parameters describing a
particle’s activities, Heisenberg held
that both the past and the future were
unknowable, and that “the path comes into existence only when we observe it”. Paul
Davies called it ‘the feedback loop,’ with its mandatory reflection on the
retroactive importance of cause and effect. The Danish physicist Holger Bech Nielsen
refers to it as “a formula for which the history of the universe, in agreement
with the equation or motion (in this case, with the present or future), is
going to be selected as the one that
is realised.” For without so counter-effective an extrapolation backward to the
microphysical processes of the early universe,
it may mean, simply, an imaginary event which is ideally but not
literally true, residing only in the consciousness of some mind whose supremacy
is undoubted but not easily defined. Berkeley called it the mind of God. His
solution was an ingenious one.
And
God, of course, is precisely the reason for introducing the ecliptic analogy;
here intended in the conceptual sense as
an ocular allegory for the missing ‘selection criterion’ and the only plausible
explanation of why the universe is the way it is. For the implication is clear,
unless lodged firmly in the sense data of intelligent perception, any planetary
or ecliptic alignment is devoid of meaning - as is “the flash on a zinc-sulfide
screen on some faraway planet where there is no life,” (John Wheeler); unless
of course, frozen in a moment of history, it is “brought to a close by an irreversible
act of amplification.”[1]
Not everyone agrees, but you may as well conclude at this point that the ‘act’
of human observation sends a signal not just across space but also across time back to the moment when the lone ‘irrelative’ atom was first released,
determining which history it went into. For the simple fact of the matter is
that the act of observation has not only created the universe but its complete
and entire history, and it is nonsense to assume that, and I quote, “the universe
existed for fourteen billion years before we arrived, and will continue exactly
as before after we have disappeared.”[2]
Nonsense, I repeat, precisely because on this scale of reciprocity, and
therefore on this scale of power to affect and be affected by the future, the perception of the past is not a property
that functions as an alternative to, nor
independent of the future.
Let’s
face it, things are animate only because of the way the mind interacts with
matter, and we cannot even begin to distinguish their outlines until we
discover ways of representing them. Or to
put it another way, it is only once
we are imposing a mental structure upon the world of chaos that we can commence
to activate its features. Features which exist in nature in the same potential
sense as an unlimited number of prospective sculptures may exist in a slab of
Carrara marble. But until the means to carve them out have been discovered,
they are, I’m afraid, potential rather than actual.
 |
| More to the point: It's the other way round! |
 |
| One of the best attested if most improbable of illusions.... |
[1]
Quoted in J. Bernstein, Quantum Profiles. Opus cit. p. 131/132
[2]
Michael Frayn. Quoted in CULTURE p. 46, The
Sunday Times 17.09.2006
[3]
C. A. Ronan, The
Natural History of the Universe. Opus cit. p. 186
---------------------------------------------------------------
VH Ironside is the author of the fabled The Willers of the Will, first published in 1996, now out of print!
---------------------------------------------------------------
VH Ironside is the author of the fabled The Willers of the Will, first published in 1996, now out of print!
No comments:
Post a Comment