Continuity isn't the only thing to be concerned about (Part 1)

It is starting to become noticeable. There are periods of time when I seem to be across a continuum. The linear self is beginning to take a backseat to the personhood that is in several places, if only mentally, at one time.

This is not a lot of fun, either. It becomes difficult to keep track of things. The only recourse is to focus in on one thing for as long as I can, at the expense of everything else, because there is just too much else. When I stop and look up, I can see it all around me, the different levels on which things work, the different responsibilities, the different personalities I am capable of wearing.

If all of this seems abstract and hard to visualize, that's because it is. An example: I find that posts I have never made are in my memory on some level as having been made. So I make them. It's sort of the reverse of Alzheimer's. It's as if my short term memory is not functioning on one, but a thousand things at once, and they all get compacted together. What I had for supper last night is lost behind where my keys are and the ten things on my incomplete to do list, and my need to journal my latest observations on continuity:

My latest observations on continuity: It is an illusion. Continuity is an idea that takes infinity and compresses it into every place you look. To assume that finite man could operate on a continuum is gross hubris. We, humans, are painfully discretized beings, only capable of a thin version of continuity. Indeed, we are so impressed with infinity, which is just continuity at the end of things.

We don't think about the mind-numbing case of infinity everywhere and all between. We blank it out. Discrete infinity is child's play next to this, but we get the two confused.

Consider: an infinite lifespan is to us just somewhere out there past our 100+- years, 101 is just as infinite as 1*10exp1000000 if we die at 99.

But continuity implies that every moment is infinite. Yes, it sounds like a trick, but what I'm talking about is the mathematical presence of divisibility completed, throughout one unit and the next. And physically, we are just not capable of that. Even though we work on the nanoscale now, for true continuity, we can just go on breaking things down forever. That is true continuity.It is an asymptote around every corner.

Is this the path that Georg Cantor traveled on his way to madness?

Quantum Behavior in the real world

It happens in photosynthesis.

And, it appears Roger Penrose predicted it before I did, of the human brain. That's why he gets the big bucks.

That being said, I stand by my conviction, made in ignorance of his comments, that our minds are capable of quantum entanglement and that the brain has the capability of viewing through time similar to the way a wormhole would go through time.

However, the new work leads me to a more precise general description of what is going on.

All the successful work with quantum entanglement including the study of photosynthesis points to the wave nature of the photon and other particles as where the real magic happens.

This shouldn't be any surprise, if we realize that almost all of our advances in science have been dependent on wave mechanics.

More importantly, as humans, we are intimately connected with the physical world through wave information. There's no question that this has a direct bearing on our own interactions and also our social interactions. It's not hard to posit that complex wave activity is at the heart of most, if not all, of our macroscopic world. That we have been ignorant of this up until now is largely because our attention and most of our success in technology has been through the exploitation of the particle nature of mechanics and through digital information processing.

Personally, I can point to quite a few examples of wave mechanics and its significance to human perception: Holography creates three dimensional perception through wave mechanics. Another: A few years ago, the DX7 was a new form of music synthesizer that worked through wave modulation algorithms. It created fairly realistic sounds that were very difficult for non-engineers come up with. (Later, digital sampling came into prominence, and wave modulation synthesis took a back seat.)

It seems also that, tied to the whole process of entanglement, what we call chaos but what I would call fractal complexity is at work. Given that most of nature is fractal in composition, it seems to me that here is the real bridge between the quantum and the macroscopic world.

What is surprising is that we can get a handle on this level of complexity at all, but that's probably because of our success with scaling up complexity through computer reiteration.

Up until now, humans have been wave pattern perceivers. Now we are at the beginning of being wave pattern scientists. The pathway will be through set theory and number theory. In my opinion.