The Consciousness Conundrum

By John Horgan; IEEE SPECTRUM (June 2008)

I'm 54, with all that entails. Gray hair, trick knee, trickier memory. I still play a mean game of hockey, and my love life requires no pharmaceutical enhancement. But entropy looms ever larger. Suffice it to say, I would love to believe that we are rapidly approaching "the singularity." Like paradise, technological singularity comes in many versions, but most involve bionic brain boosting. At first, we'll become cyborgs, as stupendously powerful brain chips soup up our perception, memory, and intelligence and maybe even eliminate the need for annoying TV remotes. Eventually, we will abandon our flesh-and-blood selves entirely and upload our digitized psyches into computers. We will then dwell happily forever in cyberspace where, to quote Woody Allen, we'll never need to look for a parking space. Sounds good to me! Notably, singularity enthusiasts tend to be computer specialists, such as the author and retired computer scientist Vernor Vinge, the roboticist Hans Moravec, and the entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil. Intoxicated by the explosive progress of information technologies captured by Moore's Law, such singularitarians foresee a "merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence," as Kurzweil puts it, that will culminate in "immortal software-based humans." It will happen not within a millennium, or a century, but no later than 2030, according to Vinge. These guys-and, yes, they're all men-are serious. Kurzweil says he has adopted an antiaging regimen so that he'll "live long enough to live forever."Specialists in real rather than artificial brains find such bionic convergence scenarios naive, often laughably so. Gerald Edelman, a Nobel laureate and director of the Neurosciences Institute, in San Diego, says singularitarians vastly underestimate the brain's complexity. Not only is each brain unique, but each also constantly changes in response to new experiences. Stimulate a brain with exactly the same input, Edelman notes, and you'll never see the same signal set twice in response."This is a wonderful project-that we're going to have a spiritual bar mitzvah in some galaxy," Edelman says of the singularity. "But it's a very unlikely idea. Neuroscientists still do not understand at all how a brain (the squishy agglomeration of tissue and neurons) makes a conscious mind (the intangible entity that enables you to fall in love, find irony in a novel, and appreciate the elegance of a circuit design). "No one has the foggiest notion," says the neuroscientist Eric Kandel of Columbia University Medical Center, in New York City. "At the moment all you can get are informed, intelligent opinions." Neuroscientists lack an overarching, unifying theory to make sense of their sprawling and disjointed findings, such as Kandel's Nobel Prize-winning discovery of the chemical and genetic processes that underpin memory formation in sea slugs.The brain, it seems, is complex enough to conjure fantasies of technotranscendence and also to foil their fulfillment.Crank the numbers and you find that a typical human brain has quadrillions of connections among its neurons. A quadrillion is a one followed by 15 zeroes; a stack of a quadrillion U.S. pennies would go from the sun out past the orbit of Jupiter. Adding to the complexity, synaptic connections constantly form, strengthen, weaken, and dissolve. Old neurons die and-evidence now indicates, overturning decades of dogma-new ones are born. Far from being stamped from a common mold, neurons display an astounding variety of forms and functions. Researchers have discovered scores of distinct types just in the optical system. Neurotransmitters, which carry signals across the synapse between two neurons, also come in many different varieties. In addition to neurotransmitters, neural-growth factors, hormones, and other chemicals ebb and flow through the brain, modulating cognition in ways both profound and subtle. Indeed, the more you learn about brains, the more you may wonder how the damn things work. Nevertheless, the brain is a computer, singularitarians insist. It just has an extremely messy wiring diagram. According to this perspective, neurons resemble transistors, absorbing, processing, and reemitting the electrochemical pulses known as action potentials. Within a decade or so, computers will surpass the computational power of brains, many singularitarians say. They base this claim on the assumption that those spikes represent the brain's total computational capacity. If the brain contains one quadrillion synapses processing on average 10 action potentials per second, then the brain performs 10 quadrillion operations per second. At some point in the near future, some singularitarians say, computers will surpass that processing rate and leave us in their cognitive dust unless we embrace them through bionic convergence or uploading. So would a fully configured Blue Gene/P be cognitive, perhaps like a monkey or a tree frog, if not like us? Of course not. As any singularitarian would agree, intelligence requires software at least as much as hardware. And that software will soon be available, the singularitarians say, because scientists will in the next couple of decades reverse engineer the brain's software, yielding all sorts of benefits. First, the brain's programming tricks will be transferred to computers to make them smarter. Moreover, given the right interface, our brains and computers will communicate as readily as Macs and PCs. And eventually, of course, our personal software will be extracted from our frail flesh and blood and uploaded into advanced robots or computers. (Don't forget to back yourself up on a hard drive!) We'll walk the earth in impervious titanium-boned bodies. Or we'll inhabit impossibly lush virtual paradises specifically created to please and stimulate our disembodied, digital psyches. Many neuroscientists do assume that, just as computers operate according to a machine code, the brain's performance must depend on a "neural code," a set of rules or algorithms that transforms those spikes into perceptions, memories, meanings, sensations, and intentions. If such a neural code exists, however, neuroscientists still have no idea what that code is. Or, more accurately, like voters in a U.S. presidential primary, researchers have a surfeit of candidates, each seriously flawed. Consciousness is not easy to define, let alone create in a machine. The psychologist William James described it succinctly as attention plus short-term memory. It's what you possess right now as you read this article, and what you lack when you are asleep and between dreams, or under anesthesia.Given our ignorance about the brain, Singer calls the idea of an imminent singularity "science fiction." A neuroscientist at Caltech, Koch was a close friend and collaborator of Crick, who together with James Watson unraveled the structure of DNA in 1953. Koch says, "It is very unlikely that the neural code will be anything as simple and as universal as the genetic code." Neural codes seem to vary in different species, Koch notes, and even in different sensory modes within the same species. "The code for hearing is not the same as that for smelling," he explains, "in part because the phonemes that make up words change within a tiny fraction of a second, while smells wax and wane much more slowly." Evidence from research on neural prostheses suggests that brains even devise entirely new codes in response to new experiences. "There may be no universal principle" governing neural-information processing, Koch says, "above and beyond the insight that brains are amazingly adaptive and can extract every bit of information possible, inventing new codes as necessary." Discussions of memory chips leave Andrew Schwartz cold. A neural-prosthesis researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, Schwartz has shown that monkeys can learn to control robotic arms by means of chips embedded in the brain's motor cortex. But no one has any idea how memories are encoded, Schwartz says. "We know so little about the higher functions of the brain that it seems ridiculous to talk about enhancing things like intelligence and memory," he says. Moreover, he says, downloading complex knowledge directly into the brain would require not just stimulating millions of specific neurons but also altering synaptic connections throughout the brain. So they sidestep the issue, predicting that all current interfaces will soon yield to very small robots, or "nanobots." Remember the 1966 motion picture Fantastic Voyage? That's the basic idea. But try to imagine, in place of Raquel Welch in a formfitting wet suit, robotic submarines the size of blood cells. They  infiltrate the entire brain, then record all neural activity and manipulate it by zapping neurons, tinkering with synaptic links, and so on. The nanobots will be equipped with some sort of Wi-Fi so that they can communicate with one another as well as with electronic systems inside and outside the body. Nanobots have inspired some terrific "X-Files" episodes as well as the Michael Crichton novel Prey. But they have as much basis in current research as fairy dust. Steven Rose has nothing against technoenhancement.  The neurobiologist at England's Open University wears eyeglasses and is proud of his titanium knee and dental implants. He says a lot can be done to improve the brain's performance through improved drugs, neural prostheses, and perhaps genetic engineering. But he calls the claims about imminent consciousness uploading "pretty much crap." Rose disputes the singularitarians' contention that computers will soon surpass the brain's computational capacity. He suspects that computation occurs at scales above and below the level of individual neurons and synapses, via genetic, hormonal, and other processes. So the brain's total computational power may be many orders of magnitude greater than what singularitarians profess. Rose also rejects the basic premise of uploading, that our psyches consist of nothing more than algorithms that can be transferred from our bodies to entirely different substrates, whether silicon or glass fibers or as-yet-unimaginable quantum computers. The information processing that constitutes our selves, Rose asserts, evolved within-and may not work in any medium other than-a social, crafty, emotional, sex-obsessed flesh-and-blood primate. Perhaps the old joke is right after all: If the brain were simple enough for us to understand, we wouldn't be smart enough to understand it. Let's face it. The singularity is a religious rather than a scientific vision.  Such yearning for transcendence, whether spiritual or technological, is all too understandable. Both as individuals and as a species, we face deadly serious problems, including terrorism, nuclear proliferation, overpopulation, poverty, famine, environmental degradation, climate change, resource depletion, and AIDS. Engineers and scientists should be helping us face the world's problems and find solutions to them, rather than indulging in escapist, pseudoscientific fantasies like the singularity.

"Dawkins writes as though the theory of the selfish gene puts paid once and for all to the idea of a creator God - we no longer need that hypothesis to explain how we came to be. In a sense that is true. But what about the gene itself: how did that come to be? What about the primordial soup? All these questions are answered, of course, by going one step further down the chain of causation. But at each step we encounter a world with a singular quality: namely that it is a world which, left to itself, will produce conscious beings, able to look for the reason and the meaning of things, and not just for the cause. The astonishing thing about our universe, that it contains consciousness, judgement, the knowledge of right and wrong, and all the other things that make the human condition so singular, is not rendered less astonishing by the hypothesis that this state of affairs emerged over time from other conditions. If true, that merely shows us how astonishing those other conditions were. The gene and the soup cannot be less astonishing than their product. Moreover, these things would cease to astonish us - or rather, they would fall within the ambit of the comprehensible - if we could find a way to purge them of contingency. That is what religion promises: not a purpose, necessarily, but something that removes the paradox of an entirely law-governed world, open to consciousness, that is nevertheless without an explanation: that just is, for no reason at all. The evangelical atheists are subliminally aware that their abdication in the face of science does not make the universe more intelligible, nor does it provide an alternative answer to our metaphysical enquiries. It simply brings enquiry to a stop. And the religious person will feel that this stop is premature: that reason has more questions to ask, and perhaps more answers to obtain, than the atheists will allow us. So who, in this subliminal contest, is the truly reasonable one? The atheists beg the question in their own favor, by assuming that science has all the answers. But science can have all the answers only if it has all the questions; and that assumption is false. There are questions addressed to reason which are not addressed to science, since they are not asking for a causal explanation."

By Roger Scruton

 

'Biological function and the genetic code are interdependent'
Albert Voie

"Life never ceases to astonish scientists as its secrets are more and more revealed. In particular the origin of life remains a mystery.  One wonders how the scientific community could unravel a one-time past-tense event with such low probability. This paper shows that there are logical reasons for this problem. Life expresses both function and sign systems. This parallels the logically necessary symbolic self-referring structure in self-reproducing systems. Due to the abstract realm of function and sign systems, life is not a subsystem of natural laws. This suggests that our reason is limited in respect to solve the problem of the origin of life and that we are left taking life as an axiom."

"In life there is interdependency between biological function and sign systems. To secure the transmission of biological function through time, biological function must be stored in a "time-independent" sign system. Only an abstract sign based language can store the abstract information necessary to build functional biomolecules. In the same manner the very definition of the genetic code depends upon biological function. This is the origin of life problem and it penetrates deeper than just the fact that organisms observed today have such a design".

An important implication of Gödel's incompleteness theorem is that it is not possible to have a finite description with itself as the proper part. In other words, it is not possible to read yourself or process yourself as process.
The replication of machines seemed for many years an unsolvable task due to the problem of "self-insight". Von Neumann believed that life was ultimately based on logic, and so there should be a logic construct that should be able to support the reproduction as observed in life. In order to solve the implication of Gödel's incompleteness theorem, von Neumann had to introduce a blueprint of the machine. The trick is to employ representations or names of objects, which code can be smaller than the objects themselves and can indeed be contained in that object. Von Neumann's abstract machine consisted of two central elements: a Universal Computer and a Universal Constructor. The Universal Constructor builds another Universal Constructor based on the directions contained in the Universal Computer. When finished, the Universal Constructor copies the Universal Computer and hands the copy to its descendant.  As a model of a self-replicating system it has its counterpart in life where the Universal Computer is represented by the instructions contained in the genes, while the Universal Constructor is represented by the cell and its machinery. In order to replicate, the necessity of a symbolic self-reference is a general premise in logic.
Can we really apply logical terms such as "paradox" and "consistent" to biological systems in the same manner as we do to formal systems? Even though we must admit that biological systems sometimes are more "fuzzy" than the strict world of formal systems, there are constrains on how it is possible to organize them. A hypothetical biological system trying to reproduce without a symbolic self-reference, but by self-inspection will run into related problems as within a formal system. Presupposing an unchanged original, problems will occur due to disruptive effects. The function of biological bodies is determined by their three-dimensional structure and how this structure relates to a whole. However, in order to copy them one should access their internal sequence of amino acids (or nucleic acids if the body is a ribozyme), which would then interfere with their structure and function. For instance, for an enzyme to replicate itself, it would need to have the intrinsic property of self-replication "by default". Otherwise, it would have to be able to assemble itself from a pool of existing parts, but for this, it would have to "unfold" so that its internal parts could be reconstituted for the copy to be produced. Thus, instead of using terms such as "paradox" and "consistent", it is more relevant to speak of what is physically and practically possible when it comes to physical constructions. These constraints require the categorical distinction between the machine that reads the instructions and the description of the machine. Von Neumann observes that there is a parallel to this logically necessary distinction between symbol and dynamics in measurement processes in physics. Here the function of measurement is necessarily irreducible to the dynamics of the measuring device. This logic is closely related to the separation of symbols and dynamics for control of self-replication since measurement and control are inverse processes. In other words measurement transforms physical states to symbols in memory, while memory-stored controls transform symbols to physical states. Von Neumann made no suggestion as to how these symbolic and material functions in life could have originated. He felt, "That they should occur in the world at all is a miracle of the first magnitude."
Life is not a subsystem of the laws of nature
Life is fundamentally dependent upon symbolic representation in order to realize biological function. A system based on autocatalysis, like the hypothesized RNA-world, can't really express biological function since it is a pure dynamical process. Life is autonomous with something we could call "closure of operations" or a cluster of functional parts relating to a whole. Functional parts are only meaningful under a whole, in other words it is the whole that gives meaning to its parts. Further, in order to define a sign (which can be a symbol, an index, or an icon) a whole cluster of self-referring concepts seems to be presupposed, that is, the definition cannot be given on a priori grounds, without implicitly referring to this cluster of conceptual agents. This recursive dependency really seals off the system from a deterministic bottom up causation. The top down causation constitutes an irreducible structure.
In algorithmic information theory there is another concept of irreducible structures. If some phenomena X (such as life) follows from laws there should be a compression algorithm H(X) with much less information content in bits than X. Biological function and sign systems, resemble the complexity of computer programs, which implies that H(X) is not less than X in bits (at least not if it is an elegant program). This is not what we normally mean with a law, since a real law should be something with much less information than the data it is intended to predict. This shows that Mechanism cannot explain symbol grounding, but the best it can do is to make representations of representations ad infinitum. However, as Hubert Yockey says "there is nothing in the physico-chemical world that resembles reactions being determined by a sequence of codes between sequences". Autocatalysis as the hypothesized RNA-autocatalysis is a purely dynamical process and belongs to another category of phenomena than function. Polanyi argued that; "since the structure of life is a set of boundary conditions that harness the laws of physics and chemistry their (the boundary condition's) structure cannot be defined in terms of the laws that they harness. Nor can a vocabulary determine the content of a text (a boundary condition on the vocabulary), and so on". Since biological function or "boundary conditions" are crucial also in replication, life seems not to have evolved from inanimate matter.
It is interesting to see how widespread the belief in randomness is as a scientific explanation among scientists. When it comes to the origin of life many have settled with a theory that goes something like this: "Isn't a cell just a cluster of molecules organized in a specific way? Given enough time or "trials" it should be possible for a pond of random chemical reactions and polymerizations to end up with something that reproduce." Some scientists have also done some efforts to calculate the probability for the event. The truth is that randomness is used in a manipulative way to a problem where it doesn't even apply. It is important that we do not throw away logic and the laws of physics even though we introduce randomness. Randomness is not equivalent with miracle, but must take place in some organized manner. Consider our model for life consisting of symbols (genes) and the cell machinery (proteins and ribozymes). As mentioned above, there is no information without an interpreter suggesting that there is no message coming from the genes without the cell machinery in place that interprets the genes. On the other hand the cell machinery must be rooted causally in the symbolic codes for at least two reasons. Firstly, the cell machinery consists of different parts that have to be produced in a number of copies depending on a memory. Secondly, functionality of the cell machinery implies a three-dimensional folding, which is determined by the intrinsic properties of the building blocks e.g. amino acids. In addition there are control mechanisms for protein folding. The production of proteins presupposes a control mechanism involving the genes that secures the entire sequence of amino acids before the folding takes place. Random polymerization may at best produce small peptides before the folding would interfere with further elongation. There is really no other alternative than first a transcription from a memory, and then a subsequent folding of the protein or ribozyme. This leaves us with two mutually dependent categories of chemical structures or events (symbols and cell machinery), which does not fit with the axioms of probability that only consider one-way dependency. Thus, the structure of life has probability zero.
Some authors have sought the natural explanation for life's self-referring structure in quantum theory. Interestingly enough these theories show how far reasoning is pushed when faced with the mystery of life. Rosen found quantum mechanics to narrow to be fruitful for biology, but did not succeed in finding a better theory. Balazs explains the origin of the interdependency between biological function and sign systems as a result of "time inversion symmetry breaking". While biology is not independent of quantum physics, extrapolating an event in microphysics to an entire organized cell system should be met with some critique. The syntheses of the complex biomolecules that together defines the genetic code are certainly events that would have to be stretched out in time, complicated by the property of folding, and cannot be understood as some sort of quantum entanglement. However, the problem of quantum measurements could indeed be related to the same kind of logic as in the origin of life; the problem of "self measurement".

Conclusion

"Subsystems of the mind as functional objects or formal systems are unique in respect to other phenomena that follows the laws of nature and are subsystems of the universe. Life express both function and sign systems, which indicates that it is not a subsystem of the universe, since chance and necessity cannot explain sign systems, meaning, purpose, and goals. Quite contrary, the human mind possesses other properties that do not have these limitations, the property of creativity with ability to create through choice with intent.  This choice doesn't violate any laws.  It merely uses dynamically inert configurable switches to record into physicality the nonphysical choices of mind. It is therefore very natural that many scientists believe that life is rather a subsystem of some Mind greater than humans or symbolic number cruncher referred to by. At least as observers we are left taking life as an axiom as Nils Bohr suggested in a lecture published in Nature "life is consistent with, but undecidable from physics and chemistry".

The possibility that's generated the fuss.
Recent work in string theory has suggested that the collider might produce black holes, providing physicists with a spectacular opportunity to study them in a laboratory.
The common conception is that black holes are fantastically massive astrophysical bodies with enormous gravitational fields. But in reality, a black hole can have any mass. Take an orange and squeeze it to a sufficiently small size (about a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a meter across) and you'd have a black hole - with the mass of an orange.
Physicists have realized that the collider's proton-proton collisions might momentarily pack so much energy into such a small volume that exceedingly tiny black holes may form - black holes even lighter than the one theoretically created by the orange, but black holes nevertheless.
Why might one worry that this would be a problem? Because black holes have a reputation for rapacity. If a black hole is produced under Geneva, might it swallow Switzerland and continue on a ravenous rampage until the earth is devoured?
It's a reasonable question with a definite answer: no.
Work that made Stephen Hawking famous establishes that tiny black holes would disintegrate in a minuscule fraction of a second, long enough for physicists to reap the benefits of having produced them, but short enough to avoid their wreacking any havoc.
Even so, some have worried further that maybe Dr. Hawking was wrong and such black holes don't disintegrate. Are we willing to bet the fate of the planet on an untested insight? And that question takes us to the crux of the matter: the collisions at the Large Hadron Collider have never before occurred under laboratory settings, but they've been taking place throughout the universe - even here on earth - for billions of years.
Cosmic rays - particles wafting through space - constantly rain down on the earth, the other planets and the wealth of stars scattered throughout the galaxy, with energies far in excess of those attainable by the Large Hadron Collider. And since these more powerful collisions haven't resulted in astrophysical calamities, the collider's comparatively tame collisions most assuredly won't either.

Should any of the particles described above be produced at the Large Hadron Collider, from Higgs particles to black holes, corks will rightly pop in physics departments worldwide. But the most exciting prospect of all is that the experiments will reveal something completely unanticipated, something that forces us to rethink our most cherished explanations.
Confirming an idea is always gratifying. But finding what you don't expect opens new vistas on the nature of reality. And that's what humans, including those of us who happen to be physicists, live for.

Earth Will Survive After All, Physicists Say
The New York Times

The Large Hadron Collider

"That black hole that was going to eat
the Earth? Forget about it, and keep
making the mortgage payments - those
of you who still have them.
A new particle accelerator, the Large
Hadron Collider scheduled to go into
operation this fall outside Geneva, is no
threat to the Earth or the universe,
according to a new safety review
approved Friday by the governing
council of the European Organization for
Nuclear Research, or Cern, which is building the collider. "There is no basis for any concerns about the consequences of new particles or forms of matter that could possibly be produced by the LHC," four physicists who comprised the safety assessment group wrote in their report. Whatever the collider will do, they said, Nature has already done many times over. The physicists, who labored anonymously for the last year and a half, are John Ellis, Michelangelo Mangano and Urs Wiedemann, of Cern, and Igor Tkachev, of the Institute for Nuclear Research in Moscow. In a press release, Cern's director general Robert Aymar said, "With this report, the Laboratory has fulfilled every safety and environmental evaluation necessary to ensure safe operation of this exciting new research facility." It is full speed ahead, they say, on the new machine, which is designed to accelerate protons, the building blocks of ordinary matter, to energies of 7 trillion electron volts and then bang them together to produce tiny primordial fireballs, miniature versions of the Big Bang. Physicists will comb the etritus from those fireballs in search of forces and particles and even new laws of nature that might have prevailed during the first trillionth of a second of time. Some critics have argued, however, that Cern has ignored or downplayed the risk that the collider could produce a black hole that would swallow the Earth, or that it could create some other dangerous particle.The safety group, however, pointed out that cosmic rays have produced equivalently energetic collisions with the Earth and other objects in the cosmos over and over again. "This means that Nature has already completed about 1031 LHC experimental programs since the beginning of the Universe," they write. But the stars and galaxies endure.
The new report, which is an update and expansion of a previous 2003 report, pays particular attention to the issue of black holes, which could be produced according to some speculative variations of the already speculative string theory. Could one eat the Earth? These same theories predict that the black holes would immediately disintegrate, the authors say. But if stable black holes could somehow be produced, they would also have been produced by cosmic ray collisions.The report draws heavily on a dense 96-page analysis by Steven B. Giddings of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Dr. Mangano, which will be available on the physics archive on Monday. In that paper, Dr. Giddings and Dr. Mangano conclude, "Indeed, conservative arguments based on detailed observations and the best-available scientific knowledge, including solid astronomical data, conclude, from multiple perspectives, that there is no risk of any significance whatsoever from such black holes."The difference between these two ways of making black holes is that the ones from cosmic rays would be going near the speed of light and would shoot through the Earth with no effect, while collider black holes would be at rest relative to the Earth and could be captured. But if such black holes from cosmic rays existed, the physicists concluded, dense cinders like neutron stars or white dwarfs would capture them and get eaten. But that doesn't happen; such objects continue to exist.The safety report was itself reviewed and approved by another panel of scientists outside Cern. And so, after 14 years and $8 billion, the future of physics is almost here. Cern's engineers are in the process of cooling the superconducting magnets that power the protons around their 17-mile racetrack down to within 3 degrees Fahrenheit of absolute zero. They are on track, they say to begin circulating protons in the machine in August and to begin colliding them a couple of months later. Because the engineers have not yet finished "training" the magnets to carry the currents necessary to propel the protons to full energy, the plan is for the colliding protons to have 5 trillion electron volts apiece initially, still five times more energetic than physicists have achieved before.In the winter, when Cern traditionally shuts down for a period, the magnets
will be trained for the full energy. In the
spring the collider will start up again
with 14-trillion volt collisions. And
physicists can finally stop holding their
breaths."

Soon, the genetic engineering
 "bio - goo" ... scenario ...

---------------------------

The Origins of the Universe: A Crash Course

Physicists believe these "sparticles" have so far evaded detection because they're a good deal more massive than their known counterparts, thus requiring more powerful collisions for their copious production.
A wealth of calculations strongly suggests that the collider will have that power.
The discovery of sparticles would be a monumental achievement, taking us far beyond Einstein by establishing a deep link between nature's forces and the particles of matter. Such a discovery also has the potential to advance our understanding of dark matter - the abundant matter that permeates space but does not give off light and hence is known only through its gravitational influence. Many researchers suspect that dark matter is composed of sparticles.
Transdimensional Particles
A tantalizing idea considered since the early part of the last century is that the universe might have more than the three spatial dimensions of common experience.
In addition to the familiar left/right, back/forth and up/down, physicists have contemplated additional directions that are curled up to such a small size that they've so far eluded discovery.
For many years Einstein was a strong proponent of this idea. He had already shown that gravity was nothing but warps and curves in the familiar dimensions of space (and time); the new idea posited that nature's other forces (for example, the electromagnetic force) amounted to warps and curves in additional, as yet unknown, spatial dimensions. Difficulties in applying the idea mathematically resulted in Einstein ultimately losing interest. But decades later, string theory revived it: the mathematics of string theory not only requires extra dimensions but has shown how to resolve the issues that flummoxed Einstein.
And now, remarkably, there's a chance - albeit a small one - that the collider may find evidence for the extra dimensions. Calculations show that some of the debris produced by the proton collisions may be ejected out of our familiar spatial dimensions and crammed into the others, a process we'd detect by an apparent loss of the energy the debris would carry.
The unknown is just how powerful the collisions need to be for this process to happen, a number itself determined by another unknown: just how small the extra dimensions, if they exist, actually are. The more tightly they're curled, the harder it would be to cram anything in them and so the more energetic the required collisions.
Should the Large Hadron Collider have the power necessary to reveal extra dimensions of space - to overturn our belief that length, width and height are all there is - that would rank as one of the greatest upheavals in our understanding of the universe.

"Reason dreams of an empire of knowledge, a mansion of the mind.Yet sometimes we end up living in a hovel by its side. Reason has shown us our capacity for power, both to create and to destroy. Yet how we use that power rests on our deeper capacities which lie beyond the reach of reason, beyond our traditions and culture, stretching far back into the depths of the evolutionary process that created our species, a process that ultimately asserts the power of life over death. And, ironically, even death, as part of the process of life, asserts that power. That is how we have come into being and now find ourselves committed to the unrelenting struggle of ordinary human existence. We surely stand at the threshold of a great adventure of the human spirit-a new synthesis of knowledge, a potential integration of art and science, a deeper grasp of human psychology, a deepening of the symbolic representations of our existence and feelings as given in religion and culture, the formation of an international order based on cooperation and nonviolent competition. It seems not too much to hope for these things. The future, as always, belongs to the dreamers."

Heinz R. Pagels
The Dreams of Reason

This book is about our  beliefs and practices, those which had emerged with the dawning of consciousness, then became embraced by human beings, and evolved within us wearing different many masks of delusion, and have been leading us towards greater and more complex delusions along the time arrow of our civilization history. It is about our Choices and the force of Free Will practice which interfere with the harmony of the natural rhythm dominating the existence, and predestined by the fundamental forces and interactions, the equilibrium prevailing the whole existence. It is about the existence being a dynamic, multi-layer, multi-dimensional, multi-color, interconnected, interrelated, interdependent, symmetrical and homogenous One Substance structured on balanced order actualizing the reality of equilibrium. Human beings are the fine tuned balanced intersection between the abstract and the physical realms, in a space-time moment expressing consciousness and the force of free will practice, of whose choices would either interrupt and contradict this cosmic homogenousity, or maintain interacting in harmony with it. The book is about Nature's Rage and Fury, the visible and the invisible natural processes of the balance  restoration, accompanied with tensions and manifested in symptoms of which are the world's dis-equilibrium economy crisis, the situational social systems fragmentation, the post-modern technologies threats and hazards for being controlled by corrupt capitalist interests, and the possible irreversible abrupt environmental catastrophe caused by the culture of consuming, the  man-made global warming and climate change disturbing the closure within which we nourish and survive. This book is about the disturbance of the state of global equilibrium conditional for harboring life and sustaining the well being of intercultural communication and peaceful co-existing; the distortion of the balance, the reality we all are certain about of being absolute and dominant in the universe, without which the meaning of being would end up in chaos and nothingness.; despite our awareness that the Truth is fundamentally inexplicit in a multi-dimensional mega-verse existence, of which we only are conscious of a one universe - the one which we live in. This book is about the present state of the world which shall inevitably enforce an "Obligatory" state of a "necessity Utopia", a Natural Laws' adjustment which ever since has been the wise rule of the visible and the invisible hands of Nature, an evolutionary step to restore Man-Nature Globalibrium and balanced order, which many utilitarians must unwillingly be obliged to accept and obey, or otherwise, face their handmade Armageddon".

mother who had newly given birth, and the gathering of my sisters and brothers around to view -- I recall all of these as photos engraved in my memory. Mother, baby, food, shelter, breast feeding, colorful weak kittens with eyes closed, the sound of mews - these were my first cognitive experience. A few years later, I recognized that Sheba and her kittens' delightful story was the objective equivalence of my family's less fortunate one, following the 1948 Arab-Israeli war when they were forced to flee from their "Kingdom of Heaven".

The Masks of Delusion is a book about the age-old vision of equilibrium as a universal reality, the condition towards which all objects in existence strive, which has been the underlying cause out of which life has always evolved. and according to which 'Being' is actualized and gains its meaning.  Equilibrium is the process according to which the fundamental forces and ruling interactions project their will in constructing existence, the phenomena of life and conscious human life, and the dialectics driving the movement of history. The Masks of Delusion are historical mistakes, those beliefs which have been embraced by humans while practicing their free will in establishing ideologies and social systems which have only succeeded in distorting the natural parameters of equilibrium, thus kindling the clash of civilizations, spreading injustice, and interrupting the harmonic  flow of evolution. The book is about human beings embodying Mother Nature, that personification of the finely tuned moment of intersection between Nature's twofold substances, the abstract and the physical: consciousness in flesh and bones, utilizing free will upon Nature's fundamental forces in the domain of their physical extension. A human's life span sums up the eternal cycle of the Universe: expansion and contraction, birth and death, Nothingness-chaos into Being-meaning and back into Chaos to re-emerge into Being again.Our core theme is that the Masks of Delusion human beings have embraced are the driving force behind all our complex socioeconomic activities, and have implications on the dynamic closure within which we are nurtured and survive. The subject of the book is neither Philosophy in the literal meaning of the word, nor an intellectual challenge to any particular religion or belief, since these would not claim to have definite practical solutions for the present complex Global mess we have ended up with. Our concern is with the present state of the world, and the current systems, technologies and circumstances which have arisen from historical mistakes committed throughout different stages of our civilization's evolution. Humanity's catastrophic disturbance to the natural balance has been the distortion factor in the equation of Global Equilibrium; an interruption or rupture in the natural rhythm of space-time caused by Human Choice and Free Will innovating Forms and Activities in an accelerated rate of progress aimed at decreasing time and increasing profits, while the fulfilled natural Functions have remained constant since life began. The chapters of this book are a mind autobiography, a collection of thoughts, observations and intuitions which occurred to us as they could have occurred to anyone; we are all human beings who have found ourselves conscious of our existence, without any clear answers to how or why, and are left wondering how to pursue survival and maintain a positive attitude towards this life whose ending is foreseen from its beginning. Our main concern is with global social justice based on equilibrium and homogeneity. We believe that life is a moment of perfect equilibrium, a finely tuned balance between the physical and the abstract, matter and energy, life and death. Cultural, economic and social systems can only operate in the interests of civilization and in harmony with the nature of life itself when an equilibrium is established between the communal and the individual, the self and the collective, science and religion, form and function. Extremism is anti-equilibrium.  Wealth in the hands of the few, justice implemented to serve the few: this is extremism. Marcus Aurelius' stoic "Meditations" teaching the negation of desire and the denial of the self, though great as philosophy and aspiration, is, in a realistic sense, also extremism, only with a different face. The contemporary Chinese example of collective prosperity challenging utilitarian individualism is an inspirational new "global dream" to believe in. Democratic socialism, equality and social justice are the core of the ethics that fulfill equilibrium. The difference between Being and Nothingness is the difference between equilibrium and chaos. Equilibrium is the manifestation of 'the gravity of being', the meaning and the creation, while the lightness of being is Nothingness and uncertainty. Our argument is also about the oppositional dialectics between East and West which have existed since antiquity and the rise of religions. The relationship between God, Man and Nature has been viewed differently by the Western mind from that of the East as a result of deriving ethics from an evolving knowledge rather than basing knowledge on the absolute ethics manifested in sacred revelation: a Western mind haunted by superhuman delusions and the quest for eternity on the one hand, and an eastern mind haunted by an arrow of time heading towards corruption and Doomsday on the other. Such divergence in conception generated the science vs. religion issue. The Western world came to emphasize ethical evolution based on relativity, utility and situation, and its active domain became accelerating Form change, which is the core of capitalism. On the other hand the Muslim world, while focusing on constant natural Functions and resisting Form change rather than containing it, entered into a circular process of reproduction without progress. These historical mistakes established border lines between science, religion, ethics, and morality. Our argument is about the gradual evolution of Human thought in its struggle to find empirical, physical and tangible explanations of the reality of our existence, and a participation in the efforts to establish a credible scientific philosophy of mind.  Ours is a voice among other voices demanding fair solutions to the accumulating global crisis disturbing the world's stability and threatening life itself with extinction; it speaks to and for all beliefs, whether secular, existential or religious, since all will either merge in the sharing of mutual moral concerns and ethical standards emphasizing active social interaction and positive intercultural dialogue, or else innovate new Masks of Delusion, to generate conflict and the clash of civilizations, as they have throughout history. This book is about Nature's Rage and Fury, visible and invisible, manifested in the world's economic crisis, the fragmentation of social systems  the threats from post-modern technologies controlled by capitalist interests, and the possible catastrophe of an irreversible man-made climate change which would inevitably impose a "necessity Utopia",  a Natural Laws' adjustment to restore Man-Nature Globalibrium and balanced order, which humanity would be obliged to accept and obey, or else face Armageddon.

When I first thought of writing this book, I intended to use the subtitle "A Mind Autobiography" to point a parallel between the stages in a human life  and the evolution of civilization; having a compact growth span, physically and mentally, from conception to old age, parallel hundreds of millions of years of life and thought evolution, right up to its absurd contemporary climax. For while individuals in past eras lived their lives in relative harmony with their cultural context, people today no sooner mature than they arrive at a sense of detachment and alienation from the emptiness of post-modern culture and the current uncertainty of belief. "Becoming" is the autobiography of a mind which suffered such a fate at a time when humanity as a whole was becoming aware of past historical mistakes, reaching an age of collective maturity, outgrowing individualism and selfishness, and realizing the necessity of placing emphasis on communal interests, common concerns, and a tgrowinghen nse of detachment,.and with Naturepositive existential sci/spiritual approach, rather than continuing to indulge in the emptiness of capitalist individualism.

        When I talk about Masks of Delusion, I trace the historical mistakes committed by humans along the path of evolving civilization. We talk about man beginning his experience of consciousness with a quest for eternity: a delusion rooted in religious ideas of a realm after death; later came a second delusion, with eternity becoming the quest for "Alchemy" or an AI cyber realm. Delusion came wearing different masks throughout history. Through technology man believed he could invent his own eternity. Through science, he believed he could develop his biological functions or transcend them to the point of finally discovering the age-old concealed fountain of eternal life. This mind evolution mirrored the evolution of civilization itself. Today we are living at a climax of imbalance in the global equilibrium which we have effected by interacting with the natural context (Nature) according to our own delusions. We have reached an advanced "Waste Land" stage of uncertainty in knowledge, having to come to terms with the fact that truth may be fundamentally inexplicit, and are facing an age of chaos from accumulating manmade global catastrophes. At the start of the Third Millennium our "Great Expectations" have crash-landed on a sense of "Nothingness"

What is monotheism other than all objects' natural pursuit of equilibrium? What is it other than the reconciliation between opposites towards ONE state of balanced being? What is it other than the circumambulation of electrons around the nucleus, or stars around the center of a galaxy, or Muslims around the Kaaba. Monotheism is in the laws of conservation, in symmetry and supersymmetry, in the Grand unification of the fundamental forces, in the oneness of the universe, in the one string quanta composing the "music of the spheres" through different vibrations, and directions, in the ONE manifested in the landscape of multilayers and multicolor superconductor materials, in "the Lightness of Being", and in the different kinds of matter that are all different aspects of ONE stuff, in the One in the whole and the Whole in the One, in "you are who I adore and who I adore is who I am, we are two souls in one body", in the saying of the poet: "and you think you are just a minute particle while the whole universe is within you concealed", in Einstein's scientific intuition when he said: "Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science, becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe -- a spirit vastly superior to that of man." It is a "cosmological constant," a formula for a new kind of "sci/religion," one in which God is a factor, denoted by the Greek letter Lambda, and one that can pave the way for an entirely new gnostic era in the history of human spirituality.

Destiny Vessel is the universal language of equilibrium expressing the meaning of monotheism, and our constant biological functions are its living manifestation. As human beings, we are destined to our constant biological functions, to the maintenance of equilibrium, and to the fundamental forces, the laws of nature and the properties of atoms and physical matter. But at the same time we possess a Fifth Force, a free will and choice to create events and innovate activities within the framework of this destiny vessel which is the meaning and the purpose, the abstract language of symbols expressing itself through genetic codes to secure the maintenance and performance of the biological functions that underlie external change and evolution.The spectrum of forms of our relative phenomena are different notes on one infinite string. You may talk about evolution, genetic mutation, about "nothing begins until something starts to move",.........

A Science of the Divine is what we need today to go beyond the kind of thought based on walls and divisions between science and religion, mental and material, beyond the implications of an opposition which has disturbed humanity for generations. Our idea is that the point at which some academics and religious people differ is in essence the same point at which they meet. The abstract is the point of conflict, but it is also the common ground. In this age of post-modern science, the immaterial realm, always regarded as in absolute dichotomy with the material, has now become invested with the physical properties attributed to multi-dimensional, multi-color, infinite values, massless phenomena. Such findings have driven many academics to declare the nature of existence to be fundamentally inexplicit. This inexplicit nature is what has always been attested to by mystics of all traditions, with their assertion that the distinction between subject and object is purely imaginary. Thus, Ibn`Arabi writes, "know you are an imagination, as is all that you regard as other than yourself an imagination." Civilization did not evolve within epistemological equilibrium, and humanity never achieved a body/mind balance except for the years prior to the emergence of consciousness. Since civilization began, our rational choices have been those of delusion, except for few glimpses of light in a dark history, when prophets, philosophers, and poets who realized the reality of the dual structure of our being, shed some of their light on the "Lost Paradise", the Disturbed Equilibrium, and demanding a balance in the polarity.

In the "Masks of Capitalism" chapter, we discuss modern capitalist evolution and form acceleration, and the fundamental contradiction between the essence of capitalism and equilibrium. We also discuss capitalist tools, in particular neoconservativism and the clash of civilizations, and their role in establishing consumer cultures, and how the dialectics in the form domain is acquiring a dangerous momentum towards world social and economic depression. We also look at capitalist influence on higher education institutions worldwide, analyze the recent world financial crisis, and argue that the void in essence  at the heart of capitalism will lead to its inevitable fall.

The "Masks of Globalization" chapter is about capitalism's tools for the deconstruction of cultures. Hitting Singularity, a term borrowed from cosmology physics, is about what happens to objects (cultures) as they approach the center of the black hole (capitalist globalization) under gravity (the dominant culture), and how matter (culture) deconstructs to primary elements then moves beyond the event horizon of its previous existence (to a Blank Slate). Capitalism and its advocates promulgate this through the concepts of globalization, free trade, global lexus, technotopia and technological singularity; these all aim to create the delusion of one world under technological capitalism. Global exclusion and inclusion of nations are also discussed in this chapter.

        "One Flew Over King Midas Goo" discusses Nanotechnology, Artificial Intelligence, Genetic Engineering, and nuclear technology, which, by revolving around the interests of capitalism, have been detached from any ethical benefit to humanity and the interests of civilization, and become immoral, uncontrolled, and therefore dangerous to the well-being of life itself. King Midas still lives, as does the alchemists' greed for turning dust into gold. We are not against technology, we are merely against leaving technology without ethical controls and moral parameters.

        "Machines Shall Not Live by Oil Alone" is about the global food crisis, and the prospective agricultural battle fields.

        "Fate democratization" is about who takes the decisions regarding inventions and research that impact humanity, animal life and the environment. Today's historical mistakes, unlike previous ones, may run out of control, with doomsday implications.

The "Masks Falling Apart" chapter is a human wish, a vision, and a hope. It is a prayer that civilization may have, miraculously, reached a mature age at last. Its about 'the magic turning back on the magician', through the same tools of communication and information that are connecting people and cultures, creating global public intercultural dialogue and generating collective human sympathy and concern. This is backed up and supported in the "Mother Nature's Rage and Fury" chapter on global warming and pollution. The mask of capitalism has become so transparent that it reveals the ugliness of the face beneath; there is no disguise any more.

        "Globalibrium: Utopia or Obligation" is about the consequent inevitable obligation to conform to the implications of the rapidly changing physical and economic environment by abandoning the old views, and replacing them by new values that emphasize eco-solutions, alternative energy development, democratic socialism and global solidarity.  This chapter is also about the necessity for activating genuine intercultural dialogue towards a world government, one which, unlike the UN, the World Bank or The World Trade Organization, would not merely manage the world in accordance with a capitalist agenda. This chapter also discusses the issue of a secular ethics established on constants and common grounds. We are not calling for the return of the old regimes, communism or Nazism or Khalifa; we wish to distil the equilibrium elements from all doctrines and regimes, while eliminating their extremist elements. We are calling for democratic socialism with minimal capital margin, capable of motivating but against accumulation, and for the Freedom of individual belief within a common secular ethical system based on a science of the divine.

BECOMING

Beliefs were born with my earliest memory, my first encounter with consciousness; I flash back to when I was around the age of one, when Sheba, the Thai tiger-colored long-hair cat, carrying in her mouth a kitten peacefully hanging in the air, was balancing herself along the edge of the garden's stony fence, then going down along a tree branch to my parent's garden to seek shelter after the American family who brought her along with them from India to Jordan had left  to go back to the States. The delightful scene of the preparations which then took place to accommodate the migrating family, preparing a big flat  traveling suitcase  with a blanket laid in its bottom and some  milk and  food  to  strengthen the