What if truth is represented by an amalgam made up of the balance of all hypotheses, theories and laws? What if it combined all disciplines, all fields of knowledge? What if nothing ever learned was left out, and we used science, mathematics, theology, philosophy and metaphysics to attain truth? We use all ways of understanding as roads to this truth.
Well, you might respond by asking what truth is, anyway? I would call it ultimate awareness; the highest consciousness that we can attain. I think we can all agree that there are levels of awareness, that we are more conscious sometimes than we are at others, and that there are creatures around us that seem less aware than we are. So if the term ‘truth’ seems too condescending or grandiose, replace it with ‘awareness’ or ‘consciousness.’ Words like heaven, paradise or God can also arouse antipathy. They’re loaded. That’s why I’ve chosen the term ‘truth,’ and I define it as a condition or state rather than as a place.
Maybe the highest truth we can attain is the combined experience of all sentient beings. Our understanding evolves in the sense that this collective experience includes all sentient organisms that have ever lived. It includes all conscious beings that will ever live in the future. The highest of all awareness thus encompasses past and future states. Yet all we have is now, for the truth stands outside of time.
Who and what are included in this collective understanding? It includes beings and entities which are aware on earth as well as beings which may be aware in other locations in the universe. The fact that we do not know whether the cosmos contains sentience other than life on earth should be no bar to its inclusion in our definition of awareness. For if they live, then their understanding must be part of the truth. Imagination is one of the ways we come to know the truth. Scientists and science fiction writers have always been modern day prophets. Einstein said that imagination is more important knowledge. Therefore, I propose that if we can imagine extraterrestrial beings, we can also imagine that they must be part included in our understanding of truth.
We can also speculate that the universe itself is self-aware. Therefore, the definition of sentience encompasses the inanimate universe as well as the animate, since spacetime and the matter and energy which the spacetime structure contains have information value. The Matter-Energy-Space-Time (METS) continuum carries and stores data. It is thus part of truth.
The collective experience of the truth encompasses observations made by nonhuman observers, which includes, in addition to extraterrestrial observers, extradimensional observers which may exist in continua other than our own. We can account for past observers which have occupied and future observers which will occupy our space, as well as for present observers which currently occupy our space. Together, these three account for the three dimensions of time which we have all, at one time or another, co-occupied in the single space we call home. Yet we also need to account for those sentient beings which co-exist with us in the same three-dimensional space which we occupy together. When we account for these co-occupying observers, we begin to know that space is in reality spaceless, that it is dimensionless in the same way that time –co-elapsing in past, present and future states simultaneously – is also timeless. Then, we know outside of space. We know outside of time. The cosmos ceases existing as an infinite – or at least an incomprehensibly vast – dimension which contains us. It becomes a spaceless point. Similarly, time collapses from an infinite – or at least an immeasurably long – variable in our equations and it becomes a measureless now. In this way, we begin to understand spacetime as expanding from a dimensionless point of consciousness during a timeless interval. Reality is conceived as spaceless and atemporal.
The understanding of truth includes the knowledge obtained, transmitted and stored by all artificial intelligences on all planetary environments in our spacetime dimension, as well as those machine intelligences which exist in all other dimensions. The inanimate gave rise to the biological, which evolved sentience, and continued its evolution until it developed technological intelligence. To the extent that these artificial intelligences evolve a true consciousness, they are included in the definition of awareness since they possess an understanding of the truth.
The truth also includes experience. The truth is dynamism. It’s action. It’s change. What kinds of experiences and events are included in this understanding? It includes those that are random, those that are probable and those that become certain by virtue of their occurrence. Randomness, probability and certainty are the three behavioral aspects of physical reality.
The random movement of particles – randomness itself – is a feature of truth and, in part, is an expression of the truth. This fact is one that many do not understand. Those with a theological understanding – with a teleological bias – of the origins of the cosmos often assume that randomness is not part of the truth, and thus not an aspect of reality. However, randomness is an essential aspect of the real. It has a role in the creation of the universe. C.G. Jung, the protégé of Freud – described the uroboros, the raw, unconscious, and undifferentiated psychic energy from which ego consciousness forms and evolves into highly specific manifestations. The uroboric substrate is randomness. It is the raw material from which the universe of phenomenon is selected.
Yet the uroboros is not the one that chooses. It is not the observer. Randomness is the menu from which choices are made. Randomness is not, however, the chooser. It lacks intention in much the same way that artificial intelligences, in their current expressions, lack volition. The uroboros has a role in agency – an intermediate role. In parallel, randomness serves an intermediate function in creating the highly specific forms we find in the universe. These entities include subatomic particles and atoms, molecules and stars, planets and lifeforms. They do not seem random in their behaviors. They organize the random into the probable, which becomes certain. Yet all manifestations in the cosmos are still, to some extent, influenced by random processes. These are observed, for example, in the collision of particles and the mutation of genes. Yet randomness is a universal phenomenon which influences, yet does not govern, everything.
Similarly, probability is an authentic aspect of the truth, without being a prime, motivating force. Probability has agency, but not intention. The observer, which preexisted the phenomenal universe, organizes the random into the probable through the act of observing. The observer then organizes the probable into the certain by having an experience, which moves the probable into actuality.
As children of spacetime, we do not fully understand the context into which these three aspects – the random, the probable, and the actual – are embedded. We cannot understand these concepts with objectivity, which is to say from the standpoint of absolute awareness, since we are trapped within the spacetime dimension. We therefore confuse means with ends, and conflate creative agency with creative intention. In this way, we who are science-minded and oriented to materialist philosophy conclude that mere physical means are the impetuses behind creation itself. As egos, we are situses of conscious awareness and development, yet we are mere conduits, not ultimate sponsors of creation of and by ourselves. As individual selves, we represent containers for awareness, not awareness itself. As separate observers, we are form, and not content. Because we are, in our individual states, products of a system, we are intermediaries in its processes. We are transitional states, not prime causes, and not ultimate effects. We therefore see randomness as causative as well, since randomness is also intermediate. Since probability is also intermediate agency, and neither ultimate cause nor ultimate effect, we similarly come to see probability as an ultimate determiner of fate rather than as a mere influence. We see ultimate truth in numbers, rather than numbers as part of the uroboric flow. Numbers are intermediate causes, and represent intermediate effects. This is what happens when we interpret physical states too literally. Equations become confused with truth. Science becomes scientism, a belief in the all-pervasive and ultimate meaning of the experimental method and the theories and laws which are deduced from the scientific method.
What about certainties? The most that can be concluded from the vantagepoint we individual observers occupy is that probabilities give rise to certainties by determining the preexisting parameters of what reality will become, based on its past states. The probabilities which the past ‘determines’ are transformed into actualities through the present observations made by sentient observers. We, as observers, have intention. We are cocreators of phenomenal reality. Thus, we are mediums of creation. Yet in our individual expressions we are not its ultimate originators. And because we are not initial sponsors of creation, we cannot stand outside of spacetime, outside of the METS continuum, and outside of the randomness/probability/certainty continuum and see that physical systems like spacetime, like matter-energy, cannot be organized purely through randomness and probability into certainty. Therefore, these continua of randomness, probability and actuality cannot be the principal creators. Nor can the ultimate destiny of the cosmos itself be dictated by these mindless phenomena. They are not truth, and truth cannot be found in them. These material systems are means, and not ends. They are neither primary causes nor ultimate end states.
For this reason, any system of logic, mathematics or science which studies the randomness, probability or certainty of physical systems cannot develop statements which describe the nature of ultimate reality. Any scientific, mathematical or logical system which attempts to come to conclusions about the nature of reality – which attempts to make ultimately true statements – by studying randomness or probability in processes is an attempt to find meaning in the meaningless, since the qualities of randomness or probability themselves have no ultimate meaning. They have intermediate meaning as they are mediating influences. Disciplines and methods which describe these processes cannot, by their nature, make statements that are ultimately true. They can only come to provisional conclusions. They can only describe intermediate, relative states. To the extent that these scientific, rational and mathematical disciplines and methods attempt ultimate statements, they will conclude that the universe – that life itself – is purposeless since they make observations of randomness and probability, which are not inherently meaningful. When they attempt conclusions about truth, these methods and fields of study exceeded their intended purposes. The balance of all knowing cannot be limited to scientific, mathematical or rational knowledge or ways of apprehending truth, though a pursuit of truth may include them in its description of intermediate states. Scientific concepts such as evolution, relativity and quantum mechanics have contributed greatly to our understanding of the truth. Yet since they describe physical states alone, and in the case of evolution and quantum processes, since they study randomness and probability, they are bridges to the truth, reflections of it, and cannot lead to ultimate understandings of essences, which regard awareness, an inherently nonphysical state.
The earth has evolved from an inanimate to an animate state. A biological, Gaian stage has emerged from a nonliving, geological stage. Gaia – the biological expression of the superorganism earth – represents a distinct, qualitative change from its previous eras. Today, a new qualitative state has emerged from the Gaian stage: the concept of the noosphere. The noosphere represents the collective awareness of the organism earth. It is also Gaia’s awareness of itself as an organism in the same way that each human on earth is also self-aware. This heightened awareness, as expressed in the collective consciousness of the noosphere, is an idea advanced in part by the scientist, Vladimir Vernadsky and the Jesuit theologian and scientist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
Sentient organisms are aware. Then they become self-aware. They become aware that they are aware. Concurrently, they develop theory of mind, an awareness that other organisms also possess consciousness. And then they become aware collectively. They become aware that consciousness itself is networked. The idea of mind is the sense that consciousness is not exclusively identified or coextensive with the brain. It is associated with the brain, but is not produced by the brain or limited to the brain’s physical locality. The phenomenon of nonlocal cause refers to the ability of information (and therefore cause) to be transmitted instantaneously without regard to the speed of light. The phenomenon of nonlocal awareness refers to the ability of consciousness (of mind) to transmit information instantaneously without regard to the speed of light. There is much anecdotal evidence to support this phenomenon as a hypothesis. Proponents of ironic science such as Ruport Sheldrake have catalogued and references much of this evidence. Since consciousness is, in a sense, information, it should be no surprise that information can also be transmitted without regard to the lapse of time or the speed of light. We have argued in this essay that spacetime is in reality an illusory feature of reality, and therefore, awareness, or mind, can and does exist in simultaneity at all perceives locations, or points, within spacetime. Awareness extends beyond the boundary of the physical systems which seem to house and contain it. The noosphere is the idea that consciousness can be collective, as the psychiatrist, C.G. Jung, theorized. Jung’s concepts rise to the level of theory based upon anecdotal evidence: his study of dreams and myths.
These ideas are advance features of our understanding of truth. The science fiction writer, William Gibson, wrote that the future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed. In this sense, the future of the universe is represented by the dense, enriched data content already found in the earth’s noosphere. Within the spacetime dimension, the matter-energy structures of the Gaian systems which ‘house’ the noosphere are highly evolved formations for generating, storing and transmitting this data, which is awareness.
Frank Tipler, a physicist and cosmologist, hypothesizes that when the data content of spacetime throughout the cosmos reaches its maximum capacity, the universe will ‘collapse’ into a singularity where all psyches which have ever lived will be resurrected. When this Omega Point hypothesis is stripped of its Christian eschatological motifs, it can be seen as the penultimate in evolution: a total awareness where all unconscious material is made conscious. Awareness climaxes in a totality. The idea that awareness progresses in a qualitative sense when the unconscious is made conscious is derived from psychoanalytic theory. Jung developed it still further by describing each human ego as a site for the development of consciousness in which raw, uroboric energies are ‘requisitioned’ from the unconscious and expressed in highly specific forms. With the addition of the noosphere into our world of concepts, awareness evolves when the collective unconscious is raised to collective consciousness.
The Omega Point is, like many hypotheses, highly conjectural. Assuming its validity, whether the Omega Point singularity is a cyclical process or a one-time, monogenetic event within a single, unrepeated life cycle for the universe remains to be seen, for from this point in Now, we cannot know. Abrahamic eschatologies posit a progression in natural and human history in which the Omega Point is a singular, unrepeated event. Hindu cosmology describes a cyclical series of universal and birth.
The ultimate issues are whether there is absolute truth, and whether we can ever know it. For purposes of this essay, I am assuming that truth does exist in absolute ‘form,’ and that it is knowable. Absolute truth will be reattained when entropic processes distribute awareness evenly throughout the whole of the spacetime dimension in all cosmoses. Also known as heat death, this distribution seems from the perspective of ego consciousness as disorder and death. Yet we believe that once it is attained, this end state will be acknowledged as enlightenment and experienced as balance. The noosphere will then have expanded from all of its point(s) of origin in spacetime to occupy the totality of this dimension, and of all dimensions. It will include every subjective site of awareness, represented as individual egos, and will have achieved its maximal state as the result of the application of all ways of knowing throughout time. This is all that we mean by maximal awareness, or absolute truth. Complete awareness of truth is truth in totality.
In order to reacquire this state of absolute consciousness, the observer must acknowledge the illusory nature of material existence, rather than attempt to achieve identification with this materiality and call it truth. In dreams, and in simulations of any nature, each point within the simulation is endowed with an equal data content. In the physical dimension which seems to surround us, this data content seems unevenly distributed in biological bodies, in artificial intelligences, and in planetary bodies which eventually give rise to noospheres. When the Observer – and the term is used in the collective here – is capable of simulating the universe which it seems to occupy and which seemed to give rise, through evolutionary means, to the multitude of the Observer’s seemingly disparate biological forms, the Observer will then be capable of seeing through the illusory nature of finite, physical existence. It will have pierced the veil and boundary of death, and Tipler’s Omega Point will have collapsed in the singularity. We will then know that awareness is truth, and truth is, simply, awareness.
In simultaneity, this singularity of total consciousness will collapse in all dimensions. Then, as Blake wrote, everything will be seen as it is: as infinite.
© 2024 by Michael C. Just