'A New Science of Heaven'
by Robert Temple
Chapter 17: Our Plasma Selves
Excerpts have not been perfectly edited, and the greater context will be found by reading the book 📖.
“Fields contribute not only energy but information too, information that may play a vital role in triggering intelligence both in humans and in plasmas in space.
We now come to what interests everybody the most, ourselves. Is it possible that we are really much more than we think we are? So much more, in fact, that we transcend our physical bodies even while we are ‘alive’, and after we ‘die’, we are still very much around, just invisible and somewhat out of touch? There is every reason to think so. I have already made plain how rare physical, or atomic, matter is in our plasma universe.
“So if we have plasma bodies, it is only to be expected. After all, why should we not have plasma bodies? Most things are made of plasma, so why not us? And in this chapter I will advance this argument by describing some more details of what our plasma bodies may be like.”
“In the course of the book we have looked at hints that fields such as the electromagnetic that pervade the Universe might interact with plasma to create the conditions necessary for intelligence to evolve. There interactions are not simply a matter of energy, but the communication of information, too. ”
“At this point, we should stop and think again about what is meant here by ‘information’. The word is not being used in the traditional sense of ‘a collection of facts’. Its use is the more modern and specialized one, prompted by information theory and relevant to what we now call IT (information technology). And that means that ‘information’ is being used not solely in the sense of passive information, which is only of use to conscious beings who receive it and make of it what they will, but in the sense of active information, which, when received, triggers an action of some kind, as in the example we saw earlier of the thermostat.
When conceived of in this way, ‘information’ is another word for ‘a signal’, or taking it further, as ‘an activator’, like pulling a switch. All hormones in the bloodstream convey information of this kind, as do our nerves when they sense that the fire is hot and trigger a response of our withdrawing our hands from the hot stove.”
“Presman’s investigations led him to conclude that DNA molecules are generators of radio-frequency signals and that RNA molecules (one of the four believed to be essential for all forms of life, with a role in coding and decoding genes) are amplifiers of those signals, whereas enzymes and amino acids are effectors of those coded signals. The cell wall he regarded as a noise filter. He believed that at a fundamental level protein synthesis resulted from ‘interactions within the organism and its interactions with environmental EmFs’. In other words, electromagnetic fields carry information that activates molecules containing information, which in turn generate signals carrying information, which then trigger life processes within the body.
I cannot emphasize enough that Presman’s reconceptualization of biology as orchestrated information flows could not be further from the purely chemical viewpoint. I am aware of how passionately and virulently many biologists hold to their exclusively chemical preconceptions. ”
“For both Peter and Presman, transactions are essentially information exchange. They viewed bodily signals as the transmission of information. And what Presman concluded was going on was information transmission and reception both within and without every organism by electro-magnetic means.
This brings us closer and closer to the true nature of our plasma selves.”
“During the war, David Bohm conducted research into plasma. When he saw the movement of particles in plasma, it struck him that they were behaving in concert in the way living creatures do. It seemed to him that there must be some underlying field or dimension that was interacting with these particles, resulting in life and a form of intelligence.
This vision of intelligence in plasma became a paradigm for David Bohm as he developed a scientific and philosophical account of the Universe that made him a senior figure in the second wave of theoretical physicists in the quantum revolution.”
“Let us start with this startling remark by David’s protégé in this particular field, the Finnish philosopher of science, Paavo Pylkkänen. He says that, according to David Bohm ‘… not only the behaviour but also the very being of particles [are] based on the activity of information.’9
That is a very big claim. It puts active information at the heart of everything.
David’s alternative interpretation of quantum theory is often famously known as the causal interpretation. In the classic formulation of quantum mechanics, the interactions of waves and particles have uncertain outcomes. The “position and other qualities of particles can therefore only be expressed in terms of probability rather than of certainty. It was thought in the standard view that this will always and inevitably be the case, because it reflects the way the Universe is made.
Albert Einstein was sceptical of this and so was David Bohm. In his formulation, cause and effect holds true in the quantum world as it does in the macro or everyday world, but we cannot calculate results with certainty because we don’t have all the information. There are ‘hidden variables’, and he saw these as being hidden in the information contained in the waves, as the form of a signal. He stressed that form, having very little energy, enters into and directs a much greater energy. It puts form into it, i.e., it informs it; hence, inform-ation. In other words, uncertainty is not a quality of the physical universe. It only arises because we don’t have enough information.”
“So David’s focus on information as the driving force at the heart of the Universe helped throw a startling new light on the central problem of quantum mechanics, which has been a matter of debate and generated a spectrum of views over the last hundred years. To explore further the mind-bending ideas of David Bohm, it is helpful to start by contemplating how a small energy charge can, by the transmission of information, trigger wholesale changes in an entity with much larger energies. ”
“[Note: Ontology is a branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being. In Bohm’s interpretation, uncertainty arises as a problem of perception, not a problem with the nature of reality or being.] The second aim is to consider the relevance of this theory to the philosophy of cognitive science.
This interpretation postulates that elementary particles are guided by a field containing active information. Bohm suggests that in certain key ways the activity of information at the quantum level is similar to the activity of information in ordinary human subjective experience, and he uses this similarity as a basis for his mind-matter theory."
“What Pylkkänen is pointing to here is that Bohm sees some of the bizarre behaviour described in quantum mechanics in the common human experience of consciousness. This is important for the main theme of this book because, as we have already noted, human brains (like quantum computers) contain complex plasma, and plasma may be a medium by which uncertain and bizarre quantum phenomena enter the human experience.
In 2006, Pylkkänen published an ambitious book entitled Mind, Matter and the Implicate Order.16 The ‘implicate order’ is the phrase that had been used by Bohm for decades to describe aspects of his evolving theories to do with the self-ordering qualities of the Universe, analogous in some ways to Prigogine’s ideas of dissipation, which we looked at in Chapter 3. This book carries forward all his thoughts on David’s ideas, and his Preface commences like this:”
“In other words, David Bohm is arguing that there is crucial information hidden not only in individual particles but also in fields – and that the entire Universe is triggered by the interaction between them.
To put it another way, a particle such as an electron contains a lot of information, some of which is triggered into action when the particle interacts with an underlying field. Of course, scientists already knew that the behaviour of particles is changed by interactions with underlying fields, but Bohm’s supreme mathematical imagination enabled him to suppose that large amounts of information in a simple seeming particle might interact not only with the fields we already know about, but also with another as yet unknown field, another dimension, something that might even be a cosmic intelligence beneath the fields we know about and ordering them. He called this the Implicate Order and he believed and described in the language of science how the Explicate Order, the Universe we see and experience with our senses, could unfold out of the Implicate one.
He understood this unfolding process to work like a hologram,... ”
“An important part of this analogy for our purposes is that if you break a hologram into bits, each bit will contain an image of the entire object. What David Bohm is saying is not only that the entire universe is a hologram, in the sense of being an unfolding of an intelligent ‘implicate order’ that underlies everything, but that this driving, ordering process is equally present everywhere in the Universe. It underlies our intelligence, the intelligence we see in animals and plants, and the intelligence we saw in the movements of plasma near the start of his scientific journey, which we are now beginning to understand.
David’s focus on the information – rather than the energy – that fields transmit by means of their form brings us to the subject of the work of Rupert Sheldrake.”
“Rupert’s book The Science Delusion (known in America as Science Set Free, 2012) is a brilliant analysis of what is wrong with ‘mainstream’ science, as the ultra-conservatives of science like to call themselves.18
An interesting description of the invisible soul was given by the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650), who called it une chose qui pense, which the English philosopher of science Joseph Glanvill (1636–1680) translated as ‘a thinking substance’.19 This excellent turn of phrase from the seventeenth century is well worth hanging on to. For if I were to find one phrase that I believe sums up the nature of our plasma bodies, as well as the Kordylewski Clouds themselves, it would be to say that those information-laden entities must truly be a thinking substance.
If all entities are essentially plasma entities that from time to time ‘become physical’, or ‘become embodied in atomic matter’, then the thinking substance of each entity will have certain information requirements for survival, and these will vary considerably....”
“...these voids and void lattices are so important in general, because they are manifestations of renewal. They are the destruction-lattices that empty themselves of matter so that the new can be made, as the creation-lattices exhaust themselves and come to the ends of their useful lives. In other words, forms grow and die and are replaced anew from formed emptiness that has grown geometrically and sits waiting to be filled. One is the summer and one is the winter, and rebirth takes place from ordered death in an endless process of birth, death, replacement, and renewal. Without the formation of the voids, this cycle cannot happen.
Since voids form in matter, and plasma is made of matter (just not atomic matter), we can expect that plasma clouds will be riddled with voids. This would certainly apply to the Kordylewski Clouds. These voids would serve the function of assisting in the continual regeneration of the clouds, by replacing exhausted lattices in the plasma crystals and renewing the crystals in an endless progression.”
by Robert Temple
Chapter 17: Our Plasma Selves
Excerpts have not been perfectly edited, and the greater context will be found by reading the book 📖.
“Fields contribute not only energy but information too, information that may play a vital role in triggering intelligence both in humans and in plasmas in space.
We now come to what interests everybody the most, ourselves. Is it possible that we are really much more than we think we are? So much more, in fact, that we transcend our physical bodies even while we are ‘alive’, and after we ‘die’, we are still very much around, just invisible and somewhat out of touch? There is every reason to think so. I have already made plain how rare physical, or atomic, matter is in our plasma universe.
“So if we have plasma bodies, it is only to be expected. After all, why should we not have plasma bodies? Most things are made of plasma, so why not us? And in this chapter I will advance this argument by describing some more details of what our plasma bodies may be like.”
“In the course of the book we have looked at hints that fields such as the electromagnetic that pervade the Universe might interact with plasma to create the conditions necessary for intelligence to evolve. There interactions are not simply a matter of energy, but the communication of information, too. ”
“At this point, we should stop and think again about what is meant here by ‘information’. The word is not being used in the traditional sense of ‘a collection of facts’. Its use is the more modern and specialized one, prompted by information theory and relevant to what we now call IT (information technology). And that means that ‘information’ is being used not solely in the sense of passive information, which is only of use to conscious beings who receive it and make of it what they will, but in the sense of active information, which, when received, triggers an action of some kind, as in the example we saw earlier of the thermostat.
When conceived of in this way, ‘information’ is another word for ‘a signal’, or taking it further, as ‘an activator’, like pulling a switch. All hormones in the bloodstream convey information of this kind, as do our nerves when they sense that the fire is hot and trigger a response of our withdrawing our hands from the hot stove.”
“Presman’s investigations led him to conclude that DNA molecules are generators of radio-frequency signals and that RNA molecules (one of the four believed to be essential for all forms of life, with a role in coding and decoding genes) are amplifiers of those signals, whereas enzymes and amino acids are effectors of those coded signals. The cell wall he regarded as a noise filter. He believed that at a fundamental level protein synthesis resulted from ‘interactions within the organism and its interactions with environmental EmFs’. In other words, electromagnetic fields carry information that activates molecules containing information, which in turn generate signals carrying information, which then trigger life processes within the body.
I cannot emphasize enough that Presman’s reconceptualization of biology as orchestrated information flows could not be further from the purely chemical viewpoint. I am aware of how passionately and virulently many biologists hold to their exclusively chemical preconceptions. ”
“For both Peter and Presman, transactions are essentially information exchange. They viewed bodily signals as the transmission of information. And what Presman concluded was going on was information transmission and reception both within and without every organism by electro-magnetic means.
This brings us closer and closer to the true nature of our plasma selves.”
“During the war, David Bohm conducted research into plasma. When he saw the movement of particles in plasma, it struck him that they were behaving in concert in the way living creatures do. It seemed to him that there must be some underlying field or dimension that was interacting with these particles, resulting in life and a form of intelligence.
This vision of intelligence in plasma became a paradigm for David Bohm as he developed a scientific and philosophical account of the Universe that made him a senior figure in the second wave of theoretical physicists in the quantum revolution.”
“Let us start with this startling remark by David’s protégé in this particular field, the Finnish philosopher of science, Paavo Pylkkänen. He says that, according to David Bohm ‘… not only the behaviour but also the very being of particles [are] based on the activity of information.’9
That is a very big claim. It puts active information at the heart of everything.
David’s alternative interpretation of quantum theory is often famously known as the causal interpretation. In the classic formulation of quantum mechanics, the interactions of waves and particles have uncertain outcomes. The “position and other qualities of particles can therefore only be expressed in terms of probability rather than of certainty. It was thought in the standard view that this will always and inevitably be the case, because it reflects the way the Universe is made.
Albert Einstein was sceptical of this and so was David Bohm. In his formulation, cause and effect holds true in the quantum world as it does in the macro or everyday world, but we cannot calculate results with certainty because we don’t have all the information. There are ‘hidden variables’, and he saw these as being hidden in the information contained in the waves, as the form of a signal. He stressed that form, having very little energy, enters into and directs a much greater energy. It puts form into it, i.e., it informs it; hence, inform-ation. In other words, uncertainty is not a quality of the physical universe. It only arises because we don’t have enough information.”
“So David’s focus on information as the driving force at the heart of the Universe helped throw a startling new light on the central problem of quantum mechanics, which has been a matter of debate and generated a spectrum of views over the last hundred years. To explore further the mind-bending ideas of David Bohm, it is helpful to start by contemplating how a small energy charge can, by the transmission of information, trigger wholesale changes in an entity with much larger energies. ”
“[Note: Ontology is a branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being. In Bohm’s interpretation, uncertainty arises as a problem of perception, not a problem with the nature of reality or being.] The second aim is to consider the relevance of this theory to the philosophy of cognitive science.
This interpretation postulates that elementary particles are guided by a field containing active information. Bohm suggests that in certain key ways the activity of information at the quantum level is similar to the activity of information in ordinary human subjective experience, and he uses this similarity as a basis for his mind-matter theory."
“What Pylkkänen is pointing to here is that Bohm sees some of the bizarre behaviour described in quantum mechanics in the common human experience of consciousness. This is important for the main theme of this book because, as we have already noted, human brains (like quantum computers) contain complex plasma, and plasma may be a medium by which uncertain and bizarre quantum phenomena enter the human experience.
In 2006, Pylkkänen published an ambitious book entitled Mind, Matter and the Implicate Order.16 The ‘implicate order’ is the phrase that had been used by Bohm for decades to describe aspects of his evolving theories to do with the self-ordering qualities of the Universe, analogous in some ways to Prigogine’s ideas of dissipation, which we looked at in Chapter 3. This book carries forward all his thoughts on David’s ideas, and his Preface commences like this:”
“In other words, David Bohm is arguing that there is crucial information hidden not only in individual particles but also in fields – and that the entire Universe is triggered by the interaction between them.
To put it another way, a particle such as an electron contains a lot of information, some of which is triggered into action when the particle interacts with an underlying field. Of course, scientists already knew that the behaviour of particles is changed by interactions with underlying fields, but Bohm’s supreme mathematical imagination enabled him to suppose that large amounts of information in a simple seeming particle might interact not only with the fields we already know about, but also with another as yet unknown field, another dimension, something that might even be a cosmic intelligence beneath the fields we know about and ordering them. He called this the Implicate Order and he believed and described in the language of science how the Explicate Order, the Universe we see and experience with our senses, could unfold out of the Implicate one.
He understood this unfolding process to work like a hologram,... ”
“An important part of this analogy for our purposes is that if you break a hologram into bits, each bit will contain an image of the entire object. What David Bohm is saying is not only that the entire universe is a hologram, in the sense of being an unfolding of an intelligent ‘implicate order’ that underlies everything, but that this driving, ordering process is equally present everywhere in the Universe. It underlies our intelligence, the intelligence we see in animals and plants, and the intelligence we saw in the movements of plasma near the start of his scientific journey, which we are now beginning to understand.
David’s focus on the information – rather than the energy – that fields transmit by means of their form brings us to the subject of the work of Rupert Sheldrake.”
“Rupert’s book The Science Delusion (known in America as Science Set Free, 2012) is a brilliant analysis of what is wrong with ‘mainstream’ science, as the ultra-conservatives of science like to call themselves.18
An interesting description of the invisible soul was given by the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650), who called it une chose qui pense, which the English philosopher of science Joseph Glanvill (1636–1680) translated as ‘a thinking substance’.19 This excellent turn of phrase from the seventeenth century is well worth hanging on to. For if I were to find one phrase that I believe sums up the nature of our plasma bodies, as well as the Kordylewski Clouds themselves, it would be to say that those information-laden entities must truly be a thinking substance.
If all entities are essentially plasma entities that from time to time ‘become physical’, or ‘become embodied in atomic matter’, then the thinking substance of each entity will have certain information requirements for survival, and these will vary considerably....”
“...these voids and void lattices are so important in general, because they are manifestations of renewal. They are the destruction-lattices that empty themselves of matter so that the new can be made, as the creation-lattices exhaust themselves and come to the ends of their useful lives. In other words, forms grow and die and are replaced anew from formed emptiness that has grown geometrically and sits waiting to be filled. One is the summer and one is the winter, and rebirth takes place from ordered death in an endless process of birth, death, replacement, and renewal. Without the formation of the voids, this cycle cannot happen.
Since voids form in matter, and plasma is made of matter (just not atomic matter), we can expect that plasma clouds will be riddled with voids. This would certainly apply to the Kordylewski Clouds. These voids would serve the function of assisting in the continual regeneration of the clouds, by replacing exhausted lattices in the plasma crystals and renewing the crystals in an endless progression.”