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.
