Posted on 17 April 2024 by Beata Grobenski, grobenskibeata@gmail.com
Are Frank Wilczek’s time crystals hinting at Plato’s Eternal Forms?
To think about OBEs purely scientifically, I think we’ll first have to figure out what an “im-pression” is in the context of Qualia Formalism. We’re not there yet. Obviously, this is still pretty much just philosophy. But presumably, instead of “philosophizing” about something that can’t fit any empirical framework, I believe we can take a step further by agreeing that there is a thermodynamic pressure factor of an “im-pression” for each and every sequence of existence.
In eternalism, as well as Empty Individualism, each sequence or slice of existence exists independently like a frame on a movie tape. In his “Something Deeply Hidden” (page 288), Sean Carroll nicely describes quantum states and the emergence of time, a problem in physics labeled as “the problem of time in quantum gravity”. Personally, I think the following aspect of our phenomenology relates to quantum gravity and I wrote about this previously (links below the post). The deeper the stress-related thermodynamic impression, the more meaningful the experience, the louder the tone in your symphony. Yes, I’m a proponent of The Music Theory of Consciousness. In this text I’ll speculate a bit further about the concerns for descibing the thermodynamic process at the implementational level of consciousness and how (thermal) expansion and contraction might relate to some extreme states of consciousness such as NDEs, OBEs, and even levitation as an ancient myth of liberated meditators.
To go further and address NDEs and OBEs, I should address Michael Johnson‘s vasocomputation. The main idea here is that Bayesian priors are embedded in the smooth muscle latches. I cite his categorization:
- Compressive Vasomotion Hypothesis (CVH): the vasomotion reflex functions as a compression sweep on nearby neural resonances, collapsing and merging fragile ambivalent patterns (the “Bayesian blur” problem) into a more durable, definite state. Motifs of vasomotion, reflexive reactions to uncertainties, and patterns of tanha are equivalent.
- Vascular Clamp Hypothesis (VCH): vascular contractions freeze local neural patterns and plasticity for the duration of the contraction, similar to collapsing a superposition or probability distribution, clamping a harmonic system, or pinching a critical network into a definite circuit. Specific vascular constrictions correspond with specific predictions within the Active Inference framework and function as medium-term memory.
- Latched Hyperprior Hypothesis (LHH): if a vascular contraction is held long enough, it will engage the latch-bridge mechanism common to smooth muscle cells. This will durably ‘freeze’ the nearby circuit, isolating it from conscious experience and global updating and leading to a much-reduced dynamical repertoire; essentially creating a durable commitment to a specific hyperprior. The local vasculature will unlatch once the prediction the latch corresponds to is resolved, restoring the ability of the nearby neural networks to support a larger superposition of possibilities.
What happens when energy that is used for storing priors in the body gets released? On a smaller scale, this happens during meditation or psychedelic experiences. It’s what people mean by saying “LSD makes me feel like I could fly”. On a more speculative side, this made me wonder about ancient myths of meditation practitioners and levitation. What if out-of-body experiences could actually be achieved by mastering meditation so well that one can release all the contraction in the body and, well, quite literally, phenomenally fly away? In Oliver Sacks‘ research on musicophilia, there are similar controversial OBE phenomena that I strongly recommend checking out, such as the one case called “A Bolt From the Blue“:
He went to a pay phone outside the pavilion to make a quick call to his mother (this was before the age of cell phones). He still remembers every second of what happened next: “I was talking to my mother. There was a little bit of rain, thunder in the distance. My mother hung up. The phone was a foot away from where I was standing when I got struck. I remember a flash of light coming out of the phone. It hit me in the face. Next thing I remember, I was flying backwards.”
Then—he seemed to hesitate before telling me this—“I was flying forwards. Bewildered. I looked around. I saw my own body on the ground. I said to myself, ‘Oh shit, I’m dead.’ I saw people converging on the body. I saw a woman—she had been waiting to use the phone right behind me—position herself over my body, give it CPR. . . I floated up the stairs—my consciousness came with me. I saw my kids, had the realization that they would be O.K. Then I was surrounded by a bluish-white light . . . an enormous feeling of well-being and peace. The highest and lowest points of my life raced by me. I had the perception of accelerating, being drawn up. . . . There was speed and direction. Then, as I was saying to myself, ‘This is the most glorious feeling I have ever had’—slam! I was back.”
[Tony] Cicoria knew that he was back in his own body because he felt pain—pain from the burns on his face and on his left foot, where the electrical charge had entered and exited—and, he realized, “only bodies have pain.” He wanted to go back, he wanted to tell the woman to stop giving him CPR, to let him go. But it was too late—he was firmly back among the living. After a minute or two, when he could speak, he said, “It’s O.K.—I’m a doctor!” The woman, who turned out to be an intensive-care-unit nurse, replied, “A few minutes ago, you weren’t.”
The most staggering connection, to me at least, is the following: in order to convert weight, a gravitational force in newtons (N) applied over an area in square meters (m²), to sound pressure in pascals (Pa), we can use the relationship between pressure, force, and area:
F=Gm1m2/r² (N/m²)
1 N/m² = 1 Pa
If expansion and contraction of (the phenomena noticed in) the energy body are one of the fundamental processes defining our phenomenology (and in Chris Fields‘ words, the universe is a contraction (hope it’s the right talk)), then heat, density and pressure demand to be addressed more deeply. There is a chance that energy raising and entropy in substrates like liquid, gas, or plasma act in the same way in consciousness, namely by reducing the amount of energy used for the world-simulation maintenance and releasing the rest, a process whose peak might correspond to “pure awareness”. “Be open like the sky” as a meditation instruction might point to something way much deeper than purely a metaphor. I also think maybe levitation wasn’t purely a fantasy.
Supposedly, near-death experiences (NDEs) work according to some of these rules relating to pressure, temperature, expansion and contraction. Muscle latches and the vascular system suddenly release the pressure that served as biophysical storage of the embodied “narrative self” (vasocomputation again) where pressure might be translated into gravitoception. Because there is no more pressure that holds the “self” in the body, out-of-body experiences happen. “You” are still alive, but you’re not in your body. In NDEs, so it seems, one loses gravity, but not time.
Similar effects happen on higher doses of ketamine when we “feel lighter”. Our muscles release the tension. It’s interesting that ketamine therapy patients report OBE’s as well. Paradoxically, their therapeutic benefits come from the feeling of finally “being in themselves” once they are actually not. All the pressure of embodiment is gone. This makes me think of Ruben Laukkonen’s story explaining an experience with ketamine that felt like a quantum leap that saved his life.
Back to Black (Holes, Again, Sorry)
The idea of connecting cosmic phenomena with music dates back to ancient philosophical concepts, notably the “music of the spheres,” which posits a harmony in the celestial order. Johannes Kepler, in the early 17th century, sought to understand the heavens through geometric principles and harmonics, imagining the motions of the planets to produce a form of music, albeit not audible to human ears. I think there’s more to the relationship between energy bodies and celestial objects. Here are some thoughts.
In 2003, ex-Director of the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge Andrew Fabian and colleagues studied the Perseus cluster, a massive cluster of galaxies, and discovered that the black hole at the center of the cluster was generating pressure waves in the surrounding hot gas. These waves can be thought of as sound waves, although they are at frequencies far below the range of human hearing. The phenomenon was described as the deepest note in the universe, a B-flat, billions of times lower than can be heard by humans.
This discovery of “a black hole hum” highlighted the role of massive black holes in regulating the growth and evolution of galaxies and provided a modern parallel to the ancient idea of the music of the spheres. The connection between gravitational waves and cosmic phenomena further expanded with the first direct detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO collaboration in 2015. These waves were produced by the collision of two black holes, confirming a major prediction of Albert Einstein‘s general theory of relativity. Gravitational waves carry information about their origins and about the nature of gravity that cannot be obtained through other astronomical observations, offering a new way to listen to the cosmos.
If neural annealing (Johnson and Gómez-Emilsson) indeed truthfully describes an energy-based physical phenomenon that triggers a phase transition in the energy of consciousness, the consequences for our understanding reality should be big. This won’t just be energy in phenomenology. There aren’t a few energies. That is just energy, and this would truly lead us to empirical observations that that the boundary between the observer and the environment is an illusion. The most intriguing question leading from integrating heat and entropy into consciousness is whether and how it links to the gravitational force. I believe there is a deeper form of communication than the one that we find obvious.
Also, I agree with Michael Johnson‘s statement:
“Each moment of experience is a certain sort of logic crystal, which may (or may not — interesting scissor point) be thought of as its own closed universe. A “stream of experience” is a sequence of these crystals.”
Thousand of years of phenomenological research done by tribes living as one with the nature, luckily, was not completely for nothing. There’s still some knowledge that is conserved. I believe once we stop interpreting everything through the materialist lens, things will start to make more sense. You know, maybe the idea behind the crucificion of Jesus Christ wasn’t actually relating to his body being crucified. Maybe it was a phenomenal cruci-fix, trying to tell a deeper story of a phenomenal self-collapse and the transcendence of material duality.
Maybe once that Pac-Man snake of yours bites its own tale, instead of being a vibrating string on the loose, you loop up as ouroboros, and as Plato and enlightened ones would wisely say, achieve a sort of immortality as an eternal celestial form. Well, maybe more than just pure wisdom, Frank Wilczek is a Nobel Prize who hypothesized time crystals. Let’s give these ideas some time to mature.
Soon I am publishing a book called “The Good Annealing Manual: From Psychedelic Alchemy to Chemistry of the Mind”, to stay in the loop with the research, feel free to follow or contact me on Twitter: @stalkerofmusik
Relevant older write-ups:
Thoughts on Evolutions 
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