Monday, February 24, 2014

Light Music


Been reading Light Music, a 2002 sci-fi novel by Kathleen Goonan. Like most good science fiction, it takes some central bit of science or technology and extrapolates it. Light Music contemplates a juxtaposition between string theory and consciousness. Now string theory has taken some hits recently as analysis of the Higgs field seems to rule out the simpler, more elegant, versions of supersymetry. But Goonan paints a picture of consciousness, residing somewhere in the extra tiny dimensions postulated by supersymetry, as a kind of energy acting on the universe through matter as a kind of string vibration, a kind of music, as photons of light are vibrations of electro-magnetism. Thus Light Music. Very interesting speculations.

In this space, I've suggested that consciousness is primordial, that it does not rise from matter, or any particular organization of matter, but may indeed be prior. That consciousness – our individual experience of it – may be bound up with light, which is its “speed.” So picture consciousness as vibrations in (of?) spaces too small for us to observe – at or even smaller than the Planck length – intersecting the fields and particles of matter and energy we can measure and manifesting as observation. Yes, a “ghost” in the machine, taking the form of mind when the organic substrate is complex enough to give rise to such. Collapsing the wave function and exercising choice, self-generating music out of our individual being, a lifetime symphony.

Just another rumination.