Panpsychism and the Transformation Proof

Intro

It’s not a long complicated beast of logic. But it is definitive in that a proof is also a definition, and this one is about specificity itself. It’s quite simple in exposition, though it is unfamiliar to the way we often think. So the book Unicycle as a whole tries to provide an inviting environment, where the main consequences are developed with the help of fiction. Sometimes the fiction necessarily gets real.

It’s a proof by contradiction, showing that whenever we assume pure symmetry (the proof defines symmetry) into any form of expression, we are contradicting ourselves. When we speak loosely, this may not always be a big deal. And it’s not always a problem for math or other forms of logic. But the more specific we try to be where symmetry matters, the more the Transformation Proof matters. The more absolutist we are, again, the more the proof kicks in to save us from chaos. And the relativist is provided with a compass connected to nature.

If the proof is correct, error free, it matters because nature is observably asymmetric, and the proof demonstrates that pure symmetry and asymmetry are mutually exclusive; if one exists the other does not. This opens doors to a more productive way of understanding universals, connectivity, and many things connected to that, including, fortunately, a progressive and democratic ethics. The Transformation Proof, when applied, can feed the hungry. I hope this works, but the way I arrived at it is by hoping mostly for the truth and that the truth might actually be liberating.

The thing about giving up on “the truth” (a postmodern retreat) is that it’s not just a matter of discovery or “the quest”; it’s about whether we are going to keep asking questions. The power of doubt. Not finding the truth is not the problem. It is even a good thing that we aren’t always right. The disaster is not caring anymore about what might in fact be true. That this the Transformation Proof has led to a panpsychist perspective has come to me as something of a surprise.

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A sample connecting asymmetry, polarity and consciousness, from What the Farmer Told the Bard, a Novel of Erotic Panpsychism.

Spoiler: They will discover that sex isn’t everything (the obvious tends to escape us.)

The more rigorous proof is rolled out in Unicycle, of course!

Chapter 2: The Pebble

The tall grass among the giant stones invited them to form a circle. They sat down under a hot, clear sky and went silently lazy. Bellarose took the strip of cloth she had cut from an old Indian sari and slowly brought it over her shoulders and tied it round the back. They watched her spread it to near transparency like a fan over each breast. She was already wearing the totally short and frayed cut-offs. Finally John said, “So what’s the invention?”

It sounded like a challenge, and he was about to try again to give it another spin, when Jesús stopped him. “Here, I’m sure you’ll recognize it. It’s simple, take my hands.”

They felt uncomfortable. It reminded them of the New Age.

“Is this something from the Project?” she inquired.

“No—” He shrugged patiently.

They held hands in the circle.

“Good, now relax. There, feel your center, feel it in an ocean of energy. Now feel your sexuality in that ocean, feel the energy run through us, the sex is uniting us with its polarity.”
Suddenly, as if on impulse, he squeezed John’s hand.

“You felt that, if I’m not mistaken?”

“Obviously!”

Jesús smiled. “Bellarose, did you feel me squeeze John’s hand?”

There was a moment of silence.

“Of course!”

“But not the way John did, right?”

“Right!”

“You felt it deeply, beyond just registering it visually. There’s energy circulating among us because we are conscious. No consciousness, no flow of energy in nature. We’ve all thought about it. Is it true? That’s what I set out to discover.”

“We all did!” said John.

“Now I want you and Bellarose to kiss.”

John looked at him suspiciously.

“Ah!” the inventor continued. “You feel the energy? Don’t let go of my hands. There! Feel it change? Ah, now—”

“Now you’re the reluctant lover,” said the cat.

John leaned over and kissed her.

“Well, basically, energy flows with male-female polarity, including LGBTQ+ attractions. It’s sexual and, to some degree, it’s conscious. The question is, to what degree, eh?” He smiled at them. Then ducked his head and shrugged slightly as though to avoid something.
“What about electrons, protons—neutrons,” she said. “Has Jesus been dabbling in panpsychism?”

They would sometimes play with his name in English, as though searching for something forgotten with a casual interest, probing him and sometimes finding him surprisingly ticklish; at other times he would suddenly go cold. “Do we want to hold hands? No?” He released them and smiled with determination. “No sex? Quite the contrary. For one thing, folks, in the neutron, we’ve discovered, there’s no true neutrality!”

He raised a finger in parody of the professor. “In fact, all particles have what amounts to a sensual—that’s sexual—polarity. Sex flows in and among them. It’s conscious.” He looked at them and smiled again.

“Wait a minute,” said John. “You don’t mean this neutron is aware, do you?”

“I don’t say it has a soul. No! But I do believe it’s about time we scientists acknowledge the other, in fact, the main attraction!” He cocked his head, showing off the blond hair and blue eyes, “All around us in physical nature.

“A tree that is self-fertile, does it actually have a soul? No, I would say, rather, it’s the manifestation of nature’s polarity in bloom. It’s nature’s polarity having sex in the form of a tree! Fabulous. But exactly what sort of soul individuality it has is a tough question, to say the least. But it’s all consciousness, gravitational consciousness, magnetic consciousness, centrifugal consciousness: all sex, that’s the problem.”

“Why?” said John.

“You see me here before you, at least, in part, because I told them at the Project that it’s probably asleep.” He folded his hands and looked humble.

“Probably asleep?” the other echoed lazily.

“Yes, probably, asleep and they fundamentally threw me out, you see?” He smiled.

“Because . . . they don’t think it’s conscious?”

“No.”

“Well, what do they think?”

“They think it’s God.” His face went blank.

“You told them God is probably asleep?”

“Feel the energy?” said Bellarose.

She looked at him searchingly. “Why did you tell them ‘probably’? Maybe they probably threw you out because you said probably!”

“Well, yes, in a way,” he shifted the powerful but supple shoulders, “you see, I’m not entirely sure, and to be honest, I said probably. Jack and I ran some statistics. We don’t necessarily agree, and things got a little out of hand, but I believe that it is probable that all matter is sleeping consciousness and so God—the All-in-All, as they sometimes call it—is asleep.”

“That’s what you believe?” said John, grinning, the strong white teeth, the weathered face, the sparkling green eyes, the long hair.

“Yes, it can be demonstrated that He, She or It is most likely not aware of many events. But I really have to describe the technical side a little more, so you understand the political environment, the people running the system. In fact, it got worse.”

They waited.

“Yes, well, the problem is, the conscious but sleeping energy that pervades all things, what they are calling God, may not even have enough individuality, that is to say, polarity, to have what one would ordinarily call a soul.

“As it turns out, God is more like the neutron.

“So, I had to tell them, effectively, that probably it didn’t have a soul, either, sooo…”

“Bellarose is right. You shouldn’t have been so honest with these guys, with all those probablys and maybes.”

“But the truth is in a machine!”

He looked suddenly desperate, a man whose car won’t start.

“It’s a strange thing that you’re alive,” said John.

“Yes, I’ve been wondering about that, myself.”

“Are you sure they threw you out,” said Bellarose. “Are you sure you got the ol’ heave ho—or was it more like you got the Black Spot and gave them the slip?” She looked him over.

“I’m not sure…”

“The soul of honesty,” commented John.

Jesús smiled at him defiantly, but teasingly, as though this was a game and John wanted to play, have a little competition. “OK, listen to this, guys. Traces—everything leaves its footprints. Even me!

“The software I designed is capable of identifying a footprint in the sand even long after time has washed its more obvious characteristics away. Because, the thing is, time never washes away anything completely. That footprint is always there to some degree and is, therefore, always remembered. All aspects of nature have a permanent memory because, and here we go again, because all of the natural world is conscious to some degree. Where some forget others may remember for them. A collective unconscious.”

“The natural world,” John asked, “you mean that to include everything, all matter, the universe, whatever is, like we used to talk about it, like—it, right?”

“I think so—”

“So you designed a system that traces all footprints in time?”

“Whoa, go easy! Hang on! Yes and no. The real breakthrough came with the new computer chip.

“Jack calls it the New Neolithic Age. He doesn’t like the word ‘crystal,’ because this technology has special asymmetric characteristics. We just call it ‘the glass,’ or sometimes ‘the goblet.’ Glass is transparent, doesn’t crystallize, remains disorganized in a quantum balance in motion. So that’s when you guys lost track of me. I was carried away by a technology that’s so fast it almost had me disappearing without a trace.”

There was an awkward silence. John was about to ask more about the computer, but Jesús cut him off. “This was fast beyond anything we could have foreseen. I realized we could run the software . . . Suddenly, it was no longer just a philosophical exercise. We didn’t just have our heads in the clouds! It began to happen.” He paused, losing the thread.

John spoke, “What you mean is that all those ideas we’d been kicking around and you’d go away and try to record in software languages finally got a ride on the right hardware.”

“Suddenly it happened! God, listen you two, listen to what happened.

“Take an object you want to investigate; you want to know its story—take a pebble from the beach, anything! Even a grain of sand . . . or take a photograph! What can it tell you? What’s behind the face, and what is the face of the photographer? What relationships brought that picture into being? How well can you see them? Who are they?”

Bellarose stopped him. “First just tell us, how could the system recognize the story told by the pebble, just the simple, living pebble on the beach, OK?”

“The system is fast. The pebble is like one piece of a cosmic puzzle. Its shape is all its own, its crystals are like its personality, they form a pattern, its composition, its energy and so forth. We give the system as much information about the pebble as we can or need to. The system takes it from there. The more pieces of the puzzle we feed in, the fewer the options the system needs to consider in order to work out what the finished puzzle picture looks like. Computers are simple.

“But this is the magic: we, ourselves, can only tell the system very little, hardly anything! It really only adds up to having one piece, one shape in the puzzle to go by, but it can still work through all the pieces fast enough to find the right fit and work out the expanding image of the continuing story of the pebble, as you watch.”

“But,” said the cat, “couldn’t there be a lot of different pieces that fit into the pebble puzzle piece’s configuration, giving rise to a lot of different puzzle pictures? How would the system know which was the real one to aim for?”

“Because, and this is, again, the magic, the truth of it all: there is only one true fit, there is only one unique, true environment that, in reality, surrounds and intimately relates to that one and only pebble. It would be impossible to find a connecting piece that would fit the exact shape of the pebble on the one hand, while, on the other, connecting up with some hypothetical non-existent environment. You can’t have a whole piece that is half real!

“For the system to figure out a connecting piece that truly fits the pebble, it has to define the entire shape of that connector—and therefore the next, and the next, and so on. Fact is, folks, it just has to work out exactly the pebble’s own shape and you’re home! It’s like, the more you find out about the pebble’s environment, the more you find out about the pebble!

“You see, it’s like we said, everything has arrived in its present state in one way only. The energy that makes up the pebble—all the molecules, electrons, forces and polarities—that pattern could only be as it is by having arrived by one particular path, so to speak, whose relationship with its surroundings is itself so intimate as to make any changes in the one show up in the other.

“It’s as though the fate of the fairy who left her footprint on the pebble changes the character of that footprint. If her fate, long after, is tragic, that tiny footprint echoes the tragedy in some way. If you have knowledge of her fate, you will see it in the footprint. Conversely if, as Sherlock Holmes, you apply your magnifying glass and careful observation to the small trace, you will realize that there is a fairy weeping further along the shore.

“This is only possible where consciousness is looking at consciousness.

“In short, the system can work out what environment must have arisen for the pebble to be where it is, as it is, at a specific time. This is because it can only have arrived there to become what it is in one characteristic manner. It can only get that way one way! That’s the extent of its individuality. There you have it, one pebble.

“Now, if you want to know how I know it’s conscious?”

“Possibly,” teased Bellarose.

“Maybe!” said John.

Without hesitating, he continued, “Nothing is completely separate, no man is an island, completely cut off from nature—or woman, or from woman . . . anyway, it’s a true saying, as it turns out.

“Put another way, when any two things connect, they must at some point truly connect, that is, merge completely. Otherwise they will never honestly, truly, connect at all! Ultimately, you can’t just sort of connect! At some place you must connect completely, if you are to connect at all! Think what this means! If I connect with you, if I touch you, even just a little bit, I must somewhere have touched you completely! If I am to touch you at all, it must be somewhere totally complete. It’s amazing, the more you consider it! What does it mean to have any complete contact at all? Does that mean we actually physically merge somewhere invisibly in our energy, even though I just feel the pressure of your skin? Well, it does, yes, it’s true. We must somewhere merge totally physically to make any physical contact at all. We call this the ‘slipstream connection.’

“This gives rise to a continuity, a slipstream around everything, that allows consciousness to flow through all barriers and flood all areas of life, even into matter! The fact is, wherever you have a connection, you have consciousness flowing, you physically just can’t keep it out!

“Fact is, folks, if you can’t keep it out anywhere, then it is everywhere and if it is everywhere, then it is everything.

“In other words, if we are conscious anywhere at all, then we are conscious everywhere, and all things are, to some extent, twisted or untwisted, conscious!”

They enjoyed seeing him so excited again; it reminded them of the old life they had shared, falling in love before his disappearance.

Bellarose purred: “Wherever you have a contrast, you have a connection? Think of those changing textures—”

She slowly rocked her shoulders, breasts and hips as though she was on the deck of a sailboat, hands billowing slightly the hair, stretching with pleasure.

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John plucked a blade of grass and held it up to the light so that it became the center of attention. “This blade will tell you about all the others? How do you feed it to your computer?”

“We can photograph it, photographing its crystalline structure is sometimes helpful. The crystals give us a specific asymmetric pattern. The merging will never allow pure symmetry in a crystal; they’re in a changing state of balancing, connective polarity, like the edge of a waterfall. Another reason why Jack avoids the term ‘crystal’ as misleading, impersonal.”

“Impersonal?” queried Bellarose.

“Yeah, another way to look at the soul is the shifting polarity of the waterfall; it has cyclical polarity between the chaotic whitewater and the level, symmetrical pond. But it never achieves pure symmetry. Nothing ever does, we’ve discovered. The pebble is never perfectly round, never in static symmetry, always in motion, with a slipstream, where the circling balance or imbalance of the soul’s energy generates your slipstream opening and closing this way and that around the polarity of who you are, your character, connected in nature’s slipstreams. A kind of crystal but more of a chakra.

“So, with a kind of photographic timepiece, we can then grow that crystal more quickly; we grow the information into what we at the Project refer to as a ‘data crystal.’ The whole thing keeps working off its various facets. We’ve now got to the point where we can feed in a digital photograph of your face, and the system will take it from there. Beyond belief—wouldn’t believe it myself if I weren’t sitting here now.”

They looked at him quizzically.

“Recently, when the photographs of the Project personnel began to pass through the system, things began to fall apart. So, here I am!”

He leaned back on his hands, the large friendly ears level with the supple mountain range of shoulders against the distant hills, and eyed them, mischievously, smiling.

“It just has to look at your face?” said John, grinning back at him.

“It takes the lines and characteristics of your face and sort of works backwards to find the map of your face, the crystalline structure behind the mask and the direction—like a river.”

“It looks at him,” said Bellarose, “and says to itself, now where’s he been!”

“Where’s he think he’s goin’?” asked John.

“Ah,” said the inventor, “it won’t predict the future—let’s get that straight from the start. Got into a lot of trouble over that one. Everyone wants a prophetic prophet—forget it. I told them they’d have to stay on the slipstream. They still don’t believe me.” He hesitated as though checking the weather.

“OK, the problem is this: the system takes into account that I’m its creator—me!” He made a monkey face.

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