How Might Consciousness In The Universe Be Structured?

The Universe (the complete and unexplained What Is Behind What Is) may be vastly different than the way we think of it (as Our Universe, the one we can detect through our senses).

Human intellect divides up the world or universe into what we think of as “in here,” and what we think of as “out there.” Is there really a line of demarcation, a delineation of the difference between the two regimes?

Our Universe seems to consist of patterns formed in memory by single cells or groupings of them (the neurons). If we are seeing people,  when we open our eyes, we not only register shapes and colors and shadings, but the interpretations and meanings of such. There may be other less likely things to detect, but our visual cortex hasn’t had the opportunity to sample and interpret such into memory.

The Universe, that all of us attempt to interpret, lies in a roiling turbulence beneath (of enfolded pattern). It exists everywhere, many times outside our explanations of its behavior.

Here I’m going to briefly, I hope, describe the ways The Universe might be structured so as to allow us a path to understanding our own deaths. I know this isn’t a very optimistic topic for one who writes HEA (happily ever after) novels. But the problem of death has been important to me since I was around nine and discovered that I too was in its crosshairs.

Today, after all my thinking on the subject, I wonder, if I think of The Universe as structured in a continuous way (the way it appears to us most of the time) then will our path to “life after death” be any different than if we think of The Universe as structured in a discontinuous way (only impinging sporadically and out of sequence)? With an assumption of discontinuity, might our complex brains function to add continuity as we randomly sample from a set of incoming thoughts and ideas (See: The Incoming)).

If discontinuity of The Universe were a reality, then how might this be accomplished and what does it have to do with THE EXPERIMENT?

About the experiment:

1. We inject a water-based liquid into an oil-based liquid in a thin mold (1mm in thickness).
2. Mathematically, we model an expanding unstable droplet, but all unstable configurations where the outer viscosity is infinitesimally greater than that of inner fluid—even if the droplet does not appear to expand—can be modeled as an expanding droplet. Why? Because zero difference across a boundary does not exist in Nature (or The Universe). There is always error and so any similar system (with an unstable arrangement of inner and outer fluid) will appear to be similar to an expanding system (at least part of the time).
3. Also, along with a perfect zero potential not existing across a boundary, neither does a zero change in potential across a boundary. That means an unstable droplet system will be in constant oscillation (be it, at first, with nearly infinitesimally small amplitude).
4. As an unstable droplet expands, depending on the flow field, it can expand or contract as it buckles in different places along the interface between fluids. We can follow this behavior in time (as expanding forms/functions become more complex and as contracting forms/functions lose their complexity).

So why do we say the arrow of time only functions in the expanding phase and not the contracting phase? Could it be there is only expansion, as we observe it? [Note: we still do not know the nature of the expansion (the change in curvature (the inflection points) of the inner boundary between systems in the universe, along with universal expansion, has not been adequately explained (how invaginated tensile boundaries can return the Red Shift between stars)]

For example: Put a sugar solution in water and let the water evaporate out. The sugar will form complex crystals (their boundaries in geometric fractal patterns) until all the sugar is used up, or all the water is. That’s how systems (like our brains) possible function objectively to “see” what’s “out there,” or “in here” in our lab.

In order for living systems to survive, why would they collect and exhibit a time arrow in one direction? Along with the arrow comes the idea of total entropy, when the ability for a system to become more complex runs out (just like in the sugar solution, when there is no more sugar in the water to crystallize out)?

When the universal change boundary (The Universe in general, us in particular) expands, it becomes more complex, a complexity, or complex form, that has more of a chance of understanding itself.

What might happen when the relational boundary in our experiment shrinks? Why are we not aware of it? A shrinking boundary might be less complex than we find ourselves, so we may not, in that form, be able to access anything. (Would this be like going back in time as we cross an event horizon falling into a black hole?

It may be that the arrow of time goes both ways (in durations that involve both expansion and contraction) but only an arrow toward complexity and total entropy can be experienced in a conscious mind.

If our minds catch and interpret only the incident, implicit Incoming, how might a discontinuous sampling of this incoming environment affect the possibility of life after death? Does our universe always expand and contract, perhaps creating the potential for other future selves?

What is required so that we can recognize ourselves from a past existence?

Are our perspectives on ourselves unique? Are our minds unique? Are we?

[Add to this a new topic: gravitational wells or troughs are quite stable in time, so when we trace expanding boundaries, the sine-wave crest bucklings may expand, but the “supermassive” troughs don’t move much (great inertia). All universal boundaries may be attached to one another in these troughs (forwards and backwards in time). Is there a way to send information through from present to past or future? Perhaps this has given rise, from another sort of logic, to the idea that, somehow, one can time-travel into the past.]