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Joe Corbett has been living in Shanghai and Beijing since 2001. He has taught at American and Chinese universities using the AQAL model as an analytical tool in Western Literature, Sociology and Anthropology, Environmental Science, and Communications. He has a BA in Philosophy and Religion as well as an MA in Interdisciplinary Social Science, and did his PhD work on modern and postmodern discourses of self-development, all at public universities in San Francisco and Los Angeles, California. He can be reached at [email protected].

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Dark AQAL and Synchronistic Dynamics in Trans-Darwinian Evolution

Joe Corbett

Here's an absurdity if I ever heard one, or an anomaly, really. In the worldview of scientific reductionist materialism, 96 percent of the universe (dark matter and dark energy) has no significant influence on the evolution of life. That is quite literally like saying the economy, politics, and culture have no influence on our mind and perceptions of the world, which is very absurd indeed. We could justifiably call those who held such beliefs either mind-body reductionists, hopelessly and pathetically short-sighted, or simply insane.

If the Uncertainty Principle is true, and it most certainly is, whereby empty space is a seething cauldron of energy boiling-up from immaterial space-time into the material universe and then disappearing again into the unmanifest realm of space-time in a fleeting instant, and if the Holographic Principle is true, as it appears to be by confirmation from what we know about the surface of black holes, whereby the information of the universe is stored on the surface of space-time at the planck scale, then even genetic mutations may be in-formed by information from the Kosmic Storehouse (Akashic Field) that permeates and fills space as the record (and launching pad) for everything that has already in the past and is yet in the future to occur within the universe.[1]

Calabi–Yau manifold | Wikipedia:
‘Calabi–Yau manifolds are
important in superstring theory.’

Of course, most genetic mutations are either useless or harmful monstrosities, and we should rightfully chalk these up to random, chaotically informed molecular changes. However, there are also those rarefied mutations that either are or prove to be in the future useful to the organism as a functional fit with the environment. These are mutations that can, again, be explained by random chance, but only in part, because they can also be explained by a combination of random chance, which occurs all the time anyway, and a rarefied synchronistic event (or morphic resonance) that gives rise, through the emergent dynamics of the molecular system of the organism, to a functional form that has been in-formed by the larger whole of which it is a part. Let me elaborate on this point with a brief excursion into complexity theory.

In complex dynamical systems, transformation from one state of the system to another occurs in what is known as a phase transition. The system first reaches a critical state far from equilibrium that cannot be maintained in its current form, most probably from external environmental pressures, which then transforms into a chaotic state. This is the mutation that either breaks the system apart and disintegrates it, or re-organizes the system into either a more simple or more complex form that can be maintained far from equilibrium.

What, exactly, happens in this phase transition is unknown, but what emerges from it is a new whole that is irreducible to its parts. A complex re-organization has taken place based on how the parts are organized with respect to its environment. And in this case, it is information from the environment, the pressures placed on the organism, which is the added factor that makes the new whole irreducible to its parts. With respect to organisms with advantageous genetic mutations, we can therefore say that the environment plays a role in shaping the new equilibrium achieved by the organism with its mutation. But how?

Surely, says the scientific reductionist, the mutation was merely random, and only after the fact was there any purely coincidental fit of the mutation to the environment where selective pressures could then operate upon the organism. But what this claim assumes is an a priori separation of the organism from its environment such that mutations occur separately and in isolation from their environmental conditions and its informational content, as if the molecular dynamics of the organism were not in direct relationship to the environment of the organism. From a trans-darwinian perspective, on the other hand, let us assume instead that there is a direct relation between the molecular dynamics of the organism and its environment, that there is no reason to separate what goes on inside the organism from what goes on outside it, that the organism and the environment are in fact an undivided whole, that the skin or cell membrane is not an absolute dividing line between life and non-life, or between consciousness and non-consciousness.

In this case, where organism and environment are not seen as separated from one another, the dynamic equilibrium of an organisms molecular genetics and the mutational phase transitions of those genetics, would depend on the information from the larger environment, and therefore information from the environment would help (especially at certain synchronistic moments) to directly shape the genes, for better or for worse. But once again, given this new assumption about the inseparability between organism and environment, how could functional mutations occur? And more importantly, how could larger re-organizations of the genetic code that are irreducible to individual mutations occur?

As I said before, most mutations do not have any beneficial effect. But those that do, given the assumption that organism and environment are inseparable, occur as the result of an emergent phenomenon of a molecular phase transition that has re-organized the genetic code based on information directly from the environment. Such mutations are not just isolated occurrences within the organism that may or may not be beneficial to the organism in its environment after the fact. They are emergent wholes of the organism-environment inter-system dynamics, and as such appear at times to take on a peculiarly purposive, directional, or teleological form.

To summarize complexity theory in relation to genetics and our new assumption about the inseparability between organism and environment, as the genetic system reaches a critical threshold of equilibrium as a result of pressures from its environment and starts to become chaotic, or begins undergoing mutational re-organization, it is integrating information directly from the environment to reconstitute the shape it previously assumed in the past to accommodate old information from a previous set of environmental pressures. In so doing, it is re-informing itself into a new form. We could simply say that this new information comes from the new set of pressures in the environment, but what links the environment (outside) to the organism (inside) in undivided unity is none other than the space within and between the atoms and molecules of the organism and its environment, which provides a seamless connection between them via the virtual particles of matter that exchange information between the manifest physical universe and the unmanifest dark matter storehouse of morphic and archetypal fields.

As in the case of astrological synchronicities, when certain molecular resonances come into geometric harmony or vibrational synch, with each other and with the larger environment, a portal to the immaterial informational storehouse is opened-up whereby the energies of the archetypes, or the entangled information from the larger environment (past and present) as a whole more generally, can be morphically constituted into functionally ordered patterns in the physical world. In the case of the four nucleotides of DNA (which are themselves physical molecular expressions of the morphic fields known as the four quadrants in the AQAL), they act as physical mediums for the informational storehouse, just as the planets in astrology act as the physical mediums of the planetary archetypes. For the nucleotides, when they come into geometric resonance with one another in relation to the larger geometric resonance they have to their larger environment, they are able to re-organize themselves in accordance with the conditions of that environment. The synchronistic tetrameshing of the system of nucleotides is thus supplemented by the synchronistic tetrameshing of that system with the larger holonic system of the environment, all mediated by the empty space of virtual particles within and between atoms and molecules, on the one hand, and the dark matter informational storehouse on the other hand.

The phenomenon of complex emergent dynamics is about how the parts of a system near and far are enfolded and entangled (tetrameshed) into each others interactions in such a way that a meta-structure emerges between them as if out of nowhere, almost like a magical manifestation ex nihilo. This miraculous appearance is the higher dimensional order of a system irreducible to its parts as a function of linear causality. Emergent phenomena at both the micro and macro-scopic levels of existence, as I argue in this essay, are the expression of the undivided wholeness of the parts of a system united at the immaterial level of the informational surface of space-time itself. Perhaps that space-time is in the form of the curled-up dimensions of a Calabi-Yau manifold as in string theory postulated to be the seed form for all the laws and forces of the universe, which would allow and even generate the endless varieties and scales of complexity throughout the universe as a kind of default operation of the structure of space-time, yielding the appearance of an erotic “drive” towards complexity in the universe.

Whatever the final answers to these questions may prove to be, a new science of esoteric ontology and cosmological panpsychism awaits our further exploration.

NOTES

[1] In my theory here, the kosmic storehouse is the dark matter of the universe, since it is the immaterial substance that clumps together with regular matter through gravity, whereas gravity is linked to the informational surface of space-time as understood by the theory of quantum gravity qubits. Therefore dark matter would appear to be a natural candidate for informational storage and retrieval in the intermediate zone of the physical universe, on the one hand, and its deep foundation at the planck scale in the fabric of space-time itself.