on Resonance & the Nature of Perception

Subject: on resonance & the nature of perception

John McCarty <j@geewhilligers.com>

Fri, Oct 15, 10:18 AM

to T

Dear --,

thank you so much for your essay on the relevance of resonance as regards consciousness. I appreciate your interest in bringing both our understanding of ourselves as well as the environment - your 'day job' - to a better place : certainly there can be no 'leveling up' until we learn the simple basics of cleaning up our messes.

Why is spiritual/ity an essential aspect of understanding consciousness? The answers are in layers, not unlike the talmudic 49 understandings of every law, and can only project upon our cave wall, here. Such also likely meta-reflects the fundamental aspect of uncertainty itself : there is no absolute in a perceived experience that includes change such as, e.g. motion, whether in our physical world experience or the spiritual. Understanding, thus, becomes necessarily a diffraction of related ideas, some shining brighter than others perhaps : such can depend on the parallax.

A useful analogy to convey the scope of the challenge is perhaps revealed in considering a maze that one is attempting to navigate ( useful, obviously, also as a meta for the consciousness quest overall ). IRL, on a simple planar layout, there are strategies that can be used to guarantee success of navigation, in a reasonable time. I believe it is as simple as 'turn right, only, at every opportunity'. Obviously, a bit boring as a challenge. However, that is the analogy to our current reductionists attempts to use prima facia, accepted as consensus 'facts', to build that knowledge tower towards understanding. The current gold standard of reductionist approach as out of context, coupled with over-reliance on the merits of peer review and reproducibility - these practices are that practice of 'always only take a right' with the rather predictable result such ultimately ensures and we see reflected, for example, in the rather dramatic current crises in physics/cosmology despite the rather hubric claim of having the most accurate theory ever known, in the standard model.

I have intimate experience in modern molecular biology/human neurology and am well versed in evolution and am well published and exposed to many types of research. I have earned a PhD from a quite authoritative institution and recently retired to write and think (not necessarily in that order).

Your hypothesis on resonance, resonates. I also have intimate experience with a maze and the supposed methodology to navigate. But let me also assure you, I have taken my lesson to heart : I learned the exhausting way, hauling kids around a corn maze on a hot day, that bridges, these contrivances that hop transiently the planar dimension, over the corn and on to the neighboring paths -- such extra dimensions, no matter how tiny a hop in the extra dimension, negate all the understood rules. A whole new approach will be needed. And Bell's Inequality pretty much nails the necessity of something being extra and physicists are happy, quotidianly, to play with 11 dimensions. So, a bit of uncertainty will, with some certainty, be necessary to find the way out of the cave and unto the bigger maze.

It is why I would argue faith as a strong evolutionary tool. Faith, as the acceptance of concepts, perhaps counter-intuitive or overly-imaginative - enables the possibility to perceive difficult-to-perceive patterns. Technologies are the result whether imagining the impact of a stone on a nut to crack it or conceiving the use of satellites to communicate and thus dissolve the 4th dimension (the two sides of the globe as essentially touching via digital communications). And with strong faith can come theisms as it would be a bayesian bad choice to exclude potentially fertile niches by ruling them out with a rigorous a-theistic attitude (you cannot open a door that you do not allow to be as a choice - and who knows what benevolence may lie behind?).

Best of luck in all your endeavours,

John