🧬🕰️⚗️ 228 - William Sarill on Intuition in Science & The Physics of Philip K. Dick

We think of entropy often as representing disorder and the opposite of pattern formation, but that's only half the picture. Although the maximum entropy principle applies to physical systems in the sense that entropy goes to a maximum, that's physical entropy, informational entropy goes to a minimum. And it's another variational principle like the principle of least action. So out of that, they did this incredibly beautiful but highly technical article showing with the help of Complex Time that entropy production is a conserved quantity, which is parallel to the energy being conserved.

Gene and entropy production are complementary and parallel objects, very similar equations. Some of their work has been using what they call quantitative geometrical thermodynamics, because thermodynamics is the most fundamental principle, they say, and I agree of all physics. In fact, for years, I collected papers showing that you could draw quantum mechanics and relativity theory out of thermodynamics. So it's the one principle that seems to operate at every scale in the universe, from the microscale to the biggest scale possible.

Greetings, future fossils. I'm your host, Michael Garfield. I'm coming you to episode 228 of the podcast that explores our place in time. And where are we in time?

Well, first we have to abandon the idea that time is best thought of as a line. Einstein and Minkowski in their work on general relativity made it clear that time may be better understood as a four-dimensional landscape. Different cultures through history have regarded time as a circle, or as a helix. Now that we're moving into the era in which our media environment is co-determined by large language models and high-dimensional semantic space, perhaps we might be ready for a definition of temporality in which our location and trajectories through this mysterious landscape are better thought of in terms of network time, association, and latency.

If time is a landscape, then all of us are addressed on paths through that landscape. Maybe network time or neural time allow us to think of reincarnation as the resonance between addresses on that landscape, especially given quantum mechanical research and evidence from psychological literature that the brain operates as a four-dimensional object, a tesseract, and that causation is more like a handshake between what was and what will be. The future lives co-determine us and there is a horizontal dimension of shared influence. Reincarnation might not be the linear transmigration of the soul, but a vast sea of harmonic resonance, each point on a complex plane of at the same timeness.

And if this all sounds strange to you, then maybe where we are in time is meeting in our readiness to review the physics literature that might substantiate science fiction author Philip K. Dix's notion of cubic time, a framework that he came up with in order to explain what he called the divine invasion of his valus experiences in February of 1974. Perhaps in so doing, we might begin to trace the outline of a new conceptual framework with support from empirical research for the non-linearity of invention and innovation and gesture toward the formalization of radically new ways of thinking of who we are, what we are doing, and what it means to create. The scientific literature is full of stories of breakthroughs that emerged whole cloth visionary experiences that governed major revolutions and discoveries are the luminary minds that shaped history shaped by the future, what is the nature of the source from which inspiration flows, the relationship between mind and matter, and the higher logical order within which we may be able to dissolve long-standing paradoxes like those inherent in the debate between advocates for free will and determinism.

Is there nothing new under the sun, or is every moment a creation and revelation kind of ongoing intersection between the eternal and the eschatological? Join me this week for a conversation with one of my most interesting and storied friends, William Cyril, friend of Philip K. Dix, an accomplished biochemist and multidisciplinary innovator, whose friendship I have cultivated over years of online interaction, one of the few people who can stand in the heat of the intersection of the paranormal and new age philosophy and rigorous fundamental physics theory. But before we dive in, I want to apologize for not having video this week.

This episode was one of the most insanely difficult edits I've ever experienced on the show. Bills, tracks were strangely desynchronized, which felt appropriate given the subject matter, but would have made for a very unpleasant and uncanny viewing experience. And for that reason, I want to thank every single person who supports all of the work that goes into pre and post-production of future fossils on Patreon and on Substack, including new supporters, thus Edward and Matt Gillespie, as well as everyone who has so far chipped in for my new project, Humans on the Loop, a special series on agency in the age of automation that will debut later this year. A few value conversations erupting from the liminal zone between scientific orthodoxy and the ontologically weird, then please consider supporting future fossils and or humans on the loop by liking subscribing, reviewing, and or signing on as a patron, for whom I will soon be rebooting monthly community calls.

I'm grown tired of future fossils' Facebook group, and I'm leaning into warmer, more highly contextual community development on the upcoming live calls and in the future fossils' Discord server, and I hope that you'll join us there. I also hope that you'll stay tuned for upcoming episodes with Jamie Cursio, Sarah Finn, Eric Wargow, JF Martell, and many other excellent minds. For now, I'm excited to share a long-awaited conversation with Bill Cyril. Thanks for listening and enjoy.

So yeah, it is a pleasure to see you again face-to-face for the first time since Fort Morgan, Colorado in 2017, that was March 25th. Yeah, insane. And what a seven years it has been. Sure, all of us.

We've all gone through some sort of mutation. But you, sir, are someone who cannot just point to the last seven years and say, my, how weird that's been, because you have led a very storied life from head to tail. And so as a way of introducing you to listeners, I would love to hear you explain Bill Cyril, who are you? What is your story?

And from there, maybe we can establish some hazyan priors upon which to evaluate whatever claims you make later in discussion. Well, where to start? Well, I'm an eccentric bright and neurodivergent. And I tend to collect other friends who are like that too, what I was feeling, like, of course.

I did the graduate studies in physics and did some really interesting stuff that even as an undergraduate, I gave a presentation to the faculty about a way I discovered of doing Julian Stringer's method of sources in classical terms, not in quantum terms. So it would have all kinds of implications for condensed matter physics. And the problem is that I was advised to go show it to someone famous. I'm not going to mention his name, Ed Harvard, who had worked with Stringer.

And I, because I might decide to go wind up going to Harvard after for additional graduate studies, and he seemed vaguely interested, but then nothing came of it except a few years later, he published a paper on the subject. So I had events like this happening where I would make some discovery and that I thought was interesting, show it to other people, or delay too long in publishing it because I was afflicted with some perfectionism. And as a result, a lot of my work got scooped by other people, which is one reason I decided to leave physics. Even my own faculty advisor published a paper based on research I had done and didn't get me credit for it, which unfortunately happens a lot with grad students.

But he's a really decent guy. I think he just forgot. In any event, I liked physics. I loved physics.

It was hard work. I was really stubborn and crazily persistent. It was that perfectionism. I took a class with a professor who had written a book on quantum field theory and couldn't solve the problems.

I don't know what other people did to turn in the problem sheets, but I just finally, I ended up getting it in complete grade in the course, took off, went to California where I met Phil there, and it took me a few years to sort the whole thing out. And what I eventually realized was that everything he was teaching was wrong. The guy didn't know anything about quantum field theory. And I essentially wound up revising his entire textbook, which unfortunately never be published again.

So the lesson I got from that is to question authority, but really to trust my own authority and not to listen to others. So I forged my own path ever since. So I left physics and I'd been into paper collectibles, popular graphics of all kinds. I wound up becoming a paper conservator.

That means works of art on paper, anything made of paper except photographs and books. I didn't do books, bound volumes. But I was applying it initially to these techniques I developed on my own. I applied to restoring sheet music, other paper collectibles I even taught a class on baseball cards.

The big money was in comic books. So I became the world's authority on restoring and preserving comic books. Even gave a presentation at the Dandenial Convention of the American Institute of Conservation for Historic and Artistic Works in Milwaukee in 1982. And very well received by the way.

And then it was, at that point I was doing, I was also restoring illuminated manuscript pages, original drawings by Maxwell Parrish, watercolor prints by Hogarth, a whole range of paper materials, ephemera. My official title was Conservator of Ephemera, which my meditation teachers loved because it's like a call on in itself, preserver of that which my definition could not be preserved. If I ever write an autobiography that would be the title of it. So I stuck with that.

Absolutely. That's what we're doing here. I stuck on that for 10 years. I have to say that it was refreshing to do that after the really hard brain work, the hard mental work of doing physics.

It was wonderful to get my hands onto something and to use my intuition. I had never had any formal art training, but I suddenly discovered that I had tremendous disabilities to do all kinds of things like match colors and even redraw missing pieces of material or fill it in and so forth. It was, I realized that what I had been missing all these years was developing my intuitive sense. Now, I was clearly intuitive.

Otherwise, I couldn't have made the discoveries that I had done physics. But when I, the hands-on training I did with paper conservation was really enhanced my abilities to be intuitive. And I did that for 10 years until I had a spiritual awakening. At the same time I had another paper published in physics in the journal Nature.

At which point I said, what's time to go back into science again, but this time with my newfound interests, the new expanded abilities in an intuitive sense and my newfound interests in the life sciences in particular. I went into biochemistry and healing. I was very fortunate that I linked up with a friend of mine who was a professor of biochemistry at Boston University Medical School. He and I had both served on the founding board of directors of the Heelers Research Center, Heelers Research Center in Cambridge.

We found that we had a lot of common interests, if no common language. And I began to learn and intuit right away how to understand his language of biochemistry. And out of that partnership, collaboration came some wonderful new things. We worked out together, for example, I got some intuitive messages that a particular peptide, you know what peptides are, there are strings of amino acids like short proteins.

That a particular peptide would be complementary to a well-known peptide in the human body and that it would be a treatment for cancer. So I told my colleague about what I got in the message I had gotten and he actually immediately understood it. He was also extremely intuitive. So we worked together in a nice blend of hard science and intuition and that enabled us to create and have synthesized and test this new compound, this new peptide.

It worked. It didn't go anywhere for a lot of other reasons. It wasn't ready to be introduced to humans, the most we could do is sell studies. Even we didn't have a lot of money in those days and it's really expensive to be able to do the kinds of studies to validate it.

So it lay fallow for many years until I found a discovery process only recently to be able to develop a form of it that was orally bioavailable. And now it's suitable for much easier to do testing with it. I'm not likely to use it right away for treating cancer but there are other things that can be done with it that are much more acceptable, much more easy to get past regulatory barriers, so exploring that at the moment. That's just one example.

There's a lot of other stuff we came up with. Ultimately, we wound up patenting a new form of vitamin B12. And when I say a new form, it's really what I would call a super omelecular complex of vitamin B12 with their amino acids. Super omelecular, super omelecular chemistry is the chemistry of hosting guest species, of complexes that are at the level above the molecular so that the product that we intuited and tested and patented turned out to be to have novel properties that were distinct from that of ordinary vitamin B12.

And in particular, it had novel physical, chemical, and bile properties. Finally, it existed anomalous conductivity. It was more conductive than ordinary B12 solution. And also, it had an altered freezing point.

And most interestingly, it had fluorescence ultraviolet fluorescence spectroscopy that was very distinct from ordinary B12. Every time we know how fluorescence spectroscopy is done, let's say you expose a particular product to a series of wavelengths going up by five nanometers at each time. So we started around 260 nanometers in the ultraviolet, not far from where the fluorescence peak of nucleotides at DNA and R and AR and started going up in steps of five nanometers at five. And instead of just simply showing peak fluorescence, every time we hit the compound with the light, it stored it.

It was almost like a laser-like storing of the energy and then released it later at a higher wavelength. It was really interesting to begin thinking this had to have some role in the human body in terms of bioenergy. The bio-fotons of Fritz Albert pop, for example, where he discussed the fluorescence spectrum of the nucleotides and so forth. We felt it had to integrate with that in some fashion to convey biological information through ultraviolet and probably other wavelengths as well.

So that was intriguing. Chemically, it had one of the amino acids involved in the complex, what blue domain is the solution after a while. It's got a relatively short half-life after a while. We wouldn't expect to see, after a while of storage, you wouldn't expect to see any surviving.

Yet we had samples where we could detect in tach-lutamine like two and a half years later, because somehow the structure of this complex was protecting the labile groups in the glutamine, so it did not fall apart. That was really interesting. Then biologically, it got taken up in preference to ordinary B12. We were able to do some studies on that showing that the people who had the greatest B12 deficiencies in general, or the most serious illnesses, needed this product and took up more of it of our product than of ordinary B12.

We believed it to be a natural product formed in the human body that was a storage or transport form of B12. That was exciting also to all. The number of studies, it turned out to be remarkably effective for the vast majority of diabetic neuropathy. The part neuropathy, I think, your mom was the subject to validate that.

In many cases of diabetic neuropathy as well responded, it's not a cure. It's just symptomatic relief, but it also has other really special properties biochemically. It helps specifically to enhance the retention of glutathione body's most important antioxidants in its reduced form, in its active form. That has many implications.

I found, for example, that even nebulizing this product, a small amount of B12 of our form in water and then nebulized will knock out the vast majority of respiratory viral infections. It's worked for influenza and our range of other viral illnesses. I've not had the opportunity to try it out on COVID, but it should work the same way because all these are the ones that we've looked at require oxidative stress in our as the initiatory step in infection. If you can knock out or compensate for the oxidative stress by delivering glutathione, which is very unpleasant to nebulize, by the way.

But you could do it with our product. That would stop these infections. It's a vitamin. I can't make claims about it.

I can't describe what we found, but I can't sell it and say, hey, this is a treatment for COVID, I have to do is nebulize it. So it's just a vitamin supplement, and I've got to be careful what I say about it. So that's just a few of the properties of this product. Yeah.

This is not financial advice either. We don't do that on this show. All this work with my partner was, as I said, guided both intuitively and by heart science. For example, when we did molecular modeling, we found that these very components of the molecules would fit together in a very specific way.

The binding was tight. That doesn't happen by accident. You can't just throw a group of molecules together and expect them to form an assembly. And in turn, led me to the possibilities of the importance of these kinds of complexes in the origin and evolution of life.

For example, vitamin B12 is an example of a tetrapyrol as is heme, the heme and hemoglobin, for example. They're both rather structurally similar. They're hydrogen cyanide polymerized. Polymerized hydrogen cyanide is something found in interstellar ice.

It's formed naturally in the universe in a prebiotic fashion and dust grains and form. You can actually get prebiotic synthesis of these tetrapyrols, including the core and ring of vitamin B12. These structures would have preceded the development of life. Now it turns out the geometry of vitamin B12, which is not quite as symmetrical as the geometry of heme, gives it a preference for associating with a cobalt, a cobalt ion in the center coordinated by the core and ring.

The geometry of heme gives it a preference for coordinating iron. The chemical properties, the oxidation states of cobalt or heme are of iron, I should say, that are important for the biological function of these molecules. The core and ring with the cobalt in it goes through a three to one oxidation states of valence, depending on how many electrons are involved in how many are lost. This determines the biological process.

So, the question arises then. We know they arose prebiotically according to the research of Albert Eshinmoser. The question is, well, in the millions of years before the fourth proteins, but these are basically co-ensimes you're talking about. Co-ensimes are like the original form of vitamins.

They plug into specific enzymes, for example, vitamin B12 fits into a specific pocket on methioning synthase, which is involved in methylation reactions. And what was B12 doing before the enzymes that could bind it evolved? Well, it turns out you can actually methylate other substances without needing the enzyme. The enzyme is a catalyst.

It actually, it promotes the effect of the B12. So we began looking at the possibility that life started through these cooperative complexes, that's simply the proteins that bind go enzymes. You could have co-ensime complexes with a range of simple molecules with amino acids, a variety of minerals, other substances, and use that to build up the possibility of life. The vitamin B12 that we ingest is not just the core and ring.

It's got things attached to the core and ring, substituents on the ring. So there's some further evolution of the ring, but we found that these complex, these amino acids which form complexes by binding to moieties, pendant moieties, hanging off the ring. And what it looks is though, I can't go into too much detail because some of it's proprietary still, but the result is that the action of the B12 driven through various oxidation states that you get biological reactions formed and new products are created, new substances are created through these complexes. And these are what are the effectors of vitamin B12.

It's really interesting stuff. B12 is just, I call it the crown chakra of vitamins. That's everything else gets organized by it, including all the other vitamins. In fact, I did a whole lot of extensive research going back into the early days of the discovery of vitamin B12 and other vitamins.

Sometimes the most interesting material was discovered earliest and then forgotten before rigid dogma has said in about subsequent meanings or uses and so forth. So going back to the original source material, I learned a lot of really interesting stuff. For example, vitamin B12 was first isolated. It was a treatment for pernicious anemia, which is an autoimmune disease in which autoantibodies in the stomach prevent B12 from being absorbed.

And the treatment was to administer raw liver, which is highly unpleasant. But somebody eventually, it was my not in Murphy who eventually won the Nobel Prize for their discovery that what the active principle was vitamin B12, which is finally synthesized in a race between Carl Fulkers in the US and Fulkers was a great scientist who discovered many interesting products. He was beaten up by Lester Smith at Glaxo to find the crystalline structure of B12. It was 1948.

Yet in 1950, it was Murphy, I think, of mine out in Murphy, who was in the New England Journal of Medicine, I think, said that the results they were getting with crystalline B12 were not equivalent to what they've gotten, the liver extracts or the liver compounds, which tells me that there are other biological structures in the liver that contribute to the effect of vitamin B12, but that you cannot isolate. So the problem with biochemistry is that it's reductive. We keep looking for the smallest pieces of what does, which without looking at the overall global picture of how all the pieces fit together. So when my partner and I started doing this, we were not simply doing this from an intuitive perspective, but one of the key intuitions was the importance of cooperative effects, of communication, of coherence, of connectedness.

It was a entirely holistic picture of how to create a company, of how to create products, of how the products would work on a higher level than the molecular and a cooperative level at the super molecular level. We didn't even know the word super molecular in those days. It's something I became acquainted with years. We was just tuned into the stuff that what makes the world work is not individual components but how they interact among each other.

And that's the key to understanding so much of the world, including biochemistry and especially reflected in our research. A point that I would love to embellish with you and then use the launch pad for a number of other reflections. If I recall correctly, an overdose of B12 is figured in an increase in the incidence of cancer. So there's stories even of people odeing on vitamin D, which colloquially people claim is impossible to overdose on.

But the bigger thing to take a step back and look at the motif that you've just laid out is that you're saying this holistic discovery in science was driven by intuition and emerged holistically in collaboration along with an entire business plan. And all of it came through at once, which is very characteristic of the way that revolutionary scientific research is almost always reported to emerge fully formed like Athena from the brow of Zeus. And you're talking about prebiotic evolution and you're talking about intuitive science and I would be remiss if I did not mention my friend Bruce Damer who just launched Center for Minds, which is an organization based on his coming out of the closet as an origins of life researcher whose major breakthrough in the hot springs abiogenesis work that he talked about future fossils on episodes four and one oh nine came out of his own psychedelic experiences and with a nod paid to Ian McGill Chris talking about the way that the right hemispheres holistic and intuitive attentional mode is the mode in which you are talking about. These things arriving not piecemeal but seen as entire patterns seen as like coming through all at once which is precisely where you would expect if you stopped and thought about it for a damn moment any kind of breakthrough in origins of life research to emerge because as Bruce points out we're not talking about a moment at which an heroic individual suddenly crosses the boundary between non living to living we are talking about incremental emergence of entire communities of interacting agents that predate even nucleotides as you're saying like that there is a sense in which life is not something that is contingent on specific chemical ontology like it's like life is not defined as that which contains nucleotides but is something that exists as characterized by processes that were in place long before we even had what we would now call the first community of self replicating molecules so there's like a couple things but for me like the thing that I find most interesting is how character of these kinds of discoveries is the content is the structure of the discovery itself the nature of scientific revolution is inherently anti reductive as you have so many of these stories that you could tell of discovery or innovation or whatever but what I want to explore with you is again a citation paid to Eric Wargo who's been on the show a few times in 117-171 to talk about close time like curves and time loops in physics might have to do with the origins of life and the nature of consciousness but this is another instance where we don't get to we don't get to indulge in this sort of the laziness of linear causal thinking and we have to think about causal relationships as inherently structured in this same kind of like motif way although orthogonal to the stew Kaufman episode 125 auto catalytic reflexive chemistry going on at the origin of life so I guess what I'm saying is to step up into the abstract here and invite you to riff on novelty production and on intuitive research and in the role of what you and I have spent years talking about on our personal correspondence about this part of science that is a little bit less closeted than it was even five ten years ago which is the kind of the spiritual quality of the ureica moment and then from there maybe we can get into your ideas about complex time and the physics that underlies and perhaps substantiates the experiences your friend Phil Dick was having over the course of his career and that he tried to make sense of in his exegesis and so on because there is there's a cosmological framework within which the quote unquote mundane concern of nonetheless deep ideological and neuroscientific questions are answered by figuring what get out as merely mystical into a more complete and multi-dimensional model of reality.

Well that's a big picture and I'll try to give you some big answers. Let me chip away at it first just by mentioning that thanks to you I did make a connection with Bruce Damer some years ago I think just before it covid broke so nothing came of it but sorry in my life every time I get really close to something major cataclysmic event that gets in the way Bruce had invited me to come down to this meeting on the origin of life that was held the Galapagos Islands and not only did I not make that I didn't get out to California to pay him a visit and chat about it. One of the reasons you connected this was I was telling you about the fact that one of the complexes I discovered I found that I could use if I sprayed some of it on clay basically through different varieties clay then allowed it to go through very gentle heat cycles that it would result in the formation of peptides from components. In other words this is a part of an auto-catalytic system which would allow the pre-biotic synthesis wedding and drying cycles which is something parallel to what Bruce had been working on so there's clearly some synergy between our ideas.

I didn't explore it further with him in part because I was still concerned about my intellectual prep and all that because there are things I discovered that haven't been patented yet but at this point in my life as I'm getting older I realized I better get the stuff out in the world one way or another and I'm less concerned about anything than sharing it for the benefit of everybody. But we did have I would say half of it the research I did with my partner and I gave us half of an auto-catalytic cycle and that leads to some interesting thoughts about which I'll get into about teleology in science, teleology in biology, teleology in the origin of life in the origin of the universe that's one part of the spiritual aspect of it. But let me mention in particular around this kind of holistic viewpoint being able to see large pictures. I'm always been a large picture guy even when I was solving problems in physics.

What I do is get the intuition of the structure of a problem. It's like when you do a Jigsaw puzzle if you get the frame as you get the edges right then you can much more easily fill in the interior. So you get intuition of the overall picture and then you can figure out how it all comes together. I had an unusual talent in this regard because many years ago when I was in high school I got tested with a Renchao Ticistoscope.

I don't know if you know what it is it's a device that will project an image on a screen and you get tested for how quickly you can resolve the image. It turned out I had an unusually high ability to pick up the image which is holistic from just seeing a very brief flash of it. So I've always had this ability at pattern recognition and that's what's been really the key to all of my creativity. I see patterns.

I see how connections are made from on interdisciplinary level from one area to another. Work I did in paper or conservation. I went from paper healing to people healing. There are actually some similarities where I was able to adapt certain ideas that I come across having to do with neutralization and buffering of the polymer chains in paper had applications to treating a variety of diseases humans.

It's the ability to see similarities in very distinct fields. I've also done research in just pure mathematics and that was greatly informed by physics. I remember years ago when I was taking a class in linear algebra decades ago and I told my instructor that about the uses of topology in physics and he was astonished that anybody could find anything useful to do with it. Today, for the last few decades, topology has been essential in so many different areas of physics, a purely mathematical concept that nevertheless has real world applications.

Just one example. So pattern recognition, being able to see the big picture was something that was important to me and my partner, my friend, had a similar intuitive background. So we could just get messages and more important, interpret the messages, see how they would work in the real world, see how they'd work in terms of physics chemistry. The whole thing with Philip K.

Dick, he was in the late 60s. I greatly admired his writing and wrote him a letter and he immediately responded. I greatly admired his writing and wrote him a letter and he immediately responded. And then on my trip, I met him at the World Science Teaching Convention.

He invited me to live with him as his house guest. So I spent a month within at that time, which was a marvelous experience because I got exposed to the way I heard a great deal about his views of philosophy. My own spirituality was kind of latent at that point, but I was really responsive and interested in what he was saying. It was only years later that I had begun to process some of what I'd gotten from as he died in 1982.

And in 1978, he gave me a copy of the speech that he'd given, the famous speech he'd given in Metz, France, the Science Fiction Convention. And it was about his theory of alternate worlds. It was called, if you find this world bet, you should see some of the others. I found in it certain ideas, I recognize certain ideas that I had shared with him years earlier, particularly about the multiverse.

But it was only after a traditional study that I began to appreciate his concept of orthogonal time. So what did he mean by orthogonal? He had a series of spiritual revelations in 1974. Today, we'd call it an emergence or an emergency.

He wasn't super well grounded, but he did the best he could with it. So all these, I can say that my belief is from having read a great deal about him and met him, that he was psychically or intuitively gifted, and that he had an ability for pattern recognition also, apophania, which random events could mean for him. I mean, don't forget, he wrote to the men in the High Castle, his famous post-World War II novel, and also at the University of the Access, at one World War II. He wrote it with the help of the Yijing, and he introduced me and a generation of other young readers in the early 60s after that book was published to Jung as an oracle.

So he was a central mentor, not just to me, but to many others. So Phil throughout his life had these different qualities, ways of picking up intuition. They're actually four psychological traits, which are very common in people who are psychically sensitive, or people deeply religious, or people who are long-term meditators. And they all fit each other, they're complementary, and they all fit imperfectly.

So ancient apophania, transliminality is where he could pick up information from the environment or from his unconscious and bring it into full consciousness. Temporal loadability, this is not the same as temporal lobe psychosis or temporal lobe epilepsy, which some people thought that he might have. No, if anything, he was a bipolar disorder, a manic depressive. There's no evidence of epilepsy.

But the neuroscientist, Michael Persinger, discovered that people who are, let's say, deeply religious or long-term meditators, would show signs of micro-seizuring in the limited system, which is what the temporal lobe ability is about. At the other end, when he gets from seizures, that becomes a disease. But at the near end, it just becomes a source of talent, inspiration, creativity, in my view. And then the one case we got apophania, transliminality, temporal lobe and ability, and schizotyping.

And all of these typically coincident one another. Again, as with temporal lobe ability, schizotyping exists on a spectrum. At the far end is schizophreidio, which he did not have. He wasn't schizophrenic, but it was more deeply neurotic.

And yet, it's also associated with the great deal of creativity. So he had all the other recognitions and material and from the environment. The creativity, his sense of humor, all of this came together and made him the unique individual. So we're using that as a basis with passionate interest in all matters, spiritual going back to when he was quite a bit younger.

Went out with this huge eruption of, or actually in an implosion, an inbreaking of divinity, divine invasion. So this week that happened in 1974, he processed it the only way that he could. And what was important to him during this whole period was the notion of retro-cousality, that the future influences the past. So he went looking for ways in which he'd always had a sense that being guided or being pulled forward by something.

Terence McKenna wrote the afterword to a selection of Dick's material from his exegesis, which is something he started writing 1974 and continuing on up until his death in 1980. He'd written a God knows what a million words, not all of which has been published in his attempt to understand the nature of what had happened to him and of the future pulling him forward to a whiteheads idea of concresence. And so McKenna in the book in pursuit of valus selection, soon they have to Jesus wrote a chapter called I Understand Philip K. Dick.

I'm not disputing that he understood him at some level. But when I got so deeply into the weeds on Dick's work and orthogonal time, which I'll exfilicate a bit in a moment, I felt that I really understood Philip K. Dick. So I had this vision when I died that McKenna and I are going to mean up in the afterlife.

And each one of us is going to be saying, I understand Philip K. Dick. And he goes, no, I understand Philip K. Dick, at which point the ghost of Philip K.

Dick comes along and says, you're both right. Nobody understands me. I've heard the conversation I had with Ken Adams, who was a long term friend of Terrence's. But in that episode, we talk a little bit about the dreams in which Terrence visited me from beyond the grave.

Frankly, I think that there is something that Terrence was picking at, that Philip was picking at, that you are picking at, that Eric Wargow was picking at. And it's the reason I want to articulate it with this notion that ideas emerge from the moon to some Aginalis and into physical form whole cloth, which is that the message that I got from Terrence and that dream was something to the effect that you hear Phil trying to understand in the exegesis, which is, in what way is the past still here and the future already exists, and the alternate pasts and futures and presents are all kind of co-extents. Right. So Phil tried to understand these notions of retrocosm in terms of what we call orthogonal time.

So it's another form of time, which is orthogonal at right angles to our ordinary sense of time, that it had a quality in which it was closed on its TV, you can get these closed time-like loops. But it's a little bit complicated than that. First, in the exegesis, he considered some possibilities. One is he looked in the question of Tachyons, which are hypothetical particles thought possibly would be considered as candidates for particles could convey information to you to fast because of their superliminal speeds.

Now, speculation about this going back a decade, many decades, and Phil wasn't about physicists. He just knew a bit about physics, so that was one of his speculations. What's fascinating is that just within the last few weeks, Polish physicists at Variety University led by Anjay Drogana showed that Tachyon theory can be completely reconciled with quantum field theory with that any of the objections that were raised previously. They showed how to do it, and they showed in fact that it would lead to this possibility of retrocosality, in fact, to a new phenomenon, which would be entanglement of future impast.

So I got a score one for Phil even on an intuitive level. But he didn't consider that for very long. He went on to consider a solution to Einstein's equations by Kurt Gertel. Gertel was always messing with Einstein's stuff.

What he did is he found a solution to Einstein's equations, which would permit a kind of time travel. It was completely untrissical. You wouldn't be able to actually use it for that purpose. But it did contain close time-like lines.

So we considered that briefly, but that was abandoned too. Ultimately, Phil settled on the work of the Nikolai Kosereb, who had been imprisoned during the Stalinist's purges and therefore had to reinvent the physics on his own because he was denied access to temporary tation at the time, or journals and so forth. So he developed an alternate theory of causality in which he saw time as an energy or a force with directionality to it. And Phil was very much attached to this idea.

These days, because of his work is considered a pseudoscience, but there may in fact be something to it. I'm not prepared to completely dismiss it at the moment, but I'd need to see how it connects with what in fact was known. I'll get to that maybe in a bit. So then we get to this notion that one way or another, time has two aspects to it, a linear aspect and a circular aspect.

Now these are actually very ancient ideas because the early societies mark time in two different ways, and we still do, on repeating holidays that occur at specific times of year, the festivals and holidays that occur. That because we're living in a system where the earth goes around the sun, we have seasons, we have distinct periods of time that resemble one another. And then on the other hand, we have the linear structure, which is the historical structure of one year follows another and each year is distinct from the previous week. So we can have time lined up in a series of events historically, or we can have time with repeated events that bear similarity to one another, as example, repeated rituals that involve cyclic festivals and so forth.

So these are two different ancient ideas that really have been prevalent around for thousands of years. And yet, usually we think of time, it's certainly in physics. We think of time usually on the linear sets. It's only relatively recently that some physicists have been considering this circular aspect.

Now you can represent that by saying that time is complex, meaning it has both real and imaginary components. The real component is the linear part. The imaginary component is like a phase angle and therefore goes through a cycle. The two superimposed on one another creates what you might call spiral time or helical time, it's even better helical time.

So time advances. And yet, we somehow go through repetitions of certain ideas, themes as we advance in time. And this is with Dick associated with the notion of archetypes and of the platonic forms that you get a form that can recur in a modified fashion, further up to timeline. So you get a series of events or of object structures.

There's a platonic ideal of a chair, a place that you sit, but then it goes through various morphisms in which it becomes altered by society, by structure, by usage and so forth. And yet a chair is still a chair, it's still something to sit in. And yet it evolves. So you get the evolution of these archetypes or rather you get the archetype whose instantiations evolve.

So there are two kinds of evolution. One kind is linear evolution. And the other kind is evolution which draws upon the past, draws upon the archetypal. And it's a two together that create this helical pattern.

Now, Dick didn't call it helical time, he called it cubic time, for whatever reason. But together, if you add two dimensions of time to three-dimensional space, you wind up with a five-dimensional picture. And 5D space was in fact something that was originally proposed by Colusa and Klein. It was Colusa who was attempting to find a solution to Einstein's field equations that could incorporate electromagnetism.

And I believe it was his work was finished by Klein, Oscar Klein. So that involved a fifth dimension, not necessarily time, but a fifth dimension that was curled up on itself. And that in turn was the genesis of the string theory with these multiple dimensions that are tiny and curled up on themselves. But what still Dick was proposing was a circular dimension of time on top of a linear dimension plus three dimensions of space.

And that is similar also to some recent thoughts that other physicists have been developing. There's a guy I know Carl Frederick. Carl Frederick was a physicist I used to know at the in New York at the Goddard Institute of Space Science, when I was collaborating on some research there with a friend of mine. I believe he went into robotics afterwards and in late his later years as become a science-fiction author.

But he's published independently some very interesting papers again, talking about this picture of complex time with a face aspect to it. There's also Evo Dina of the University of Michigan and his colleagues have found a way of conveying information about, let's say, what's the word I want, time series by incorporating a fifth dimension in their work. And so they're showing that they can extract certain patterns from reams of data as long as it's put into this fashion. I can't go into details too much, but their work is very interesting, especially the models they built showing what they call space kind in that time with a team time with a K to indicate complex time.

So there's papers on that which are quite interesting. And then most interesting of all, to me was the work of a couple of British physicists, Mike Parker and Chris James, who have been publishing recently some really beautiful work on the nature of entropy and how entropy determines pattern structure. We think of entropy often as representing disorder and the opposite of pattern formation, but that's only half the picture. Although the maximum entropy principle applies to physical systems in the sense that entropy goes to a maximum, that's physical entropy, informational entropy goes to a minimum.

And is it's another variational principle like the principle of least action? So out of that, they did this incredibly beautiful but highly technical article showing with the help of complex time that entropy production is a conserved quantity, which is parallel to the energy being conserved. So energy and entropy production are complementary and parallel objects that describe very similar equations. Some of their work has been using what they call quantitative geometrical thermodynamics, because thermodynamics is the most fundamental principle, they say, and I agree of all the physics.

In fact, for years, I collected papers showing that you could direct quantum mechanics and relativity theory out of thermodynamics. So it's the one principle that seems to operate at every scale in the universe, from the micro scale to the biggest scale possible. Do you look like you're going to say something? Yes, I was going to say, when I heard you say this in the talk that you did for David, I was like, I need to put a pin in that.

Hopefully, I can get you to provide a binder of those papers, because I remember in episode 102 of Complexity Podcast, David Wolpert said that reconciling thermodynamics with relativity and quantum mechanics was basically the holy grail of complex systems research. And the reason that SFI exists, which is funny because I hadn't heard that, it took me four and a half years of interaction with that organization and 200 researchers find out that arguably everyone but David Wolpert had forgotten. I say this generously because there's lots of interesting stuff going on there, but like kind of the Moby deck of that whole situation, and what a resource it would be to have bibliography in the show notes of this episode if you're willing to indulge us anyway. Yeah, we'll do.

Yeah, so I think this, I mean, to me, the work by Parker and James is just elegant, just beautiful. It's this aesthetic component of physics that I responded so strongly to, which is why I got into physics and subsets in the first place. But their work is just to me breathtaking. When I first read about their work, there was an article they published in the conversation in which they showed how the double logarithmic structure of spiral galaxies, as well as the helical structure of DNA could be explained purely on thermodynamic principles using this notion of quantitative geometrical thermodynamics.

And when I first read about it, especially the notion that according to Schrödinger and Bruan, information is supposed to be negative entropy, negative entropy. But according to these guys, it's much better to think of it as orthogonal to entropy. So they don't want to go into details, it's in the article, but they created some equations. When I first read it, I was dubious, frankly skeptical, because it looked to me like they had to make some a lot of ad hoc assumptions.

I became a convert only after a year or two later when I went back to read it and followed up on their subsequent work and their subsequent work. What they showed is that you could predict the stability of not just the spiral galaxies or the double logarithmic spiral or of DNA, but they could apply it to, as I said, at all scales to things like the half-life of the neutron. They did the stability of not just individual quantum particles like the neutron, but also a certain isotopes of helium, which they could prove without using quantum mechanics, just using these notions of thermodynamics and their geometrical picture. And then later, they've done a lot more elaborate research.

So this work has tremendous potential. I find that very few people have taken note of it. It's one of those things that is waiting to be fully acknowledged, but I think they're absolutely correct. And I think it's great stuff.

So I let them know about the work of Carl Frederick and also Philip K. Dick and also Evo Deeneuve. And they wound up noting me in a new paper, they just submitted to Synthates, which is a journal of philosophy of science, which they discuss complex time. And they mentioned in particular, that Dick's orthogonal time seems to be a version of what they were talking about years later, as complex time for Deeneuve's and Frederick's work.

I'm not sure when that will be published, but I'll let you know. So there's these really interesting ideas. Now, let's go back to what Dick thought and also what the implications of that are, which is what you were asking about. And what I was also implying about teleology.

If the future influences the past, then in some sense, it already exists and is pulling us forward into it. So this raises questions about where do the universe come from in the first place. I answered this in a manner of speaking by interpreting what Philip K. Dick had to say.

It seemed to me that if we don't want to talk about deity, God, we can talk about what I would just simply call consciousness or divine consciousness. I'm a panpsychist. I believe that the entire universe is conscious in some sense, or that there even exists because I'm a monist but one would do aspects in which spirit and matter are perfectly complementary and not the same but are joined together in a unity. That's what the Yanyang symbol represents.

Spirit and heaven and earth, spirit and matter, and so forth, as above, so below the ill-thermatic aphorism. So whatever we see on a spiritual level is reflected on physical level and vice versa. So if consciousness exists, where does it exist? And if it is just independently of matter, just pure awareness.

I saw it from, say, be in space with imaginary time because once you convert time to imaginary time, when you look at the imaginary aspect of complex time, it looks like it's another spatial parameter. This is a well-known trick in quantum field theory, the WIC rotation, where it to solve certain problems. For example, in the Fineman's Sum of a History's Approach to Calculating Probabilities, you have to do integrations over time that can't be done because they're periodic. So you choose complex time, you can then solve the integrations, and then at the end of the calculation, you convert back into real time.

So the calculations all take place in Euclidean space, let's say four-dimensional Euclidean space instead of Minkowski space, which is three dimensions of space in one dimension of time. So both of these in some sense exists. It's hard to find the right language for it, it exists at the same time. So at any given instant, we are immersed in Minkowski space, which is the arena in which physics, according to special relativity, according to Maxwell's equations.

And at the same time, there's this other domain closely related to a separated by the set of sub-partitions, by a WIC rotation, in which you have a space time that is a causal, where time just looks like another spatial variable, and with all meaning of causality has been lost, because you can't have a before or an after without the causal structure of Minkowski space. So if you want to talk about consciousness, you can say the material consciousness is inherent in Minkowski space. In spiritual consciousness, it's inherent in Euclidean space. In spiritual consciousness, call divine consciousness if you want, god consciousness, that exists independently of causes and effects.

That kind of consciousness can reach back, again, the terminology is lacking, because there is no back, but can you access any point in history can influence the past through the future, though past and future have lost meaning. They're rigidly defined in Minkowski space, but not in Euclidean space. So I use that as a model for what Dick was talking about, and its interpretation that allows for discussion of god, in terms of his spiritual viewpoint. So the esoterics tell us that divine consciousness just was, it simply existed.

And at some point, it had to become something, and at that moment, at the moment, it becoming time again, which is a principle that's enunciated in the headings of Saint Augustine, but also comes out of contemporary physics, that before that the universe was created whole at the same moment, that time and space began that there was no before. Now Stephen Hawking, who was not a theist, tried to get rid of god entirely by coming up with his theory of how the universe evolved, how it was born, instead of everything emerging from a point by closing off the origin point with a surface that was closed, so that you get a there is no beginning of time. This is its so-called no-boundary proposal. And it utilizes imaginary time, but there's no explanation.

This is the primary objection to the heart-l-hocking approach to the birth of the universe is no understanding of how you go from real time to imaginary time and how that would occur in his model. So generally, his model is not accepted these days, but there are other models showing that the universe can be born out of a quantum tunneling event, tunneling out of a thing, which is something that's a guy named Trion and Alex Lincoln, who is now at Tufts University, has written extensively about. Some people say that the same objections arise there, but I don't believe that's the case, but I don't want to go into detail about why I think that's the way it is. It's a little bit complicated.

But anyway, the point is that at some point being became becoming, and that at the point of becoming, all of the universe, all of time, space, matter, energy came into existence. And yet, at the same time, there's this other domain that's beyond Nkovsky space, which consciousness exists and could continue to influence. I mean, if you want to look at it purely materialistically, you say the consciousness is a product of the brains, which evolve over time and it's worth. And then what happens if we go into the far distant future, if we all become freed of materiality, can we then just through pure consciousness, having developed that in material fashion, can we then go back, just consciousness, then go back and start the whole thing to begin with.

In other words, it's the universe of closed cycle, whether it's created by an external consciousness or whether the whole point of human evolution is to become, in effect, godlike, which is kind of what they auditioned on and also a field of curiosity influenced very much by Taeir. So we're all evolving the big point. So yeah, this is the core thing, right? You've mentioned at different points in your work, the vinyl record analogy that Phil Dick used and the notion of groove escape.

And this idea of or the problem that some folks have with a perfectly cyclical model of time is that it affords no opportunity for change at the cosmic level. If there's nothing new under the start, the evolution is impossible that you're merely repeating, there's that great episode of Futurama where they take the time machine, they can't go back, but they can go forward. So they just go forward all the way through the big bang to get back to where they were on the last go round. But yeah, so you make this distinction about eternalism and presentism with Minkowski and how a block spacetime Eric Wargo is hardcore in his insistence that free will does not exist.

Because, like you said, it's this rigid formulation in which we're still talking about past present and future in that way rather than as something where there's still an opportunity for some kind of change. And this is why the notion that a present emerges at the intersection of possible pasts and possible futures affords some kind of sideways motion. So I'm curious to just hear, because like in the humans on the loop project, which is like, I want to call it like the business facing version of future fossils, the core consideration I'm trying to reconcile there is that we need to develop something more nuanced than arguing about whether free will does or does not exist. Because it seems like free will doesn't exist at one level of resolution and then it does at another.

But yeah, I'm curious to hear you on this particular thing. Yeah, so I'm also have two minds about this, just the same that with two minds, two notions that are complementary to each other, just like spirit and matter are free will does exist, free will doesn't exist. They're both true. And I'll try to explain in what sense I believe that's being the case.

But first, I want to mention you, you talked about sideways motions and novelty. I mean, Dick talked about this in that paper I talked about the speech at Metz. If you find this world bad, you should see some of the others, which by the way, was the origin of the Matrix movies. They had that is following that speech that the watch of key siblings became aware of Dick's writings and really structured, certainly, especially the first Matrix film, which I think is the best of their not the concerns are very much based on some of his concepts.

They've admitted they're indebtedness to him. It took only 22 years from the time of the speech until the movie came out, but it's a deep stuff. But anyway, in that speech, Dick talks about imagining God looking through a closet full of universes like clothing and deciding, which one am I going to put on today? Maybe I'll put on the one in which the Germans said the Japanese won World War II.

That was a good one. I may best or maybe the one in which Napoleon succeeded. So I mean, there is a way of framing alternate universes. And I might get into it later in terms of these pictures of complex time that I talked about.

But for now, just this notion that Trie Will is certainly at a divine level. Something is able to choose our going sideways. And novelty arises from that. But really, that novelty is a product of consciousness.

It's a product of the universal consciousness, the panpsychic consciousness that it's the universe thinking and exploring itself. It's the universe inventing itself for an all into moment in which we are part of the invention. We are part of the inventors. That's kind of the way I look at it.

Now, the notion about Trie Will, I mentioned the Yi Jing before, which Dick used to write his book, The Man in the High Castle, and which told him that it would be a great success, which in fact it was. It won him the Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction novel of the year, I think in 1961 or 2002. Anyway, the Yi Jing is full of advice. I mean, it's disguised as an oracle.

It's full of a confusion and doused advice, wisdom. And what's interesting in terms of all the injunctions that it tells anybody consulting it, the one thing it doesn't say, I mean, the Yi Jing considers what it calls the superior man, somebody who lives life in an appropriate moral fashion. Never in the book does the Yi Jing say that the superior man consults it. The paradigm of virtue instead, what it says is that if the superior man follows the dictates of heaven, then surely he'll be blessed.

If he anticipates the dictates of heaven, then he will be equally blessed. So what does that mean? The superior man is somebody who understands intuitively the way the universe is unfolding, like the Taoist sages. And they can apprehend the right way the thing should go and they follow that path.

So is that is that predestined? If you reach a certain state of evolution, you can say, well, it's not really just doing what they have to do because they constrained to acting in that mode of behavior. I'll give you another example. There's a very interesting relationship between Taoism and physics.

It goes back to, I think, the first books of from China that were communicated by Matteo Ricci, Jesuit priests to the West. That's where Leibnitz got hold of the, notice that the cycle of hexagrams in the Yi Jing matched what he'd found in his binary arithmetic. But it seems also to have influenced subsequent researchers, at least indirectly, this concept that the way the university follows, the laws of nature, the principle of least action, was enunciated by Euler, Bernard Euler. I can't say he ever read these Chinese documents, but it's basically very similar.

The notion is that physical law proceeds in the direction of greatest efficiency, natural activity, which matches the Taoist notion. Taoism, as Alan Watts mentions, is called the water course way because it describes a natural way in which water flows downhill. We can talk about movement on an energy landscape where when you seek the lowest energy level, as water does, it will flow downhill until it reaches a hollow. And if that's a local minimum of energy, the water will stay there until enough water comes in that will overflow and then proceed further until you finally reach a global minimum and so forth.

This is how the principle of least action works. So in a sec, the Taoist sages were people who say this is the natural way of the world, the way that water flows downhill, the way that the world naturally unfolds. That is our principle, our guiding principle. So if you're surrendering to the spiritual discipline, do you have free will or not?

You can choose not to. Now let me give you an example, take it further than that. When you look at what happens in terms of principle of least action and what it looks like for a particle to go from point A to B, you can take a very wandering route, or you can take a very direct route. And this is true also in quantum physics where, again, find Richard Feynman was able to take the elite principle of least action and apply it to his, he just imported the whole of action theory into his formulation of quantum field theory.

Think of a particle as representing the human individual human consciousness, a human soul, if you want, you can say the path of evolution of a human soul. So we're heading towards enlightenment, whatever that is, we're heading towards unity consciousness, consciousness, consciousness unified between the individual and the universal, call that enlightenment, you will, with is so that a person can take any path to get from point A to B. It's not necessarily the most efficient path. The most efficient path, the path of least action, is the most direct path.

So if you're enlightened, are you surrendering to that path? I mean, you can choose to go in other directions. That's where free will comes in, but not necessarily the outcome that's the best for you or the most efficient. I'm also thinking of Paramahansa Yogananda, the great yogi in his autobiography of a yogi in chapter 16.

He writes about how he was foretold through Vedic astrology that he would marry at a certain point, dictate his whole life to him. And basically, he said, no, that's not my choice. And life was harder for him at certain points, he said, but he said he trusted in his own faith, his own communication with the divine, that the path he was choosing was the right one for him. And ultimately, was the one who got into his goal.

So where's that free will involved? Sometimes it's necessary to, for the purpose of evolution of the soul or the self to choose a path that can seem to be more difficult. It's all learning at the end. They come to the end of this lifetime.

And if we do believe in a cyclical version of time, that there's at least something that passes over him, one life to another. And the enlightened individual is someone who is not constrained by previous behavior, not conditioned by society or by past experience, but is free to choose whatever their path is. And it's a famous passage in the Dhammapada written in Pauli, the original Buddhist doctrine, which I had the exact quote handy, I know it's about the enlightened person's path is as unknowable as the flight of birds. It's a phenomenon that just appears in the sky and just dictated by whatever it's not random action.

It's emerges without necessarily without thinking, but through something that draws the individual towards that necessary conclusion or that necessary action in their lives. So from an evolutionary point of view of spiritual evolution, we do have free will and matter what we choose, we're constrained by reality that some events we are obliged to experience that we can't escape. I could tell stories about that as well. It was one year, I mean, I'm second think sensitive very often, I get specific pre-conmissions and they come out of nowhere.

If it's just random thinking, if I try to do it, it doesn't necessarily show up. It's more if it just emerges spontaneously. So one year, this is back around 2011, maybe I live in Boston. So I've been a fan of the Boston Red Sox, at least when they're winning.

And the Sox, it's like September the last month of the season. They were doing pretty well. So I asked just an intuitive question, what are the chances that they're going to win the Panance of the World Series? And the answer I got shocked me, said, no, the bottom is going to fall out of the series for them.

And then I said, well, what about next year? And message, I said, no, it's going to be even worse. What about 2015? Yes, they're going to win the World Series that year.

Well, it turned out this exactly what had in detail. Now, my reflection about that was not G, what was I on a recognition? Because I can't do this all the time. That was just pure half and sense that I got that message at that moment.

But rather, it was, what is the purpose of losing in any given year? How does that fit into free will? How does that fit into the evolution of the universe? What does it mean?

What has been predetermined? If I was tuning in on something that was predetermined, what is the significance of that? It did something I'm still grappling with. Well, so when I talked to work out his model for the function of precognition in living systems, as he puts it, he connects it actually to, I was just pulling up this piece of reference on the show a lot, Alfred Kribzzyz, who influenced Phil, Dick, as well as Frank Herbert, Robert Heinlein, and others called it time binding, the ability to plan and pursue goals, even though he was transcending the span of an individual lifetime, and then connects it to the active inference in living systems.

And so when you're talking about this thermodynamic model for time and how informational entropy diminishes as, what is that? Shannon and Boltzmann, right? Boltzmann entropy goes up, Shannon entropy goes down. And this is eventually when I have Brendan Graham-Dempsy and Bobby Azarian on the show to argue about the rigor of emergentism as a sort of secular religious framework.

I mean, I just spent with Timothy Morton, we just spent two hours taking rather comprehensive pot shots at teleology. In spite of everything that you've said in this conversation, and I agree with the other pieces that if a maxent model of the world is one in which all paths are taken. So any one teleology is just a very low dimensional slice of the actual contingency that we have to consider in tandem with whatever kind of strongly convergent forces constrain the direction and whatever we can say with confidence about the future. And so yeah, we're go in time loops.

We talk about this in 117. I really appreciate that he notices how the content of people's pre-cognitive experiences seems tethered to one of two kinds of reward, either emotional in the sense that these are matters of personal concern, like back to the future. Are the cubbies going to win? Are the Red Sox going to win the series or evolutionary in a broader sense of reproductive success or of survival?

And so he looks at what Jung was calling a causal synchronicity and says, actually know the famous case study of the gold bug that starts tapping on the window when his analysis is giving her dream about the Egyptian scarab is because she wanted to impress him as her therapist and he was developing a crush on her. And so that's meaning emerged whole gloss out of this close time like thing in which time warped the attentional manifold of what they found to be particularly rewarding. And I've had the same experience. I've talked about this with Eric about how and I both had have a lifelong fascination with dinosaurs and dinosaur toys and how he and I both have instances of pre-cognitive dreams in which we experienced something associated in his case with the pre-store times magazine and in my case with the release in the 1990s of the first Jurassic Park current Atari action figure that I saw happening six months before it actually came out.

And most of my precognitions over the years that I've talked about elsewhere on the show had to do with the pending birth of my kids and the fact that I saw our children in my son's case 16 years before he was actually born can be interpreted as an instance of what you are saying, which is that I chose to take a very circuitous path to what seemed like an inevitable conclusion. But it all has to do with this relationship between consciousness and attention and information. This question again of emergence, right? But we've talked a lot on the show about this about since we cannot actually measure the complexity of an object with perfect certainty, and you talk about randomness, right?

Like you can never say for sure that you're actually observing a truly random pattern. You may be observing a pattern that has structure at a level that is beyond your ability to compute or recognize. This is the eternal open epistemic humility thing about the search for extraterrestrial life. Like we know with mathematical certainty that I talked about this on the Danny Jones show, the Newman Lockman and Moore paper in 1999 on the physical limits of communication and how they said basically an optimally encrypted message is indistinguishable from black body radiation.

So it's entirely possible that advanced alien intelligences are communicating in a way that looks to us just like noise, but it's indistinguishable from cosmic background radiation. And so at that point, I want to bring in the work of Jessica Flack and Hestering the sort of mainstream assumptions of complex systems, understanding that self-organization leads from less complex to more complex states, because ultimately the only way that we can know this is by observing the very, very micro or the very, very macro. And at either end of this hourglass structure, it seems as though complexity does not rule the dynamics of those domains, that we look into the micro and things seem simple. We look into the macro and it looks like Newtonian physics.

But how much of that is because of the level of granularity that we're capable of bringing due to the fact that our own cognition evolved within constraints that are principally concerned with the mesocosum of human scale phenomena. She's basically saying, no, it's complexity all the way down and complexity all the way up. And as we get a better resolution on the behavior of molecular interactions inside of a living cell, then it starts to look as computationally complex as the what's going on in the entire organism, and that we cannot say for certain really either way. She is suggesting her work that complexity is basically a perceptual artifact.

And so that's where it goes with this question of what does it mean to create something new? It gets to that very deep question in the sciences, which is, are the mathematical structures the cosmos created or discovered? So that's the riff I want to hear if you want to take it there in terms of your own weird personal experiences storytelling hour is most definitely invited. Yeah, I was perfect what you ended up with because I made a note to talk about that in particular.

But yeah, one of the things that occurred to me and my partner early on in our intuitive work is whether we're creating or discovering something. In a sense, the universe is like a blank slate which anything can be written. But yet that's not true because there are certain physical laws and other laws of nature that constrain what messages are possible. And I look at all of this from an informational point of view.

The structures that we thought up were on an abstract level of molecular models interacting. It was only when we incarnated them by actually having products synthesized and tested that we could see that they behaved exactly the way that we had predicted. Even the discovery that I had come up with the notion of how B12, I mean, if you look up the literature, you'll see that it's long been known that B12 deficiency is associated with a deficiency of glutathione in particular and other antioxidants. It's in studies done in 1960 on pernicious anemia.

But the explanation for how that worked whenever to me really satisfactory until I saw that our complex in particular accomplished that was able to keep glutathione in its reduced state through very specific molecular mechanisms. So again, so the question is that I discovered that or did I create that? Did I invent that? And we built an explanation of how that would work.

Who knows, so far it's worked extremely well in practice. But just more generally, it's true for so many disciplines in science. But we found this to be particularly true in biochemistry that we're intuitive abstract structures, which could then be incarnated, so to speak, physically, that would have the properties that we thought they might have. We weren't doing the point of view of saying, well, we want to create something that would have these properties.

It was more find the framework to find the structure and find out that it would be viable. And then we get the message what it would be good for. Originally with the B12 in particular, we created so many other compounds, complexes, which are all remarkable. Some of the work I did on my own after my partner and I split up, I found ways of using vitamin B12 to deliver a whole range of biologically relevant materials, including steroids and sterols, which were so important in the evolution of life in terms of cell structure, membrane formation and so forth.

But that's a side of the point. So we found all this interacting networks put it that way of different substances. And it wasn't that we were saying, well, let's find something that explains the origin of life. It's just emerged naturally from the whole picture, the whole pattern.

The intention was just to exercise pure discovery, pure creativity, really to have fun. That's what we started off doing this by intuiting things together. And then at some point, a year or so later, suddenly realized, hey, you know what, maybe this has practical applications. The components of discovery to me that are so important involve play and also an aesthetic quality.

There's a book by a biologist, Robert to Ruth Bernstein. He won a MacArthur award, I think, in the early 80s, has written about structures actually rather similar to what my partner and I came up with at the same time. Although he didn't have what we had, they're parallel, but he found that their molecular complexes or molecular sandwiches, he called them, could have great explanatory power. The guy is really brilliant.

I recommend his book Discovering because it was published in 1989 by Harvard University Press because he gives abundant examples of how discovery is made in the sciences and in particular in the field of biochemistry. And he talks about everyone from Einstein to St. Georgie and Pasteur and especially prominent is Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin and lysosine. Now, what they had in common was that they were all not just scientists, but they were multidisciplinary in a particular involved in the arts in various ways as musicians.

Einstein played the violin. Interesting with Fleming is that he was an artist. And just for fun, he used to paint pictures on agar plates using different cultures of bacteria, which would take a day or two to develop and you could see all these different colors. It was like a hobby for him.

But if he hadn't had that kind of sensitivity and that kind of training, his mind wouldn't have been prepared to make sense of what happened when a penicillium mold landed on his agar plates and caused the bacterial colonies to be destroyed. And it was a combination of an aesthetic awareness and sheer play that enabled him to make some outstanding discoveries that saves countless lives from through the first viable antibiotic as well as this discovery of lysosine. And you can read about the whole discovery in Rook Bernstein's book, but I look at that as a prime example of somebody with what Pasteur called the prepared mind, who was open and prepared to receive the information. Whether you get the information because you're getting intuitively or because you're a good observer of what happens in nature, you still have to have the kind of mentality that can do something with it.

And that's where the creativity comes in. It's to recognize what's different, what's unusual, what's the pattern, what does this mean, how can this be applied, and so forth. So I think that's really important that aesthetic quality as well. It seems like we've found ourselves in the orbit of something that Timothy Morton and I spent a good deal of time talking about in their episode because it was a central thesis in their book, Hell in Search of Christian Ecology, which was that the connection that you're making between play and divergence and the way of water as something that is inherently governed by nonlinear dynamics, like turbulence and vertical movement.

And so therefore, water does not flow in straight lines because if it does, it ends up splashing back. And that there's something in Morton's work about their thesis on the nature of evil as contained within the arrow like ideological vectors of people that are trying to collapse the complexity of our world into this is the plan that we're going to execute to make this a better place. Whereas Morton argues that grace and salvation are actually to be found in sin, which is like divergence, right? Divergence, the moving into the sacredness of our animality.

And I was thinking about this again, like we talked about the way that different cultures have told the story of the devil and of rebellion and how there's this sense in which you're saying like so many great scientific discoveries happened when people were not engaging the very linear, focused, predatory, all kind of left hemispheric optimizing kind of mode, but occurred in the shower or on a walk or while playing music or engage in some ostensibly unrelated activity. And that we're going to tell this cosmic story of learning and play as the point, a sort of a paradoxical, synthetic move I want to make here with you as we wrap this conversation, which is like, actually, huh, the whole lesson is in not trying to imminentize the eschaton, right? It's like, okay, that may be the case. My first two DMT trips in 2008 were very insistent on me developing a meditative practice.

And I'm somebody who seems quite capable of flow states, but has trouble with the discipline of Zazan, of sitting down and engaging in any kind of daily routine. And by 2010, when I went back into that space for a third time, I felt great guilt at having not risen to the occasion of having not listened, having not been able to engage in the thing that I felt like God was telling me to do. And I just I felt this cosmic desperation at what an undisciplined fool I was. And I think I've told the story on the show before, but it speaks to Philip K.

Dick's notion of cubic time, it speaks to this whole five-dimensional thing we're talking about, which is the answer to that emotion was and also shout out to Andreas Gomez-Emelson with whom I talked about hyperbolic geometry in DMT space just a few episodes ago. The answer to that sense of guilt and inadequacy was to see this fractal Rubik's cube made out of fractal Rubik's cubes. And each face was black. And it rotated 180 degrees, like an ethelotable in which all of the pieces went from black to white.

And I interpreted this as sort of geometric proposition that there is always another dimension within which error and sin and inadequacy and failure are part of a bigger, more coherent fabric within which we all constantly have access to a kind of universal forgiveness and perfection. And that somehow we have to reconcile these things, that there's the diachronic time angle in which people like Zen master Diane Muschle Hamilton say, it's not what you do, it's what you do next. What you were saying is that freedom from the conditioning of the past, like I'm a drunk or whatever it is. So tonight I'm going to be a drunk and tomorrow I'm going to be a drunk.

And that opportunity for Phil Dick's divine invasion, that opportunity for Christ at contingency that Morton talks about in hell, that's the last thing I wanted to pass back to you just because it seems like a very concrete example of where I think all of this gets us. So I can't respond to all of it, but I'll just pick out a couple of points and just make things absolutely clear for listeners. So the whole notion that Phil Dick had was that in a sense our future is written out for us and are passed like the grooves in a phonograph record and that we're constrained to move by the particular way by the wall groove. But what he called groove override was possible through an existential free choice.

And as Eric Davis points out, that was Dick's attempt to compensate for what he called astral determinism, which is this concept from Hellenistic astrology that our faiths are completely determined by the past of the planets and so forth. So it's like the law of karma, it's a law of fate, whatever. But my response also to that is what I quoted before from Paramahasa Yogananda that he chose freely to not follow the dictates of astrology, which is breaking astral determinism, but choosing his own path. But that was again guided by his inner sensitivity.

So it was his free will, but he was still constrained by this higher consciousness that was pulling him forward. Now, in your case, hearing the message, you got to do this, you got to do that. You know, that's your higher self calling, some aspect of divinity within. I would interpret it more saying you'd really benefit if you did this and you probably would.

I wish I'm trying to get my son who's getting his PhD in biochemistry in Switzerland at the moment, I'm trying to get him. Before you kids, please go do it like a week-long meditation retreat. We'll change your life and you won't get a chance to do it otherwise for another 20 years or so. So we'll see what happens with that.

But there are forces that are calling us forward. And then we cannot fall into the trap of regarding ourselves as a failure if we don't respond to them. First of all, from the picture that this picture of the soul on its journey from A to B, from Alpha to Omega, if you want. Yes, there is a way that is most efficient at going in a straight line.

But the beauty is the aesthetics and the aesthetics of the human life. And I mean that including all of its aspects, including all of the emotions, it's not just about joy and bliss. It's about to be human is to experience grief as well and loss and pain. The aesthetics of human life is that we go through these paths.

We follow, we make our choices, we live with the consequences and presumably learning so that in the next round of the cycle, if we get a chance to not to live the same life over again, but to go to a higher level with it. And that's what reincarnation is really about that notion. I will say also talking about beauty and sadness and precognition. My wife died, it's going to be in September, it's going to be 19 years.

She died of inflammatory breast cancer at a young age, she was 46. And with two kids who I had to bring up on my own. And I'm really proud of them. They've turned into amazing human beings.

But that was a do not just to me. That was to the love she shared with them in the years she had with them until she was taken. My wife was a highly gifted psychotherapist then an intuitive healer who knew how to work with energy. And our kids have some of those very same abilities.

So my daughter is having gotten finishers. Their dear of residency is now embarked on a fellowship in Master of Science in clinical research. Both my kids inherited this devotion to research from me. But anyway, to go back, this is about the year before she died.

And I did, she wanted me to give her hope because she did not want to leave our children. She wanted to stick around for their case because she was such a caretaker, such a nurturer. It was her job, the director of a center for adult psychiatric disabilities. I mean, she took care of everybody, the whole community.

She was like a little mother to research type, literally a small person with an enormous heart. And she was taken from us early. So about a year before she died, I got a precognitive message. It was really just, it came in between sleeping and waking when I heard a voice.

And the voice said, your wife is going to die, but she's going to die for your sake and the sake of our kids. So with that, it took me a while to step that into interpret it. But I finally believed that in fact was correct. It was her sole purpose had been completed.

It was time for her to move on elsewhere, to move on to another experience, another lifetime, whatever. She had life lessons that I don't want to go into detail explaining what they were. But she achieves all of them. I witnessed her getting free on her deathbed.

She cleared through literally hundreds of past lives and freed up the energy that was trapped in her lower chakras, lower centers. Her leaving at this point, it was all contractual, as it were, set up in advance for our benefit to because we needed, she was such a caretaker, she took care of us in every domain possible. We needed to learn how to exist without her. And that, I think, was the painful beauty of her death.

And when she died, I went out to the Yogananda Center. I think it was in Pacific Heights with a friend of mine. The night after she died, we wanted to go to the evening meditation. We missed it, but we were standing around looking at the brilliant light display in the sky.

Look, the sun was speaking out from behind some clouds, although it was five o'clock in the evening, quite dark up. It was only later that I found out what that was. But it looked like her name, synchronistically written in the sky. And it turned out to be the separation of the second or the third stage of a rocket fired from Vandenberg Air Force Base to the north.

But I got a photo of it. And it looks amazingly like her signature. It was that we were just there in the right space at the right time to witness that. And it was like a message from beyond.

I would interpret it that way, saying what the blessing had been, and that it was time to let her go. And that's what I mean about the painful beauty and the aesthetics of her departing. And when she left, she evaporated into the universe. I mean, I walked up to the edge, the doorway of death with her until she fled beyond.

And it was a shattering experience, because it was all these years her likes, her wants, her desires, her happiness, her fears, just suddenly gone, just gone. Her work on Earth exists in the form of our children, and for what she did for me, personally. And for the countless numbers of people, the hundreds of people, literally, that she influenced at the mental health center, saved them from lives of, saved them from suicide, saved them from alienation. She was a beautiful human being.

And it was time for her to go elsewhere, time for her to leave us. So was that predestined? I would have to say so. Did we have a choice about it?

I tried everything I could to keep her alive, because she wanted me to. And do I regard this a failure? No, she did what she had to do. I did what I did.

And we're the survivors with the inheritors of what she left behind, which is an enormous and not a good will. So maybe that's a good place to stop. I could, I think we've covered a lot. But thank you.

It's been a great experience to talk to you again. Indeed, Bill. I just want to say that, folks, this is the first, maybe not the last time we get you on the show, that in case we ran out of things to talk about, I went and dug up a comment that you left in the Future Fossils Facebook group, when I invited everyone to tell stories about, what is something you're pretty confident you're the only person on my friends list has ever done? And you poured so many unique, bizarre, interesting life experiences into that thread.

But we didn't even have time to get to today. Like, your friendship with Isaac Asimov, how you found an exact analytic solution for even parody perturbations of the Schwarz-Tuyld field, your parallel universe experience that you claim you had a whole bunch of friends present for and can substantiate. You are a very interesting person. And yeah, thank you for taking the time to share some of that with us today.

I'm glad we can finally connect after a lot of trying. So it's the right time. And thank you. It's been a wonderful opportunity to connect with you again.

And I look forward to any future ventures. Thanks again for listening. If you enjoyed that episode, follow me wherever I'm still lingering on social media, or better, interact directly as a patron through sub-stack. And Patreon, I'm also available for creative and organizational consulting.

You can find all of this at linktr.edu.edu. As well as an extensive trove of music, art, lectures, the future fossils coloring book, and more. Take care, and I'll see you somewhere in time.