Saturday, April 01, 2017

Is conscious experience without definite causal order possible?

The exciting question is what the superposition of causal orders could mean from the point of view of conscious experience. What seems obvious is that in the superposition of selves with opposite arrows of clock-time there should be no experience about the flow of time in definite direction. Dissipation is associated with the thermodynamical arrow of time. Therefore also the sensory experience about dissipation expected to have unpleasant emotional color should be absent. This brings in mind the reports of meditators about experiences of timelessness. These states are also characterized by words like "bliss" and "enlightenment".

Why I find this aspects so interesting is due to my personal experience for about 32 years ago. I of course know that this kind of personal reminiscences in an article intended to be scientific, is like writing one's own academic death sentence. But I also know I long ago done this so that I have nothing to lose! The priests of the materialistic church will never bother to take seriously anything that I have written so that it does not really matter! This experience - I dared to talk about enlightenment experience - changed my personal life profoundly, and led to the decision to continue work with TGD instead of doing full-day job to make money and keeping TGD as a kind of hobby. The experience also forced to realize that our normal conscious experience is only a dim shadow of what it can be and stimulated the passion to understand consciousness.

In this experience my body went to a kind of light flowing state: liquid is what comes in mind. All unpleasant sensations in body characterizing the everyday life (at least mine!) suddenly disappeared as this phase transition propagated through my body. As a physicist I characterized this as absence of dissipation, and I talked to myself about a state of whole-body consciousness.

There was also the experience about moving in space in cosmic scales and the experience about the presence of realities very different the familiar one. Somehow I saw these different worlds from above, in bird's eye of view. I also experienced what I would call time travel and re-incarnation in some other world.

Decades later I would ask whether my sensory consciousness could have been replaced with that only about my magnetic body only. In the beginning of the experience there was indeed a concrete feeling that my body size had increased with some factor. I even had the feeling the factor was about 137 (inverse of the fine structure constant) but this interpretation was probably forced by my attempt to associate the experience with something familiar to physicist! Although I did all the time my best to understand what I was experiencing, I did not direct my attention to my time experience, and cannot say whether I experienced the presence or absence of time or time flow.

Towards the end of the experience I was clinically unconscious for about day or so. I was however conscious. For instance, I experienced quite concretely how the arrow of time flow started to fluctuate forth and back. I somehow knew that permanent change would mean death and I was fighting to preserve the usual arrow of time. My childhood friend, who certainly did not know much about physics, told about about alternation of the arrow of time during a state that was classified by psychiatrists as an acute psychosis.

See the chapter Topological Quantum Computation in TGD Universe and the article Quantum computations without definite causal structure: TGD view

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

Articles and other material related to TGD.

2 comments:

Ulla said...

What is a measurement described in this terms of timelessness?

This is a good piece of evidence, really, in spite of written april 1st.

Matti Pitkänen said...


I did not have patience to put it to homepage April 2.

The repeated quantum measurements leave the second boundary of CD and members of state pairs at it invariant (self as generalized Zeno effect) for both sector and time reversed sector of WCW. These sectors are different only if T is violated and Kahler form form M^4 implies this.

Then occurs the reduction selecting either arrow of time and localizes the WCW spinor field to that sector. The only difference from the previous picture except that self and its re-incarnation are allowed to live in superposition. Excellent candidate for what is called enlightened state since there is no experiemce of arrow of time and no experience of dissipation. Schroedinger cat and its re-incarnation in superposition. Schrodinger's cat might be much more real than Schroedinger ever thought;-).