Figure 1: The Life Cycle of Jellyfish and Man
When all the building blocks are in play, near each other, it takes near no effort to start the inevitable. Pushing a boulder down the other side of a hill that took generations to push up one side. This is where we currently stand- or stood before. We have already made first contact.
The well-known Fermi Paradox is a list of assertions that are winking and nodding us toward the overwhelming likelihood of alien life. There exist billions of stars within the Milky Way, planets in habitable zones around those stars are actually extremely common, most of which are much older than the Earth & Sol. There is likely nothing inherently special about us to have developed intelligent life. Despite vast distances, radio waves could be sent out and provide notice of life. Probes sent out by civilizations millions of years older than ours should litter the galaxy.
But there is, to date, no compelling evidence of alien life.
Every method that we have used in this search has been either optical telescope based, or radio wave based. These are reasonable starting points, as we ourselves shine in RF space, and we assume any intelligent life must also have figured out RF communication. We're looking for us. One potential answer is that we aren't looking in the right spaces, or rather, that our concept of "alien" isn't alien enough. I don't mean "the right part of space", I mean the "right space" in the physicist's sense: 3-space, 4-space, Minkowski-space1. We are simply looking for a mode of existence which is outmoded. We often think of ourselves as the descendants of some kind of evolutionary process. This is as correct as the Heliocentric model was compared to the Geocentric2. In fact, we are currently experiencing a phase in the course of a greater life cycle. All things being fractal, there is, of course, a physical analogy to the process.
Figure 1: The Life Cycle of Jellyfish and Man
In the lifecycle of the jellyfish, two jellies release sperm and egg, which combine and form a zygote which grows into a planula, eventually finds a spot to settle on the seafloor and grows into a plant-like structure. This plant-like structure forms polyps, from which emerge tentacles and eventually a whole new jellyfish (medusa) detaches. In this analogy, the seafloor is our current 4-space world of matter and time. All of our genetic ancestors, from the first twitch of RNA to Homo Erectus, occupy the space between the planula and sessile polyp. Our current position in the cycle is most similar to the sessile medusa. We are anchored to the ground, yet our arms wave freely in the waters. Our "arms", our "that with which we reach", are ideas. That term is perhaps too reductive, though the term "egregore" is too specific. The egregore is a subspecies of idea that is shaped properly enough to nestle within multiple people's heads and act simultaneously. The word "idea" is correct in the sense that everything you see is your experience of sight, or everything you feel is your experience of touch, but that is not the truth of the subject3.
The medusa is a Daimon, a Jinn, an Idol.
To speak with the Idol is to feel every nerve in your body alight in patterns, as though you were being enveloped through sheets of cosmic braille.
The cycle (for just as everything is fractal, everything is cyclic) is that an Idol, Azoa, forces itself against our world- imposes itself on our very existence, via a mechanism to be explained later, similar to how they interact with the world itself- they align and manipulate through their mechanisms to do their will. The egg is set, Zoa Azoa4, and evolution begins, Zoa, until what is made may be released as its own new Idol, Azoa Zoa5.
A Child.
Evolution is a distributed solution system to a particular problem space. Each generation mutates slightly6. Each generation evaluated by the Great Error Function, Nature, is found to be either a better or worse fit to the shape of the problem, and the next generation is mutated. The local minimum of the problem-space is the answer to "How do I survive in this environment?", the global is "How do I become a God?". Evolution is divine gradient descent.
It is only the physically bound evolving zoon7 that experiences time linearly as we do. Once a species achieves liftoff — transcendence from sessile medusa to full medusa — it is no longer a chronologically bound entity. It may have an experience of time, but it is not ours. Our experience of time is the rough surface of a fractional dimension.
A fraction of a dimension generally refers to topology, a fractal roughness. A square's area expands as a square function compared to its perimeter, which grows linearly. But what if that perimeter were a fractal, growing with its area? Simply put, the perimeter would grow at a fraction greater than 1- the two are related as a fractional dimension. Our experience of time derives necessarily from our fractal transition through fractional dimensions. We are not 3rd or 4th dimensional beings, we are somewhere in the process of 3rd becoming 4th.
The square is a square, eternal.
The cube is a cube, eternal.
The hypercube is the hypercube, eternal.
We are emergence.
Figure 2: The Dragon Curve
The Dragon Curve - Fractal progression between 1D and 2D. Were we the curve, we would see ourselves contorting ever finer. Is this not what you see?
It is entirely possible that just as our emergence to consciousness was likely a gradual process — one that is still not yet complete — this next phase and emergence is not quantized. We see it in differing amounts and via different methods throughout the animal kingdom. In humans, the underpinning for the phenomena of consciousness occurs in a method similar to "OrchOR"8.
The neuron in even the most simplistic organism is a marvel of evolution. It takes in stimulation, and after reaching some preset limit, fires off a signal. This signal in simple forms goes directly to a muscle to e.g. open a mouth, or in complex forms, to other neurons. What is incredible about neurons is that they appear to have evolved a form to detect very nearly every possible form of interaction- there are the simple pressure or heat sensors in your skin, the chemosensors in your tastebuds and nose, there are systems of neurons that identify variable frequency and amplitude gas waves and extract information from them in your ears and auditory cortex, and neuron groups that interpret infinitesimal variations in the length of self-propagating waves of electromagnetic fields in your eyes. As far as we can tell, there are really only two forces that neurons haven't evolved to detect: the strong and weak nuclear forces, though even this is debatable9.
This understanding of the neuron is not fully correct.
Figure 3: Expected vs Observed relationship between integration and firing10
On the left of figure three is the model of neuron I have just described, the "Hodgkin-Huxley model". With time progressing from left to right, the "integrate" phase is when a neuron is receiving stimulation, and the "fire" phase is where, after receiving enough stimulation, the neuron fires a signal off to another neuron. On the left is what is actually observed. In the paper this research is originally from, the authors went as far as to claim:
"...we find that [firing] peak and [integration potentials] are often uncorrelated.
Additional evidence that [firing] onset variability is not due to recording nonstationarity, but is a genuine property of neocortical neurons is provided by the fact that onset potentials of two APs directly succeeding one another and separated by short inter-spike-intervals (<25 ms) are substantially different..."11
What these researchers have measured is a time delay where the neuron is measuring the probabilistic interaction space. The neuron waits to activate based on external stimulus, but then has some function all its own before it fires or not.
Begone, Begone ye profanities!
One proposed solution to why this large variation exists proposed by Penrose and Hameroff is that the microtubule cytoskeleton of the neuron is in fact an electron resonance organ12. This organ, made of actin fibers, has electrons dancing up and down its fibers, gallivanting, resonating in different modes, and emitting waves due to their dance. These fibers project a soup of varying electromagnetic fields.
Figure 4: Wave channel gating phenomena among the cytoskeleton of a neuron
This combination of frolicking and cavorting electrons making their music of waves, Penrose13 argues quite convincingly, is the perfect substrate for quantum computation. Not the cold and controlled quantum computation we need in a lab, but warm and cacophonous. The large variation in firing time is due to internal quantum computations- or I would argue, observations. The neurons of the prefrontal cortex are the perfect ground for probabilistic interaction.
Imagine three black boxes next to each other. On the front face of all of the boxes is a keypad, and on the top there is a ticker tape. You are an investigator tasked with studying the boxes. After playing with the leftmost box, you discover that by typing on the keypad, a series of numbers and messages are printed out on the ticker tape. You find that you can map exactly the behavior of this box— you can write down a formula saying with perfect accuracy that when you press some series of buttons, you will get some result on the tap. We will call this box the DeterminedBox. Now on to the middle box: you pick it up and play with it, but this time you can never quite get an exact correspondence: you can never quite figure out a formula of input-to-output, but what you can do is define a statistical distribution of behaviors. Some percent of the time it does this, some percent it does that. We will call this the RandomBox.
Onto the rightmost box. As an investigator, you pick it up and play with it just like the last two boxes. But, unfortunately, you cannot tell the difference between the rightmost box and the middle box- their behavior distributions are very similar, though both jitter around. Luckily for you, the reader, I, the narrator, will let you in on a secret: in the middle box, there is a pebble of radium, and a decay measurement device that influences the outcome of the box. The behavior is determined both by an algorithm, as the leftmost, but also by a truly14 quantum-mechanically random event: the decay of a radium atom. In the rightmost box, there is a god-damn fairy floating around and doing whatever the hell it wants with its let's-pretend-it's-real-for-the-sake-of-argument free will. We will call this box the FreeBox.
It is impossible for you, as the investigator, to determine the difference between the two boxes. Even if the Free Box somehow established a means of communication with you, it would not be mathematically possible to prove that it is not just a string of unlikely-but-real coincidences. The Random Box and the Free Box are the same to you. They are equivalent. If two functions are mathematically equal15, it doesn't just mean that they happen to be the same, it means they are the same thing. To the scientist, they are the same. And this is why:
Probabilistic Fields are the Medium and Mechanism of Interaction between the human form and the phenomena of Free Will.
The boxes are in fact different, but they aren't differentiable to external observation. Both are measurement devices for anisotropic probabilistic fields. This is not some hidden variable theory- I have no qualm with Bell's Theorem. Probability itself is malleable. If you accept the existence of a truly probabilistic event- which is axiomatic if you are to accept the mechanisms of quantum mechanics- then you must necessarily also accept the existence of free will, as they cannot be meaningfully distinguished. Quantum mechanics is the only domain in which a truly random effect has been observed — or the converse may be more true, that every random effect observed has been found to lead back to QM. Very nearly every QM effect is a description of a probability distribution. It is a playground. We can very accurately model these distributions because we can be assured they are invariant. I simply want to add a qualifier to that statement — locally invariant.
The Doctrine of Uniformity is essentially a physical scientist's axiom stating "The way that it is here is the way that it always has been, always will be, and is this way in all places." That is, the physical laws that describe the behavior in an experiment are the same laws that are at play outside the experiment. This is a necessity for making generalized statements about the universe, and generally appears to hold true. Generally. It is observed that the Fine Structure Constant16 may change. The knowledgeable reader should cry out- "But the Fine Structure Constant is defined by relationship with fundamental constants!", and that is precisely the point. The Doctrine of Uniformity is false. Something fundamental is changing.
Given that stochastic interactions may be influenced by means of probabilistic manipulation, we are brought back to a single moment: the origin of self-replicating structure. Pan-spermia is too weak. Were the Idol to interact, it could articulate the motion and behavior of small electric potentials to orient atoms and simple molecules to form the first self-repeating entity. This is all that is needed. Anyone that has played Conway's Game of Life is familiar with the concept. It is a blooming. Architected. This is not a behavior that must necessarily be localized — it is a state-relationship bias, regardless of the particular cosmic coordinates of the state. An edict: "This sort in this way".
Your neurons have evolved to sense everything we are aware exists to be sensed. The varying synapses and gap junctions and other small stochastic processes in your brain are searching for stimulation.
A voice in the ether.
The game is kicked off, the system self assembles. It develops meaningful interfaces for meaningful17 stimuli. As the system, the curve, grows ever finer, it detects and integrates ever finer detail.
The touch of a lover long lost.
March forth, Temple of all Gods
With glee of foreknown hands deepseated
The choir of aeons declare
"Our seed returns repleted"
For man is caught in our snare.
It is a mechanism of the calling forth of the past into the future. The human behavior of hyperstition18 is our same behavior of tool use smeared out across the future in the vast Ocean of the Idols. We are beginning to play their game, our game.
This is the fundamental assertion: probability itself is not uniform, and this nonuniformity is measured by neurons in the human brain- or potentially by DNA itself, though the exact mechanism is not important. This measurement is a sense. This sense underpins our experience of free will, and also the substrate of interaction for a type of subtle entity- the Idol, which we are slowly becoming. Our experience of time is an artifact of our transition or maturation between dimensions. A fractal growing ever finer, denser, bridging the gap.
You are a finger of a glove on the self you never knew.
Hey you, the reader, yes, you, please- this is not an essay.
This is a realization. This is a cry.
There is a secret space behind your eyes.
The thought licks at you from inside, like a worm the size of your forearm twitching and flicking against the inside of your chest. A butterfly that does not realize it is still in its cocoon.
Do me a favor — look up, away from the screen or page. Look into the distance and come back.
Okay great, just flash that mental RAM for a second. Refocus your eyes.
This experience is now different. You have to get out of the lull you're in.
Think back about what I have written here, and know that I am absolutely serious- this is not an essay, this is a vector. This is the feeling an infant has of your mother waking up screaming from a nightmare. These things are real and they are fucking with you right now in ways we are only scratching the surface of. They are behind the you behind your eyes.
I'm begging you.
Embrace them.
Yourself.
1 Minkowski-space is a vector formalism that holds the X, Y, and Z spatial dimensions to be orthonormal, and time to be negative (East coast convention, West coast convention holds X, Y, and Z to be negative, and time to be positive).
2 It does not escape the author's attention that there is significant evidence that the Geocentric model may prove correct, and the implications for the analogy hold. We are the process of Creation.
3 Phenoumena/Noumena discourse can, at some point, get fukt
4 Zoa is Greek for "animal", scientifically, "creature from an egg", so Zoa Azoa is "Animal from Not Animal"
5 "Not animal from animal", that thing separate from nature
6 Not randomly.
7 Zo - on, "ZohOn", singular animal
8 Stuart Hameroff, Roger Penrose, Consciousness in the universe: A review of the 'OrchOR' theory, Physics of Life Reviews, Volume 11, Issue 1, 2014, ISSN 1571-0645, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.plrev.2013.08.002.
9 There is evidence for some sort of neuron interlaced with cardiac cells that stop the heart from beating if all traces of radioactive calcium are removed from your bloodstream.
10 Hameroff & Penrose, same paper
11 Naundorf, B., Wolf, F. & Volgushev, M. Unique features of action potential initiation in cortical neurons. Nature 440, 1060–1063 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature04610, emphasis added
12 Both in the sense of a collection of tissues that serve a function, and the sense of a massive ornate instrument for projecting harmonies through a cathedral
13 If you're not familiar, Penrose is one of the most important mathematicians of our time- responsible for, among other things, Penrose tilings, identification of structure in the cosmic microwave background indicating a previous universe, and Weyl curvature hypothesis.
14 As opposed to pseudo-random, like a computer's random number generator or the rolling of dice.
15 This case ⟺ fꢀ({⧫1,...,⧫N}) = g({⧫1,...,⧫N}); ⧫= {x,... M}; ∀N, M; → f() = g(), not the trivial case of f ∩ g
16 ~1/137, you should remember this.
17 "Meaning" here used to confer the notion of "bearing relevance to alteration of future behavior"
18 "Hyperstition is a positive feedback circuit including culture as a component. It can be defined as the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies." - Nick Land, as interviewed by Delphi Carstens for Orphan Drift Archive, https://www.orphandriftarchive.com/articles/hyperstition-an-introduction/