Speculation, Musings, & Insanity

Like many kids who grew up in a radically religious home (Pentecostal Assembly of God), I actually got to the point where I had no respect at all for religion. The reasons basically came down to hearing one thing and seeing another my entire life. I heard preachers and relatives pounding bibles while telling me what Christianity was and was not supposed to be. Then, I saw every one of them ignoring what they told me and living their lives in ways that contradicted everything I heard. Religion seemed to be all about hypocrisy.

Not only were people I knew rampantly breaking their own "rules," but I saw that people around the world were killing one another over differences in religion. Everyone claimed their God was the only God, even though these various versions of God all seemed essentially identical to me. It was confusing for a kid, to say the least. It left me extremely cynical about religion by the age of 11.

Being a very analytical kid who was in a gifted program for 4 years, I decided to break religion down to the lowest levels and figure out what I believed about it all. My first decision was that as soon as you get humans involved in creating a religion, then imperfection, bias, and corruption all creep into what should be a divine equation. So, for my own beliefs, I removed religion from the equation. God made sense to me for a lot of reasons. Religion didn't make sense as anything more than a social club to educate young initiates and spread beliefs. 

Every religion seems to have a set of guiding documents, so I decided to analyze those myself. Being from a Christian background, I began to examine the KJV bible more closely to figure out what it was actually saying to me. Early on, I realized that nearly 100% of the bible was metaphor and stories about morality. Metaphor, to me is a way of communicating on a level where specific details aren't as important as the message. So, I took the messages of the KJV bible and used them as rules to live by. The Golden Rule. The 10 Commandments. Those were most important. The rest was basically supporting documentation and explanation.

I also realized that everything in the bible was written by a person who was writing what somebody else told them. After looking into it, I also found out even the words of Jesus were written down at least 40 years after his death. I tried to imagine real people I knew trying to remember exactly what somebody said when they wrote it down at least 40 years later and again decided that the message was more important than the specific wording.

In fact, word by word, literal analysis of a document created this way seemed well beyond pointless and I nearly laughed when I would hear my relatives approaching the bible this way in their heated arguments. Each word was the source of argument over interpretation. They somehow lost sight of the facts that each word was originally written from old memories and that each word was already an interpretation of what the author had originally heard. Add in the repeated translations to a variety of languages over many centuries and the words they were fighting over couldn't possibly be precisely what was originally stated.

So, what do I believe? I believe in God, but I am cynical of religion. I trust the overall messages of the bible, but not the literal translations. I try to treat people like I want them to treat me. Like any normal human, I don't always succeed in this effort, but I also don't hypocritically claim to be "Christ-like." I don't feel any human has all the answers. I do feel we should all keep looking, living, and learning. This has been my set of guiding beliefs through most of my life.

A few years back, I started looking at other religions to see what's different. Amazingly, I found most were pretty similar. It made me wonder what all the fuss and arguments are about. Many have large quantities of wisdom which would be useful for anyone from any religion to embrace. That's the great thing about truth. It's the same, no matter who says it. The things that really are different amount to minor details if you focus on the bigger vision of each.

One thing I like to embrace is humans as creators. According to many religions, we are made in the image of the original Creator. We are a "chip off the old block," so to speak. If we are an admittedly less powerful copy of our Creator, that still makes us creators, too. If you think about how we change the future with choices we make today, you can see how that is basically the "creation" of a different future world.

"With our minds, we create the world."- Buddha

Thousands of years ago Buddha literally summed up an interesting oddity we discovered in quantum mechanics only recently. Our consciousness alters reality. If you want to take the many worlds view as an explanation of this fact, you could say our consciousness constantly chooses an alternate universe. Or say that we create a branch into a parallel universe while traveling along our own timeline. There are many ways to word it, but the bottom line is we create the future with our choices, thoughts, and actions.

Some people have reversed this concept and invented the "law of attraction." They say that you attract various alternative futures with your consciousness. Focus on bad, you attract more bad. Focus on good, you attract more good. The book (and movie) "The Secret" outlines this theory very well. It's a great read, but as they present each supporting story of success, notice that it was a combination of choice, thought, and action which actually succeeded in changing the future of the individual. The "law of attraction" is one way of looking at how things work, and it gives the same result, but it is at least semantically different than what science tells us. I feel the many worlds interpretation noted previously is a better explanation for how it really works.

I like to say there are infinite potential futures with greater or lesser probabilities of occurring. What my consciousness does with each thought, choice, and action is to adjust those probabilities. As the probabilities change, one specific future becomes far more likely than others. Eventually, the probability of that future hits 100 percent and that future simply occurs. The end result is the same as with the "law of attraction," but the process is more reflective of the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

When viewed this way, all of the "positive thinking," "faith-based," and "believe and receive" books on the shelves will all work for the same basic reason. Our consciousness alters reality simply by choosing one alternate future from many. We eliminate some realities and bring others closer to fruition with each thought, choice, and action. Given enough time, enough thoughts, enough choices, enough actions, nearly any future can be shifted into the realm of immediate possibility.

One theory I also have, which isn't part of the many worlds interpretation is that I believe each of us has a sphere of influence. With better mental discipline and focus that sphere expands. With no focus, it shrinks. Your ability to influence the probability of a particular potential future depends on how many of the particulars of that future fall within your sphere of influence. Those with no focus or discipline have tiny spheres of influence and therefore no control over their futures.

For example, if the future you are trying to create is that you want to lose weight, with proper focus, thought, and action, the likelihood that you can create that future is very high. The reason is because your own body falls almost completely within your sphere of influence.

If you are trying to create a future where you win the lottery, it will be extremely difficult because the myriad physical laws governing which balls come out of the machine are really far outside your sphere of influence. So, it would require a level of mental discipline and focus virtually impossible for any human to achieve. Then, it simply becomes a matter of equal probabilities working out to pure chance. In other words, you have the same tiny chance as anyone else and you just get lucky.

Another way to expand the sphere of influence is to get many people focused on creating the same future. The spheres become additive, blanketing the particulars of creating that future. Basically, the energy of a crowd is greater than the energy of an individual. The change in probability becomes amplified. If their thoughts, actions, and choices continue in unison for extended periods of time, the shifts in the future become larger. But those are my extensions of the basic premise that we choose a future through thought and action.

Let's look at the way the universe works from an entirely different angle. Cognitive psychology says we can change how we feel and behave by changing our thoughts. If we consciously avoid bad thoughts, we feel better. If we force ourselves to think good thoughts, we feel better. If we feel better, we act differently. If we do this long enough, we change how we think, feel, and act permanently. We alter our own future, by making a choice, thinking a thought, or taking an action today. We consciously, through effort and focus, create a different future for ourselves. They have proven over and over that this works.

Many worlds, positive thinking, power of faith, law of attraction, cognitive psychology, and the many other similar concepts all come down to how our universe adapts to, and is adjusted by, our focus, energy, choices, thoughts, and actions. Whatever we each choose to call the phenomenon, we do know it happens by design. The laws of our universe were set up so that our consciousness can literally alter our reality. We change the future with our choices, thoughts, and actions. We were created as ethereal consciousness inhabiting physical bodies, but more importantly, we were created as creators.

It all leads to each of us being given the power to choose, mold, shape, and create our own futures. That's the real "Secret of Life."

"With our minds, we create the world."

Labels: Consciousness, God, Physics

I have, for years now, explored the age-old philosophical conflicts between God and science. I discovered that, like Sir Isaac Newton, I personally don't believe there is any conflict at all between science and the stories from religion. I think the perceived differences are actually fabricated in the minds of each side while looking myopically at the other. In fact, I personally feel that science supports the existence of God in many ways. In this blog, I often outline my reasons for this belief. Today I'm going to talk about one of the biggest reasons I believe God created our universe. I'm going to talk about probabilities.

What is the likelihood that God created us and the universe?

While reading and researching, I've looked into religions all over the world to see what is common. Basically, all of them say we're spiritual beings. In fact, they mostly say we are all parts of one Great Spirit. We are children of, or components of, or derived from that one spirit which encompasses everything and everyone. In a word; God.

What are the chances that every culture spread all over the globe would all decide to adopt the same basic belief about our nature? Some of the more ancient cultures who believed this never had contact with the outside world. Some were isolated by vast oceans without the technology to cross them. Yet, they all arrive at nearly identical conclusions about our spirituality, our interconnection to one another and our connection with the divine. Most have a very similar creation story, as well. Again, what are the chances of this?

In fact, I started thinking about statistical probabilities a lot while thinking about the biology, chemistry, and physics involved in getting us to this moment we're living in now. Exactly what had to happen to get us here? In fact, to get a better feel for these probabilities, let's start multiplying out just a few of them. I don't mean literally doing the statistical math. I mean simply trying to grasp the likelihood of an incredibly long sequence of many trillions of tiny events all leading to where we are now.

What are the chances that a small glob of primordial ooze would suddenly come to life as a single-celled organism? In fact, what are the chances that the DNA molecule in the nucleus of that cell would have formed naturally, to begin with? You really don't see anything else like it in nature. The symmetry and beauty of it plus the functionality it performs is virtually divine in nature. Most molecules are ragged-looking, oddly-formed conglomerations of atoms. In contrast, DNA looks like perfectly-designed, mathematical code. Even aside from these obvious differences, there are almost infinitely more statistical improbabilities which support believing in creation. Let's keep thinking.

What are the chances that the single living cell which came to life from the ooze would just happen to be able to replicate itself? What are the odds that it could replicate itself faster than it dies? Why haven't we seen a single living cell spontaneously come to life out of dirt and ooze in any recent time period? What are the chances that any two of these suddenly appearing single cells would start magically working together toward a common goal? How would they even decide to work together, considering they start as single individual cells? What causes it? What is the motive force acting upon them?

What are the chances that a few more cells more would join those two? What are the chances that billions more would eventually join those? What about trillions? What are the chances that millions of those trillions of cells would gather together into sub-groups to change their functionality, chemical makeup, and even their shape in order to specialize into organs that would contribute to the survival of cells billions of cells away on the other side of this vast clump?

What are the chances that dozens of these sub-groups would happen to each do exactly what is needed for all the other dozens of sub-groups and many extra billions of other cells in the clump to survive? Why would some cells carry nutrients to other cells instead of keeping the nutrients for themselves? Why would some cells decide to turn into a pump to help those nutrient carrying cells move more quickly?

Now, what are the chances that a portion of those cells would decide to  turn into legs? Or arms, fingers, toes, and the extremely specialized organs of our 5 senses? How could a random occurrence create connected networks of radically different types of cells all for the purposes of moving the entire clump of 10 trillion cells around to different locations in the environment or to manipulate objects?

What are the chances that two slightly different clumps of 10 trillion cells would need to combine in order create a third one which could turn out to be similar to either or different from both? (male, female, and babies) Wouldn't it make more sense for an incredibly complex organism to evolve a way to reproduce itself without dependence on other organisms? Surely that type of organism would reproduce more easily. Why didn't it survive natural selection? In fact, why does the whole organism need to reproduce the entire 10 trillion cells? Why don't those cells just individually divide to make another organism? Yeah, a lot of strange choices were made among the many trillions of trillions of selections which would have happened in order for us to randomly evolve to where we are now. In fact, let's look at the sheer number of selections.

The Earth has been dated as being 4.5 billion years old. The simplest of single-celled life didn't appear for about 1.5 billion years after that. That means 3 billion years, or about 1 trillion days total of evolution time. Natural selection happens when one out of many randomly-mutated versions of an organism survives while the others die off. Even if the sequence of evolutionary events for all life on Earth started exactly 1 trillion days ago, the trillions of trillions of tiny natural selection events which would have led to us being here through random mutation and evolutionary selection would have needed to happen at the rate of hundreds, thousands, or perhaps even millions of events per day.

We're talking major evolutionary adjustments happening at a blazing-fast, near-constant rate for a trillion days straight. Then it eventually arrives at our current 10 trillion highly-specialized clumps of cells, organs, skeletal parts, etc, by sheer trial-and-error? How likely is that? How likely is it that this process would happen insanely fast for a trillion days and then suddenly stop? Why do I ask that? Because we don't see anything close to that rate of evolutionary change happening in today's world. Mutation and natural selection is a relatively uncommon and slow process. So how could we have possibly arrived at our current biological complexity level in only 1 trillion days if our progress were solely based on truly random mutation and natural selection?

Think about this one little thing. After trillions upon trillions of supposedly random mutations and natural selection, nearly every animal on the entire planet has a nearly identical facial structure. We all have a head, 2 ears, 2 eyes, a nose, two nostrils, a mouth, teeth. Seriously? After trillions upon trillions of random mutations, there is no variety at the end? Natural selection seems a little specific, if you ask me. How can such a vast amount of purportedly random activity over a trillion days, across such a huge area of landmass, separated by vast oceans, end at virtually the same design?

Where are the three headed or even headless creatures? Where are the ones with eyes on all four sides of their heads? Where are the creatures who have wooden skeletons and bark for skin? We were supposedly plants at one point, why aren't there still animals which retain those qualities and structures? It's not like there was one cell, which gave rise to one plant, which gave rise to one fish, which gave rise to one animal, which gave rise to one human, who then replicated. If mutation and selection is true, then there is no single direct lineage which resulted in all of us. If the mutations were truly random, and not pre-programmed with similarity by DNA, why would nearly all animals even have a face, much less a highly similar face after 3 billion years of evolution?

All life is just masses of cells. Random mutation and selection should apply to all cells equally. The extreme levels of similarity, don't support random mutation and selection. If it did, we wouldn't see such well-defined boundaries between cells, organisms, plants, fish, birds, and animals. There should be creatures like plant/fish, plant/animals, and plant/birds. With every single member of every single species having the potential to create a new species through mutation, there should be FAR more noticeable variety than there is after a trillion days. And it should still be happening far more frequently than it currently is.

On top of that, this particular massive clump of highly-evolved, cooperating cells called a "human" would have to become conscious, self-aware, able to think, make decisions, imagine, and dream. We're not talking about one cell being able to think. We're talking about a bunch of individual cells working together to think or dream about an abstract concept like "the future." Again, we end up staring straight into the nagging question, "How likely is ANY of that to have randomly occurred?"

What are the chances that I would be sitting here as a clump of 10 trillion individual, and sometimes vastly different, cells all somehow working together for one purpose - so that I could type a blog post about how preposterously unlikely it is that all of this was simply a random occurrence? Why should these trillions of cells cooperate to do all of that? Even narrowing it down, why should the brain cells of this organism work to create all of the highly improbable electrochemical interactions involved in me thinking about this sequence of historical events? Creating those chemical reactions has zero to do with their survival. In fact, it benefits them in no way whatsoever. Yet they do it.

Natural selection may make tiny adjustments over time based on environmental influences, but how could all of this sequence of events happen so quickly that it could finish in only 1 trillion days? It's all based on the DNA in the cell nucleus. DNA is what tells the specific cells to develop the way they do, but where did this magical DNA molecule come from? How did that DNA, an unbelievably intricate thing in itself, happen to be "accidentally" structured in a way to cause all of these incredibly statistically unlikely events to occur? In fact, why does DNA change slightly over time in response to changes in the physical world? Water molecules don't change over time. Why does DNA change?

Frankly, all of this evolutionary speculation quickly begins to sound far beyond EXTREMELY far-fetched to me. Too much had to happen in too short of a time period for it all to be random mutations and natural selection. We're not talking "struck by lightning" or "winning the lottery" levels of unlikely here. We're talking far more unlikely than the number of stars in the universe. I'd even say unlikely to the point of virtually impossible. This realization leaves me looking for another explanation for all of it.

In my mind, our DNA is the cornerstone supporting intelligent design by an outside force. Life on this planet follows a design. Even our ability to adapt to changes in our environment is by design. Our DNA is designed to change slightly as needed.

To me, the sequence of trillions upon trillions upon trillions of tiny random events required for me to eventually be sitting here thinking and typing seems far less likely than for an intelligent Creator to have put the perfectly pre-constructed DNA blueprints for the evolution of Earth's creatures into the ooze from the start. The concept of "seeding Earth with DNA" causes all of that unlikely sequence of events to happen automatically by design rather than occurring based on some miniscule beyond belief, incredibly random, and highly unlikely, evolutionary probability. Yes, there is evolution. Yes, it makes adjustments. But in my mind, the sequence for life to progress had to have been preprogrammed into those first living cells by a designer. DNA behaves the way it does, by design.

In fact, even when I try to grasp the probabilities for every facet of our universe turning out the way it is, I feel compelled to believe this reality we live in was all created intelligently by an outside influence. Science really supports the idea of the creation of the universe, when you look at what we know. Matter and energy were literally brought into existence from nothing by the sequence of the Big Bang. Even our physical laws based in 4 dimensions came into existence with that initial energy burst of the Big Bang. Before that instant, there was something less than void. No physical laws. No dimensions. No anything. What made that happen? That's the real question, isn't it?

If you imagine something that exists without time, space, or the laws of physics, from our viewpoint, it must be ethereal in nature - a spirit. It would have to be something difficult for us to mentally grasp because it isn't based in what we know as reality. In my mind, the Big Bang was the act of an incredibly powerful spiritual being (God) "thinking" or "willing" our universe into existence from a less than nothing void.

Granted, the entire process which led to where we are now happened over a time frame which is beyond vast by our limited standards. But, to a spiritual being, not bound by time or space, it would be less than the blink of an eye. The insane probability that the entire sequence of tiny events leading to this precise moment happened by accident is just too far fetched for me to believe.

Further, the act of divine creation also explains why (or how) the Big Bang happened, which science has never been able to do. I'm really big on knowing the "why" behind things I choose to believe. Science is based on the natural laws we know. The moments before the Big Bang happened simply don't include those natural laws. The laws didn't exist yet, so they are beyond the grasp of our science. Fortunately, our imaginations can travel to places science can't take us.

So, why do I think our universe was created with thought? First of all, my reasoning says in order for all of this to be created, as I believe it was, there must obviously be a Creator. Further, the Creator can't exist as a part of the universe being created. Not being part of this universe implies no space or time restrictions apply, which means it isn't "physical." It is formless, because form only exists in our 4 dimensional universe. For me, this means the Creator must be ethereal consciousness.

With his logic exercises, Descartes implies that the one remaining ability of consciousness which we don't lose if we remove everything physical, is the ability to think. We exist because we think. If the Creator existed but had no physical presence before creating the physical universe, then our limited understanding says the Creator must have used thought to create it. In other words, the Will of God created us. The creation of our universe was a conscious choice (via thought) made by an immensely powerful, self-aware, conscious being. Perhaps this universe IS the thought and the act of thinking it was the act of creation.

From our point of view, trapped here in our 4 dimensional universe, there would have been a point where the Creator's thought made the vast energy of the universe suddenly come into existence. This matches up with nearly every creation story worldwide. Think of Genesis - "Let there be light." Light is energy. Conveniently, this idea lines up perfectly with what we know about the Big Bang. Energy was created first and it was all that existed during the earliest moments of the Big Bang. It took a tiny bit of time for some of that energy to make the transition into the subatomic building blocks of matter and later to combine into atoms, molecules, etc.

Even more conveniently, we've already seen that consciousness affects reality directly in the collapse of superpositions during the act of quantum measurement. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics shows subatomic particles, which are the building blocks that make up all matter, can pop into and out of existence.

For me, the incredibly unlikely mathematical probabilities, combined with our knowledge that consciousness affects reality at the subatomic level, serve to emphasize one conclusion.  An immensely powerful consciousness should be able to both create and bend our perceived reality at will. That consciousness would have all the power of God, including the ability to create our universe.

To sum it up simply, I believe God created both us and our universe because after giving it a lot of thought, there is no alternative explanation which is statistically believable to me.

Labels: Consciousness, God, Physics

A few years ago, I began to think about my own beliefs in God and how they related to who or what I am. During this period, I did a lot of reading to see what science, philosophy, logic, and religions say about God and our own spirituality. Although there were far too many tidbits of information to put into a blog post like this, in my next few posts, I'll try to give you the big pieces that really pointed me in the direction I took.

First of all, I wanted to answer the question, "who or what am I?" I removed all external observations and looked at how the mind works. The first conclusion I kept reaching was the fact that we are self-aware beings. Here's why. Even if every nerve connected to every sense organ in our body were severed, we would still be aware that we exist simply because we are aware that we are at that precise moment, thinking about being aware. This is summed up in the pure logic exercise done by Rene Descartes where he eliminates all other possibilities and external influences one by one and eventually states the inevitable conclusion, "Cogito, ergo sum" or "I think, therefore I am."

Next, I thought about what the "I" is in that simple statement. Is it a physical brain firing electrical impulses? Well, in my view, those electrical impulses and neurons are basically more of the same physical manifestation of "I" which Descartes tries to eliminate in his logic exercise. On a more personal note, I realized that during my many years of struggles with bipolar disorder, "I" had observed that my mind was not functioning correctly during my worst mental states. Well, if "I" am able to observe the functioning of my mind from an outside perspective, then "I" must be separate from my mind, right?

This led me to reason that the human mind is more like the steering wheel and pedals on a car. I believe the real "me" is the willful entity driving the "car." In other words, I am the entity making a constant stream of choices and causing my mind to move my body in such a way as to act on those choices I've made.

Think about the act of driving a car for a moment. You control the car using a steering wheel and pedals. When you first start driving that car, you aren't able to control it very well. As you drive longer and longer, your skill at controlling the car grows. You are better able to control the steering wheel and pedals to produce the specific motions you desire. The steering wheel and pedals are the physical interface you use to control the larger physical object - the car.

With that analogy in mind, imagine a spirit inhabiting a newborn baby. They are not very good at "driving" their body. They flail about. They gurgle. They make noises which don't reflect what they are trying to communicate. They lack the skill at controlling their physical bodies which they will gain with practice as time goes on.

The mind is the physical interface for controlling the larger physical body - the steering wheel and pedals. A baby's control over their mind is poor, so they are unable to control their body. Electrical impulses in their minds fire in a random fashion at birth. The mind is far more active than it is as an adult. "Something" gains more skill at controlling those electrical impulses as time goes on. "Something" is able to operate the "steering" wheel more precisely with practice.

So if I'm not my mind. If my mind is simply the steering wheel for my body. Then, what am "I." Considering they have never found some physical thing in the brain which causes all of the precise firing patterns of neurons which govern self-aware thinking, "I" must be non-physical. I am not a tangible, physical, object. I am self-aware consciousness. I am spirit. I am ethereal. For me, that is the only explanation that makes sense. We are spiritual beings operating physical bodies and using the mind as an interface between the two.

This obviously matches what we're told, not only in the Christian bible, but in the vast majority of religions worldwide. Some are confused by the creation story in Genesis because it literally reads like we were being created twice somehow. Well, if we are indeed two parts - physical and spiritual - then perhaps we really were created twice. First, our spirits were created as derivatives of the spirit of God the Creator. Then, He made physical bodies for us so that we could interact with the physical world which He created. In fact, if you look at nearly every religion worldwide, they all have a pretty similar creation story. Plus, they all depict us as spiritual beings inhabiting physical bodies.

Speaking of creation, I believe the story of creation was primarily intended to establish the order of creation, not the timescale. I don't think humans in that ancient time period could have grasped the reality or real timescale of exactly how it happened, so they told the story in a way they could grasp. In fact, hearing detailed explanations of all aspects of a powerful spiritual being creating the energy and matter of our universe with a single thought would be beyond their grasp due to the vast gaps in ancient vocabulary required for a more accurate understanding.

Any story you tell has to be told in terminology that the listener can understand. Imagine having to explain that God created all things as energy and matter to somebody who doesn't have words like energy and matter in their vocabulary. When they repeat the story, or write it down, instead of them saying God created energy and matter, they would likely tell people God created space and solid. Or maybe it was something similar which got changed slightly during each of the many translations of the story over time until it became heavens and Earth. In any case, the gist of the story (God created this universe) remains while the terminology eventually becomes slightly confusing and the subject of great ongoing debate. So, unlike many, I believe Genesis and science actually agree on creation. According to both science and the bible, a lot of stuff was put on Earth before we humans finally got here.

I also think the act of creating our physical bodies to house our spirits was the result of direct DNA manipulation and seeding by God. Would ancient people have understood this concept or would it have been simplified for them to grasp the story more easily? Again, I have to believe that terminology and ancient vocabulary got in the way of the literal verbal accuracy of telling the story so that people of that time period could understand it. My mind envisions a divine being relating this story to an ancient person by saying, "See this fine dust? Even that is made up of much smaller parts. Those same tiny parts were used to create man." The person then writes the story down as, "Man was created from dust." It's easy to see how that could happen. But, I digress.

Let's get back to the spiritual vs physical question.

Another indication that we are an ethereal consciousness controlling a physical body comes from science. I looked at the physical laws in science and tried to find something in science which verifies us as being ethereal consciousness rather than random firing neurons. To my surprise, I easily found huge indications in quantum physics.

It has been found that our consciousness plays a deterministic role in the observation of states of quantum level objects. These states are known as quantum superpositions, or simply the ability of a subatomic particle to exist in more than one state at the same time. The indication that consciousness exists comes in the fact that the actual state isn't set until it is observed. Who observes it? We, as conscious beings do. Before we observe its state, the possible states of a quantum object only exist as probabilities.

This concept is also outlined in the "Measurement" problem. You can't directly observe whether a wave function collapse occurs in a subatomic particle because the observation itself alters the result. For a thought experiment demonstrating this problem, see Schrodinger's Cat or the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox.

So over the course of a lot of research and reading, I have firmly established in my own mind that we exist as spiritual consciousness inhabiting a physical body. Amazingly, I also established that our consciousness affects and interacts with physical reality. This realization was the stunner. We, as spirits, can actually modify reality directly. My theory is that this ability is exactly how we cause specific neurons to fire in our minds in order to tell them how to manipulate our bodies. I'll touch on our ability to directly manipulate physical reality more in a future post.

Labels: Consciousness, God, Physics

I like to think. Some say I think too much. One day, I saw a documentary about a dozen or so of the thousands of documented world wide UFO sightings. This being a widespread unexplained phenomena, I naturally started trying to reason out what it could be.

Perhaps 95% of UFO sightings are able to be explained away by examining weather phenomena, aircraft flight patterns, FAA records, electrostatic discharges igniting methane, or by various other means which sometimes border on ludicrous themselves. After exhausting all possible explanations, there remains 5% of sightings which simply can't be explained at all. In some of those cases, hundreds of witnesses see the exact same thing from various angles. In many unexplained cases, there are even reports of contact with alien beings.

What amazes me is that all the sightings of alien beings worldwide basically group them into two categories. There are dark gray taller aliens and smaller light gray or pinkish gray aliens. Even more strange and difficult for me to believe, these alien beings basically all look like US!!

Yes, their skin is a different color/texture and they usually have one less finger, but that's about it. What are the odds that "IF" life exists on another planet a million light years away from us, it would end up with 1 head mounted on a neck, 2 arms, 2 legs, hips, knees, ankles, elbows, shoulders, 2 eyes, a nose between the eyes with 2 nostrils, a single mouth below the nose? I mean come on. One of these aliens could be your really skinny, big-headed, cousin Jimbo with a fluorescent-light tan and big black contact lenses. Isn't that odd to anyone else?

Scientists also say that it would be nearly impossible for beings from even the nearest inhabitable star systems to travel the vast distances required in order to visit us. The ships would need to travel at near the speed of light. Physics tells us that as you near the speed of light, mass increases quickly toward infinity. In order to move a near infinite amount of mass, it would require a near infinite amount of energy, which you can't generate without infinite fuel. That's one BIG gas tank to tote across the galaxy. With all of those infinites in the equation, you can see why they believe it is virtually impossible.

More recently, it has been speculated that a ship could create a localized distortion or bubble in space and sit inside that bubble while the bubble moves near the speed of light. In theory, this could work, because a space distortion could be created in a way which would effectively have no mass. We have an idea of how this could be accomplished theoretically, but doing it is well beyond our technology and resource level. It would require planetary scale commitment of resources and star-sized amounts of energy in order to build the type of equipment needed to create that bubble. More importantly, (in my mind) it doesn't explain why the aliens basically look like us.

In my thinking, I came up with another possible explanation. What if these light and dark colored aliens are actually just humans from our own distant future? We already know humans have evolved over the last 10 thousand years of human history. We can see it by examining the remains of people who lived back then. We've changed gradually in a number of ways. We're taller. Our jaws and teeth are different. Our brains have gotten bigger. Now imagine those changes projected forward maybe 100 thousand years or more into our future. Then, factor in changes in our environment which might affect our future evolution.

What if in the future our eyes had to evolve into huge black pupils because we screwed up our atmosphere so bad that we had to start living underground in bunkers breathing manufactured oxygen? What if we became so addicted to technology that we basically stopped doing anything physical? Or what if we had to leave the planet and live in zero gravity orbit? Our bodies would evolve into skinny little things barely able to support the weight of our own heads.

Perhaps in the future our brains grew and evolved where we could communicate telepathically? Or maybe we communicate solely through a neurological link to our technology? What if natural food doesn't exist in the future because people take up all available land space? What if we all live on manufactured food we drink through a tube? After thousands of years, our mouths would become tiny slits from lack of use. In fact, if all of these changes happened, we would look exactly like the "aliens" everyone keeps seeing.

So, what if rather than traveling through space, these "aliens" are future humans who traveled through time? Is that even possible? The answer is yes in theory. In fact, Einstein's Theory of General Relativity predicts mathematically that it is possible. Difficult, yes, but possible. Again, we don't have the technology to do it now, but we might in the future. As I see it, time travel would require a control over gravity which we don't currently have, but who is to say we wouldn't have it one day? In fact, I would say that travel through time is probably about the same difficulty as traveling vast distances through space. So it seems like an equally probable explanation for the identity of these ships and beings we keep seeing.

In fact, the ability to control gravity would open up both possibilities. Gravity is what warps space and time. As further evidence for my theory of time-traveling human "aliens" most of the features of alien ship sightings support a gravity-based drive system. Being able to manipulate gravity at will would eliminate propellers, jets, rockets, or any other type of noisy drive system, making the ships virtually silent. Manipulating gravity would allow you to negate the effects of inertia, allowing ships that could make right turns instantly. Fine control of gravity would allow invisibility effects, allowing the ship to bend light around the hull.

All in all, if we're looking for an explanation for the zillions of alien and ship sightings over the course of thousands of years of human history (modern "aliens" are even drawn on the walls in ancient Egyptian temples), my money is on these "aliens" being future humans who are trying to keep a low profile while visiting us in the here and now. They just aren't doing a very good job of staying hidden. Even that fact seems profoundly human, when you think about it.

Labels: Aliens, Physics, Time Travel, UFOs

This is the blog where I will go off on strange tangents offering theories about everything which can't be proven. Stay tuned to see what kind of strange things I come up with, but don't take any of it too seriously. That's the appeal of this sort of esoteric rambling. Imagination is the only limitation. Enjoy