WRR@LARGE

by Joy E. Stocke

Ralph Abraham - Mathematician - A pioneer of chaos theory and its applications. Abraham is Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley, and creator of the Visual Math Institute. He has taught at Berkeley, Columbia, and Princeton before moving to the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1968. He has performed works of visual and aural mathematics and music (with Ami Radunskaya and Peter Broadwell) since 1992.

Ralph Abraham

"A year and a half ago, I had a Fulbright to Kokata, India. I stayed at the Ramakrishna Mission and Institute - http://www.sriramakrishna.org/

Nowadays Kolkata is like Boston with fabulous schools where I had the opportunity to lecture on chaos theory. In my early history I spent a lot of time in India "out of time." Ever since, I've been thinking of how to make use of my experience, and was finally given the opportunity when I was asked to participate in a conference on science and consciousness. I was with a group of yoga practicioners. They included yogis who live in caves; Christian mystics from Egypt, Sufi practitioners. These people were models of consciousness according to personal experience.

What you have in India is a culture of scientists who meditate. I don't find this much in the U.S. It's not taken seriously here, but in Kolkota that is okay. I ended up in partnership with a quantum physicist who was studying Yoga Nidra or yogic sleep."

(Ed. Note: In Yoga Nidra, one leaves the waking state, goes through the dreaming state, and into the deep Sleep state, yet remains fully awake.)

"He had been author of an advanced model for quantum vacuum, which is a weird thing beyond reality. The quantum vacuum is the realm of energy behind matter. In this realm, there is neither space nor time and yet everything in it is interconnected."

(Ed. Note: The properties of the Universe come from `nothing', where nothing is the quantum vacuum - a piece of `empty' space that is not truly empty. It is filled with spacetime, which has curvature and structure, and obeys the laws of quantum physics. Thus, it is filled with potential particles, pairs of virtual matter and anti-matter units, and potential properties at the quantum level.)

"He said, 'Let's use the quantum vacuum as a model for the soul. Something which all mystics know exist, but which has never been scientifically proved or quantified. My day job involves a lot computer programming for bioiolgists, social scientists. For example: With voters, why do the Democratic and Republican platforms drift together? So we thought, maybe a computer program can help answer the question of the soul.

We came to this conundrum: Condensation creates the illusion of space-time - zilions and zillions of nodes that are conneceted by links. Condensation has micro times - changing lights. Out of this comes an illusion of ordinary time. So time is created step by step from an object which is eternal.

There can be evolution following laws of physics, biology. This condensation process, if we envision it the right way, makes us understand without conflict parnormal behavior."

(Ed. Note: Paranormal - any phenomenon that in one or more respects exceeds the limits of what is deemed physically possible according to current scientific assumptions.)

"In the neo-Platonic emanation view of reality in some sense creation is from the top down. You have Plato's cave where human beings only see shadows on the wall, not the reality. In Plato's world, human beings are simply passive agents in the story of creation.

In the condensation model, the agency becomes important because the understanding of condensation would include the mind of the observer. How do we base ths out of relativity?

We have among paranormal phenomena, free will, something which doesn't appear in Einstein's view. But the physical world has evolved the quantum vacumm. I want to make a phantom double: the soul. So we create a model for mind and a model for the body. We can double them up by putting links between them.

We create dynamic cell networks in our model for mind, which we only know through our experience. It's hard to write the rules for a model. But the point is, what we think matters, and thoughts exist."

http://www.ralph-abraham.org/

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