I recently came across this article, describing a paper outlining the discovery of scale-invariant fractal patterns within the information dynamics that are believed to give rise to the subjective experience of consciousness. Yeah, that's a mouthful. The ramifications of this study, should it stand up to peer review and all that, are huge for my quantum information model of magick. So far all the latest discoveries related to consciousness have been consistent with the model, and I actually have been a little surprised at how close they seem to line up. I'm pretty sure none of the folks behind this research are familiar with my work, so it's significant that results emerging from the scientific community and results emerging from the study of magick seem to be coming together.
Major breakthroughs in the study of the physics of consciousness—and information dynamics in general—are occurring through the discovery and elucidation of holographic and fractal principles underlying fundamental properties of nature. For instance, in a fractal organization the degree of complexity of a system is scale-free, or invariant under any translation of magnitude. This means that one can “zoom in” or “zoom out” forever and the same degree of complexity will be observed—patterns of patterns reiterate ad infinitum. This has implications for the science of consciousness, as it is often assumed that consciousness emerges in a system once it reaches a significant threshold of complexity and integration. Yet, if the complexity is scale-invariant, is it not possible that the same information processes engendering consciousness at one observable domain are occurring at smaller scales as well?
The authors of the paper—Dr. Meijer, professor emeritus at the University of Groningen; and Dr. Geesink, a biophysicist who has developed novel EM-shielding technologies and led projects on polymer development and mineral nanotechnology DSM-research —have been performing ground-breaking work in biophysics research that is answering some of the most difficult outstanding questions in biology and other major scientific fields. From a meta-analysis of more than 500 biomedical publications relating to electromagnetic (EM) radiation and interaction with the biological system, Geesink and Meijer identified a novel and specific pattern of coherent EM frequencies that have statistically significant bio-resonances. With the identification of specific EM frequency domains that have significant effects within the inter- and intra-cellular system, the researchers were able to correlate their data with known wave resonances of nucleotides in aqueous solution, proteins and enzymes, as well as sound-induced vibrations evoked in bio-polymers and cellular membranes.
The research describes in detail the interplay of light and sound within the biological system—how photonic, phononic, and solitonic waves are instrumental and integral in maintaining and directing coherence and order of the inter- and intra-cellular system in development and information processing. Solitonic oscillations in large bio-molecules can result in quantum coherence, known as Fröhlich condensation, which Meijer and Geesink have explained can create quantum geometric wave patterns that guide biomolecules and cells much like the pilot-wave structure of Bohmian mechanics. Showing how the living system, and the information processes underlying life consciousness reside at a much deeper, intrinsic level of the universe.
I've been on the fractal consciousness bandwagon for years. It seemed to be a reasonable assumption that followed naturally from the conjecture Roger Penrose outlined in The Emperor's New Mind back in 1988. Penrose argued that much of the evidence we had at the time supported the notion that consciousness was in some way related to quantum interactions in the brain and thus would prove impossible to simulate using a regular digital computer. Penrose would go on to work with an anesthesiologist and psychologist named Stuart Hameroff to develop the Penrose-Hameroff or Orch OR model of quantum consciousness. It remains one of the most complete models out there and overall I like it the best, but that being said, it does not address the fractal dynamics described in the linked article.
I wrote my first paper on integrating fractal ideas into a model of the mind as an undergraduate back in 1991, and you can read it here. Unfortunately this was back when I was still a Jungian, before the whole psychoanalytic model was basically disproven by neuroscience research. Jung's "complexes all the way down" model worked great with the idea of fractal dynamics and strange attractors, but with what we now know about memory and how the unconscious doesn't share many characteristics with what we generally call a "mind" it can't possibly be how cognition works in real life. So the paper is more of a snapshot of my thinking from a long time ago than anything all that profound.
There are a couple of key takeaways from scale-invariance that are especially intriguing. First, the proposal that the overall structure can be zoomed out of or magified infinitely without changing the overall level of complexity pretty much implies panpsychism and cosmopsychism. Basically that's a lot like a modern version of animism, with the additional postulate that consciousness as a whole comprises a sort of "field" that permeates the entire universe and may addressed in a holistic manner. This is a key concept in the quantum information model, and I'm convinced that without it magick would work much differently than what we observe, if at all.
Second, it appears to treat mystical consciousness as simply a matter of scale - that is, a "more enlightened" consciousness encompasses more of the overall "consciousness field" rather than conforming to some sort of hierarchical "ladder" as you see in most Western mystical systems. In my unpublished Operant Magick manuscript completed in 2006 I proposed that scale could be treated like a "dimension of spirit" perpendicular to physical reality. But really, it's just about the field of awareness becoming more diffuse, more focused, and most importantly more flexible in terms of shifting back and forth between those viewpoints. While I'm not sold on the idea of belief powering magick, this does have a lot in common with the "flexibility of belief" promoted by chaos magicians. It's just flexibility of consciousness itself, rather than anything related to specific declared ideas.
Third, a deeper look into the dynamics of vibration at the quantum level suggested by the article could pull together (A) Sheldrake's morphic resonance hypothesis, which remains the best explanation out there for the effectiveness of similarity links, (B) Chinese findings relating Qigong practice to infrasonic waves, and (C) how devotional practices facilitate mystical shifts in consciousness, and how that contributes generally to "awakening" or "enlightenment." This also may have something to do with mystical process by which consciousness seems to be able to jump from being bound by one "event horizon" (microcosmic awareness) to another (macrocosmic awareness), and findings along these lines will help to explain how these two realms interact.
So it seems that we are moving into exciting times in the world of consciousness research, which is directly applicable to a scientific understanding of how magick and other psychic phenomena really work. I'm really looking forward to finding out where this all leads.
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