Our brains create the images we see. We know this. We know it, intellectually; but its implications have not fully hit us yet.
Donald Hoffman says it best. He likens what we see to a desktop interface on a computer. My email file appears as a blue square in the lower right corner of my screen. In truth, my email is neither square nor blue. I am seeing an icon, an image, a representation.
The image may not be literal. But it is not, I believe, arbitrary. I believe the images our brains create are designed to convey information. It is up to us to decipher and decode what that information is and what it means.
When we see “sun” and “moon,” what are we really seeing?
Perhaps I am seeing the same 2D plane. When I am beneath it, it curves above me. When I am beneath a concave curve, I am seeing too much information.
When I am above it, it curves below me. When I am above a convex curve, I am seeing too little information.
I saw an interesting article recently that linked my father’s work to a kind of Schrödinger equation. “The mathematical form of the Black–Scholes equation has led to parallels being drawn with quantum mechanics. As a linear second-order partial differential equation, the equation can be interpreted as an imaginary-time Schrödinger equation.” From Quantum effects in an Expanded Black-Scholes model.
The same idea is here: Black-Scholes: A Quantum Perspective.
So let’s look at information via the classic Schrödinger frame.
What is “too much information”? Too much information is both outcomes, superimposed. The dead cat and the alive cat, stacked on top of each other. Like seeing in a concave mirror.
What is “too little information”? Too little information is either/or. The cat is dead, or the cat is alive. Like seeing in a convex mirror.
Both of these perspectives, I believe, are wrong. The actual image is flat, 2D. It does not possess the excess redundancy of the concave mirror. Nor does it possess the “one eye covered” partiality of the convex mirror.
The truth is neither “both, superimposed” nor is it “either/or.”
It is “both, parallel.”
The truth is not a purple bunny. Nor is it a red bunny or a blue bunny. It is a red bunny and a blue bunny.
Which do we see? We see the one that we aren’t.
Our brains … our brains, in a sense, can’t handle the truth. We can’t handle a red bunny and a blue bunny. We can handle only one, therefore we see only one. We cannot see simultaneous, “other” outcomes. We cannot see parallel worlds.
My brain takes a flat line, a parallel line, and it makes it curve. When I am behind it (when it has not happened yet), it curves above me. When I am above it (when it has happened), it curves below me.
When I observe the future, I see more than will be. When I observe the past, I see less than what was.
Looking forward in time, I see red and blue. But the truth will be red or blue. Looking backward in time, I see red or blue. But the truth was red and blue.
When I am behind time, it curves above me. When I am behind time, it is a dome.
But I am not always behind/below it. When I surpass time (when the acceleration of the universe surpasses the speed of light?), then it is below me. When the universe eclipses the speed of light, we go “over the rainbow.”
“[O]ur observable universe is at the threshold of expanding faster than the speed of light.” ―physicist Lawrence M. Krauss
What Donald Hoffman has explained about the way the brain works is nothing short of profound. And it compels us, I believe, to see the universe in a new way.
The following is from the Wikipedia entry for firmament. It is called the Flammarion engraving.
“The Flammarion engraving is a wood engraving by an unknown artist that first appeared in Camille Flammarion‘s L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire (1888). The image depicts a man crawling under the edge of the sky, depicted as if it were a solid hemisphere, to look at the mysterious Empyrean beyond. The caption underneath the engraving (not shown here) translates to “A medieval missionary tells that he has found the point where heaven and Earth meet…”
This is why I have called this site welcome to heaven.
