Everything that takes place within ‘the Domain of All Possible Mechanical Actions’ (which is also ‘the Domain of All Possible Defined States’) also takes place in reverse – it has to ‘also take place in reverse’ so as to ensure that the account books always remain perfectly balanced. Anything at all can happen within this domain, just so long as the debit and credit columns balance out. We have – in other words – perfect freedom to do whatever we want to do (or think whatever we want to think) just so long as we pay the bank back what we owe it. This is what the phenomenon of polarity is all about – it’s all about taking out loans and then paying them back. Polarity is a state of ‘unpaid debt’, therefore.
This principle can of course be seen at work in the case of so-called ‘vacuum fluctuations’ (or ‘quantum foam’). Quantum foam – according to physicist Don Lincoln writing in Hard Science (February 6th, 2013) – ‘represents particles blinking into and out of existence’. What’s going on here therefore is that loans are being taken out and then repaid again very rapidly so that the law regarding the conservation of energy (which states that energy cannot be created or destroyed) is not violated. The loophole allowing this to happen comes about as a result of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which – as we know – has dramatic consequences in the realm of the very small. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, according to Don Lincoln –
…is commonly explained as saying that you cannot simultaneously perfectly measure the location and movement of a subatomic particle. While that is a good representation of the principle, it also says that you cannot measure the energy of anything perfectly and that the shorter the time you measure, the worse your measurement is. Taken to the extreme, if you try to make a measurement in near-zero time, your measurement will be infinitely imprecise.
Because of the impossibility in making accurate measurements in a ‘near zero’ interval of time ‘borrowing’ becomes possible and so – as Don Lincoln goes on to say – ‘nothing can be something’. Or as we could also say, over all there is nothing (as in ‘nothing definite’) but – temporarily – on the small or local scale of things, as a consequence of the operation of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, there can be the very convincing but strictly temporary appearance of there being something. This is what radical uncertainty is all about – we can’t ever say that ‘there is nothing here’ and so out of this irreducible uncertainty comes what we are pleased to call the physical universe. We can’t say that there’s ‘definitely nothing’, but by the same token we can’t say that there’s ‘definitely something’, either…
Instead of bluntly saying that ‘matter’ (or ‘the universe’) comes into existence as a result of a type of vacuum fluctuation’ we have to be a bit more nuanced than this and avoid using the word ‘exists’ as casually as we do. If something ‘exists’ only because of a loan that we have made (and must one day repay) then it can’t really be said to ‘exist’ at all. We can only say ‘it exists’ when we take a ‘partial view’, when we are scrupulously careful not to look at the whole picture. After all, when we use the word ‘exists’ we mean this in an absolute sense (we mean it in an unconditional sense) and there is nothing absolute (or unconditional) about to the type of existence that we’re talking about here. When ‘borrowing and paying back’ is involved in the creation of the universe then all we can ever talk about is ‘relative existence’, or ‘provisional existence’, and this is an entirely different kind of thing. We take the physical universe to have an absolute existence (for us, subjectively speaking, it is absolute – no question about it) and yet if it only gets to be here because of a loophole in the Law of the Conservation of Energy allows us to ‘temporarily borrow it’, then we can’t say that it is ‘real’ in the sense that we take it to be. We can’t say that it’s real at all – we can’t say this because ‘real’ isn’t actually ‘a thing’. Anything we can point at (which is what we’re doing when we stick a label on something) is only there (as some sort of ‘tangible phenomenon’) because we’ve taken out a short-term loan and when the loan has been repaid then that’s the end of all tangibility.
Naturally, when we talk about ‘existence’ we mean it in an absolute sense – what other sense would we mean it in? For some reason, the very same assumption jumps into everyone’s head, the assumption that real is ‘a thing’ (and not just ‘an idea’). It’s not as if we have analysed the matter in a philosophical fashion and came to this conclusion; neither is it the case that we scientifically researched the matter and have proved this hypothesis to be true because of evidence and stuff like that. Somehow, we have this sense that we exist and it’s so blindingly self-evident that we never think about it and yet at the same time there’s no such thing as ‘exists’. ‘Exists’ is only a concept in our heads, ‘exists’ is only one half of a polar pair. ‘Exists’ is just another concept, no different from any other concept; ‘existence’ can only have the meaning that it does have to us when it is contrasted with the equal-and-opposite concept of ‘nonexistence’, and although each term in the pair has meaning in relation to the other, neither one nor the other has any reality of its own. It’s a cheat, it’s a type of cheap collusion.
We only have this thing we call ‘exists’ because we borrowed it from the bank, and the debt that we incurred as the result of that lawful transaction is ‘not exists’, which is the reverse swing that we must one day reckon with. This corresponds to the transaction we were talking about earlier, which is where a positive subatomic particle is taken out on loan from the central bank at the very same time as the corresponding negative subatomic particle is produced to balance the books. When the loan is repaid then there is no more positive and no more negative – no residue remains. Opposites such as ‘plus’ and ‘minus’ don’t exist in the bank – the ‘anti-particle’ is just something that gets produced so as to maintain the balance in the accounting books. When we talk about ‘quantum fluctuations’ (or about ‘particles and anti-particles’) then this is legitimately within the domain of science – it’s ‘science’ because we can measure stuff and establish relationships that can be empirically verified. When it comes to the ‘central lending authority’ however, this takes us beyond the remit of scientific investigation; this takes us beyond the scientific domain because the bank doesn’t contain anything that can be measured. It has absolutely no characteristics whatsoever – hard as this is for us to comprehend.
There is absolutely nothing we can say (or know) about the about the Central Lending Authority and this is necessarily going to be the case since in order to say anything (in order to think anything, or know anything) we need this contrivance called ‘polarity’ (i.e., we need pairs of opposites, and the field of tension that exists between them) and whilst the Central Bank can produce pairs of opposites, it doesn’t contain them! It’s not as if the bank that we’re talking about here is a kind of warehouse full of ‘matching pairs of opposites’, stacked up like rows and rows of gold ingots in a federal reserve bank vault. Although the bank can happily produce any amount of polarities – at no cost whatsoever to itself – it itself is not a polarity, and it is this that excludes what we’re calling ‘the Central Bank’ from any sort of scientific inquiry. We can’t inquire into something that doesn’t have any measurable characteristics; we can’t make any meaningful statements about something that can’t be defined.
If we were being totally rational about it then we would be very much inclined to just come right out with it and declare that something which has no measurable characteristics, something that cannot in any way be defined simply doesn’t exist. Saying that something can’t be measured or detected in any way (since to detect is to measure) is just another way of saying that it isn’t a real thing – to be real is to be in some way tangible, we will argue. This is why at this point we have to replace science with philosophy; we don’t in the rational West have much – if any – regard for philosophy because it doesn’t give rise to any useful technologies, because it doesn’t give rise to knowledge we can exploit and make money out of, but – all the same – philosophy necessarily precedes science without the philosophy of science there couldn’t be any science, which is something we don’t tend to appreciate. We’re pragmatists and we’re only here for the ‘goodies’ – we don’t really give a damn about anything else. From a philosophical perspective however, we can point out that the measurements we value so highly, and place so much stock in, can never be any more than mere abstractions, and – as such – they can never tell us anything about that reality which is not a mind-created abstraction.
We’re somewhere at the interface between science and philosophy here. Physicist David Bohm talks about the universe being a ‘unitary movement’, a movement that can’t be defined or measured because there’s nothing to define or measure it against. This is what he calls the Holomovement. Although Bohm gets to the point at which he is able to speak of the universe as being ‘a single indivisible movement’ via the study of physics – specifically quantum mechanics – as soon as he posits the existence of this thing he calls ‘the Holomovement’ he is talking philosophy, as we have said (since the one thing we can’t in any way do is measure or detect a single, undivided movement). We can’t measure the Holomovement because there exists nothing outside of it to base our measurements on; ‘measurement’ as a concept implies the existence of a static frame of reference. Even those elements that we believe we can isolate – atomic particles, for example – aren’t as measurable as we would like to think; we can only define subatomic particles to the extent that we can separate them from their environment, and ‘separating subatomic particles from their environment’ is something that can’t actually be done. The particles that we’re attempting to seize hold of are themselves abstractions, as David Bohm says here –
Classical physics says that reality is actually little particles that separate the world into its independent elements. Now I’m proposing the reverse, that the fundamental reality is the enfoldment and unfoldment, and these particles are abstractions from that. We could picture the electron not as a particle that exists continuously but as something coming in and going out and then coming in again. If these various condensations are close together, they approximate a track. The electron itself can never be separated from the whole of space, which is its ground.
No matter how we try to get around it, all of our measurements, all of our definite assertions, all of our ‘positive statements’ about the world, are going to turn out to be nothing more than disguised tautologies – our assumptions are being reflected back at us. This is the classic QM paradox – if I try to make some measurements of some quantum event then in order to do this I must first take a definite stance, but the stance I take conditions what I see and so the measurements or observations I obtain don’t have the meaning I take them to. What I see isn’t independent of me, but rather it’s a function of the viewpoint that I choose to adopt – I’m ‘chasing my own tail’, in other words. Mutually arising pairs of opposites create a context within definite statements can legitimately be made, but since any one opposite is only meaningful in terms of its opposing number, the ‘context’ that we’re talking about here is a null one, an empty one. I can only make a definite statement by contrasting that statement with the equal and opposite statement, but this isn’t really getting us anywhere; I can define ‘yes’ by saying that it is the opposite of ‘no’, and I can also define ‘no’ by saying it’s the opposite of ‘yes’, but all I’m doing here is travelling around in meaningless circles. All I’m doing here is generating my own hyperreality, substituting self-referential concepts for the reality that stands up all by itself (and which therefore doesn’t need to feed of the hyperreal).
Non-polarity can produce as many polar worlds as you like but no matter how painstakingly we examine these polar worlds we never going to learn anything about the source (or ‘parent’) of these worlds, which is the symmetrical or unitary situation. This is because there is simply ‘no basis for comparison’ – the symmetrical situation has no form but, nevertheless, has Everything within it, whilst the Polar World has a form, has a definite character or appearance, but no actual content. The most we could say about this relationship (which isn’t actually a relationship at all) is that the World of Polarity is an inferior analogue of the Unitary Flow, which is to say, it is ‘a token’ that has nothing in common with what is being tokenized. We are attracted to the ‘lower analogue’ just as we are terrified by the shoreless vastness of the Unitary State. We are attracted to the ‘world of form’ because it gives us something to hold onto, just as we’re inclined to run from the expansiveness of the unconditioned or nonpolar reality, since it gives us nothing to cling to, and the end result of this flight from formlessness is that we become ‘unreal without knowing it’, or ‘hollow without knowing that we are’.
In the Analogue World we have a format within which we get to be 100% defined (i.e., where we can be ‘defined with nothing at all left out’) but our situation here is entirely hollow, whilst in the original world (the symmetrical world, the ‘Unus Mundus’) there is no authority structure that we can buy into, or sell ourselves to, which presents us with enormous difficulty, but which isn’t bogus. So, we have ‘easy but unreal’ on the one hand, and ‘extraordinarily difficult but real’, on the other – being governed from the outside is easy, whilst acting freely (which is to say, not succumbing to the external deterministic influences) is forbiddingly hard. The surrogate (or analogue) world is what we started off talking about as The Domain of All Possible Mechanical Actions – in this domain everything is an ‘authority structure’ demanding our obedience; all there is here is ‘us being told what to do by the rules’. We wouldn’t know how to continue if the rules were to be taken away, we would experience pure ‘ontological panic’. Our life in the Analogue World is one long extended exercise in ‘being told what to do’, ‘being told what to think, ‘being told what to believe’, and so on. This is extremely convenient from the point of view of us not wanting to have any responsibility ourselves but handing over all responsibility to a bunch of rules, at the same time as providing us with the ontological security that we love so much, also delivers us over to what has been called the Cybernetic Paradox.
We can find the cybernetic paradox at the heart of all logical systems; what we have called ‘the Domain Of All Possible Mechanical Actions’ is also ‘the Domain Of All Possible Instructions’, or ‘the Domain Of All Possible Rules’, which is also ‘the Domain Of All Possible Compliant Actions’ (‘rules’ and ‘compliant actions’ being of course one and the same thing). We might argue that there are very many mechanical (or predefined) actions that are possible within this formal domain and that – on the strength of this – that the domain we live our lives within (on a daily basis) is a very big world, a very spacious world, a world full of many and varied possibilities. It isn’t, however; any action that we perform in this world is the same as every other – it’s generic. The only way what I’m doing could be any different from this would be if it were an action that wasn’t forced, an action that wasn’t predetermined, an action that wasn’t ‘made to happen’ by some external authority structure. The generic or mechanical world is a very small world, therefore – it’s so small that there’s only the one possible action in it (since there’s no difference, psychologically speaking – between following one rule and following any other). Even saying this isn’t doing justice to our situation however – what we should say is that ‘the generic or mechanical world contains only one possible action and that this action is exactly one half of a plus/minus cycle’…
Image credit – deepdreamgenerator.com