In our own Time and Space

“Midway in the journey of our life,” Dante wrote, “I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost. Ah, how hard it is to tell what that wood was….” Each step affects the mind and unravels strands of thoughts wrapping around themselves, prompting the need to frequently pause in moments filled with sparks flickering over sensemaking and the Universe. Like Ivy-leaved toadflax in the tiniest chins and cracks, drilling into walls, the mind wanders. Ideas germinate.

Through Muir Woods, I reached Aotearoa and came back with a concept ringing louder than the memories of korimakos (bellbirds) at the foot of the Pinnacles and piwakawakas (fantails ) along Rotoroa Lake. It tells the human story of neurodiversity. The Maori word created for autism is takiwatanga. It means ‘in his/her/their own time and space.’ While ‘neurodiversity’ suggests a cognitive aspect, the concept brings up images of bundles of thought processes and feelings that occur simultaneously, superposed in stacks, all being relevant, all being real. 

I felt the white clouds’ touch, the mist’s wetness, and the sky’s closeness as I did ten years ago... On the forbidden trail along Rotoroa Lake, I reflected on the nature of other minds and states of consciousness, the diversity of feelings, and the plurality of existence. Freedom of being unites amid fragmentation. When we say ‘diversity’, we mean freedom to be in one’s own time and space. “What is it like to be a bat?” is used to ask: “how it feels to live in its own time and space?” It implies that its outer reality is intrinsically connected to its inner world. 

The walk in the woods mirrors how I lose my footing in the Quantum Forest. I imagined a set of values and coordinates that measure the body of a bird, its location on the branch along the forbidden path, and its field of view. It might have been a particle, a star, or even the twinkling of an eye. Wary of the warning sounds made by piwakawakas, my body was alert, and my eyes focused. Still, I slipped and fell in the mud.

While it remains inconceivable how far in time and space the Universe’s boundaries reach and how many dimensions spread in and out of those confined limits, Sean Carroll describes a kind of stratified reality. “If we imagine describing nature in terms of multiple levels of reality,” he writes, “one such level appears to be a particular kind of quantum field theory, with other levels above and possibly other levels below” and the Core at the Quantum field level where entities, known and unknown, share time and space.

In the togetherness of Nothingness and the Quantum Universe, ‘compact’ dimensions extend the realm of existence into the field of potentialities, for they are neither observed nor perceived objectively. Since existence precedes the essence of information, we wonder whether something is not observed or belongs to another dimension. Extra dimensions draw routes in and out of the existential field. They are embedded in the grid of spacetime, closely intertwined with each other, making it a hard nut to crack. 

The Universe is an interacting organism comparable to a network of plants and animals, trees and fungi, birds and bats-like entities dying in a split second or over billions of years, feeding and pollinating. Some shapes and forms wither, fading away not before producing seeds, while others continue to thrive. It may be why, as John Muir foretold, "When we try to pick out something by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." 

Even more so, we fail to observe a single quark, for "quarks don't exist as individual particles" in the Quantum Universe. The expectation value of energy cannot be measured for a single quantum system, comments further Shan Gao. Particles are carried away by invisible quantum rivers with winds and currents above and below riverbeds, above sea waters and on the sea floor, above grounds and under the soil, bringing seeds lightyears away, microscopic threads connecting filaments and galaxies. Gravitational signals are sent along these paths like nutrients.

In the end, there exists a distinction between Nothingness and the Quantum Universe when there is a perceived interaction. Dreams, too, only very weakly influence and interact, competing for our attention beneath the surface. "Newton himself, "wrote Frank Wilczek in The Lightness of Being, "usually used the phrase quantity of matter for what we now call mass. His wording implies that you can't have matter without mass" If we acknowledge its existence, we assume it has a mass even if we can't measure it like a force carrier at the threshold of higher dimensions. 

Wilczek wrote in A Beautiful Question that energy conservation is "a useful but approximate result that applies in limited circumstances." One possibility may still be that the conserved energy of the system lies within hidden variables, or we simply "can't know what it is," concedes Carroll. If a dimension is a physical quantity that can be measured, a force carrier may be a relative unit meant to encapsulate it. 

Massless photons and gluons are bits of information, "embodied ideas." Whether sub-particles are the product of the mind or the outcome of observation brings up the mental image of a tree falling when no one is there. Given such uncertainty, what we virtually cannot see becomes a matter of probability. On the one hand, the problem with probability, De Finetti explained, is that, instead of considering it and studying it as such, trying to perfect our understanding of it and its use, we often externalize it as if we believe we can conceive of it only by representing, if not as a real object, at least as something which exists outside ourselves, something which acts on the outside world according to its own laws which are supposed to govern the facts which do not follow the laws with, in addition, laws which are not laws. 

And so it is with particles we say exist as distinct entities, in addition to the wavefunction, which, itself, becomes an entity. The wavefunction — a link between entities — "guides the particles," Carroll writes, "but the particles exert no influence on the wavefunction whatsoever." On the other hand,  if, as Sartre wrote, there is a being of the thing perceived, then a thing thought of, even as a probability, is like a plant beneath the surface of the river or a fungus underground.

A set number of evolutive stages separates zero (point particle) to oneness — a time-subjective state. Each entity, large and small, regroups itself into a one-dimensional experience that adds up to create the multidimensional Universe we know. The togetherness of Nothingness and the Quantum Universe refers to an above and a below — the ultralight fields of the dark matter that open up to extra dimensions as if in a dream where translucent weightless butterflies slowly escape through the gates of darkness. 

A month ago, I came home. A house sparrow rested on a twig of a fledgling oak. Its state of being offered a last glimpse of the neuro and bio diversity surrounding us. On the edge of the in-betweens, I set on to imagine all the things that exist in Heaven and Earth. There are voices in my head — haunting ghosts pressing me to explore — for there are so many dreams, so little time… 

Only one letter sets the artist apart from the autist. The double empathy problem speaks of a lack of connection and miscommunications between 'differently disposed social actors'. The call to mourn for what never was seeks to lift the veil of our limitations and remove our blinders. In the midst of it all, all levels become visible, for we carry within the bird's eye view, the butterfly's flapping wings, the bat's echo-sensing abilities, the chipmunk's instinct, and the elephant's gentle soul.