The 3Ms of Meaning

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I am often fascinated by the paths we take to our perception of “truth.” For example, I had my hair cut the other day by a young woman whose accent implied that she was from “somewhere else.” I inquired - perhaps politically incorrectly - where she was from. “Ukraine.” she replied. 

Naturally, I asked what she thought of the current brouhaha. “Ah,” she said, “Is all fault of Ukrainian president.” And then launched into a lengthy analogy about what one should do if you saw someone climbing up a ladder into your neighbor’s daughter’s bedroom several times each week. I had no idea what she was talking about, but she had scissors in her hand at the time, and was waving them around my head. So I remained mum. Her insights, it sadly became evident, did not translate to much facility in cutting hair. But I was intrigued with the fervor with which her analogy reflected, to her at least, an obvious path to the “truth” of a complex situation. The more I thought about it, the more I came to consider that, despite the varying way-stations along the route, our path to truth seems to traverse a common countryside. I now think of that path as the 3Ms of meaning. Let me share. 

The first M is “moment.” Meaning has to start somewhere, and I think for us big-brained apes that somewhere is an experiential moment. Something happens to us that is of such import that we stash it away somewhere up in those billions of cells between our ears. Think of it as a still photo. And, like many of the still photos in the dusty photo albums in our closets, or in the “photos” file on our phone, tablet or computer, that may well be the end of it. But occasionally something - a conversation, a movie, a similar instance, jogs the grey matter, and out pops that photo, and that leads us to the second M: Memory. 

Memory is unique. My wife can remember, it seems to me, every meal she has ever eaten, who was present, what they had to eat, how it was prepared and if each person liked their meal. For me, I assume that I usually have somewhere between 2 and 5 meals a day - and have done so most of my life. However, if pressed, yes, I can remember the bistecca alla fiorentina we had in Florence, in the Spring of 2000 something - “Ah, yes, I remember it well.” On the other hand I really do remember the tune and most of the lyrics to every top-40s hits from 1957, when my big brother was a teenager. So, memory is unique and certainly not infallible. In our photographic analogy, memory is like those little videos everyone now shoots on their phones. Little fragments of the past, moments digitally strung together, but still not “the whole thing.” We construct the whole thing. And the “whole thing” that we create is not so much an accurate reconstruction of the reality we lived as it is the “truth” we cobble together from moment and memory. It is the third M: Memoir. 

Memoir is one of the building blocks of our truth.  It is our life remembered, and, to certain extent reconstructed. Unless you are among that small population of folks blessed, or cursed, with a photographic or eidetic memory, we forget far more than we remember. And that is probably a good thing. We grow, we change, we evolve.  It is most likely not healthy to constantly remember a previous version of ourself that is at odds with the person we are now, or hope to be in the future. 

This notion of a “truth” and an “identity” largely based on these evolving and flexible memoirs has always fascinated me.  Most interesting is the implication that we are different, or at least differing, people at 6, 16, 60, 86, 106, etc., as our evolving memoirs construct evolving versions of truth and reality. Long time readers of these posts may sense a potential conflict here with the notion of “chord theory,” the variation of string theory upon which Distilled Harmony is based. Very, very basically, chord theory asserts that at the final, irreducible, physical level, we are uniquely constructed of tiny vibrating strings. Vibrating strings produce musical notes, hence, we are made of music. Furthermore, that unique music, that “chord” is the purest definition of the “self.” The potential conflict could arise with the evolving memoir’s impact on the self, and hence potentially upon the chord which is a physical construction. I resolve that possible conflict by remembering that memoir is a constructed reality. We use both moment and memory to construct memoir. It is the chord that guides that construction, which provides a fundamental consistency to the differing realities - differing selves - that we construct from 6 to 106.  

That assertion puts to rest a lingering concern I have always had regarding our evolving identity and mortality.  I am less comfortable with some of my past identities than the current version. Yet, neither am I content to define the current version as the final form. Both situations raise the uncomfortable question of “the interrupted self.” What happens to these evolving memoirs and their codependent versions of the self when we die? I find comfort in the following points:

The chord is constant and utterly unique to you. Like our DNA, which is itself built on the strings that express the chord, the chord may be subject to some evolutionary shifts, but those would be minor and consistent with the dominant tonality of the chord. So every expression of the chord in our lives, no matter how immature, retains the legitimate core of the chord, so death, “the interrupted self” is not the end of the story, particularly when you consider:

This life is only the most current expression of your chord. Distilled Harmony always cycles around to the notion that one lifetime is insufficient to the task of becoming a fully evolved entity. So, obviously, we must experience more than one lifetime. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Which segues neatly into another reoccurring Distilled Harmony meme (a word I swore to resist - but sometimes it just works): That which we call enlightenment, or nirvana, or inner peace, or ultimate oneness, or whatever, is that state of existence when we become aware of our previous existences and the truths, selves, identities, lessons, accumulated in those lives.

And, if we want to get really strange, in a “many worlds” view of existence it seems likely that we only die in one world at a time, hence our “self” and “identity” continue to evolve in those other worlds. And perhaps true enlightenment occurs when we come to realize that the many worlds are not really divergent, but are rather “covergent” paths leading .  .  .  well, somewhere. 

So, in any case, the 3Ms of meaning provide me with a seemingly never-ending supply of interesting “what ifs” to consider when sleep eludes me in the tiny hours of morning. Occasionally, I think I stumble upon meanings. Occasionally, I remember to write them down.

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Schrag Wall: Uncle Ben in a "Big Car"

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OK, this is a "full disclosure" post from my "Legacy" series of drawings.  The original photo remains unchanged.  Here it is:

I had always believed that this was a picture of my mother in one of her father's taxis - he ran a cab company. I posted the image with that description. Not too long after, my sister Margaret - the family archivist - contacted me to say she wasn't sure of the image or its provenance. So she began to search through her archives.

Eventually in one of Mom's journals she found the original image with this caption:

"Bennie in a really BIG CAR.

1917"

So the picture is obviously of her brother Benjamin, who died young, before she married and naturally before I or any of my siblings were born. The provenance of the car remains a mystery. One of the family taxis remains logical, but year, make and model all remain mysteries. Obviously, some type of touring car manufactured in 1917 or earlier. A friend pointed out that the valve on top of the radiator might be a diesel escape valve. The multiple intake valves on the side of the hood might also might point in that direction. But still a mystery.

I will admit that none of those issues concerned me during the 4 million hours - OK, maybe only 2 million - I spent creating the Legacy image below. Finished mere minutes ago :-)!

The image is 9.5 x 15 inches. The color is the result of several types of markers on heavy water color paper.

Enjoy!

The Human Singularity in Many Worlds - Or The Body Entangled

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It is like seeing a landscape through a fog. You can make out shapes and perhaps movement, but nothing is quite clear. Then a breeze sweeps away the mist, and you now see things in a different light. Isolated insights weave together in a pattern that may still be fragmented, but is somehow better, more complete than what you had before. I had one such moment when Google recently announced, but then recanted, a claim that it had achieved “quantum supremacy.” At first I thought it meant that Google had released a new Jason Bourne film - anything would better than the last one. But after reading a number of articles on quantum supremacy, I realized that that was not the case.  However, it also became clear that it would take a long time for me to understand the marriage of quantum mechanics and computer science that such supremacy would represent. However, since the claim quickly dissolved into a kind of Internet “Oops,” I wasn’t overly concerned. I’ll worry about it a bit more once we see a “We really mean it this time!” post.

What did happen, though, was that a number of previous, semi-connected “quantum-esque” musings came together in ways, that while probably still incomplete, seemed a tad clearer than before. Let me try to share them and hopefully retain at least a bit of that clarity. Let’s start with the “many worlds theory.” In this version of quantum mechanics there is no such thing as the path not taken. When we make an important decision - when path A is chosen, paths B, C, D, etc., - the other decisions we could have made - are also simultaneously taken, but those decisions play out in different worlds, in different - or at least somewhat hidden - universes. OK, hold on to that for a moment and let’s jump to the “human singularity.”

In the Big Bang theory of the universe, before the big bang itself, all matter, space-time, the whole enchilada, was compressed into an infinitely tiny small point - a physical singularity. Then quantum fluctuations within the singularity caused the Big Bang throwing all the contents of the singularity out into an inflation that, in an incredibly minuscule blink of time, resulted in the humongous universe in which we exist and can observe.

OK, trudging on to yet another quantum condition - entanglement. This is the one that Einstein initially resisted but later accepted and defined as “spooky action at a distance.” Wikipedia defines it thus: 

“Quantum entanglement is a physical phenomenon that occurs when pairs or groups of particles are generated, interact, or share spatial proximity in ways such that the quantum state of each particle cannot be described independently of the state of the others, even when the particles are separated by a large distance.”

To simplify, particles that are “entangled” react to any stimulus identically and instantaneously regardless of their degree of separation - inches, miles, light years, makes no difference. Do something to one of a pair or group of entangled particles and the other entangled elements react identically and instantaneously regardless of their degree of separation. Thus, entangled particles seem to toss information back and forth playing fast and loose with the speed of light and other cosmic niceties. No wonder Einstein found it “spooky.”

I haven’t run across any sources that assert that the contents of the original physical singularity which inflated into the universe we know were entangled, but they certainly shared “intense spatial proximity” in the original singularity. So I wouldn’t be surprised at all to read that someone had discovered evidence that the entire universe is entangled. If that pops up, remember you heard it here first! Or drop me a note and let me know where you read about it years ago.

Anyhow, I don’t want to focus on the possible entanglement of the physical universe. Well, not directly anyhow. I am more interested in the possibilities of what I think of as the human singularity.  Let me jump back almost 20 years to the original publication of The God Chord. Stealing from string theory, I asserted in that work that we were literally made of music. That our own unique Chord was the result of the vibration of the strings that formed the smallest unique divisions of each replicated particle in our bodies.  Now, these couple of decades later, it doesn’t seem much of a stretch to posit that all these tiny harmonic particles in our body are “generated, interact, or share spatial proximity” in such a way as to be entangled. After all, the particles were generated together, constantly interact, and share the spatial proximity of our body. Seems a strong argument for “the body entangled.” There are obviously tempting possible paths here for medicine, genetics, science and physics here. But that is not the path that intrigues me. I am more interested in the metaphysical spin implied by these entanglements.

Let us assume that we are composed of entangled particles. Let us further suppose that the many worlds theory - or the multiverses theory - is right. So that when we make specific life choices that lead us down path A, entangled versions of our selves simultaneously head off down paths B, C, D, etc.  I am willing to admit that that is strange. But not nearly as strange as this: if we are entangled with those other versions of ourselves shouldn’t we - at some level - be experiencing elements of the lives of those alternative choices? Down paths B, C, D, etc.?

What happens when we choose a major, a career, a partner? In a many worlds reality we simultaneously chose a different major, a different career, a different partner. When we marry “many worlds” with “entanglement” we simultaneously make all those different choices and entangled versions of our self are living those different lives in different worlds in different universes. 

My most intense curiosity at the moment focuses on possible evidence of being able to sense - via entanglement -  what is going on in my “other lives in other worlds.” Those entangled harmonic worlds I created by not choosing them.  Do I experience them through dreams, sleeping or waking? Visions? Trances? Prayer? Creative impulses and works? Meditation? What are those intensely “real seeming” experiences that feature precious people in alien situations, or hyper-realistic dreams of familiar situations inhabited by strangers? 

I said that I consider these musings to live more in the realm of metaphysics than traditional or classical physics. But that may well be a spurious distinction. If one world yields up its secrets to the probing of physics, might that choice in itself give rise to other entangled worlds governed by “spookier” paths to understanding? An alternate type of physics? metaphysics? philosophies? Why not? After all, Halloween is just around the corner!

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