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When Mr. Luger asked me to speak to your organization, I warned him that I do not claim to know anything at all about parapsychology as a discipline dealing with phenomena outside the realm of physical and biological science which, together with mathematics, constitute the sources of biophysical science.
I did, however, observe that much of science dealing with perception, human and social consciousness, perception of space and time and the awareness of consciousness itself and of a space and time in which to let it travel, is framed in language that prevents it from dealing with these problems or, indeed, of giving them verbiage in which to exist.
I offered to present to you, on condition that you give me plenty of discussion and even interruption in mid-sentence, if you are so moved, an approach to this problem that is at least unusual if not unique. I claim that most of our difficulty with space—time perception, consciousness and parapsychology lies in our lack of a suitable set of “figures of thought” along with well exercised routes for using them in real world applications. Have you tried to say “Good morning” in algebra? It is no easier to say “I am conscious of being here and now where time is passing” in physical or psychological terms. Without language we cannot express ideas and such language is proscribed from each of the scientific disciplines.
Traditionally we wait for evolutionary development to force upon us a language in which the phenomenology becomes intuitively understandable, even simple. Classical physics ran after the language of calculus was generated. Chemistry ran when the atomic table, molecular structure and the laws of reactions were discovered. Biology at least trotted a little when quantitative genetic theory appeared. The general theory of Biophysical Science is at best crawling and I see no brilliant unifying theory in Psychology or Parapsychology on the horizon.
Why should we not attempt a deliberately stimulated evolution of these sciences by generating a set of figures of thought in which understanding may potentially lie along with a body of mathematics deliberately designed to fit the needs, not repeatedly retreaded from other slightly appropriate applications?
This is the thrust of the Biomimetic design that I offer you. Envision the problem and solution areas, design verbiage in which answers and understanding are likely to occur, and then practice, practice, practice — —do your daily mental jogging until proficiency brings insight and understanding.
Now obviously this effort cannot be expected to pay off instantaneously;
I have been working at it in the time and space unification area for about 20
years and am now seeing gratifying results. Why not get started on consciousness
and space time unification which I believe will remove the “mystery” and make
parapsychology another respectable exciting area of quantitative science?
This is where the Biomimetics comes in. Biomimetic means “In imitation of life”
and Biomimetic Transforms are mathematical operations defined by unifying and
formalizing for easy thinking and computer processing those basic ideas that
we use in natural language when we think about or converse about a subject.
Here there is a lot of folk wisdom and a lot of superstitious nonsense in our
conversation when we talk about spatial-temporal relationships and go on to
philosophical and experimental explorations in psychology and parapsychology.
Now I have mainly directed my efforts toward developing a body of unifying field theory applicable to cardiology and electroencephalography where there has been steady and gratifying progress. Here we started with the notion of a heart as an assembly of current generating bits of myocardial muscle and by the development of the transfer impedance vector point function
mode, a quantitative relationship that allows integration of the whole heart action into an orthogonal vector viewed from chosen viewpoints.
More recently we have been occupied with applying Helmholtz's reciprocity theorem to this field and devising a physiologically understandable mutual impedivity spectrometry that is hopefully leading to an electrical analysis like the now popular brain scan CAT or Computer Assisted Tomography reconstructions.
This sounds far removed from the imagery of space-time perception but it leads to a biomimetic interpenetrating domain representation of biological tissue that closely resembles our intuitively understandable treatment of a human set of thought and perception processes as part of a God seeking animal while simultaneously being a part of a functioning and species preserving family, a leader of a scientific society and a member of a socially conscious community. This socially conscious community is not a bad place to start in looking for inter-individual consciousness coupling and unconventional individual referencing to global time-space events.
I have worked out for myself a very satisfying eight element unifying
field representatation of the universe but that is entirely another topic which
I would be glad to discuss with you but not in the immediate context of Biomimetics
and Mental Jogging.
Let me turn to the time-space perception where there is precedent for useful
Biomimetic transforms devised for another purpose but still applicable to the
consciousness and parapsychological perception processes as suggestive approaches.
First I observe that our biological senses - hearing - sight - smell, proprioception, etc. are not really linear in the domain that is classically assigned to them in physics and transported into physiology. We make vigorous use of a good biological nature that when transformed into conventional variables becomes a mix of the function, its integral and its derivative but is biologically very useful. We find a biomimetic measure that is a composite of what is the present status, what is the cumulative history of recent events and an acute “but what's new?” I can illustrate this principle with a few slides later on.
Even more striking is the ease with which we can make a Biomimetic transformation confusing to our internal perception of time and space as a ‘‘wave function'' like entity combining these two formalized physical measures into a combined moving here and now measure.
There is something very different between consciously perceived time and physical clock time. They are like the United States and England: two countries separated by a common language. You have surely experienced the “time stood still” phenomenon when you were engrossed in a busy happening. Indeed we have used this concept of conscious stream of Happening comprising time as well as space to develop an H transform that is a useful device taken directly from Einstein's special relativity transform but not requiring a gratuitous negative sign in the time component. We declare H for happening the independent continuously increasing consciousness variable which may be vectorially shared with space variables such as x, y and z.
If we are stationary in the spatial-event components, time trudges on at a physical time rate and classical physics is happy, but let events direct our conscious perception into event-space and time has to be robbed to pay space so that time appears preshortened. None of this violates, of course, the physics relativity principles.
Other time transforms have been developed biomimetically. We have applied this principle by phase locking the normal respiratory rhythm to the natural heart rhythm and discovered that individuals have a patterned but dynamic internal modulation pattern that differs from person to person considerably but is stylized for one person. We have not followed these patterns for years so that we cannot tell whether they change systematically but they clearly change with aging as sampled on a moderate size population of normal people.
We find that the episode of biological activiiy may be a much
better indicator of internal time than the period that is commonly used in Chronobiological
analysis.
Now how can we hopefully combine these ideas of biomimetic modeling with concrete
experimentation? We can take the interpenetrating domain approach to what some
call levels of consciousness and deliberately merge them or move up and down
to provide a parity check on real life problems. This requires a lot of practice
if it Is to be done deliberately by design although many of us pursue an analogous
procedure spontaneously or according to assorted meditative techniques.
The parity check is by direct analogy with computer technology where a computation is often made concurrently by different but equivalent rules so that the results can be compared to detect errors. Detecting the existence of an error Is not enough even for the ship's navigator who took along a second chronometer; we should have error correcting codes.
We can deliberately reformulate life problems consciously at diverse hierarchical levels and do a comparison parity check to warn us if we can accept a conclusion or need to verify it.
While this is relatively easy at conscious levels, it can be done with a bit of effort as higher levels ordinarily disassociated from ordinary consciousness but still very really conscious in a more global sense. Establishing conscious communication along the vertical hierarchical axis is hard indeed but rewarding when it works and leads - I feel sure -~ to many of the frequently described remote in space or time perceptions.
This is pure speculation except for the rewarding experiments that its biomimetic modeling invites. Choose an hierarchical level and scenario and recreate an imagery perceived in the sensoriuzn and allow it to run its course as a simulation of a societal interaction in full color, sound, with even taste and feel, but do not let it become “reality”.
Very pragmatically I would like to know whether exercise In deliberate manipulation of the time-space variables will work as well with some mental cogging to develop skill once the appropriate hierarchical levels and figures of thought were inserted.