"What we observing is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our type of question. Space exists only in relation to our particularizing consciousness. The portions of the external universe of which we have additional knowledge by direct awareness amount to a very small fraction of the whole; of the rest we know only the structure and not what it is a structure of. Science is concerned with the rational correlation of experience rather than a discovery of fragments of absolute truth about an external world."
     - Sir Arthur Eddington

"We do not see the 'space of the world', we live our field of vision projected by incoming connections from all over the brain. Since reality and its cognition are a mode of operation of the nervous system as a closed neural network, perception and illusion are indistinguishable. There is no independently existing objective reality. The world everyone sees is not THE world but A world which we bring forth with others."
     - Excerpted from a lecture by Umberto Maturana

"There is no world at large - only a description of the world which we have learned to visualize and take for granted." We live in a bubble, the bubble of our perception "and what we witness on its round walls is our own reflection."
     - Don Juan [from Carlos Castenada]

"The world of time and space is a projection."
     - Robert Monroe in Omni, October '93

"There is always a triple correspondence -
     (a) a mental image, which is in our minds and not in the external world
     (b) some kind of counterpart in the external world, which is of inscrutable nature
     c) a set of pointer readings, which exact science can study and connect with other pointer readings."
"To put the conclusion crudely - the stuff of the world is mind-stuff."
     - Sir Arthur Eddington

"A rainbow only appears when sun rays, atmospheric processes and the optical activity of an observer come together in a certain relationship in space and time. In Tantra's understanding, all other objects, no matter how dense they may seem, like rocks, planets and men, are so intimately interwoven with men's ideas of them as to be inseparable."
     - Philip Rawson

Matter unobserved exists only in the form of probability patterns.
"These patterns can act together producing a new physical possibility - much as superimposing a number of transparent images in a slide projector can produce an image that is not contained on any of the individual transparencies."
     - Fred Allen Wolf, Parallel Universes

"The world, in the Copenhagen convention, is merely potential before our observation of it, and only becomes actual afterwards."
     - Bryce S. DeWitt

"No photon exists until a detector fires, only a developing potentiality. Particle-like and wave-like behavior are properties we ascribe to light. Without us, light has no properties, no existence. There is no independent reality for phenomena nor agencies of observation."
     - Neils Bohr

"...The past has no existence except as it is recorded in the present."
     - John A. Wheeler

"Instead of regarding the initial state of the system (whether described by hidden variables or not) as determining the outcome of measurements made on it, we might regard the outcome of the measurements as determining, at least partly, the initial state. If this freedom to choose the initial state is not available, the whole causal thinking has no significance for man."
     - Costa de Beauregard

"In a looking glass universe, the observed and the observer are codetermined. If obstacles are placed in the way of an ensemble as it unfolds, effects and causes interweave with each other. A paradigm shift changes the data and the actual process of our looking changes nature's laws."
     - Briggs and Peat, The Looking Glass Universe

"Cyril Hinshelwood, a Nobel Laureate in physical chemistry has suggested that a more appropriate name for the particles (of elementary physics) might be 'manifestations'."
     - Lyall Watson, Lifesteam

"...We ourselves can bring into existence only very small-scale properties like the spin of the electron. Might it require intelligent beings 'more conscious' than ourselves to bring into existence the electrons and other particles?"
      Barrow and Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle

Sum-Over-Histories

Action (et):
Energy, unless carried by angular momentum, cannot be transported from one atom to another. The energy and momentum possessed by two charged particles at t=0 are shared during the time interval 0 < t < r /c by both particles and the field (which "memorizes" what is happening.) If r <ct, any size mass fluctuation is possible.

"In Feynman's sum-over-histories formulation of quantum mechanics, the wave function of a particle at the present time t₁ is determined from the wave function at an earlier time t₀ by summing a function of the classical action of the particle over all possible paths the particle could take in going from x₀ to x₁ in time t₁- t₀"
     - Barrow and Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle

Self-consistent method:
Mutual balancing of world lines to determine the possible motion of a system of particles. Exact enhancement of the waves associated with all possible paths occurs only along the shortest route (and to a limited extent in the paths close to it.) The degree to which a particle is likely to wander in an indeterminate way from the straight and narrow is determined by its lack of mass.

"The probability that a particle, say, passes through some particular point is found by adding up the waves associated with every possible history that passes through that point." These particle histories take place in imaginary time.
"When we apply Feynman's sum over histories to Einstein's view of gravity, the analog of the history of a particle is now a complete curved space-time that represents the history of the whole universe. To avoid the technical difficulties in actually performing the sum over histories, these curved space-times must be taken to be Euclidean. That is, time is imaginary and is indistinguishable from directions in space. To calculate the probability of finding a real space-time with some certain property, such as looking the same at every point and in every direction, one adds up the waves associated with all the histories that have that property."
"Because one is using Euclidean space-times, in which the time direction is on the same footing as direction in space, it is possible for space-time to be finite in extent and yet to have no singularities that form a boundary or edge. The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE."
"A particular family of histories that are much more probable that the others "may be pictured as being like the surface of the earth, with the distance from the North Pole representing imaginary time and the size of a circle of constant distance from the North Pole representing the spatial size of the universe."
     - Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of the Universe

In the many histories version, Murray Gell-Mann and James B. Hartle "emphasize that the histories are 'potentialities' rather than physical realities."
     - John Horgan, Scientific American, July '92

"...Any one universe is composed of virtually an infinite number of potential or unobserved overlapping parallel universes so long as no resolution or observation is attempted. In this manner the whole range of unobserved phenomena represents a completely undivided universe. This whole undivided mess is greater than the sum of its possibilities, because the various possibilities are able to interfere with each other at a level existing before observation occurs."
Quantum waves propagate both from past to future and future to past. "Coincident waves tend to bundle into groups. These groups become parallel universes." Observing a particular state in one universe requires a superposition of phase differences of a complementary observable in parallel universes.
"...Our sense of experience and our sense of will that moves us through space and time with matter - can only result, according to the parallel universes interpretation of quantum physics, when there is a conspiracy, a merging together of the different choices in different universes."
     - Fred Allen Wolf, Parallel Universes

"We have to consider the system a tentatively trying out all possible potentialities out of which one actually emerges."
     - David Bohm

Self-Reference Cosmology

"Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past."
     - T. S. Eliot

"The initial local system does not have deterministic reality because the systems in its future with which it interacts do not have deterministic reality...and so on along an infinite chain...Yet somewhere the Gordian Knot has to be cut...since our everyday experience tells us that it is! The mathematical loophole lies at the limit of the infinite chain of interactions...We cannot establish deterministic reality by starting within the chain and by attempting to argue in a past-to-future direction towards the limit. But if we were to start with deterministic reality at the limit, arguing backwards from future to past, there would be deterministic reality at every link in the chain. In other worlds, the trouble may well come from arguing the problem back-to-front instead of front-to-back."
     - Fred Hoyle, The Universe: Past and Present Reflections

"Albert, Aharonov, and D'Amato point out that if a measurement is made of the position of a particle in the past, and another measurement of the momentum of the particle is made in the future, then both the position and the momentum of the particle are knowable with certainty in the present." The uncertainty principle "only works for processes going one way in time - either from the past to the future or from the future to the past. It fails if both future-to-past and past-to-future processing is allowed."
"Because the past and the future events are determinations of complementary aspects of real physical objects, the messages are each incomplete. I believe that it is only when both messages are received, in the present, that any sense of reality is perceived."
According to John G. Cramer, the wave function collapse "occurs when the future-generated conjugate wave propagates back through time to the origin of the quantum wave itself. There the two waves multiply, and the result is the creation of the probability for the event occurring at the site of the original wave... The offer and the echo cyclically repeat until the net exchange of energy, and other physical quantities that will manifest, satisfy certain requirements. These include the conservation laws of physics and any other restrictions imposed on the quantum wave, known as boundary conditions. When this is all taken into account, the transaction is complete."
     - Fred Allen Wolf, Parallel Universes

"The 'dice' work to ensure an outcome consistent with the quantum boundary conditions of a transaction and are 'loaded' in proportion to the magnitude of the echo that an emitter receives from potential absorbers."
"...The completion of the transaction removes all interacting advanced fields except the one connecting emitter with absorber, and the remaining advanced plus retarded superposition can be reinterpreted as purely retarded."
"...In the transaction model the emitter is given a privileged role because it is the echo received by the emitter, rather than that received by the absorber, which precipitates the transaction. Thus the past determines the future (in a statistical way) rather than the future determining the past."
     - John G. Cramer, "The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics",
     Review of Modern Physics, Vol. 58, No. 3, July 1986

"In analogy to a two-stroke engine, quantum mechanics is just one of the cylinders, stroking from past-to-future. The other cylinder serves to condense the wavefunction, and it strikes from future-to-past....The cylinder which strokes from future-to-past is directed by superintelligence, and that through the condensation of the wavefunction our thoughts are controlled."
     - Fred Hoyle, The Universe: Past and Present Reflections

The Participatory Universe

"In a self-reference cosmology, past, present and future are wired together and the universe does not come into being unless and until the blind accidents of evolution are generated to produce the consciousness, consciousness of consciousness and communicating community, that will give meaning to that universe from start to finish. The universe is brought into being by the act of participation."
     - John Wheeler

"The universe is an inextricably-linked loop."
     - Fred Hoyle

"The observers - indeed the whole system - are coupled to the extent that agreement on the final state of the system is involved... The will arises from the pool of all consciousness - a pool formed by small contributions of each without spatial or temporal bounds. This collective will has the power to bring about events in the physical world that transcend the physical limits of information transfer or kinetic events, suggestive of (but more complicated than) the ideas of omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence."
     - Evan Harris Walker

Cooper and van Vechten (CVV) "explain that we alone cannot make up our minds. We need additional information coming from other observers that concur with us that our observation is the right one...In each branch or universe there exists a world of agreement. And the matrix of minds, being made as complex as possible by having more minds in the fold, is composed in such a way that there is no longer any interference possible between the two branches. This is where the buck stops for CVV. Once all these minds have entered the picture, the possibility for interference vanishes, and the worlds are completely split apart. Once this happens, each world coexists without any further interaction. From this point onward each separate world is a real world made up of knowing minds and there is no confusion possible."
"Thus, using CVV reasoning, the past is a question of many minds coming to agree that was the past and no other. Any single mind would be helpless to the onslaught of interfering parallel universes. We need each other to provide a basis of reality."
"As our minds become more complex, the effects of interference from the parallel worlds would diminish, and each integrated complex mind would be able to differentiate between possibilities - one becoming fact and the other fantasy."

Fred Hoyle "believes that the many universes are simply an overlay of messages from the future. When we become aware of them, we tune to a universe possibility, and thus the other message possibilities are lost forever. In this case, the present universe is cut off from evolving to the future universe whose message was not received. The general tree of all possible parallel universes, with all of its branches, is simply a reference tree that defines the statistical possibilities. To Hoyle, it is the lopping off of the unused branches that makes consciousness possible."
     - Fred Allen Wolf, Parallel Universes

"If it is possible for the universe to split into two slightly different realities by a quantum-mechanical event, then surely it is equally possible for two slightly different universes to become identical in the same manner.
"If we accept multiple universes then we no longer need worry about what really happened in the past, because every possible past is equally real. Therefore, to avoid... insanity, we can, with clear consciences, arbitrarily define reality as that branch of the past that agrees with our memories."
     - Joseph Gerver

Hyperlinks

• The Great Awakening
  
• A Path Not Taken
  
• Thought Forms