Saturday, July 20, 2013

Open Systems and Cyclical Anomalies


Predictability and Chaos

One of the most difficult challenges with the scientific investigation of anomalies of any stripe is their shared key characteristic of unpredictability in every imaginable category, which hearkens back to the origin of physics. Until the advent of quantum physics, the workings of the universe was given a theory by consensus that it was akin to a precise, perfectly tuned clockwork.
We know that any cycle works by repetition within a measurable framework in a closed system just as we measure space by time through the orbital rotation of our planet and using weather prediction as a forecasting tool based on probability, using stationary points of observation that correlate data, we can say rain today has a 75% chance of occurring between such and such time in a specific location. One of the difficulties of predicting periods of heightened anomalous experiences may be attributed to the interconnection between an individuals biological energy field and anomalies we are aware of in our energy environment, but they remain elusive in of themselves in terms of their nature, let alone, their influence on perception.
That being the case, one can say that the behavior of animals in terms of fleeing an area or demonstrating anomalous behaviors just prior to a seismic event is a simplistic yet mysterious interconnection that may be due to the nature of environmental energy.
This is no example of hoo-doo but rather worthy of further examination as cited in this research paper.

 "Appearance of anomalies in the atmosphere before earthquakes (EQs) has been verified, through observation of anomalous transmission of VHF electromagnetic (EM) waves beyond line-of-sight. Anomalous increase of the received intensity for a few minutes - several hours on a day was identified by the previous 15-day running median and its inter-quartile range. The cross-correlation between the EQ occurrences and the anomalies shows that the appearance of anomalies was significantly enhanced within 5 days before M ≥ 4.8 EQs. The one-day average number of the anomaly appearance within 5 days was found 2.4 times larger than that of other days. Through the polarization measurement of the received EM waves, the anomalies were found to occur in the atmosphere."

In the research of causation regarding extraordinary experiences, the critical assumption is to focus on the individuals experience, and thus separating the experience from environmental factors, more specifically, we do not exist in a stable or fixed electromagnetic field. Gravitational anomalies are another factor which science has identified as being interconnected to crystalline deposits in the geological environment that influence the atmospheric energy fields.. We live in, not one, but several environments, just as we do not exist in one reality, but several parallel realities. Aldous Huxley stated the matter sufficiently, when he observed we are amphibious by nature, just as metaphysicians put the matter as we exist in a isthmus

   Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” 
― Aldous HuxleyComplete Essays 2, 1926-2

Predictability and The Issues of Open Systems
One of the weakest links in theory and practice in analyzing anomalous events is it's incommensurable root in relation to causation and so the focus has been for some time among various researchers to approach the problem of predictability in reverse order. In other words the focus has been on where and when such events occur and analyse the resulting data, by searching for patterns of repetition The critical assumption being that these manifestations occur within a closed system, rather than an open one..
John Keel, who was known to carry his tongue firmly in cheek, while being self skeptical of his own suspicions, suggested that the 24th of every month appeared to coincide with a variety of anomalous events.
We tend to forget that non predicted anomalies occur elsewhere, whether it is ocean currents, the stock market, solar activity, etc and if you go searching for a comprehensive list of them, the potential list of the unpredictable is inexhaustible, whereas predictive events are comparatively rare. The discernment between living systems and mechanical systems seems to have been misplaced due to reductionism used to make the complex, "understandable", resulting in a series of evolving mythos.
One could suggest that closed systems are rarer than open systems in terms of  having repeatably predictive behavior and probability whether we use our own experience or read a daily newspaper. And so is the lack of predictive repeatability, a reliable arbiter to suggest that the paranormal is simply a figment of one's mind?
Of course, it is not. It could be that the very concept of a closed system is an absurdity and that open systems are the glue between various material and non material manifestations An apt example of open systems interacting is perhaps exemplified by the fact that dogs can predict an epileptic seizure up to 45 minutes before it happens. No one really knows what dogs are picking up on, but there are theories that it might have something to do with an unknown smell or tiny behavioral changes. Dogs can also sniff out cancers. 
For anyone interested in this topic, one can examine a state of energy, and this being what we call a heightened emotional state, which, of course has to due with activity in the physical brain as well as in the mind, this scientific paper should be of keen interest as far as the relationship between outer and inner states, leading to an anomalous state of both that could well be regarded as an example of open systems.

http://archived.parapsych.org/papers/47.pdf

A Transient Coherence of Patterns
In terms of a pattern of events versus chaos, even a pattern has variability within a pattern that is cyclic and is repetitive, and so the analysis of emergent patterns is not a simple matter as it has been shown through Chaos Theory, while there may be a pattern present, the pattern may not be related to the subject of the search. One could consider this the weakness of the NSA's domestic intelligence monitoring of our communications as an aggregated sum. Then there a transient trends, sometimes termed transient coherence or more familiar to those who study atmospheric anomalies these are termed wave patterns.



Mind and Matter as Open Systems
What may be a significant clue that the biological aspect of the mind may be subject to cyclic influences is a state of brain wave activity in terms of cyclic experiential anomalies is known as the Theta State.
From the Skeptico website:

"Claims of telepathy, ESP and other psi phenomena are a mainstay of popular culture but taboo in neuroscience research circles.  Fortunately, Dr. Michael Persinger of Canada’s Laurentian University has never been afraid to venture where other researchers fear to go. In the 1980′s Persinger made headlines with his “God Helmet”, a device that stimulates temporal lobes with a weak magnetic field in order to produce religious states.
Now, Persinger has discovered the same type of brain stimulation can create metal states conducive to human telepathy.  “What we have found is that if you place two different people at a distance and put a circular magnetic field around both, and you make sure they are connected to the same computer so they get the same stimulation, then if you flash a light in one person’s eye the person in the other room receiving just the magnetic field will show changes in their brain as if they saw the flash of light. We think that’s tremendous because it may be the first macro demonstration of a quantum connection, or so-called quantum entanglement. If true, then there’s another way of potential communication that may have physical applications, for example, in space travel.”
While Persinger’s experiments could prove groundbreaking, he remains doubtful about his controversial findings reaching his colleagues, “I think the critical thing about science is to be open-minded. It’s really important to realize that the true subject matter of science is the pursuit of the unknown. Sadly scientists have become extraordinarily group-oriented. Our most typical critics are not are mystic believer types.  They are scientists who have a narrow vision of what the world is like.”"

http://www.skeptiko.com/michael-persinger-discovers-telepathic-link/

In this, several researchers such as myself have suggested that there is no single bullet that sets off  chain of transient trending, although both of Princeton's PEAR study and Global Consciousnesses data appear to refute this suspicion. Oddly, in one of his last lectures, entitled Portents and Fortents, John Keel reviewed a pattern that linked key historical events to increased paranormal activity through wave patterns, long before the Global Consciousness Project  found any substantiation of a pattern and this pattern that was specifically assigned to shared , emotional states on the planet. Dr Brian Joesphson of Cambridge University who recently presented a paper entitled "Biological Observer-Participation and Wheeler’s ‘Law without Law" suggested ( I think rightfully) that biological systems must be accounted for when attempting to define the observer effect, which if we take emotional states as having a profound influence on the observer effect, this would go a long way in supporting the global shared emotional states found by Princeton to have a profound effect of statistical patterns versus random results .
Another aspect of interaction between the energy environment and the individual human energy field is that this field is cyclical and directly linked to the observer's relationship to perception. A goof example of this is what is known as the Theta state of the brains wave activity, which some researchers have suggested bears some indication that there is a relationship between vivid, waking and REM dream states, precognitive dreams as well as other anomalous phenomenon, and so we may have a more complex case of proverbial wheels within wheels in macro quantum phenomenon, such as UFO wave activity..

http://phys.org/news/2013-07-big-schroedinger-cats-quantum-boundary.html

Wherein if we share a network envisioned by the results of data correlations as In Princeton's Global Consciousness Project, the atmosphere may serve as an energetic medium to create phenomenon that is in a intermediate state, neither solid nor intangible, existing in a transient wave form, akin to the nature of consciousness itself.

https://neurocogconsultants.app.box.com/s/l9f7tld3yjny4b00eqbq/1/207365383/1583371865/1

One researcher, cited by Keel in his book , "Our Haunted Planet" who worked at Princeton's Bell Laboratory did an averaged analysis of global wave activity that was emergent in a cycle of 9.6 years. Take the date of the Phoenix Lights and count forward. However, the term "wave activity" was coined long before the advent of quantum realities that mark Huxleys "amphibious" observer to the predictability of quantum wave activity in terms of an equal isthmus between a wave and a particle.Interestingly, science has begun to use wave activity to more fully understand human death processes, from beyond the biological processes in of themselves.



Holon Theory A Key to A Tumbler of Factors?
What I suspect is that there are several cycles involved that interact with one another and so it would be difficult to assign any dualism to this, terming them either exclusively closed or exclusively open. They appear to have characteristics of both. An apt analogy would be the cycling of orbital rotation of planets etc within a solar system. Some orbits and transit times are longer or shorter than others, some have a more elliptical path and yet all are influenced by one another, and to some extent within variations some can align to produce a more profound effect and other times, this is not so. Think of the difference between watching one clock and several at the same time while one clock influences another at varying rates, and yet as a whole, they operate as a system while at first glance all this seems chaotic  Again, none of this is simple nor should it be discounted. One could say that mentally and physically, our species individually on the surface and as a whole has both similarities and differences and yet we are one species, not several species.
Of course, to some degree, the environment plays a role when searching for effects rather than causation as David Rountree has pioneered the study of this aspect of anomalies which also can be compared to Dr Josephson's reasonable suggestion that our biology ( more specifically neurology has a strong influence on the observer effect. and in this case, David studies various bands of interacting field strengths to determine their influence ( if any) on the manifestation of experiential anomalies. A further extension of the study of our energetic planetary environment may lead to a connection that hearkens back to the periodicity of extra-planetary fields that wax and wane such as solar activity, which in of itself, is a mystery in terms of it's cycling, at the root of it's largely unpredictable and transient patterns  of storms, flares and sunspots. One could perhaps say that the unpredictability of wave activity in the study of the anomalous is a microcosm of other phenomenon, seemingly interconnected by an application of Arthur Koestler's Holon Theory. An accurate summation of his theory is found in Wikipedia, easily accessed by anyone, and yet the author of "The Ghost in The Machine" is largely forgotten.
The summation is as such:
"A holon (Greek: ὅλον, holon neuter form of ὅλος, holos "whole") is something that is simultaneously a whole and a part. The word was coined by Arthur Koestler in his book The Ghost in the Machine (1967, p. 48). Koestler was compelled by two observations in proposing the notion of the holon. The first observation was influenced by Nobel Prize winner Herbert A. Simon's parable of the two watchmakers, wherein Simon concludes that complex systems will evolve from simple systems much more rapidly if there are stable intermediate forms present in that evolutionary process than if they are not present. The second observation was made by Koestler himself in his analysis of hierarchies and stable intermediate forms in both living organisms and social organizations. He concluded that, although it is easy to identify sub-wholes or parts, wholes and parts in an absolute sense do not exist anywhere. Koestler proposed the word holon to describe the hybrid nature of sub-wholes and parts within in vivo systems. From this perspective, holons exist simultaneously as self-contained wholes in relation to their sub-ordinate parts, and dependent parts when considered from the inverse direction.
Koestler also says holons are autonomous, self-reliant units that possess a degree of independence and handle contingencies without asking higher authorities for instructions. These holons are also simultaneously subject to control from one or more of these higher authorities. The first property ensures that holons are stable forms that are able to withstand disturbances, while the latter property signifies that they are intermediate forms, providing a context for the proper functionality for the larger whole."
Any beginning physics students knows that energy and information are transcriber to one another and of course, the scientific quantum revolution suggests that the observer of phenomenon is a steering influence in determining predictive and repeatable behavior, but what of the millions of us as an aggregate observer much like the metaphoric Adam Kadmon who was one and yet many. Dr Persinger of Laurentian University has used the analogy of individual computers as stand in for individual beings that share a common network.



The Cyclical Lives of  Theories
What Vallee found as well as myself in a different series of contexts far afield from his own is that archaic metaphysical texts have an odd correspondence with new discoveries in physics.One of the most familiar examples of this correspondence of ancient metaphysical texts being applicable to contemporary quantum physics ia the relatively well known series of discussions between the Dali Lama of Tibetan Buddhism and physicists. Then we have Dr Persinger searching for what he terms "extrasolar influences" meaning that energy waves from a source outside the predictable patterns of energy exchanges  between bodies within our own system may be partly responsible for this "wave" activity, which then hearkens back to Rodney Collin's  non scientific treatise,who, as a disciple of PD Ouspensky that was entitled "The Celestial Influence"  that suggested that much the same could be occurring and wrote the book in the hope that science would take such a possibility seriously in order to analyse it.Unfortunately copies of this book as well as others are hard to come by.

http://www.holybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/The-Theory-of-Celestial-Influence.pdf

The Janus Face of Experiential Reality
If physics is correct in their critical assumption that energy and information are the Janus face of phenomenon regardless of how we classify events, it would be surprising if synchronicity in and as presages to anomalous and transient waves of anomalous activity did not occur and yet it seems in terms of our search for coherent cycles that lie behind the wave effect of anomalous events, we are stuck in a asynchronous situation analogous to  the absence of weather prediction decades ago. Meaningful coincidence can be analysed outside of one's own subjectivity toward valuation if we simply compare the entrainment of  seemingly disparate events that are as self organizing as in Koestler's Holon theory, that seemingly defy blind probability, let alone such phenomenon taking up the ladder of complexity to the realm of precognition.
Dr Jacques Vallee's recent presentation at TED on his theory of everything being information in various interactive states is, if anything, an intriguing possibility and yet we remain in Borge's "Library of Babel", a metaphor in light of the relationship between energy and information.
 In this short story Borges's narrator describes how his universe consists of an enormous expanse of interlocking hexagonal rooms, each of which contains the bare necessities for human survival—and four walls of bookshelves. Though the order and content of the books is random and apparently completely meaningless, the inhabitants believe that the books contain every possible ordering of just a few basic characters (23 letters, spaces and punctuation marks). Though the majority of the books in this universe are pure gibberish, the library also must contain, somewhere, every coherent book ever written, or that might ever be written, and every possible permutation or slightly erroneous version of every one of those books. The narrator notes that the library must contain all useful information, including predictions of the future, biographies of any person, and translations of every book in all languages. Conversely, for many of the texts some language could be devised that would make it readable with any of a vast number of different contents.
Despite — indeed, because of — this glut of information, all books are totally useless to the reader, leaving the librarians in a state of suicidal despair. This leads some librarians to superstitions and cult-like behavior, such as the "Purifiers", who arbitrarily destroy books they deem nonsense as they scour through the library seeking the "Crimson Hexagon" and its illustrated, magical books. Another is the belief that since all books exist in the library, somewhere one of the books must be a perfect index of the library's contents; some even believe that a messianic figure known as the "Man of the Book" has read it, and they travel through the library seeking him.
Perhaps the metaphysical equivalence is Attar's "Conference of The Birds"  which may be an apt commentary on human desires  as told in the metaphor related to the search by a flock of birds for a anthropomorphic deity that is a bias projection of themselves as if they themselves were gifted with  a incommensurable knowledge of a universe unchanging, again, as in the discarded theory of the universe as a work of precision machinery rather than a living creature. It would seem the library is as evolving as the microcosm of any creature walking, crawling or swimming upon the Earth. 
Perhaps this Janus face of energy and information is the crux of animism, another ancient system of interaction by way of metaphysics that has evolved into pantheism.

A Mirror Universe
One gets the impression that we reside in a universe of our own habitation, that explores it's nature through us as we explore the universe to learn of our own nature. The renowned Islamic metaphysician Ib Al-Arabi , suggested that if one can learn what is between the mirror and the image, that is as far as it is humanly possible in terms of attaining a transpersonal, experiential reality that allows for some insight as to this situation. In other texts, the human being is seen as an isthmus in a mirror universe between environments, or as Huxley observed, we are amphibious by nature. Even the distinction of "I'  versus "Not I" at some point becomes a provincial distinction wrought by biology. Is there a ecclesiastical season for all things under heaven, just as there are the "seasons" of REM and waking consciousness albeit in a greater velocity of cycling? Or is this search for patterns yet another mirror? These questions remain unanswered.




2 comments:

  1. Hi again Bruce and thanks so much for the clarification in your previous article-really appreciate it and I can "see" no pun intended:-) what you are considering when you talk about external/internal, life/death, etc. simulations!
    Thanks also for this newest excellent article and I will be back to add to or ask a question once I have had a chance to think about it more.

    On an offside note- for you -or anyone who is interested - apparently an article was posted today about FTL (faster than light) travel -I am going to find it now -just saw it on another computer.

    I hope you are doing well my friend!
    Devin

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  2. Devin
    All is well here and I hope for same for you. Another commentator (some time ago) made the observation that if it were not for the limitations of our biology and our senses in providing us a simulation of what takes place outside of us, we could not ( even remotely) process all the nearly infinite amount of information in any feasible manner, if those limitations were removed.
    Bruce

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