The study of paleoneurobotany has few adherents around the world; it's a difficult subject, not meant for the faint of heart. Moreover, they are shunned by the rest of the scientific community as not only expousing what's considered fringe science, but also for not producing provable results, instead engaging in packaging pure speculation and conjecture as rock solid facts. Nonetheless, in the latest edition of the American Journal of Paleoneurobotany, no
fewer than six foremost members of that esteemed yet obscure brotherhood collaborated on a single article of ground-breaking significance. To whit: 400 million years ago, plants were on the verge of organizing neural pathways from root through stem to leaf tip into the semblance of what can only be considered a fully functioning brain capable of cognition and basic reasoning.As it happened: Seventy-five million years after plants first gained terra firma, the self-organization of a primitive brain reached critical mass and the final threshold was about to be crossed. In fact, amongst varying species that collectively formed an ecosystem, a rudimentary language had evolved. The absence of evidence of any structure capable of functioning as vocal chords in the fossil record points to a form of telepathy as the medium of thought transfer. However, evolution hinges on contingency and necessity working in tandem. With the advent of sexuality -- flowering plants -- basic, nascent communication broke down. Consequently, as we see clearly today, they restricted themselves to spreading information through simple chemical means.
It's the general consensus of paleoneurobotanists worldwide that, owing to the exploitation by flying insects (symbiotic though it be), sex curtailed and derailed the incipient emergence of genuine intelligence. It's a curious aside that such preoccupation has the same effect on humans as well.
Plants are essentially opportunists, after all, especially the seed bearers who appeared after the green frontiersmen had secured terrestrial earth. The insects made it easy for these sexually active plants to reproduce and dominate the planet. Overwhelmed by clouds of pheromones in the otherwise unspoiled atmosphere, the original green spore plants -- ferns, mosses, cattails -- lost the will to evolve further along intellectual lines. They were thwarted, in other words, and regressed; instead concentrating their energies towards refinement of purely metabolic and phylogenetic design.
Were it not for sex, paleoneurobotanists contend, plants may have eventually left behind their vegetative existence to achieve an organic sentience beyond mere awareness and gone on to form societies and civilizations and, possibly, become mobile in the process. Imagine an intelligent life-form able to live off the sun? What great philosophers, teachers and statesmen they would have made. God knows they could do no worse.
However, they shouldn't think of themselves as failures for not realizing their ambitious dream. Maintaining the same basic body plan for 475 million years successfully is nothing to sneer at.
* History of Palaeozoic Forests: The Earliest Land Plants
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Science Report: The Fenwick BosonAn article to appear in the upcoming October issue of International Physics Quarterly concerns a remarkable and earth-shattering discovery, likely to necessitate the rewriting of modern physics [and philosophy] textbooks, by a team of researchers from the Leibnitz Nuclear Laboratory at Fenwick, Austria. The reader might be aware that, thanks to critical experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, Cern, the Higgs boson, hypothesized to be responsible for matter's mass, was discovered and its properties proven to be true -- without it, matter would have no mass and therefore, gravity would not be. Now, similarly, a force particle, currently named the Fenwick boson, has been found to be responsible for the phenomenon of duration in the time field. Without it, scientists agree, everything would happen at once, radioactive decay would occur instantaneously, the universe would not exist, and there would be no waiting in line. The very idea of waiting would cease to make sense. Light would be all that existed, traveling as it does in a zero time-frame differential. The nature of existence itself will now have to be drawn into question. How could anything, including people, be said to exist without the backdrop of temporal duration against which the forces of nature work their magic? What, in effect, is reality? Is it all just a dream?
The members of the team refused interviews with both the BBC and the New York Times, among other worldwide media outlets, stating that they just didn't have the time.
It remains to be seen what consequences subsequent experiments will bear. At any rate, it represents a truly monumental discovery worthy of a Nobel Prize [this reporter's opinion].
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Click image to the right for larger version ... →
Science Report: Dark Matter Galaxies
The picture on the right is a schematic of the Milky Way galaxy and its vast family of neighboring galaxies. I scanned the picture from the Scientific American magazine edition, October, 2011, page 45. The accompanying article is entitled: The Dark Side Of The Milky Way. It has to do with dark matter galaxies (satellites) and their affect on our galaxy, causing a serious warp in its outer region, like a vinyl record that'd been left on a heater. A quote from the article states: "In the universe as a whole, the ratio of dark to ordinary matter is almost exactly 5."
In the picture, the yellow dots respresent known satellites, the red indicate predicted faint satellites, and the blue, predicted dark satellites. The cone is the area surveyed by the Sloan telescope, our galaxy is just off to the left of its apex.
In the same edition there's an article on the Higgs boson. Here's a quote by Fermilab theoretical physicist, Bob Tschirhart, I thought was interesting: "There's a layer of existence out there we haven't discovered." Really. Physicists speculate on what is referred to as an "energy desert" existing between the realm they are able to probe now and the realm of new physics on the other side. As well, they speak of other levels of reality. If we include the current theorizing on the underlying nature of space and time, science seems to be on the verge of discovering worlds that have only been imagined in the contexts of science fiction and magic.
Within the fields of cosmology, astronomy, and particle physics, in particular, a major upheaval in the universe of thought concerning the nature of everything is in the offing. For example, the ingredients we have assumed necessary for life to exist may not be all that necessary. Nature coughs up its secrets through application of our cognitive faculties, based on the questions asked. So, our knowledge is constrained and fashioned by our humanity which limits us in our perception and understanding, how we filter and interpret reality. By so doing, we humanize reality. We can't help but be geocentric, projecting and imposing our understanding of how things work onto the universe. The Copernican revolution has not yet come to an end. If we can imagine that how we see things may not be the only way, that the human universe is not the only one, then, possibly, a new mode of questions might emerge the answers to which might elucidate the blind spot.
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"Mother Earth, lately called Gaia, is no more than the commonality of organisms and the physical environment they maintain with each passing moment, an environment that will destabilize and turn lethal if the organisms are disturbed too much.""Humanity coevolved with the rest of life on this particular planet; other worlds are not in our genes."
-- from The Diversity of Life by Edward O. Wilson
Comment
There's no reason to believe that if we were to land on another life-giving planet we'd be able to digest and gain nutrition from any of the flora and fauna growing there. Configurations of proteins may be such that they simply don't 'fit in or on' human genetic sequences. At fundamental, DNA designs every living thing--flora and fauna--on the planet; if the geometric invariants between energy source and receiver map congruently, when the source breaks down, its biochemcial constituents will mesh with the receiver like gears, harmoniously. And despite distinctive cultural cuisine differences--what we're used to eating--evolutionarily, as with lactose intolerance, or strictly cultural, as with the eating and digesting of extremely hot peppers or raw fish, the potential to digest and effectively utilize essential nutrients present in our biosphere is a common denominator of our species. The invariants in DNA across all living things on Earth are the same. Congruence is the key. If we think of 'food' superimposing itself onto our biochemcial profile, the biochemical arrangements of invariants will line up, and the particular offerings of the food will reinforce and energize the basic matrix that is us.
On another planet, however, there is no reason to expect this congruent immersion--energy forthcoming by virtue of the equivalent invariances being present. We base that supposition on the mistaken belief that all life is as we know it, that the DNA molecule is the source of life and no other arrangement is possible. Life will find a way with whatever ingredients are available and by any means. Not only by substituting other chemicals in the double helix configuration we're familiar with, but by a whole other form. We can't know now how that would effect living things on some other planet. Thought processes. Could we even communicate other than through mathematics, assuming their understanding and perception of the physical laws of the universe are the same? There may be physical relationships and forces which we are not unaware that intermix in ways only a being constructed completely differently can see.
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Science Report: Thought Has A Material Base
Doctor Oscar Gablinski, of the Munich Polytechnic Institute, and his team have recently discovered that thought affects the familiar material plane in a manner, and from an oblique dimension, previously unanticipated or imagined. That is to say, the brain's biochemical activity in the form of cogent coherent engrams is not only capable of generating four-dimensional phenomena in ordinary five-percent matter, but also is directly connected on multiple channels at once to the fabric of spacetime. As the stationary ether was once believed to exist, it had always been accepted that an intervening medium was necessary for thought-manifestation, but now Doctor Gablinski has shown that thought is everywhere; in fact, it is the medium. In other words, without thought, there would be no spacetime. As well, they've demonstrated that thought-energy can pass through both ordinary and dark matter with the same ease as neutrinos. Unlike neutrinos, however, thought encapsulates information about the nature of the universe, and, as such, is self-organizing, complex, and capable of replicating and evolving, much like an organism. Experiments have been conducted at the Polytech's Cognitive Research facility that clearly point towards the development of a theory describing how thought can be transformed into reality on all levels of existence. Apparently, it happens all the time, we're just not aware of it. That is to say, underlying the whole of the multidimensional universe is what may be called a psychic field, the source of all that is and the well-spring of cognition.
It's expected by the scientific community at large, and the neuroscience community in particular, that Doctor Gablinski will no doubt receive the Nobel prize for this work. His findings explain much, after all. They go to the heart of mysteries of the physical realm as well as shedding light on the nature of consciousness and its role in creating and shaping the world around us.
Ether: Physics: An all-pervading, infinitely elastic, massless medium formerly postulated as the medium of propagation of electromagnetic waves.
"If we could change our psychic apparatus and should then discover that the world around us was changing, this would constitute for us the proof of the dependence of the properties of space upon the properties of consciousness."
From Tertium Organum by P. D. Ouspensky
"The thoughts that one creates generate patterns at the mind level of nature."
William Tiller ---- Tiller Foundation
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Science Report - November, 2126Doctor Leonardo McEisenstein and his team at the Appaloosa Academy of Sciences in Hungdung, China--Advanced Exploratory Division--have recently discovered that when the entire set of universes composing the local block are stacked on top of one another, for any parallel event and property under observation, the varying quantum series of probabilities 'fill in,' creating a continuum of infinite detail--fractally receding beyond the reach of present instrumentation--as well as an emergent configuration not otherwise apparent. This latter phenomenon has yet to be investigated; it may hold the key to understanding how blocks of universe-sheaves join and work together.
Parallel Universe Theory has been around since the late 21st century, but once Doctor McEisenstein's group had ascertained the generating function defining discrete distances separating adjacent universes, the frequency operator revealed, through the universe-frequency wave equation--the McEisenstein Equation of Isomorphic Membrane Mechanics--the precise characteristics of each quantumly varying membrane-universe by projecting it physically 'into' our space, its manifestation nonlinearly apprehended, its specific laws and constants translated conformally.
"There is yet much to learn," Doctor McEisenstein said at the awards ceremony, "we have only seen the frontier; now we have to discover what lies therein, what it all means, and,..., ponder the incredible vastness of the Hyperverse. We live on but a single membrane of a local block among countless billions, and for each block, the universes exist independently alongside each other and pass through one another unnoticed, while yet embedded one within the other. How can that be?"
At that point, his eyes welled up and a glassy look came over him; he was led away by two of his team.
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Science Report - May 13, 2013Doctor Frederick Solvenstein's new book, The Evolution of Man's Destiny (Simon & Shuster), is the talk of not only academic circles, but also the broader world of the cognoscenti. A professor of evolutionary developmental biology at the John D. Oppenheimer Institute for Advanced Studies, he's spent years researching the behavior of mankind around the world. As is his custom, instead of trying to force raw data into historically preexisting grooves of thought, he approached the study without benefit of a presupposed hypothesis, allowing unbiased evidence and pure reason to lead the way. His conclusion, based on extensive statistical analysis and interviews with select individuals, from leading scientists, artists, and teachers to builders, mountain farmers, and menial laborers of every sort, is difficult to refute.
Because of his almost supernatural objectivity--underlying his perception of novel patterns and unexpected trends--he anticipates emergent behavior from disconnected phenomena and is unafraid to acknowledge it. To say he thinks outside the box would be an understatement. As a result, his prediction for the course of future humanity, though undeniably painful and incredulous even to comprehend, is nonetheless accepted by the scientific community as though written in stone.
He explains: Current evidence puts the bifurcation from chimpanzees of pre-humans at five to seven million years ago, and human beings, as Homo sapiens, began in their modern form 200,000 or so years ago. Then, there was no recognition, or rather, speculation that mankind was separate and apart from nature, that humans were in a class all by themselves and, accordingly, all other living things were subservient to human needs and desires. Religions came along and reinforced this notion. Consequently, substantiated by flashes of insights, people gradually began to isolate themselves from the rest of nature, perceiveing it with an adversarial attitude as something hostile and threatening, needing to be subdued, conquered.
Over tens of thousands of years, this originally intellectual or mental disposition affected the human genome through adaption and feedback. Very few people at present, almost exclusively tribes far removed from civilization, identify with and feel as one with the natural order. We have taken over the process of evolution, he states, and so are responsible for our own undoing. Our resistance to cooperation has altered our genetic makeup, genes established originally to support cooperative effort, to reinforce synthesizing bonds have atrophied and fallen fallow, no longer passed on as was the case when mankind was relatively new.
Humanity, he concludes, is weaning itself away from the capacity for empathy and compassion. Individuals are becoming more and more isolated, exponentially, from a genetic standpoint, with each successive generation. This direction will inevitably lead to the ultimate breakdown and disintegration of the family, the fundamental unit of society, as well as the fragmentation of all other forms of communal and natural world cohesion. Chaos will ensue, dissolution, entropy, mankind will finally have destroyed the living planet--a process that's been going on for millennia--and, as a result, man will most certainly self-destruct, implode.
For a time, anarchy will reign, but then, that too will pass, lose its impetus, whither and turn to stone. As we as a species evolve, paths present themselves, unbeknown to us, on an unconscious level; we venture down one or the other as though pulled along, but we can also make choices based on an understanding of how things work and what is going on.
However, we humans are not exempt from the laws of nature, special and held apart, some paths are irrevocably dead-ends.
It's only a matter of time, he states. The path is set and nothing can be done about it. Only a tiny fraction will survive the coming disentanglement, as Doctor Solvenstein phrases it. And, according to him, there's no way to know who they will be.
